T w e n t y S i d e d
This is where I would make jokes about there being too many elevators if I still had the capacity to do so.
At least Randy put some points into intimidate.
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.
The No Politics Rule
Here are 6 reasons why I forbid political discussions on this site. #4 will amaze you. Or not.
Top 64 Videogames
Lists of 'best games ever' are dumb and annoying. But like a self-loathing hipster I made one anyway.
Good Robot Dev Blog
An ongoing series where I work on making a 2D action game from scratch.
Twelve Years
Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.
Being unable to comment on the video makes watching them rather frustrating now. Arg.
Why can’t you comment anymore krellen?
Viddler banned my account or something. No explanation, but the username is still in use, they won’t send me a new password, and they claim my email is already in use so I can’t re-register.
What a pisser!
I really enjoyed your commentary. :(
But apparently Viddler didn’t? I had no idea that they cared about Mass Effect so much.
I’d suppose it was some spam-filtering action (too many comments in too short a time) – have you tried to contact the viddler team?
Going by their About & Contact page, they strike me as rather sympathetic and small enough to make a blunder such as banning you without explanation.
For me the problem with the codex entries is that the narrated ones are voiced by the same guy who was the narrator in Leisure Suit Larry. They’re really well written and work brilliantly as an appendix to the story, but I swear I keep hearing a lot of double entendres in them because of the voice.
I never played Leisure Suit Larry, so to me, he’s the Voice of the Agency from Crackdown.
I just realized: If Bioware didn’t expect someone to do this, I don’t think they would have made a “walk” function for Shepard. I can’t think of any other practical use it has, other than for providing footage for the opening voiceover.
Hence my comment at the end of the last video.
As I certainly never found a practical use for it.
Re: Sarin not protecting his systems from other SPECTREs.
It’s been a while since I played, but could he have been trying in some small way to self-sabotage his plans after beginning to realize he was being mind-controlled?
I realize this could be “Bioware apologetics,” but I thought I’d toss it out there.
Hell no. When you encounter him at Virmire you can have several successful persuade/intimidate checks while talking to him about the indoctrination just to have him say something along the lines of “I used to think like you too, but not since I got hip-deep in Sovereign’s plans”.
A slightly more likely though still silly explanation to me would be that this simply made it more convenient to him since at the time he visited the planet he might have been still a Spectre.
Quite ironic that Viddler popped up an Evony ad while I was watching.
I “popped up an Evony” while looking at that Evony ad …
(sigh) … I know … http://www.sadtrombone.com/
It does mark unread codex entries, and it flashes that section of the menu.
It was nice to hear you mention FUEL. I normally dislike racing games, but I enjoyed the Mako sections of Mass Effect so much that I decided to pick up FUEL, having heard (mostly from your reviews) that it was a good game to drive around in. And now it’s one of my favorite games, so thank you for that.
Regarding elevators: the Noveria ones never bothered me because they were so short, and the Citadel ones I was okay with because I didn’t have to use them very often. The one elevator that I absolutely HATED was the one in the Normandy. It took a ridiculously long time, moved incredibly slowly, and you had to use it twice whenever you need to buy or sell something, manage inventory, or talk to most of your team.
Also, you guys realize you’re skipping about 2/3 of the loot, right? I assume it’s just to keep the flow going, but it could mess up your power level by the end. Unless Randy is secretly sneaking back to all the previous areas in between recordings…
I don’t think that skipping two thirds of the loot will make much of a difference, more likely the xp will be the only thing they miss out on.
Most of that loot is pointless crap anyway.
Enjoyed the show as usual, good work :-)
And not to tell them how to run their own show (which I enjoy greatly), but I hope they don’t forget to take a few of the Cerberus side missions for contrast with ME2. Or would you want those to be “extras” to avoid spoilers for people who haven’t played the second game?
Of course, it is called “Spoiler Warning,” so that might be a moot point…
At the end of this, could you post the save so that if we use this as our pre-mass effect 2, the story will make sense?
