Right at the outset you make a couple of conversation choices, but really what they want to do is hustle you into some action before they lose the xbox shooter crowd. It's not the most sophisticated shooting game I've ever experienced, but then again, I'm a PC shooter, myself. I should probably have just played this game on the PC, for heaven's sake. I can hardly hit anything. I begin to miss Jade Empire, which was focused on martial arts and other sorceries that are easy for a console character to excel at. Why does everyone love all this cover-based shooting with two analog sticks? It's neither realistic nor intuitive. Ah well, I'm not concerned. After all, I'm about to grind the hell out of this game, and I'll be so overpowered I'll ruin people before they even see me coming. Unfortunately, it means a little dying at the beginning as I struggle through early levels.
You land on a human colony named Eden Prime to escort a newly-discovered Prothean beacon back to Alliance space. Remember, all our current technology is based on the ruins of old Prothean stuff - finding an intact and working piece of their technology could launch us into new realms of advancement. So it's pretty important. The Council has sent along a Spectre to oversee both the mission and to check you out as a prospect, he's a turian named Nihil. Naturally, before you even finish the mission briefing, something's gone catastrophically wrong - the colony on Eden Prime is under attack by an unknown alien force. Time to get to work. I'm dropped into a hotzone with my buddies Lt. Alenko and Lt. Jenkins and almost immediately, Jenkins bites the big one. He runs out of cover and is gunned down by some kind of android flying bot. Sorry, Jenkins. We barely knew ye.
I fumble around with my guns for... probably longer than is respectful. There isn't much in the way of tutorials - just point and pull the trigger when the reticule is orange, I guess. Too much shooting and my gun overheats. Right bumper button pauses while I mull over weapon choices for the squad, and left bumper pauses while I look at our activate-able powers. That's all I can figure out, but that's probably all there is to it. Luckily, the enemies are pretty much pushovers at this stage, and we soon run into a marine who's on the run from more droids. Ashley Williams, last survivor of her squad stationed on Eden Prime. Welcome to the team, Ashley, now gun down those other drones. The AI drones are impaling still-living humans on high-tech spikes; unnecessarily gruesome! It turns regular humans into weird drones called 'husks' that run at me and explode into a bunch of sparks. Meanwhile, Nihil is off scouting ahead when he runs into another turian he recognizes. Of course, as soon as Nihil's back is turned, this turian (Saren) pulls out his gun and shoots him in the back. I come across his dead body and wring the full story out of a scared witness who was hiding behind some crates. Two people dead on my squad, and an entire colony, about to be blown to smithereens - this candidate review for the Spectres is not going to look good, I'm afraid.
I defuse the bombs that Saran left to blown up the entire colony and finally reach the beacon object I've been looking for all this time - wonder where Saran went, I thought he was just here with it a second ago. Alenko wanders too close to the beacon and it starts go to berserk. I shove him out of the way and get sucked up in some kind of weird knowledge-transmission / vision or whatever you want to call it before the entire beacon self-destructs. Ashley and Kaiden carry my unconscious self back to the ship.
Friday, July 20, 2012
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Mass Effect, Day 1, Part 1
Obviously, I know I'm late to this party. Bear with me, I just got my first ever Xbox.
Though, I have played Jade Empire on someone else's xbox, long ago, and I suppose these games were made by the same people? It's got all the same hallmarks - you make your own person and drive your own personality, but you have to interact with about 6 different teammates that you can swap in and out of your squad, and whoever your morality lines up with the most, you can sleep with by the end of the game, provided you did enough kissing up, etc. I enjoyed that one immensely - I felt like it was a good 'consequence' of the morality of your actions, without affecting their bottom line. You know how it goes; the company can't make fifteen different endings of the game based on your morality choices. Sometimes a game goes with two morality-based endings (as in BioShock: Nurture the Little Baby Orphans, or Murder Everything Everywhere), and sometimes a game will just go with one (as in most games - you can be a jerk, but you've still got to save the universe and be hailed as a hero). I mean, I can't imagine Mass Effect being able to adjust for horrible behavior by, let's say, firing me from the Fleet and I spend the rest of my days playing a quick-time mini-game to mine ore on some remote planet while some other upstanding fellow saves the universe, even if I hang up on the Council mid-transmission.
It's mostly moot - I always play the same way anyway. I answer exactly how I would really answer if it was me, and I finish all the side-quests, because I am some kind of side-quest-aholic. I crave me those side-quests. Gotta catch 'em all. And that includes squad members. If I have to be Captain Slut, so be it, I'm gonna hunt down every romantic interlude side quest available. Now that our intentions are clear, let us begin the festivities.
