Mass Effect

God i love Mass Effect. The Bioware epic RPG has captured my heart, i am 25 hours in and i am half through the game maybe. I seem to get caught up in side quests and spend hours getting them done. The game does a fantastic job of giving you interesting story lines in the side quests. They send you exploring the underside of a futuristic super city, hunting down criminals throughout the galaxy and even tracking down mad doctors throughout the galaxy. The game does a fantastic job with the story, the game play is difficult but it becomes manageable eventually. The combat actually becomes very fun when you start chaining abilities together to make fantastic combo's with adept and soldier powers. Now for the downside to the game:

- Mass Effect is buggy. Sometimes your squad mates disappear or get stuck on something and the only way to fix this is to save the game and to reload it. This can become especially annoying during difficult fire fights were you fear that your team might bug out. Watch out for the tunnels of Feroes, they are extremely buggy.

- Many story lines in Mass Effect are left uncompleted. One quest line tells of a doctor being black mailed and leads into the blackmailer somehow being killed months before making the situation impossible. These little things just seem like Bioware did not put enough effort into the little things like this. Many quests also involve some sort of super company which has been doing horribly experiments and even engineering monsters and even ends up in the murder an Admiral. While the actual game play is fine, up to 5 quests about this company leads to no real story, the player learning nothing about this evil company (Cerberus) and we are left empty handed about what the heck is actually going on. One more example is the Shadow broker, an evil mastermind who is never revealed to the character or even hinted at. This story line in particular seemed like something that bioware wanted to put into the game but did not have time for. It is these things that need to be addressed in Mass Effect 2 for the fans (Banes the Blackmailer, Cerberus and the Shadow Broker)

- In a similar line for bugs, the game has a few quests that can be picked up but cannot be completed due to a different event moving this character away or changing circumstances in the game. This is not only poor design but poor implementation.

- The game does give a feel of being incomplete, there were ideas of controlling different squad mates and more tactical ideas shown by bioware and many incomplete story lines that never really go anywhere which hints that Mass Effect was released early and to be honest it shows. The game feels rough around the edges with graphics sometimes being choppy, buggs popping up and many of the broken story lines.

Still after all this Mass Effect might be one of the best games i have ever played. I might finish the game tomorrow or Wednesday depending on how many side quests i want to do. The main story line is just so good i might just get tired of waiting and focus on that.

Dark Knight

Holy crap this movie looks amazing. One of the best trailers ever, better then 300 even.

Books!

I need to read more books. I have a very certain taste in books so i am going to be trying out these before i go onto anything more difficult:
(I just ordered most of these off amazon, hopefully they are good)

1) Halo: Contact Harvest
2) Mass Effect: Revelation
3) World Of Warcraft: Tides of Darkness
4) World of Warcraft: Cycle of Hatred
5) World of Warcraft: Rise of the Horde
6) Dauntless (The Lost Fleet, Book 1)
7) Signal to Noise
8) With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa
9) Speaker for the Dead
10) Ender's Shadow

Yes 10 books and my goal is to read most or all of them by the time i get back from india (which is at the end of January.) All these books should be good times, i am a huge fan of the Warcraft books and i am espcially exited about the Mass Effect book (a book based off of a game that i have been playing way too much.) Other then that i will be down with school and Mass Effect. Mmmmmm Mass Effect.

Greatest. Book. Ever.

Why Mommy is a Democrat. This is the greatest book ever. Sample pages from the book explains it all:

Mass Effect

I am crazy about Mass Effect. 5 days till launch and i cannot wait for this game. The story is supposed to be fantastic and the game play sounds incredible. The ability to play with multiple variations has never apealed me much but when you can play the game as a strategic shooter or a more thought out RPG sounds rather interesting and i know i will play through the game at least a few times, once for Mind Powers and once just to shoot everything up. I have been looking at kmarts that might have leaked the game but luck is not on my side.

In other news i have been getting more and more worried about the writers strike so i will be looking more towards anime and older shows. I have also been looking for some books to read so i'll be on the look out for that. I got a new time card for WoW and i plan to play some Zul'Aman this weekend but with mass effect and essays i don't think i will have the time to play too much. Ah well at least it will give me something to do while i am not playing mass effect or something else. Well that is enough for today, i used the phrase at least way too often so i'll need to think about that from now on.

I keep on hearing this song on a commercial and it's stuck in my head. Damn.

Music of the day

I have been into music lately, most of it your average stuff but here is some of my favorites as of late.
The first song is a Timerland remix and it is fantastic. It sinks in quick and it is possibly the best remix i have ever heard.













Bitter Sweet Symphony is particulary good, beautiful girls is catchy as hell and you know my name just seems to hit that right cord.

The Hushed Casket

For anyone not in the know, this is a Halo (the video game) reference and there is nothing sinister about it. I decided to make a blog to get some of my thoughts down, some music i'm into at the moment and anything else really. I hope to post daily just to get some ideas out there but i want to improve my writing so the best way to do that is practice. Go Pats.