Mishap Effect: Andromeda

About five months ago I was incredibly excited for the next game in what is probably my favorite series of games after Metroid.  Mass Effect.  I've loved Mass Effect from its first broken ass menu game with it's vanguards that couldn't charge.  That all changed on March 21st of this year...

To start with, we need to rewind our understanding of the ME timeline, and stop all of our Milky Way history right about when Shepherd defeats the Collectors.  That's about the time that the Andromeda Initiative freezes their entire crew and fires them off on their 600 year tour of the universe on the SS Minnow.

Jump forward 600 years and everyone is now in a galaxy that is at least 2,537,600 years OLDER than any observations made in the Milky Way prior to launch.  That's right.  That's the fastest any kind of information could possibly travel from Andromeda to the Milky Way.  Now, I can suspend a LOT of belief here.  As a civilization we're only in the last few years beginning to identify planets within, say, 100 light years of Earth.  And those observations are of things that happened 100 years ago.  See what I'm getting at here?  If we launch super fast ships at a galaxy 2.537 million light years away, we better damned well know where it ACTUALLY is, if it actually exists, and where it will absolutely be in 600 years.

I'm just saying that the math doesn't leave a lot of room for small significant digits.  Science lesson over.

Mass Effect: Andromeda

Okay, so presumably it's 600 years after ME2.  And you wake up on a ship that's just run into a galaxy-sized pot-hole, lovingly called "The Scourge".  It's everywhere and it's one of the scarier and cooler ideas in this game.  Except MEA basically says "The Scourge is bad, m'kay?" and then proceeds to take away any reason to be concerned about it.

In fact, the absolute weakest part of this game (apart from it needing about 27 updates to be functional) is the story and its telling.  For a Bioware production, people should be damned embarrassed.  Whatever editor signed off on this should have either a) been fired for gross incompetence or b) walked off the job with all the writers because some asshat executive made them spend 3 years writing garbage.

Basically, I could spend pages and pages talking about how bad the dialogue is, and how painful their attempts are to recreate the brotherhood and unity you had at the end of ME2 (or, if you liked it, ME3).

I understand that Bioware felt the NEED to create a rich environment, with engaging characters, and epic storyline, etc.  But what they ended up writing were LITERALLY the same characters from ME.  You get... Not Miranda, Not Garrus, Not Liara (okay, this is a win in my book), Not Wrex/Grunt, Not Ashley (as a boy), and one new character named Jaal.

Jaal is an Angara, one of two new sentient races you'll encounter in Andromeda (that's right, MEA is so DAMNED LAZY they only bother creating two races for an ENTIRE F*$&ING GALAXY).  The Angara basically look like Star Wars Twi'Leks with a lot more thought about what happens below the neck.  They have a natural ability generate an electric charge and use it in combat.  They've been at war with the other sentient race, the Kett, for their entire written history.  And the explain their entire culture by saying that they value emotional expression, and then proceed to really not express any emotions any better than the Elcor from ME...  Seriously, Jaal never sounds angry, happy, sad, outraged... for an alien that is supposed to let his emotions fly, he really doesn't have a broad spectrum of emotion..

And you've got your non-combat ship crew.  Not Joker, and Not Dr Chakwas are about as plain yogurt as they get (I'd save "vanilla", but it has flavor).  There is also Doctor Don't Flirt with Me, and Engineer PLEASE FLIRT WITH ME (seriously, he's begging for it).  Finally there is Bad Irish Accent, your science officer.

One other character you get is SAM.  The true AI that has an implant in your brain with one huge shortcoming.  You can't shut him the hell up.  SAM is full of useless information and never fails to tell you when the ice planet is cold, the desert planet is hot, or explain how to "mine resources" if they happen to be near by... EVERY. DAMNED. TIME.  It's like having a tutorial on for the entire game.  Half the reason it took me five months to get through this game is that SAM doesn't shut the hell up.

Okay, I mentioned the Kett.  They're organic (non cybernetic) Borg.  That's it.  They're not scary.  They have no personality.  They're goal is to turn everyone into Kett.  And the story tries to make this interesting and engaging, but it isn't.  It's shite storytelling on Bioware's part.  You can run around on planets all day long and collect information on the Kett that eludes to what they're up to or you can just play a few missions and learn about it fairly quickly with zero ceremony.

There is also another.. well, not a race, but an old technology generally referred to as "The Remnant".  Literally Halo's Precursor race as an old AI that is prevalent within the entire galaxy.  Basically it's a robot race that you fight all the time but there's literally zero interaction.

Now, I mentioned the storytelling is awful.  And the plot is very weak for most of the game.  It's not so much plot holes as a long train of bad choices getting into a wreck in a dumpster...  Told very poorly.

The "Plot"

So the Milky Way crew shows up in a bunch of arcs (one for each major species) and the Nexus, which we could easily refer to as the Not Citidel.  You're brought out of cryo stasis when the human arc is damaged by the scourge, and your dad, the Pathfinder, says "well, we're here, let's go look at this golden world" where you immediately crash land and start fighting the Kett, and exploring a Remnant site.  It's implied that your dad has been out of cryo for a bit longer.  He seems to know a lot more than he should, but you'll never find out why.

At the end of the mission, your dad has to decide between saving you, or himself.  And, honestly, he makes the wrong decision.  He gives you his helmet and makes you the Pathfinder.  Wait, what?!  Your dad was an N7.  He practically designed the Initiative. He did design your annoying as hell AI (thanks, daaad...).  And despite the fact that there was someone who was VASTLY more qualified than you available (and officially next in line) he sacrifices himself for a guy who stood guard duty at a mass relay and knows nothing about survival or combat.

Sidebar..  While everyone had no problem talking about your dad while using his first and last name, they just call you "Pathfinder" all the time.  It's a bit annoying.  There are four other pathfinders that use their names, but not you.  This surgically removes the ability to feel any sort of camaraderie, because no one will use your damned name.

You get back to the Nexus and, surprise, you're the only arc that's checked in.  When you hop on board, it's Lord of the Flies time.  You'll find out that the Nexus has been parked for about a YEAR, and shit went south.  Apparently, in that year, enough essential personnel had been sprung from cryo for TWO complete rebellions to make new factions and make multiple settlements.  These renegade settlements are managing to survive despite the harsh conditions on the "golden worlds" and constant attacks from the Kett.  Yet since there are no Pathfinders reporting in no official settlement has been able to take hold.  The Kett just wipe them out over and over.

