Link (YouTube) |
True story: The entire batch of episodes we recorded last Sunday had to be trashed because the voice recording file was somehow corrupted. I’m still wrenching my brain for an explanation as to how it happened. We record using ventrilo’s record feature (we’re all in agreement that the benefits of skype are far outweighed by the lack of a bind-able push-to-talk key). Ventrilo also makes it very easy to separate each individual’s voice into a separate channel for re-composition later because that’s how they’re saved natively, and all you have to do is export them to .wav files (rather than having everyone record their own voice and then send each recording to me). Right now the only explanation I can think of is that I may have killed the program before ending the recording, but that doesn’t quite mesh with what I remember – I’m fairly certain I recall ending the recording long before I left the server, so I really have no idea.
On the bright side, it seems this was a one time glitch. We all got together on Monday to re-record the episodes, so everything you see this week is actually Take Two. And as I wrote that I realized that would be a perfect place for a pun about the game publisher, but I’m far too lame to come up with one.
So enjoy one of the rare times where a major problem with the show has led to me sharing the pain of extra work with everybody, instead of just myself.
(And yes by “me” I mean “Josh,” not “Shamus.” He really needs to add something to the “Posted by” section that makes it more obvious who posted a given post so I stop having to clarify it when he gets tired and goes to bed before the episode is ready to be posted. Maybe an avatar or something.)
Trekrospective

A look back at Star Trek, from the Original Series to the Abrams Reboot.
Please Help I Can’t Stop Playing Cities: Skylines

What makes this borderline indie title so much better than the AAA juggernauts that came before?
The Plot-Driven Door

You know how videogames sometimes do that thing where it's preposterously hard to go through a simple door? This one is really bad.
Juvenile and Proud

Yes, this game is loud, crude, childish, and stupid. But it it knows what it wants to be and nails it. And that's admirable.
A Lack of Vision and Leadership

People fault EA for being greedy, but their real sin is just how terrible they are at it.
The video is private. Is there something in there you don’t want us to see? >:D
It’s public for me, and I’m signed out of the Spoiler Warning account.
Works for me now. How odd.
Private for me as well
edit: works now. :)
No problems on my side
I somehow have the feeling they’re going to meet someone from ME1 again after all…
That’s so odd, isn’t it.
Since nobody else has pointed out that Liara’s first line is directly lifted from Matriarch Benezia’s pre-fight dialogue, I should probably come in and do that.
“Have you ever faced an asari commando unit before? Few humans have.”
Nice catch. Totally missed that one.
Does this mean you’re not doing the DLC?
We do plan to do the Shadow Broker DLC at the very least, we just want to get these recruitment missions out of the way first.
Plus Samara’s mission finally gets me a good shotgun.
Aren’t you running around with the overpowered long-range DLC shotgun? At least i can’t remember having any shotgun with 3 shots in my playthrough..
There’s actually four shotguns by my count, and two of them are DLC. The specifically “long range” Geth shotgun is the one I happen to not have, unfortunately. The Eviscerator is just another pump-action shotgun with high damage but a tiny clip meaning I can shoot it once or twice before it becomes more expedient to just run up and melee people.
Well, then there’s the krogan shotgun. I guess opinions vary widely, but on lower difficulties It’s actually pretty fun to use (mainly when combined with charge, otherwise yeah, a bit useless).
Krogan Poetry > Krogan Shotgun
I’d much rather have assault rifle specialization for longer ranged fights than a shotgun with a one-shot-clip and 10 extra slugs.
So I take it you’ll be taking the Assault Rifle specialization when you get to the Collector Trap thing?
I find the vanilla assault rifles in ME2 a waste of time. Before I downloaded the Firepower pack, I always used sniper rifles as the main weapon for my soldiers (and then I picked up either the machine gun or the widow at the collector ship).
I mostly agree, but the machine gun(which counts as an assault rifle) completely breaks the game on normal if you get the accuracy upgrade. Heavy weapons are for wusses.
