T w e n t y S i d e d
Again, I apologize for the crappy audio. The little tone you hear just before I talk is actually my Ventrilo client. It makes a sound when you begin and end talking. It’s never shown up in a recording before, and now all of a sudden it is? It’s amazing that of all the crazy tech that goes into making this – the game, the video editing, the streaming – it’s the audio that consistently gives us the most trouble.
We recorded episodes 14-16 all at once, so we have one more episode of difficult audio to get through. Hopefully we’ll get this issue worked out.
Marvel's Civil War
Team Cap or Team Iron Man? More importantly, what basis would you use for making that decision?
Hardware Review
So what happens when a SOFTWARE engineer tries to review hardware? This. This happens.
Fable II
The plot of this game isn't just dumb, it's actively hostile to the player. This game hates you and thinks you are stupid.
Grand Theft Railroad
Grand Theft Auto is a lousy, cheating jerk of a game.
Secret of Good Secrets
Sometimes in-game secrets are fun and sometimes they're lame. Here's why.
Huh, that was the first time I have seen the “No comments. At ALL.” text.
Maybe you should try switching to a Skype conference call instead of Ventrillo?
You can record those very easily. Call quality can be a tad uneven, though.
You can disable Ventrilo’s beeps. Setup -> “Play Key Clicks” -> off. Those beeps have been popping up since episode one, but not really often.
I was gonna say this, but it’s already been said. So… +1
Virmire has one of the dickiest instakill places of them all.With lava at least you have a clear boundary of safe/not safe.Here,you have a loose array of rocks,and behind them is a sheer drop in the ocean.No gradual increase of depth,just a huge cliff.
Also,the fact that krogans are dying was not retconed nor ignored in second game.Genophage is still the preventing them from repopulating,and only their huge lifespans make them able to still be around.Why else would grunt have been created?
Yeah,ashley is such a bitch.I know you guys are gonna kill off kaidan because of that path blocking,but Id still prefer to see her dead.Actually,the best option would be to leave both of them.
So,will there bi probing away once you guys finish this game?
In the second game, they talk about how they had to re-engineer the Genophage to repair it. This conflicts with “my people are dying, Shepard.”
I think the people who re-engineered the Genophage were the only ones who noticed. The Krogans (mostly) didn’t know it had been re-engineered, which they would have noticed if they had known that the Genophage was weakening.
That was why it was done by special ops guys.
Yes,but only a small group of people knew that krogans were evolving.It was a shadow operation.The rest of the galaxy still thinks its the original genophage that keeps them from repopulating.
Yes, but in the second game they made it clear that the goal of the genophage was to make the population *stable*. What made Wrex think his people were dying? Propaganda? Were their numbers dwindling or not?
Well making the population ‘stable’ is done by essentially stopping the Krogan from breeding like bunnies, or more accurately by having a smaller percentage of fertile females.
That coupled with their long life spans would make it seem like their people are dying. A negative birth-rate. Since they don’t have many scientists — what few there are want to make bombs instead of figure out the genophage — I expect the Krogan don’t know what it actually does so the only statistics they have to go by is a negative birthrate.
Said birthrate would eventually level out and then stabilize, but given their long lives there would be awhile where more Krogan would be dying than being born. I think it’s less retcon and more the character being ignorant of the nature of the genophage.
Edit: Oh wait. I just read the mass-effect wiki on the matter and the codex entry for the Genophage has this:
“The resulting mutation made only one in a thousand krogan pregnancies carry to term. It did not reduce fertility, but offspring viability. The rare females able to carry children to term became prizes the krogan warlords fought brutal battles over.
The krogan are a shadow of their former glory. While the Rebellions took place centuries ago, they are constantly reminded of the horror of the genophage and of their inability to counter it.”
So, uhm, if I’m reading that right it isn’t that eggs don’t get fertilized… it’s that they miscarry. With only one in one thousand being carried to term. That’s rather grizzly and to me the “My people are dying” comment makes sense in that light too, in a way.
The original genophage was designed to stop the krogans.They didnt plan to keep them stable.It was mordin that found out 1 in 1000 successful pregnancies can maintain them stable.However,mordin found out that the current population will remain stable.Krogan population was orders of magnitude larger before genophage,so naturally everyone thought krogans were a dying breed.Mordin is probably the first to seriously deal with that problem and study it thoroughly,and his results are still not public.
Not to mention that in mass effect 1 those left on tuchanka were still fighting clan wars and diminishing,while in mass effect 2 they started unifying.
It wasn’t that the original genophage was to stop the Krogans so much as took the wrong approach to the basic goal of controlling the population growth.