This makes no bloody sense.  Why were thousands of people out of cryo so soon?  If the answer is there, I honestly couldn't bear to listen to MEA drone on about it.  So many people had left the Nexus that there are roving bandit, pirates, etc on all the worlds you'll eventually colonize.  It's been a year and already the new galaxy is filled with just as much crime and destitution as the Milky Way was.

Either something physiological changed in every being in cryo, or the Initiative gave literally zero craps about who would end up being frozen for their glorious 600 year journey, and just filled the pods with whatever depraved monsters they could find.  You'll find out that the project was rushed a bit, but that's not really going to account for all this madness.

So your first Pathfinder task is to establish a real colony, but all the planets' environments are death traps.  So each planet you find will involve a half dozen fetch quests with some sudoku before the planet becomes livable enough to bring down a colony.  And the first time you establish a colony the entire remaining Nexus governing system makes it very clear that there is a HUGE decision coming up.  Do you want it to be more military or science based?  Like, this is going to change everything.

And then... Nothing happens. Absolutely nothing.

In MEA, your choices don't. Mean. Squat.  Unless you're trying to get freaky with someone in particular, nothing you do or say means anything.  There is no renegade/paragon.  The conversation wheel has been replaced with four contexts in which you can emote.  I think they're emotional, logical, professional, and wise-ass.  And you'll learn very quickly that there is no point in picking one to stick with, because nobody cares how you act.  Sure, they may point out that you're being an ass, but it never makes a lasting impression.  I can think of one mission in the entire game where it is possible that your choices might make a difference.  And at the time I thought, "Should I reload and see if I can change this?  No, because then I'd have to talk to these people again..."

Naturally, since the storytelling was already garbage, I just picked wise-ass whenever it was available.  It's... an epic disappointment coming from Bioware.

The worst part is that when you near the end of the game, the boring ass stuff that has been happening sort of starts to get explained.  But they don't bother with it.  There's an ENORMOUS revelation about one of the races close to the end of the game.  They could easily have added hours of game time (or thrown it in the middle and made a better overall story) based on this one bit of knowledge and it's given a single conversation.  I was thinking to myself "ah, here's where shit gets interesting".

Playing the game.

Exploration is even more boring than the last three games.  You go to your map, select a system, planet, etc.  Run the scanner like in ME3 (if an anomaly is there, Bad Irish Accent will be sure to tell you).  Look at planet, scan, leave.  That's it.

Then when you do visit a planet you're in the Not Tank.  Which you don't even get right away.  It's an afterthought.  Whomever set up the Initiative didn't think you'd need any way to get around on the planet once you've landed so you have to basically steal an APC.  And for all the technology available in the ME world, this thing is a POS.  It has less horse power than some of the first automobiles on Earth.  Even with its 2 wheel drive and 6 wheel drive mode, this machine is pathetic.  2 wheel drive is only good for level surfaces and going down hill.  6 wheel drive mode is meant to get you up mountain sides and hills, maybe.  Eventually you'll find ways to upgrade it so it can travel up slight inclines, and 6 wheel drive will scoot up hills pretty well in the end game, but until then you may as well get out and push.

When exploring there are environmental hazards (heat and cold) that SAM will never let you forget about.  Apparently they forgot why people have a HUD.  And, if you're exposed too long you'll run out of life support and die.  This is frequently used as a gameplay mechanic, where you have to stay under the smoker's heaters long enough to warm up, go back into the fight, and find the heater again so you don't die.  Then, as quickly as the platforming fights could be interesting, they abandoned it with the rest of the story...

To drive home the point that Bioware stopped caring about this franchise you can actually pick different perk profiles to augment your favorite abilities.  Classes are out the window.  You're no longer locked into a set of skills.  If you don't like charging around as a vanguard, just start spending points in soldier or tech abilities.  It doesn't matter, because you've got infinity points!!  Or, just respec for free!

Oh, and remember how in ME how you could direct your teammates to attack a target or take a certain position, or use an ability so that you could use their unique skills to get through difficult situations?  GONE!  Hey Jaal, can you set me up for a combo detonation?  Nope!  Jaal and the rest of your teammates, despite what they might say if you talk to them, are all firm believers in the mantra of the Honey Badger.

I had a very difficult time finding reasons to even bother with combo detonations, anyways.  Literally anything that had a shield couldn't be primed for detonation.  Armored enemies could be primed with incinerate, so all I ever did was light people on fire and run into them.  The other power generally would be reserved for something that took down shields, but those powers were so ineffectual, that I just said screw it and started carrying the heaviest sniper rifle I could find since it could break the shields faster than any powers.

While running amok you'll use your AI powered scanner to scan literally everything you see.  It's novel at first but gets annoying as hell.  It's never quite as bad as Metroid: Other M, but it gets close.  And you can't skip it because if you don't scan things you can't get research points.  And if you don't get research points, you can't unlock better equipment to build with the scant materials you find.  And if you don't unlock better equipment it won't randomly drop.  That's right, you have to research guns, mods, and ammo BEFORE anyone carries them.  There must be a mole in your ranks or something.

Oh, and gathering resources is more of a pain.  In previous games you'd just find some occasionally or probe things so you could get at them.  And it was sort of a "gathering resources mode" of play.  Annoying, but it worked.

In MEA, you'll find resources in the a few ways. First is the Dragon age, "Oh, there's a small pile of Eezo sitting over there.  I just picked up 18 Eezo.".  Next is driving around when SAM won't shut the hell up about driving through a place that's rich in resources, you press a button at the right spot and you get an ordinate amount of resources as shown on your scanner.  Finally, there is the planet scanning.  And let me be perfectly clear.  This is pure bullshit.  You find an "anomaly" on a  planet.  Oh, a big pocket of eezo?!  SCORE.  Send in your probe and... You get 18 eezo.  You'll eventually say screw it and never scan another planet.  It's not worth your time.  In face, if you need to 100% the game, pay someone else to scan planets.  It's almost as boring as most of the dialogue in the game...