I found the Revenant extremely satisfying to use, albeit somewhat tricky to get the hang of the AK47-esque recoil.
Actually, if your going to do the Kasumi DLC (though her lack of presence on the citadel would make me assume not) the Locust SMG you unlock through her loyalty mission is pretty much as good as an assault rifle. Makes anything non-soldier a lot more fun to play.
Plus, the Claymore shotgun’s description is so iffy. It led me to think that if Shepard tried it it’d blow her hand off clear at the shoulder from the blowback.
Sadly, nothing happened when I tried. It would’ve been a rather lovely thing to have happened.
Did you read the entire description though?
It does finish with the line: “Fortunately, Shepard’s no ordinary human” or something similar at least.
Ringwraith, yeah, I did, but it would’ve been surprising inspite of it!
Get the Kasumi DLC as well. It has a really fun Heist mission, as well as the best submachine gun in the game. And you don’t even have to do a recruitment mission to get her.
Also, on a less ‘trying to pimp products’ tone. Where would Jack fit. I mean she hates Cerebus even more then you do. Hell, if you guys were going to kick all the goons out of the ship, she would be more then happy to help.
Of course, by help I mean ‘remember that she’s actually supposed to be a badass biotic and punch a hole through the ship before throwing them out.’
@Poiumty, the over powered DLC shotgun fires a trio of small glowing balls that are rather easy to notice. Plus it wouldn’t be used only after charging.
Jack is also one of the cool ones.Though she is silly at first,she kind of grows on you the more you converse with her.
Your mileage may vary. The more I talked to Jack, the more I wanted to space the brat – or at the very least send her to bed without dinner, or something.
The creepiness of the romance scenes also didn’t help.
You should definitely consider doing Kasumi’s mission, then, because you get an SMG that is actually usable at distances greater than four feet.
There’s also one very important reason to play Kasumi’s mission, besides how I want to eat her up everytime she talks (yeah!): the music! Holy wow, I was back in the eighties with that track!
Be sure to do the Firewalker pack. Your suicidal playstyle combined the Hammerhead’s paper-mà¢ché armour ought to make for some fun schadenfreude moments.
You know how them old fellers are. To Denny’s by 5, to bed by 5:30.
Ahh,I was hoping youd do the bar first,liara second.Oh,and please dont miss the bachelor party,its awesome.
And here we have 2 people from the previous game that know who youre working with,are very pissed about it(not to mention talis resentment towards ais),yet because you are shepard,someone they know well and trust you,they decide to be polite and help you any way they can.You know,they act really in character.Unlike those idiot humans from horizon.It just makes that horizon encounter that much worse.
Also,one other power that is awesome with area of effect is hack.Especially if both you and tali have it(I didnt do a three engineer run,but I guess it gets even funnier).
Oh,and I really think you should add a fourth member to your crew.Maybe a girl gamer.Someone who has different opinions than you,maybe even likes bioshock.
Don’t be ridiculous, there are NO girl gamers.
Mumbles really needs to stop audio tuning his voice.
I’l like to add Pull to the list of “good choices for AoE”. The other option just makes it last, like, 3 more seconds. When it already lasts like 7-9 seconds which is more than enough to kill anyone (and you get more targets to use Warp on if the first one dies).
Also explosive drone could probably work better on higher difficulties where it would die really fast (explosion does 3x damage compared to one shot), except enemies tend to not target it so much.
Really? Mine get targeted to the point I can nearly run around out of cover on Hardcore (haven’t tried Insane yet).
Maybe, i haven’t extensively tested the thing so i can’t vouch for it surviving long. Point was, explosive drone seems to be designed with higher difficulties in mind.
Kal’Reegar died in my play through and all that happened was that Tali said he died.
How did it affect the Tali loyalty mission later?
Why would it affect the loyalty mission? (Other than him not being on the ship) It’s not like you tell her specifically about how you risked his life for some fire support :P
If he’s dead, you can’t have him side with you on the trial…
Could be Zombie-Jayne.