Mass Effect begins by asking you to configure a character, both in appearance and background. Well, you could choose the stock options, but you'll forgive me if I assume the worst about you if you do such a thing. Your options in appearance are terribly endless; I managed to create something that resembled a human being, at least. She is a touch amphibian in her facial features, but I had already spent enough time trying to tweak her - I'm pretty sure I can look at her for the duration of three games. All the NPCs you meet in the game are configured really well - I guess I'm just not as adept as the game's artistry team. The choices for background are more limited. Three choices for personal history (orphan from Earth growing up on the mean streets, military kid, and sole survivor of colonial massacre), and three choices for military history (war hero, sole survivor of a military catastrophe, and ruthless). Do they affect your gameplay? Not that much, though people do mention it in conversations, and apparently a side mission or two will depend on your choices.
The game world is based on the a sci-fi concept: the human race uncovered artifacts from an ancient civilization under the surface of mars in the not-too-distant future. Study of these advanced technologies allowed our own science to move forward by leaps and bounds, and we soon discovered the 'mass relay' at the edge of the solar system - a device created by these progenitors (called Protheans) to travel across galaxies in moments. By jumping through these still-working relays, we traveled and colonized across the universe. We met (and had a First Contact War with) alien races, and finally have started to gain a modicum of respect in galactic civilization as the newcomers. The Council rules from an enormous structure called The Citadel, which is another working piece of Prothean technology - everything that everyone knows is from Prothean artifacts, apparently. No one even knows how the Citadel works, but they figured it was as good a place as any to gather all the races up and conduct politics. The Council is made up of only 3 representatives: a Salarian, a somewhat bug-like race that thinks fast and talks fast; an Asarian, an all-female race that are a little betazoid, with biotic powers and a reputation for promiscuity; and a Turian, a more warrior race that humans distrust after the First Contact War. Humans, and the myriad of other races in the galaxy, get pretty much no say in this hierarchy, but that's what we're working to change at the outset of the game. The human Alliance is making a push to get one of their own into the Spectres - the Council's MI5, if you will, a secret organization that can bend galactic law to execute the Council's will. No human has yet been admitted, and the Alliance's candidate is me, Shepard.
It's mostly moot - I always play the same way anyway. I answer exactly how I would really answer if it was me, and I finish all the side-quests, because I am some kind of side-quest-aholic. I crave me those side-quests. Gotta catch 'em all. And that includes squad members. If I have to be Captain Slut, so be it, I'm gonna hunt down every romantic interlude side quest available. Now that our intentions are clear, let us begin the festivities.
Mass Effect begins by asking you to configure a character, both in appearance and background. Well, you could choose the stock options, but you'll forgive me if I assume the worst about you if you do such a thing. Your options in appearance are terribly endless; I managed to create something that resembled a human being, at least. She is a touch amphibian in her facial features, but I had already spent enough time trying to tweak her - I'm pretty sure I can look at her for the duration of three games. All the NPCs you meet in the game are configured really well - I guess I'm just not as adept as the game's artistry team. The choices for background are more limited. Three choices for personal history (orphan from Earth growing up on the mean streets, military kid, and sole survivor of colonial massacre), and three choices for military history (war hero, sole survivor of a military catastrophe, and ruthless). Do they affect your gameplay? Not that much, though people do mention it in conversations, and apparently a side mission or two will depend on your choices.
The game world is based on the a sci-fi concept: the human race uncovered artifacts from an ancient civilization under the surface of mars in the not-too-distant future. Study of these advanced technologies allowed our own science to move forward by leaps and bounds, and we soon discovered the 'mass relay' at the edge of the solar system - a device created by these progenitors (called Protheans) to travel across galaxies in moments. By jumping through these still-working relays, we traveled and colonized across the universe. We met (and had a First Contact War with) alien races, and finally have started to gain a modicum of respect in galactic civilization as the newcomers. The Council rules from an enormous structure called The Citadel, which is another working piece of Prothean technology - everything that everyone knows is from Prothean artifacts, apparently. No one even knows how the Citadel works, but they figured it was as good a place as any to gather all the races up and conduct politics. The Council is made up of only 3 representatives: a Salarian, a somewhat bug-like race that thinks fast and talks fast; an Asarian, an all-female race that are a little betazoid, with biotic powers and a reputation for promiscuity; and a Turian, a more warrior race that humans distrust after the First Contact War. Humans, and the myriad of other races in the galaxy, get pretty much no say in this hierarchy, but that's what we're working to change at the outset of the game. The human Alliance is making a push to get one of their own into the Spectres - the Council's MI5, if you will, a secret organization that can bend galactic law to execute the Council's will. No human has yet been admitted, and the Alliance's candidate is me, Shepard.
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