The game also has a lot of fanfare for settlement points (or something like that) where the more livable the galaxy, the more "nexus resources" you unlock.  Let me assure you, these are useless.  They make it sound important.  They made it sound like base building a couple years ago.  It isn't.  You can more or less skip this.

Multiplayer

I LOVED the multiplayer in ME3.  The game... was not the best in the original trilogy, but the multiplayer was great.

I haven't bothered with MEA multiplayer.  Probably won't.

Conclusion

Bioware has fallen.  My faith was shaken heavily when they phoned in ME3.  My faith in Bioware is now gone.  I'm certain that there is a great fount of talent in their ranks, but ineptitude, petty politics, or I don't know what has decisively destroyed this franchise.

I've played through the ME games multiple times each.  Yes, even 3.  And I don't think this one is ever getting more play time.

MEA's story is like jumping on a roller coaster that has about a 3 degree decline.  You get on, the brakes let up a bit.  Then you sorta just coast... riding the brakes... for hours.  Then you see it.  A giant hill for the coaster to go up.   But the closer you get, the more you realize that it's your brain making a mountain out a mole hill.  The hill is there, but the clicky part is only about 10 feet high.  You go up... and then the ride is over.  Exit to the left...  Thank you for visiting Bioware.  We hope you enjoyed your stay.  You don't even feel disgust.  Just pure disappointment.  You look at the rest of your ride tickets... and let them fall to the ground.  It's time to find a better park.

Everyone Expects the Dragon Age Inquisition!

After picking up the PS4 I felt a bit underwhelmed by my available options for gaming.  There were some solid downloadable titles to play, and I'll get to them later, but right now I'd like to talking about Dragon Age: Inquisition.  I spoke about Origins oh, ages ago, and I didn't really feel that DAII was worth my time after being bored by its demo.  But there was a lot of positive buzz about Inquisition, and from what I'd read the gameplay returned to the original.  This game has sooo much going on that it's going to be difficult to keep this review flowing as I'd like, so I'll do my best to not jump around.

As usual I spent way too much time creating my character, and eventually just gave up making him look like anything in particular and just went with a standard elf rogue.  I was very tempted to go with a mage but understood from what I'd read that the mages weren't quite as pigeonholed as in the first game, so I wouldn't have to saddle myself to the class I never really enjoyed playing.

You start the game in a standard Bioware tutorial level that establishes that you're about to have all the responsibility in the world for no reason other than you were in the right place at the right time, and your hand glows.  Actual qualifications be damned.  You'll be given a base of operations and a bunch of companions that range from reliable and useful to Cassandra Pentaghast.  You're not technically in charge to begin with but then they decide you are after some heroic story progression.

Just like before you get rogues, mages, and warriors.  For the most part your warriors and rogues will specialize in one style of combat, and throw some points into their support tree.  Mages can be a lot more versatile, or can heavily specialize in one area.  After a certain level every character will have access to their sub-specializations that technically have no bearing on their current skill tree.  The PC is the only one who gets to pick their sub specialness, and I found that the sub specializations are more entertaining in description than they are in practice.

GAMEPLAY

The game is mainly driven from the War Table.  Your advisers hang out around the table and you direct missions that you'll eventually handle or they'll just do whilst you're gallivanting about and trying to get various NPCs to show you their wobbly bits and such.

Around this table you've got a handful of advisers, each of them have a special area of use, espionage, military, and political, and for the most part you can tell them to handle any mission you find on the table that isn't a map.  Each one will offer a solution that leans on their mad skills, and have different results, however I'm not certain that any of these has much more to do with missions than the flavor text.  The time you have to wait for your adviser to be ready to act again is different for each mission, and this will largely dictate who you pick to do each job.

As your Inquisition gains notoriety you'll gain access to special perks that are offered by each adviser as well.  The perks involve lots of different aspects of the game, but I found them to be ill weighted. Some will give you a small amount of crafting materials that are completely inconsequential (seriously, you can run around and find them EASY), others will let you carry more potions (a good thing), and yet others will just open up dialog options when talking to everyone you meet.

From the war table you can deploy yourself to about a dozen large areas you can explore and fulfill dozens of missions each.  Most of these are just fetch or kill quests, so you have to entertain yourself with the decisions you make while on the main missions, and by doing waaaay too much armor and weapon crafting and modification.  I spent a lot of time modifying my armor, only to realize it's rare that you'll ever need to min/max your kit (e.g.,dragon hunting), and so you just pick what you like and go about slaughtering whatever you find.

Getting around without fast traveling is done by your legs.  Run, kill, fetch, run, kill, fetch..  The landscape looks great, but after a while you stop noticing because you're just hitting the button that scans the area and highlights whatever hedge or rock you can throw in your backpack.  You're almost afraid of running off to whatever your current errand is for fear you might not have the materials you need for some potion or armor.  The problem is that progression is scaled in such a way that your gear gets better so slowly that you just ignore it until things start getting tough, then you notice you've got enough stuff to outfit yourself with good stuff again.

Just like in Origins you can queue up actions and assign behaviors, only this time the tactical nature of the beast is just part of the game, rather than a reward, you can let your team do their thing or go into a tactical overview and assign everyone their next action, hit play, and then assign the next action when it's time.  Magic and Energy are harder to read and understand, there are no numbers on the HUD, so you just need to know what percent of it you're going to be using.  It automagically regenerates in combat, and each skill has its own cool down.  The skill trees grant new active and passive combat and magic abilities to fry and impale your enemies and make it easier to use the skills.  I won't dig into the tree too much, there's a pretty good variety of things you can do, and nothing unexpected or of note.

PLAYING THE GAME
There were some fun NPCs and then there was Cassandra, Cole, and Vivienne.  I only used Cassandra when I didn't have a better fighter on hand.  Cole and Vivienne never made it on my team and I only interacted with them because they were there, and there might be some goodies if you complete their plotlines.  Most of the story line was well written and intricate, however there are times where Bioware sidesteps their writing to get all flashy about saying how much they love the civil rights movement.  I only mention it because many of these plot lines aren't written in very well and it feels like the dialog isn't there for the game, but for PR.

