Tuesday, December 25, 2007

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.

Monday, December 17, 2007

Dark Knight



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