Well, if you didn’t send Veetor to Cerberus and Kal’Reegar is still there, you can have them back you up on the trial to get the people on your side. It’s a Third Option aside from Paragon/Renegade, if I remember that doesn’t end up screwing Tali over.
Wait wait wait wait, what? WHAT!? I did both those things and never got that option!
* research*
Oh, so you have to talk to them, and gain their support, or alternatively, talk to the Admiralty board and expose their political agenda. Both of which I did. Neither option I got. Grr.
I think he cops it if you take too long to take out the colossus, as it finally gets annoyed with his rockets and decides to blow him to Mars.
Also, we all know it’ll get mentioned in the third one in at least some capacity.
Somehow, I’ve always half-expected you would be using Mumble… :)
Awesome bit about the airlock. Yeah, Mordin would totally be cool with it.
Had you kept the Queen alive in ME1, she ALSO sends you a message on Illium…
Weirdly, Shepard seems rather nonplussed about single-handedly saving an entire alien race. In the Shadow Broker DLC she says, “I unleashed the Rachni on the galaxy!” as part of a big “This is why you should fear me” speech. When just the other day on Ilium she heard that she didn’t so much “unleash” the rachni as she moved them to outpatient care from the nursing home.
Also that choice of words makes her sound like a dangerous idiot instead of a dangerous idiot who only released it because it asked nicely. I’m pretty sure unleashing it on the galaxy was nobody’s reason for freeing it.
I am appalled at how nobody pointed out that Liara’s eyes widened and narrowed irrespective of each other.
Seriously, the whole scene with her looked freaky, like her eyes really itched, but would explode if she blinked.
What, you never noticed? That’s something she does. She did it in Mass Effect 1. In fact, a lot of Asari do that. Samara does it, too.
You know what it reminded me of? A certain vagrant occasionally featured in drawings on Chocolate Hammer.
Mumbles’ your mum joke didn’t seem to go down well…
I’d like to think that everyone else just muted her for the rest of that episode – hence the talk of needing a new 4th member ^^
Josh should have edited that to play a cricket sound in the 5 seconds of awkward silence after she says it.
if you knew how many your mom jokes they have to sit through on a regular basis…
Ah yes. The SHOTGUN! I am glad I got it in my game already. :)
Now I just need to get another assault rifle.
Also… edit, The Justicar makes me bug out, it’s the extra large eyes.
This episode really brings up my personal problem with Mass Effect 2. ME2 has a lot more emphasis on fighting that the original Mass Effect. When playing ME2 I wanted to get the fights over with so I could get on with the story, but the fights go on so long, they sapped my will to play the game. Watching this episode, you finally finished the fight and got on to something else… and it was just boring talk talk. Mass Effect had wonderful walking around talking to people. It was fun to play it and fun to watch Spoiler Warning. How far was this conversation going to go before Shepard would punch the reporter or hang up on the Council… again. This is just, who else is going to be completely unsurprised to see a dead woman and launch into a boring conversation that serves no purpose except to establish a flimsy excuse for a too long fight scene?
Really? Because the combat is the only reason i’m still playing it (for, like, the 4th time) and the only reason i’m not playing it RIGHT NOW is because there’s a quest hub coming up and talking is boring.
The story’s interesting the first time, but gets really stale fast. You don’t see a whole lot of difference whether you go paragon or renegade, anyway.
In essence your post is why I find ME2 to be less interesting than ME1. The combat mechanics in ME1 became a chore when I tried to play through a second time but the story remained interesting. In ME2 the combat was less of a chore but the story really didn’t support multiple play throughs because the choices were trivial so the story had already played out. In ME1 the choices mattered you could
kill/save the Rachnii, kill/save the council, kill/save Wrex and then had to select Ashley or Kaiden to diewhereas in ME2 the only major choice came at the end and was ridiculous.ME2 was a franchise expansion title but in expanding the audience they seem to have ditched the depth.