You spend hours and hours completing quests and directing the Inquisition around the map, directly involving yourself in a lot of very repetitive missions.  At first I thought this would possibly be broken up by the base-building element the game supposedly has, but it doesn't take long to find that choices made while building said base are inconsequential.  The most useless feature of any game is "cosmetic", and it shines in DA:I.  If I'm supposed to be leading an army, let me lead an army.  It doesn't have to be like the Total War series, but for crying out loud, my choice of whether or not I build an infirmary or sparring ring should mean SOMETHING.  I had a serious problem with the whole 'base building' aspect of this game.  Either make it relevant or just get rid of it.

.

Shadow of Mordor Creed

Ubisoft should be embarrassed that most of their games aren't as good as Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor.  Set in the world of Middle Earth (did you get that from the title?) you play as a random ranger whose name is relatively unimportant, but for the sake of saying it, his name is Talion.  But seriously, not important.  Because he's a vanilla dude who just HAPPENS to get sorta possessed by the elven (yes, elven, not elfin, read your Tolkien!) spirit of Celebrimbor.  Celebrimbor is most famous for helping craft all the rings, secretly crafting the 3 rings given to the elves, and finally, the One Ring to rule them all.

So while for most people the hype was the one thing that set this game apart from Assassin's Creed, the Nemesis system, for me I was just stoked to get more Middle Earth lore.  I didn't expect a lot, and what I got was great.  Mostly a lot of visualizations on how things happened back on Sauron's day (when he could still deceive people into thinking he was a nice guy), but also some other information.  There are a few grating moments that really got on my nerves, like interacting with Gollum, which makes no sense at all..  And some other plot points that make less sense, but I won't get into them because I don't want to spoil the plot.

Usually I'd go through a bunch of stuff about game mechanics and some plot points, and this time is no exception, but I'm going to glaze over some of it because the game has been out for a while and I beat it ages ago.  I would have glazed anyway, however, as I want to get to what I found the most fun and exciting aspects of the game.

Talion is a ranger who is equipped with a broken sword which functions as a dagger, a regular sword, which functions as a regular sword, and a magic bow that functions as a time slowing sniper rifle.  Oh, and the spirit of an elf lord of old that makes him embarrassingly powerful by the end of the game.  Each of these tools is used to fight orcs and uruks (taller, stronger, and I imagine smellier versions of orcs) and some animals.  Each of the weapons can be equipped with runes harvested from dead captains that you've managed to prune from Sauron's army.  They can add health, very specific damage output (like, when mounted, if you get a headshot, add 7% damage), and some other odd stats.  

As you complete quests you gain experience and can use it to buy new abilities or upgrades to current abilities.  There are two sides of the skill tree.  One side grants ranger abilities, the other wraith abilities.  Ranger abilities are generally centered around combat and wraith abilities are, well, mystical magicy stuff.  It's pretty easy to max out both sides of the skill tree with abilities you find useful, and the rest seem to become filler.  For instance, there is an ability that allows you to throw throwing knives at fleeing enemies for instant kills.  I never used this, however as I write this, I remember a few fleeing captains that could have used knives in the back.

There are tons of quests to do that involve sneaking, direct combat, and ranged challenges.  I really enjoyed the challenges as they were framed, stanzas in the songs written about the wrath of a weapon.  There isn't a lot of emphasis on weapons in Tolkien, however when he chose to name a weapon, that weapon's legacy was nothing short of epic.  There are also hunting (kill x beasts) and alchemy (find x plants) quests and some other fun sidequests.

So let's talk Nemesis.  It's pretty cool.  If you can't finish off a captain and have to run away, that captain becomes stronger.  They gain a level and generally some kind of protection.  They tell their friends about you.  And when you come back for them, they remember what happened the last time.  It's a great system... provided you're not constantly dying.  Like I did.  Constantly.  More so than in Dark Souls.  All the captains knew me and laughed.  It took a long time for me to get the hang of the game, and by the time I got into the grove all the bosses were pushing level 10-15.

When you get around to killing a captain, they'll drop a rune for one of your weapons, then they get replaced by the next random goon who killed you.  What I'm saying here is that I got so much Nemesis that I didn't feel like there was a need for a second, unique playthough.  I had, like, eighteen playthroughs already.

I mentioned that this game is better than some of the Assassin's Creed games.  That's because you can climb and stealth kill almost everything.  Just like in AC.  The difference is that it's more fun to stalk your prey in Shadow of Mordor.  You get a ton of options while sneaking around to isolate your prey.  If there's a giant swarm of orcs in your way, you might be able to knock a bee hive (they're called Morgul Flies) on them, causing them to flee in terror, and open your way.  There are other possibilities like releasing large predators into an enemy's midst, or just telling one of your dominated subjects to start picking off everyone to cause a commotion.  All while being a stealth game.

I have to say, though, that I really enjoyed Shadow of Mordor.  I liked getting to plan out how I took out Sauron's army.  The game takes on a new level of fun when you can start dominating orcs and forcing them to your side.  It's a lot easier to take out a general when all their bodyguards suddenly join your cause.  I loved the lore.  Loved it.  The lore drove my desire to play more than the gameplay.  Yup.  If you love Tolkien, you should suck the marrow out of this game.

I do have a few pet peeves, though.  The first is that with all the polish in this game, Monolith forgot to give Talion ANY kind of expressions.  He looks at everything with a sort of confused fear.  You clash swords and Talion's expression says "Why am I here? This guy has a SWORD?"

The second peeve isn't gameplay related, but plot.  They just HAD to throw Gollum in there...

It's time to PS4

I moved across the country about six months ago and one part of the deal was I got to pick up one of the latest gen systems to entertain myself.  The choice wasn't too difficult.  Which system had exclusives I wanted to play?  Well, neither, really.  I don't care much about Halo, Fable has always been a bust for me, and while I will likely never again have time enough for hardcore racing games, I was always a fan of Gran Turismo.  I don't give a crap about DVRing or other cable-incorporated features because I don't watch TV, so I decided the things that were most important to me were the specs.

But my XBox 360 did great service to me and my gamer score got pretty high, despite having not owned the original XBox.  There were a lot of great games for that system that I haven't reviewed, and may retro-review in the future, but for now I'm going to talk about the slightly more present.

So the new challenger comes along.  The PS4.  The only other Sony console I owned was a PSOne (the little white one) that I picked up around 2002.  I wanted to play through Einhander, Xenogears, FFIX, and a few other games I had picked up.  I never owned and didn't have much time logged on a PS2 (mostly playing others' xboxes).  And as far as the PS3 went, I've never actually touched one.  My brother bought the original PSP on release day and I played a couple games on that, too.

