After spending some time with Eternal Sonata (now my little daughter helps me out in battles thanks to the kickass multiplayer feature), I found myself covered in sugar. Wanting to shrug some of that sweetness off, I fired up my second Mass Effect playthrough. I intend to keep this thread updated as I progress through the game as a soldier on the hardest difficulty setting, while describing its awesomeness to the uninitiated peasantry.



Mass Effect is the first title of a series of three games developed by BioWare. It's a western styled RPG with a heavy shooter emphasis, although combat goes well beyond standard firepower usage. Let's get the bad things out of the way first. Because of the hurry to get the game out, it looks unfinished, from a technical standpoint. And BioWare wasn't the tidiest dev team to begin with. Full textures load right in front of your eyes at the beginning of each scenario, making the first seconds of your missions a nightmare filled with amorphous blob-like beings, and framerate is as smooth as sandpaper applied to a sore ass.

Most of the installations and facilities you'll be visiting suffer from uninspired and monotonous interior design, yielding a boring look, Mako handling can be iffy and frustrating at first, and it's easy to abuse its firepower. Mineral (and other stuff) gathering offers no tangible reward. Many of the planets available for visiting offer nothing more than rocks and emptiness. Elevator times are...well, many jokes have been made on that already.



But if you are willing to get past that, you'll find a pretty solid RPG, with a background so deep and well fleshed out that you'd think it was taken out of written sci-fi, believable, likeable characters and voice acting, some of the most beautiful space vistas in sci-fi, a fast-paced combat with a few tactical elements and breadth well beyond your standard gun-toting fare, and the first arc of a plot that is remarkably self-contained, and deeply satisfying in its conclusion, unlike most other cliffhanger endings out there.

I started this playthrough on the highest difficulty setting, with the default male Shepard, a soldier born in space, war hero and regular boy scout. My first ride through the game was with a female renegade adept, which proved fun after some frustrating moments, but with some bad choices that prevented me from achieving true evilness, although everything was redeemed by means of some hot lesbian action between my character and smurf girl. Now I'm aiming for a more direct, balls to the wall approach.



Combat is way more engaging in this difficulty, and you have to be very mindful of your tactical approach in each skirmish, because a few shots will leave your health bar butt naked. This forces you to focus more in choosing the right weapon for each situation, and managing your squad members efficiently, in order to outmaneuver your enemies. Being an adept on my first playthrough, I never really had the chance to fiddle around with guns other than the pistol, so it's a nice change to be able to blast through close-quarters situations or snipe your foes from afar, offering cover for your teammates. So far I'm just starting the first mission at Eden Prime, but I'm already feeling the heat. More later.

The game is truly an awesome experience. I'm planning on playing it through one more time yet again just to make absolutely sure I'm set up just the way I want it to carry over to the sequel. I'll likely get the latest dlc even though it received a very disappointing review from GS.

Really, really enjoying this game. Right at the end, so all I need to do is just sit down and finish it.

darthhomer said:

Really, really enjoying this game. Right at the end, so all I need to do is just sit down and finish it.

I love the stance that Bioware took on their whole morality thing they put into all the games nowadays. Particularly that you can do all these actions that would make people see you as evil, but you're never truly evil...if that makes sense. It's the first RPG where I've primarily specialized in speechcrafting, so I can pretty much talk my way out of any problem, and it's a blast.

The dialogue system is also pretty rad too. I love just how you can  make a conversation flow...even if the characters in the conversation just stand there.

Though thanks to ME2's ability to pick up your ME1 save, it's made me play the game slightly differently than I originally planned.

And yes. I sexed the smurf girl. Because that's how Shepard rolls baby.

My problem in these games is that I always seek out every last bit of info from a character because otherwise I think Im missing something. With these conversation trees, it makes it a laborious process.

Sometimes I prefer them to just give out the pre-canned dialogue and move on.

Change of plans! I'm going to ditch my early soldier character and favor a hybrid class, the Infiltrator, who is a tech/combat mix. You get to fuck up with electronics and snipe your way to spectre-dom. Yay!

gamingeek said:

My lips are sealed

Dammit!

SteelAttack said:

phantom_leo said:

gamingeek said:

My lips are sealed

Dammit!

Don't worry, his buttocks aren't.

They were sewn shut a long time ago.

And you wonder why I can't poo.

Groin inspecting. Only the best Spectres can handle the sight of four sweaty balls hanging in front of them.