I just wanted to point out, Josh, that after you complained about the stealth ship Normandy that never actually seems to stealth anything, that I brought this up and the answer was that by ME standards, “stealthing” your ship is the equivalent of putting a muffler on your car. Sure we can find your car every other way people find cars, but hearing it is harder.
Also, did anyone else see the skyline and think we were going to see Caprica on the bottom of the screen?
True, but you would think you could at least sneak up on planets a bit more easily. You know, give them less time to see “Oh that’s a Cerberus frigate, it must be Shepard. Let me tweet half the planet that Shepard’s coming, we can all hang out at the dock she lands at and pretend we don’t know who she is.”
#Shepard is coming! =D Surprise welcoming party on the docks for old friends!
The best part is how it’s an alliance design and nobody would have any reason to peg it as Cerberus if not for their logo, once again, being EVERYWHERE.
I mean, it kind of makes sense here – you’re landing in a crowded spaceport and have presumably been in-atmosphere for a while and had to declare intentions to land*, giving Liara ample time to spot you – she no doubt follows the people arriving in said spaceport/financial district(???) and so has a plausible excuse for noticing you. The only real confusing part is how you landed and nobody onboard seemed aware you had to pay a boarding fee or even ask about it.
*I thought the entire point of the shuttle was that the Normandy SR2 is too big to enter atmosphere without collapsing under it’s own weight. And it’s just hovering there the entire time?
Given that you probably want to tell the authorities that you’re docking ahead of time (I imagine air traffic controllers usually don’t take kindly to unannounced landings on modern airports, and it’s probably no different in a futuristic and much more armed universe), you probably won’t be sneaking up on planets you’re intending to land on peacefully.
Of course, why the new Normandy doesn’t have a fake name and registered identity to give to the docking controllers (it’s not like they’ll be physically inspecting every ship that lands anyway) I’ll never know. Why *did* Cerberus name it exactly the same as the old one again?
Tbh the one greeting you this time is briefed by liara…who apparently knows everything now….no really…she does.
Noooo!!! Why did you get attack drone??? Attack drone sucks! It’s not much of an improvement from the regular drone which doesn’t do much damage and dies in a grand total of two seconds. At least explosive drone, well, explodes, for massive damage. AoE doesn’t matter here. It’s still effective against the one guy it distracts.
With Kal’Reegar, basically if you allow him to help in the battle, he gets put on a timer. If you take too long to kill the Colossus, then Kal’Reegar gets killed. It is therefore possible to allow him to help, but then kill the geth quickly enough so he still survives. If you instead tell him to stay down, then he definitely survives, but you won’t have his rockets to help against the Colossus (I’ve never seen him firing at the ordinary geth).
Yeah, Jacob was TOTALLY being an ass by mentioning EDI to Tali. No other excuse for it. *shakes his head* Then again, everybody was complaining that Jacob was too boring as a character, right? ;)
I found Liara’s personality change in ME2 quite jarring too, but you get to see more of the old Liara in the “Lair of the Shadow Broker” DLC, thankfully. (As well as continue your romance, if you romanced her in ME1.)
Maybe I’ve been reading these things too long, but it’s pretty easy for me to tell who’s posting the thing just from the writing. “Not-Shamus” comes out after about two sentences, and there’s enough “Josh” style to sort out authors pretty well by the time I’m done with the first long paragraph. The “too lame to think of a pun” part almost sounded line Shamus, but he’d probably have had a specific excuse (“too tired”, “too uncaffinated”) or otherwise used a different word.
Of course, personal icons are fun too. And it’d be trivially easy to throw the Gravitar pic into the layout somewhere, I’m sure.
can i be 4th person? for SW? hahah. great commentary here. i promise, i’m more cynical about the games you play than anyone. plus my dwarf is pushing level 13. holy carp.
I let that guy with the nerf rocket fight for me, he was dead within the first 20 seconds.