I ordered the PS4 from Amazon and it came with Little Big Planet 3, and Lego Batman.  I ordered Shadow of Mordor to come with it, which I'd been wanting to play since it was announced.  I wasn't sure what other games I wanted for the system but knew I'd like to get around to GTA5, and eventually Bioware would release another Mass Effect, and I wanted in on that.

Turning on the PS4 wasn't as magical or monumental as I remember the Gamecube startup being (with it's quirky little home OS).  Sony's OS reminded me of the OS that shipped with my brother's PSP.  A bunch of scrolling tiles that do all things you'd like to do.  The built in browser isn't bad, I used it to stream an episode of Downton Abbey that my wife and I missed during the recent season.

The PS4 hardware makes some great looking games. I remember watching the promotional and demo videos over the last year or so and thinking there was no way this thing was any better graphically than the previous generation, but I was wrong.  Things have been stepped up, and that's cool.

The best part of this new console came in the latest update.  You can suspend your games and pop back in exactly where you left off.  It's great.  In the middle of a long battle and have to run to work??  Hold the PS button and enter "Rest Mode".  The game is suspended and when you turn on your system later that day (week, month, year) the same battle is going on.  Admittedly you're probably not in the zone anymore and are going to die a horrible death, but we're talking seconds, not minutes, to get back in the action.  This is, of course, using power the whole time.  And if your power fails at all, your suspend data is vaporized (and your PS4 will not let you forget that you should power it down nicely every time...)

I have two big complaints.  The first is how the OS organizes your apps/games.  Video apps and social apps get their own tile, but games are in a long carousel that doesn't seem to end.  You just keep scrolling until you find whatever it is you want.  Everything is organized by chronologically.  It's very annoying, borderline broken.  Say you've downloaded 50 games from the market.  They're not in alphabetical order, if you haven't played the game for a few months, you're going to be digging for a while.  I hope this gets fixed.

The second big complaint is a twofold complaint regarding the Dual Shock 4. The battery life sucks, and the light bar can't be deactivated.   It can be charged over USB micro, so if you need a mid-game charge, a normal charger will work fine. but still, maybe six hours of power.  For $60 MSRP they should be putting a real battery in these.

All in all I'm glad I made the switch.  It's difficult getting used to not having a gamerscore anymore, but it's a small price to pay.

Mass Effect 3: Revisited

There are two things I want to cover about ME:3.  The first part is regarding the multiplayer and the second part is a giant spoil-rific discourse on the ending of the game.

Multiplayer

ME3's multiplayer (MP) is great.  For anyone who knows me or has read a good deal of this blog, you know I'm not a fan of MP modes for most games unless I'm playing with people in the room.  I hate CoD and Halo online because it's you, Mr or Mrs Normal vs a virtual phalanx of 12 year olds with mouths that would cause sailors to blush who have nothing better to do with their time than play that one game.

Why do I like ME3's MP?  Well, it's basically horde mode only.  You're part of a squad of up to four people trying to defend a base against waves of enemies.  The game can be set up to fight specific enemies or choose them at random (for more XP/Credits) and you fight a particular faction for 10 waves plus extraction.  The same goes for location, pick one or leave it on random for more credits and XP.

You might say, "What?  You favor a rewards based economy in a MP online setting?!"  Yeah, I do, in this case.  You do better, you get more cash.  It gives you an edge.  You use that edge to kill more stuff and get better.  You use the XP to level up your squadies and you use the cash for permanent upgrades as well as one-shot upgrades.

Allow me to explain.  As you probably know the ME universe classifies anyone without brittle bone disease as one of six classes.  So does the MP.  The fun part is there aren't just Shepards to choose from in MP, you can actually acquire (by luck and lots of credits) almost all of the major races in the ME galaxy.  Very cool.  They're mixed in so you can have an Asari Vanguard or a Quarian Engineer.

As you gain experience it is distributed throughout your CLASS.  There are 5 available squadies in each class (a male and female human and three alien race memebers).  If you spend all your MP time using your Krogan Vanguard, all the vanguards gain the same XP and can be leveled even though you never used them.  There is a cap at level 20 to keep balance in the MP (not enough points to fully level your class skills).  Once you hit 20 you can just keep playing at harder difficulties or you can "promote" the class to the main game.  This gives you a galactic readiness boost as well as ups your N7 rating (an amalgam of all your current levels and promoted units).  This is how the MP crosses into the Single Player (SP).  I also feel it helps with the replay value of the MP since you can play through again with slightly different evolution.

Credits and Equipment
As you gain money you can buy packs of equipment of varying cost.  The packs contain random equipment and squaddies.  The higher the cost the more likely you are to get rare items or races (you only get humans from the start, you have to get Asari, etc from the equipment packs).  Equipment ranges from weapons and mods to new race/class combos and extra experience boosts.

Note:  You can also pay real money for equipment packs.  However they're not cheap considering your $1-3 purchase only nets you five items each time.

Weapons and mods are permanent and you can always use them.  If you get the same weapon twice it upgrades the weapon instead up to level 10.  Eventually your level 1 Asari Adept could start off with a fully upgraded super sniper rifle (not actually a weapon name) if so you choose.

Other items can only be stocked up for single use.  You always bring your maximum into battle, ie medi-gel, rockets, ammo packs, and instant shield recharges. There are also items that increase how many of each you can carry into a battle (starts at 2, maxes at 10).  Essentially you'll have 50+ rockets but each full MP mission you get two rockets for use in all 10 waves (they're a one-shot kill if you hit!).  With a full team there could be 8-40 rockets and on Gold they don't stop flying in later waves.

There are mods that are in effect for entire missions.  These are ammo mods, armor mods and weapon mods.  Ammo mods are cryo, incindiary, etc ammo types of varying degree.  Armor mods will grant you faster shield recharge, stronger powers, cooldown bonus, etc.  Supplemental weapon mods can increase the strength of your weapons, help them penetrate armor, make them more accurate, etc.  In the MP screen these appear as "Equipment" and you can have one of each category equipped (or none).

New race/class equipment usually carries some bonus experience for that class and will often result in a free level up at lower levels of the class.  If you already have that race/class combo then you'll usually receive the ability to customize the appearance a bit.