Mordin said that the Krogans were actually beginning to increase their fertility rate through natural evolution and were adapting/overcoming the genophage before he was brought in to find a way to keep it at pre-industrial levels.
Which is 1 in every 1000 surviving.
Which means that originally the environment of Tuchanka was so harsh that 99.9% of juvenile krogans would die. I guess that’s what you get when your puberty ritual is fighting a friggin’ THRESHER MAW.
Well, I imagine there’s also an aspect of the genophage being designed with certain assumptions in mind that don’t necessarily obtain in reality. As Wrex says when you spend more time talking to him, he tried to get the krogan to stop fighting (each other and anyone else who was available) long enough to do some serious breeding, but the old guard resisted him. I would guess the Salarians assumed they’d stop losing quite so many of their people to stupid war once they couldn’t maintain the flow of replacements. Since they kind of didn’t, they’re dying faster than they can replace their numbers.
I imagine some of it is also psychological. The krogan as a people are accustomed to both very high birth rates and very high rates of death by violence. They have not changed their lifestyles very much with regards to the death rate (though they get into fewer massive wars where they spend themselves like cannon fodder, it’s true), but their birth rate has dropped precipitously. Without an understanding of the larger statistical relationships that Mordin has studied, I’d imagine it would look like a slide into oblivion to Wrex.
Also, saying 1/1000 females can carry to term, what happens when some of those females become collateral damage?
I haven’t played ME2 yet but I figure with the amount of violence the actual birth rates becomes lower since it the numbers skew closer to 1/2000 or 1/4000 just due to collateral damage or some war leader being a dick and figuring if I can’t have you no one can.
I always interpreted this part as Wrex saying that the Krogan culture is dying. Birth rates may be stable, but the Krogans as a culture aren’t going anywhere anymore — all they do is fight. Wrex talks about this (as mentioned) in Mass Effect 1: all most Krogans do is fight for money, fight for territory, or just fight for the hell of it.
Krogan culture isn’t advancing. Hell, it isn’t even adapting to the genophage (Wrex being the exception). They’ve just given up: they’re just sort of living out the remainder of their race’s allotted time. So in that sense, the Krogan are ‘dying’.
Which is what I made out of it, anyway.
Wow, lot of good points here. Yeah, in ME2 there’s a point made along the lines of “piles of unborn babies.” The Genophage clearly causes miscarriages rather than limits egg production–it’s basically a massive, forced abortion disease. This is why Mordin is so conflicted over its use and why he’s quick to point out that the Genophage isn’t intended to cause extinction. Of course, that raises the question of how or why it was more feasible to engineer a miscarriage-inducing genetic condition rather than a true fertility reducer; I think the writers may have chosen the more horrifying option rather than the most logical one.
Krogans are incredibly adaptive,so designing a genetic disease for them is not an easy task.Maybe there were some fertility decreasing diseases in the works,but none of them was successful enough.
So what kind of rig is running this?
I was wondering that… I think it’s capable of playing the game comfortably, but with voice chat and video capture running in the background, it can really hit your performance, especially if you don’t have a quad-core processor.
having never actually played mass effect i’m actually interested in the next episode. also i haven’t noted anything really off about the audio except that there’s some echo effect but thats not really a problem.
The video didn’t work before but it does now, yay!
One of the things this series has taught me is that I’m not very good at this style of play. I move carefully into combats, use every bit of cover available, try to lure the bad guys out to be picked off, and only move forward when it’s clear no more of them are going to come to me. If my guy ran around like Conan he’d die every six seconds.
Vermire takes me approximately eleventy-one times as long as it’s taking here. Obviously you guys are just blazing through while I refuse to leave any area of any game until every single enemy is thoroughly killed, but even so… eleventy-one times as long.
Definitely going to try running some Colossi over. That was hilarious.
The way you described it, I’d say you’re playing better, it’s just not necessary, if you’re also playing on normal like Randy.
It also depends on the difficulty.While you can run around guns blazing on normal,you have to use cover on higher difficulties.
only until you get the credits for the better armor/weapons *snicker*
god that’s normal? Hardcore is HARD-freaking-CORE then, because he’s running around oneshotting geth. Annoying…
* Interesting that you post this on the day that the Kasumi DLC for ME2 is (supposed to be) released, because from what I understand, her loyalty mission will involve an art collector.
* It’s really fun to, after you knock a Colossus down, park on top of it so it can’t get up, get out of the Mako, and ping the Colossus with your pistol until it dies. Get more experience for that, too.