~Lar
Racchni= zerg?
They could just kind of.. fly in space, I guess. Starcraft never really made sense to me.
Nope. Plenty more elevators next time. ;)
And now it’s time for more fan exposition from yours truly!
On everybody knowing you’re a Spectre: Yeah, I always thought it was weird how everyone seems to be able to verify that you’re a Spectre. Then again, you did get a LOT of publicity as the first human Spectre.
On the Rachni: Don’t be fooled by their insectile appearance. The Rachni (or at least their Queens) are incredibly intelligent, are capable of using tools (note their arms in front of their torso. I know, their tentacles are WAY more distracting. ;) ), and actually built STARSHIPS. They were just as technologically advanced as any of the other sentient races in Mass Effect.
On the ‘inaccessible’ Rift Stations: To be fair, there ARE shuttles that take you to the Rift Stations. They’re just grounded (conveniently for the plot) due to weather. I’m guessing that Hanshin Station is also the only place on Noveria that has a space port, so the Normandy has to land there. You can’t do a direct drop to the station that Benezia is at, because you firstly don’t know that she’s actually HERE until you arrive and talk to Gianna Parasini. Plus, if you remember what Captain Anderson told you after you became a Spectre, you’re only coming to Noveria because there were “reports of geth sightings” around the area. There was never any specific information on where they were or what they were doing.
It’s also hinted that the Rift Stations were deliberated designed to be isolated. Noveria is basically a big “no rules, no foul” playground for amoral corporations to do research that’s banned elsewhere in the galaxy, so they have safety precautions for each of their research stations. Not only are they each remote from the central spaceport, but as the player learns when reactivating Mira, there are a TON of safeguards built in to contain and isolate the Hot Labs found at each Rift Station. Each Hot Lab is built into a glacier. If an experiment gets out of control, the Hot Labs are heated up, which makes them sink into the ice, containing whatever might be in the labs. In truly extreme cases, an anti-matter warhead is dropped from orbiting weapons satellites to completely vaporise the Rift Station.
On the red light elevators: Maybe the elevators are red because they’re ‘running on emergency power’? It seems to be a trope that emergency lighting are always red. :P
I think I heard once that emergency lights are red because human eyes have a faster transition when going from no light -> red light then they do for any other color light, and we can still see fairly well in low amounts of red light, better than in the same amount of white light. Or something. So red lights take less power for the same amount of visibility (assuming you don’t need to differentiate between colors), and if most of the lights go out entirely, you won’t be squinting and swearing when you move into an area that’s actually got the red lights working.
I could be totally wrong, of course >.>
Ah yes, the Rachni. That particular thing was a bit odd in my game. I had already done one of the side-quests at a Cerberus facility, where they were already doing stuff with Rachni. A short bit of shock from the team mates saying they are supposed to be extinct and what not and then I went to this story planet and then all of a sudden my team mates go: “What are those?!”. I blinked and shouted at my screen. “They are Rachni! You had just identified these creatures as Rachni 1 planet ago, how can you suddenly have forgotten this?!”
You know, these videos present an interesting decision. On the one hand, I’m eager to watch them to enjoy their content straight away. On the other hand, it’s so much more pleasurable to read people’s appended comments/witticisms while watching it. Going back a day later and trying to figure out what someone said ‘Nah’ about without watching the video again (which I shouldn’t really make the time for) is much less satisfying. So there is some incentive to let these videos sit for a bit and to let everyone else get to them first.
Well, I thought it was interesting, but I recognize now that I’m really just spewing out the doubtful meanderings from the inside of my skull. But hey! That’s what the internetz are for!
All said and done, I am really enjoying this format – reading the comments from people who are listening to other people talk while watching the game being played.
What’s really silly about the Rachni thingy is that fallout 1 already had a way of dealing with that exact problem. Just copy the monster data and swap the name to “Mysterious Creature”.
Incidentally, explode on death suicide bombs tend to fratricide. /experience