Part of the team
The mechanics of the multiplayer are slightly modified from the single player.  There is no power wheel and there is no weapon wheel.  This removes your ability to pause the game, look around and assign a target for your abilities.  Everything moves much quicker than SP.

In MP each character has an assigned set of skills.  Three skills are active (biotics, tech, armor, etc), and two are passive (fitness and the class skill tree).  The skills are assigned to right, and left bumper and the Y button.  Then cannot be remapped.  As I mentioned before you will never max out your evolutions so it's important to have a defined strategy when leveling out of combat.  If you're heavy on combat abilities bring lighter weapons or just one so you can use your abilities more often.  If you're favoring passive skills then you can probably afford to carry a beefier arsenal.

Those one-shot items you carry into battle are activated by your D-pad.  If you are knocked out of battle, just like in SP mode, someone can come revive you for free, however if you have medigel left, you can revive yourself.  When you're out of medigel and your teammates are either a-holes or couldn't get there in time, you bleed out and die (there are some enemies who can insta-kill you, too).  At this point you go into spectator mode and follow around your still-breathing teammates hoping they can beat back that wave.  If they die, the mission is scrubbed and you're awarded any experience and credits awarded to that point.  If the rest of the team lives through it you're revived for the next wave.

Note: When you're stuck in spectator mode you can change the camera angle and call out things other players can't see, such as a Banshee sneaking up behind them.  Very useful.

Each wave consists of random objectives that are usually just "kill everything you see" with increasing difficulty.  There are three other possible missions: kill four targets in succession, defend a certain area while being IN the area, and activate/deactivate four objectives.  Each of the non kill-everything modes has a timer and you fail if you don't complete the wave in the allotted time.

For killing in succession the commanding officer will call out targets who are highlighted whether you can see them or not.  The targets aren't always the most powerful creature, either.  On occasion you'll get lucky and one of the high value targets is a grunt.

The other two variants are pretty self-explanitory.  Either you're running around defending a guy who takes about 10-15 seconds to activate/deactivate something (and isn't shooting) or you're defending a certain area while standing in it.  I find the latter to be the hardest variant because in order to finish the wave properly you sit in a relatively small area which is just over the radius of a grenade blast.  And there will be grenades.  And blasts...  It's VERY easy to get overwhelmed as almost all of the defense areas have limited cover and you're easily overrun.  When you're in the Gold difficulty level you spend a lot of time high-tailing it out of there, killing everything that follows and running back in, hoping you can accumulate enough defense time before the wave timer causes you to fail.  It sucks.

What really makes the MP go is that it's very difficult to grief other players.  Your squad most likely won't make it through an encounter if you're not willing to help each other out (with the rare exception of a useless teammate who isn't worth reviving).  Teammates can't harm each other so you never have to worry about a pistol whip from a bored 12 year old.  If someone steals your kill (and they will), XP is distributed for damage done, not for finishing off the baddie.  So wearing down a brute to the very last tick only to have a vanguard or sniper finish it off will award you with a majority of the XP.  Bioware made it very difficult to be rewarded in any way for being a dick.

Basically Bioware made a reward and combat system that removes almost ever reason I dislike online MP gaming.  I've been enjoying it immensely.






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Warning, this if full of spoiler.

The ending"s"

There's a lot (a LOT) of.. discussions going on about the end of ME:3.  And for good reason.

Despite how Bioware feels or what they say, there is only one ending to Mass Effect 3, and it has slight variants.  No matter what you do, all the relays end up blowing up.  You cannot prevent this from happening regardless of choices made throughout the game or at the end of the game.  The variants have to do with whether or not the Earth is blown up, if your team survives, and, if they don't survive, when they die.

There are a lot of flaws in this ending too.  Lots of gaping plot holes that lead people to figure they just "called in" the writing.  I reached the end of the game and saw Garrus and Tali live through the ground battle.  I chose to destroy the Reapers and all of a sudden the Normandy is trying to outrun the destruction of the relays.

Why?

If my ground forces survived the fight what prompted them to leave me behind as they tried to save their own skin?  Shouldn't they have been in the fight the whole time to give Shep the time to figure out how to win the galaxy?

Also, invariably there are thousands of ships from the reapers, council races and more floating around in the Sol system as well as thousands of scientists who all know how they work.  If they all survived the fight, why does the very end of the game make it sound like only the humans lived past the events of ME:3 to repopulate Earth?  It's well established that the mass relays are gateways between major clusters and that inter system travel is commonplace technology.  The galactic community would remain.  They would just move slower.

I'm reasonably certain that the non-Earth races didn't just decided to off themselves because it wasn't their planet.

I'm not calling bullshit on the style of the ending.  If Bioware wants everything to blow up, fine.  But what we have is an ending that seems like it was conceived by some kid in 10th grade who always thought, "I hope I make videogames some day and I hope that the last line of my game will be 'Tell me about the Shepard' ".  That's right.  Up until the final battle the story and immersiveness of the Mass Effect galaxy is phenomenal.  Then you get to the end and the writing turns to shit.  It jars you out of your Mass Effect world and throws you into a world not unlike the sins of George Lucas's later years.

For shame, Bioware.  For shame.

Mass Effect 3: Your spell fizzles...

(kudos to anyone who gets the reference in the title, answer below)

Anyone who has been reading this blog knows that I'm a very big fan of Mass Effect. So when I finally got my hands on Mass Effect 3 (ME3) after being on vacation during its release, I played the crap out of it. There isn't a lot new in ME3 so I'll just cover the main changes from ME2 and anything else pertinent.

When you start ME3 and attempt to import your character you very well may be instantly disappointed because you'll see your very first bug. Thankfully my main Shep had no problems importing. Not thankfully he's an ugly SOB. I spent around half an hour trying to make a Shep that looked like me on the original game and gave up because, well, I wanted to play the game. The result was that I spent the next two games hating how my Shep looked and just getting used to a hero who had gotten 43 lashes of the ugly stick before he joined the Alliance Navy.

About the story.