* I remember approaching one of those rock walls and thinking I needed to jump over to the other side to continue the mission. No doubt, no hesitation. Just up, over, and critical mission failure. Fortunately that was the playthrough where Therum was so messed up I couldn’t tell the lava from the not-lava, so quicksaving every 10 feet was standard procedure for Mako-driving segments.
* Survive a volcanic planet, hell. It can survive a jump through a mass relay (although it’s slightly beat up afterward). And after everything it goes through in the introduction to ME2, when you find it again, it’s still intact (although you can’t recover it so you could use it instead of the Hammerhead, which is decidedly less awesome).
* For the sequence at the salarian camp, everyone but Shepard is wearing their default armor. I don’t know why.
* It may not be a retcon so much as simply getting a different point of view. Also, Wrex has been a mercenary for 300 years. The modifications to the genophage happened within the last 50 years; it’s possible Wrex is completely unaware of the situation that required the modification, let alone that the modification happened.
I’d like to say that I love your titles in the credits. They often make me laugh out loud, as they did this time.
Hey cool, you showcased the weird bug with the mako in ME1
The bug kind of makes a comeback in the ME2 as the the charge ability for vanguard.
In ME2 the charge ability lets you punch a guy from across the room by superman style rushing a guy.
There is bug in the PC version that lets you fly across normally inaccessible gaps in the map. As long as you line up your target. As long as you can normally get to your end point by walking, the game will let you fly across gaps and go up and down levels. I know it is a bug because it doesn’t let me do it all the time.
Weird Cliffs on Virmire: Actually, you CAN find cliffs like those in real life. It happens when a mountain range is comprised of a mixture of water-soluble rock (like limestone) with harder, much-more-resistant-to-erosion rock (like granite). Over the centuries, the constant wear of the water on the rock will eat away the softer rock, but leave the harder rock intact, forming columns, sea caverns or sinkholes.
** BIG HONKING ME2 SPOILERS ABOUT THE GENOPHAGE FOLLOWING: **
As others have pointed out, the big secret about the Genophage is that it was NOT intended to exterminate the entire Krogan race; it’s actually meant to stabilise the population at ‘pre-industrial levels’. From what Mordin tells you, I gather that the Salarians essentially looked at the typical reproductive rate of Krogans, and then calculated how many offspring would need to die during each pregnancy to stabilise the population at that specified level, then programmed the Genophage to wipe out exactly that percentage of unborn children, thus making the Krogan a race that simply ‘replenishes’ itself, but can’t increase in population.
There then arose two problems with this solution; one is that over time, the Krogan were actually evolving to overcome even the Genophage. As Mordin explains it, the Genophage works by attaching itself to key sections of the Krogan genetic code. The Krogan were adapting to this by having a whole bunch of ‘garbage DNA’ attached to the parts of the code where the Genophage normally attacked. Thus, the Salarians had to engineer a Genophage 2.0 and re-infect the Krogan with it again.
The second, and more difficult to deal with, problem is that the Salarians have never told anyone how the Genophage actually worked. As far as the Krogan know, it’s a purely statistical issue. 99.99% of Krogan babies due in stillbirth. They don’t know that the Genophage is designed to ‘shut off’ once a certain percentage is reached. Thus, the deeper issue is that the entire Krogan race is afflicted with a deep sense of fatalism, and as a result, are not bothering to change their customs or behavior to adapt to their new reality. “We’re doomed anyway,” thinks the average Krogan, “so why not just fight, pillage and go out in a blaze of glory?” As a result, the Krogan population is steadily declining, but not because of the Genophage; it’s because the Krogan see no point in trying to live more risk-free, productive lifestyles. Ironically, it’s the Krogan’s own violent tendencies and brutal lifestyle that is ultimately killing them, not the Genophage.
Re: Genophage comment, point 2:
I don’t even think the Krogan population has to be declining per se. I mean, they’re still breeding, and they’ve picked up on the fact that fertile females and children are precious resources. The crux, I think, is in what you said earlier: most Krogan simply don’t care anymore. They may not be going backward, but they sure as hell aren’t going forward.
Remember Mordin’s comments about the Collectors’ lack of art and how that was indicative of their stagnation? I’m willing to bet it’s the same with the Krogan. No art, no science, no progress, just a neverending succession of hollow carpe-diem days.
This is also what makes Wrex’ work so incredibly important. He’s trying to show the Krogan that there às life after (with) the genophage — but it’s not the kind of life they’re living now.
On a completely related note, I love Bioware.
Worst part about the “Hold the line !” and the “Go ! Go ! Go !” ?
They’re also present in the french version of the game.
…
I mean they’re present in ENGLISH in the FRENCH version…
Lame.
(And. Yes. I’m French.)