Bioware sort of glazes over Shepard breaking off from Cerberus somewhere between the end of ME2 and six months before ME3. The timeline is very sketchy. At the end of the main storyline in ME2 you tell The Illusive Man to either "fuck off" or "kindly fuck off"... then fly around in his ship doing other missions and getting paid for a while until you finally blow the shit out of the Mass Relay in the Batarian's section of the galaxy (with a giant freaking MOON) in the Arrival DLC, which is definitely after the main quest. It's understood that sometime after that, the Alliance breaks apart your team, commandeers the Normandy, and grounds/discharges Shepard because he killed billions of Batarians trying to save the universe from mass extinction.

The funny thing is that after the first two games the galactic governments are still basically saying, "Crazy old Shepard is up to his old antics!"

The game starts just as Earth is learning about the Reaper invasion. Earth is one of the first civilizations targeted, and you're on your way to talk to the heads of the Alliance government to tell them they're getting their asses kicked by Reapers. Basically Bioware's future Earth is filled with ass-faced politicians who wear bags over their heads 90% of the time and have no idea what happens outside of their office and checking account. So foreign policy hasn't changed one bit from today's USA.

Half way through the conversation the Reapers start... reaping. The opening part of ME3 is one of my favorites. It illustrates better than any other game I can remember just how weak and desperate a situation can be. Everything around you is blowing up and everything keeps going from bad to worse without being over the top (or under it). Eventually you make it to the Normandy and fly away to the Citadel to attempt to rally support to take back Earth in the same Normandy that Cerberus built and Shepard stole. True to form, bot the Normandy and Citadel have received a few cosmetic updates.

It should come as no surprise that nobody gives a Krogan fecal pellet about Earth's problems and Shep spends the next few months playing fetch missions for everyone on the Citadel. As a bonus, you've also got to contend with almost limitless Cerberus forces since the Illusive Man thinks that he can handle the Reapers by controlling them and obviously killing Shepard is a good way to make that happen. You'll do a tour of most of the other race's worlds, fighting Reaper forces, Cerberus forces, and some Geth.

Before ME3 was a lot of mystery. You were always chasing the unknown, which was a lot of fun.

ME1: What the Hell is Saren doing and how do we stop him?

ME2: What the Hell is behind the Omega 4 relay and how do we stop it?

However the plot of ME3 is somewhat... subdued.

ME3: Kill reapers and when the Hell is Shepard's sexytime?

The game play:

Pretty much identical to ME2, however you no longer carry heavy weapons. You'll find the occasional BFG conveniently lying around most boss fights, but you can't keep it and there isn't any spare ammo.

Shepard is no longer locked into class-specific weapons, but at the same time Shep can't carry an arsenal without some drawbacks. Shepard now has an arbitrary carry weight limit. It starts off around 20 or so and can go up to 70 or perhaps more for other classes (I played a vanguard). It doesn't work exactly as you would expect, though. You can carry everything you want, but the weight of the weapons in total will affect your power recharge time. Keep it under the limit and you get a bonus. Go over the limit and you're penalized up to 200% either way. Loading up with big, heavy hitting weapons will severely penalize your power recharge. But carrying no weapons isn't going to be a big help either.

The game constantly displays tips you during loading sessions, often advising you to carry a fast weapon and a slow weapon for different enemy types. Here's my advice. Always buy the SMG ultralight materials upgrades. Eventually it'll get 80% off and it's like a free weapon. They do almost no damage, but are useful if you've got Cryo Ammo for freezing a room of enemies to give you more time.

There are a LOT more guns this time around. Between the five gun types (pistols, SMGs, assault rifles, shotguns, and sniper rifles) there are probably 40 weapons total. Each weapon has stats for weight, capacity, rate of fire, damage, and accuracy. Each weapon has two slots for mods and five types of mods that affect the stats in one way or another. Furthermore, you can purchase whole weapon upgrades on the Normandy that give them minor boosts in damage, accuracy, and weight.

Your armor is about as customizable as in ME2. N7 armor gives you a 50% health boost and all the armor offers a straight up trade with other attributes, save for a few pieces that hide and extra 5%.

Characters

The squad in ME3 consists of a mostly Normandy Veterans (lots of pardoned Cerberus personnel) and a few new guys. Someone you'll meet right away is a Latino Soldier named.. well I honestly can't remember his name because he annoyed the shit out of me and I kept hoping I could get him killed (spoiler alert, I couldn't...). You'll spend a lot of time doing missions and saying, "Well hey, if you want to get on the ship, great." and getting new team members, again depending on who survived the last two games you'll have a lot of familiar faces.

You and your squad now have a more diverse powerset. In ME2 there were four powers, now there are five. There are six upgrades per power with the last three involving choices as to how you want the power to evolve. Generally the choices are tradeoffs between damage and area, health/shields and weapon/power damage, that sort of thing. Some characters can significantly effect the squad as a whole which can be very useful if you plan on letting your Shepard lack in some areas.

Grenades are back as powers now. So you can toss them until they're gone if they're available to your class. As far as the biotics and tech powers go, they're largely the same with a few exceptions, depending largely on who survived the previous games.

Squadmates remain largely useless in combat and do about 1/10th of the work Shep does until you tell them to focus on an enemy. Their mapped powers change from the primary to whatever would be more useful to the situation at hand. So if your primary mapped power is pull, but you're targeting an armored bad guy, it'll change to something that works on armor (usually).

The big difference in ME3 is now the squad hangs all over the ship interacting with each other. This can be rather entertaining as the squad will bicker with each other and recount old times. It adds a lot of depth to the characters. There is a trade off, though, there seems to be fewer conversations between Shep and the squad this time. I hope you enjoy combing each level of the ship for conversations because that's what you'll be doing between each mission.

The war

Everything you do in ME3 is to contribute to your War Assets and Galactic Readiness rating. Ultimately you're attempting to rally the entire galaxy to save Earth if possible. This involves every species to whatever extent is possible. Generally you'll do a mission or three for a race and they pledge their support during the final push.

Most of the stuff you find throughout the galaxy will contribute to this. Like finding a squadron of fighters that got lost, or finding a flag so some Turian squad's morale will be bolstered. Minor stuff like that. It all has a point value, some of it is almost insignificant, some of it is a giant help.

More on all this later.

Exploration

This will be fast. Because there is none.

Apparently from ME1 to ME3 nobody thought to build another stealth ship, because the Normandy is the only one that can come and go where it pleases. In ME3 the galaxy map gradually lets you go to almost every system from the previous games, letting you fly around to known systems to your heart's content. However the Normandy can now send out a SONAR like ping that can find things withing something like a 1 or 2 AU radius. All you're doing is looking to see if something might be on a planet or floating around in the form of wreckage. If a planet has something on it, you scan for it ME2 style and send in a probe. Unlike in ME2, probes are unlimited because you'll only ever need 20 or 30 throughout the game.

Scanning doesn't come free, through. Every time you send out that ping, an "awareness" meter will begin to fill and a few red arrows will appear on the edge of whatever system you're in. Keep scanning wantonly (sometimes just twice will do it) and the Reapers will show up on the edge of the map like some intergalactic troggles and chase you down until you leave the system. They come back every time you re-enter that system until you complete a mission, at which point they universally lose interest in you and kindly go back to whatever low traffic area of space where these god-like creatures must be looking at Reaper porn or something. Otherwise why would they NOT be hiding out at each Mass Relay? Yup, the only reason an advanced race like that would be hiding has to be porn.

Paragon/Renegade

Okay, here's where things get iffy. The good/bad, +/- scale in games has always been a strange line to walk since the ending of the game is almost universally the same aside from a few shining examples such as Jade Empire, ME1, and Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain (yeah, I remember it!).

Just like in the previous games you'll spend a lot of time being a nice guy or a dick. Just like in the previous games if you're nice enough or dickish enough, you'll get special conversation options that are reserved for people with enough points on either side. The problem here is that I always seemed to be able to take either choice despite the fact that my Renegadity was always over 75%. That's just how I play my main Shep. He's generally a dick but isn't stupid and bullheaded.

Whereas ME1 and 2 managed to more or less lock you into one style, ME3 gave me the option of being completely bi-polar. Shooting a hostage taker in the face and pissing on his mother's grave for effect one moment, kissing a civilian's boo-boos and brewing hot cocoa for orphans the next. You get the idea.

Trigger pulls for "bold Renegade" actions and "bold Paragon" actions are fewer and farther between than in ME2, if I'm not mistaken. And almost universally the "bold Paragon" move is to, and I kid thee not, hug someone.

Old choices/New choices

This is where ME3 really "suffers". ME3 makes an effort to have you focus in on three important stats. The Readiness Rating (a percent), War Assets (total military strength) and your Effective Military strength, which is War Assets * Readiness. The problem is that at the beginning of ME3, your total available War Assets are finite. And your Readiness rating starts off at %50. Meaning that you have to work incredibly hard for the 'best' ending(s).

The only way to affect Readiness is to play the multiplayer game (which is actually fun, but won't be reviewed) or to play minigames for your iPhone/iPad. Either way, to get your readiness rating you have to fork money over to Bioware, sortof. See, in ME3 your new copy comes with a code allowing access to the multiplayer game. If you buy it used, you need to buy a code. And the iGames aren't free, either.

The finite available War assets aren't supposed to be a problem, but they are because the sum of all your decisions throughout the ME universe will factor into the total possible points. Meaning that there is a theoretical maximum and minimum points available.

The controversy really comes from the inability to easily determine what paths would lead to the greatest success. Presumably, you should be able to play ME3 through without importing a character, and get the best ending without playing multiplayer or paying for iCrap.

How many play throughs will it take you to determine how to optimally gather galactic forces? 10? 20? 100? Each time you'd need to spend dozens of hours doing the same lame fetch missions to see if you can get your military strength to the highest possible number.

As I understand it, there are over a dozen possible endings to ME3 with the main determination being the major decision at the end of ME2. Many of the endings are remarkably similar, and none of them are very descriptive. Even so, you have a major decision on how to handle the reaper problem at the end of ME3 which can determine what happens. I wasn't happy with how things turned out.

You can look at this two ways. You can say Bioware gypped you out of a descent ending, robbing you of any sense of fulfillment, or you can say that you played out a story in the way you chose and you got what you earned.

I'm more 50/50. I think that after spending well over $200 on a series of games I'm entitled to a lot more closure if I managed to save Earth and/or the galaxy, however if I wasn't able to save anyone, well, there is no more story to tell, is there?

In conclusion
I think ME3 is a damned fine game. The missions range from defending one of the multiplayer levels from a few waves of enemies to epic battles across the face of a planet. Often I felt like the decisions I made no noticeable difference in course of the ME world. Finally, I feel that Bioware does owe its players a lot more of an ending. We've paid for it, we've earned it, and we've learned to expect it from a Bioware game. (I could and probably will devote a separate entry to address game endings)

Is it perfect? No. Is it better than ME2? Probably not. Is it better than ME1? Yes. It is simply the conclusion to ME1 and 2, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I'd recommend anyone with any vested interest in Shepard's universe to play it.

Bonus: Annoyed the crap out of me

1. The reaper Troggles. Every time they enter a system they make the noise that originally terrified you. The sound effect quickly went from blood curdling rumble to annoying bass from the jackass in the rice burner outside.

2. The SPECTER firing range locked the game every single time I entered it. I'd have to save the game and restart the XBox in order to get in to test out weapons.

3. No definitive damage for any weapons. Even with the firing range you wouldn't know a weapons true abilities until you played a mission with it. The test dummies on the range weren't effective test subjects at all.

4. This one was a big annoyance. It probably should be in the main review. ME3 suffered from a good deal of deus ex machina. In many situations it's just fine because you're attempting to make things happen. But there are a few fights with a kind of hopeless boss that are infuriating. Mostly because you could easily beat the sonnofabitch if you had more time. And a lot of fights that don't end when you would expect.

Your spell fizzles

My brother and I had a game called Eamon on the Apple IIGS. It was a text based adventure and we were too young to really understand how to play it. When you tried to cast spells they would only work if you were a high enough level, otherwise they would "fizzle" and if i recall correctly, sometimes your companion would laugh at you.

Dernit Ubisoft!!

I had decided that the next Assassin's Creed game wasn't for me. You know, because I kept putting money in Ubisoft's coffers despite their games being identical and all? Well I saw the new trailer and then I see this shit.

Seriously? You sling three identical games at us with the only difference being the BEARD. Which, to be fair, worked on me...

Now you want me to play in colonial America; I hated to study this time period back in school... Fuck.