T w e n t y S i d e d

Full disclosure: This episode was recorded over a week ago. We got to the end of our usual four-episode session, but we were right in the middle of blowing up the Geth base. We couldn’t save the game and so we decided to roll forward and do the first episode of the next week. We were all a little tired and so we wound up with what you have here: Fifteen minutes of disjointed events, loveless angst, confusion, slurred speech, and bone-headed mistakes. For example, at about the three minute mark I talk about the feud between “Jack and Samara”, when I should have said “Jack and Miranda”.

The whole thing with the entire team getting on the shuttle was another great example of the clumsy writing that clings to the main plot of this game. Really, it’s not that hard to come up with a reasonable justification for this. To have the whole team pack up and fly away with no clear destination or goal is just lazy. It’s like starting a sentence and then not even bothering to

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Here is how I would have decided to handle the Heretic problem if this was a holodeck-style game of infinite possibilities:

First of all, I’d straighten out the question (in my mind, it might be explained in the game and I missed it) if the Heretics are the result of Hacking on the part of Sovereign, or if they are simply Geth who came to a different conclusion. I think they came to this conclusion on their own, but in my mind this mission is an amalgamation of conflicting spoilers from the comments, my play-through from a year ago, and the snatches of conversation I caught while recording the show.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Spoiler Warning S4E48:
Every Vote Counts!”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

In this episode, I said that I really didn’t like how the difference between the two types of Geth boiled down to a math error. We got distracted talking about the Pentium problem. (1994? Seriously? Has it been that long already?) So let me expand a bit on what I wanted to say… Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Spoiler Warning S4E47: I am Spartacus”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Some people claim that Mass Effect 2 is not a brown corridor shooter. Allow me to retort:

Gah. I haven’t been subjected to such high doses of brown since the original Quake.

It’s not just the lack of color, but also the overbearing industrial style. It’s as if everyone in the galaxy lives in warehouses. Yes, we get some nice color in Jacob’s mission. And the non-combat areas of the game are at least as vibrant as the ones in Mass Effect 1, perhaps even better. But as soon as we start fighting it’s back to flat, boxy, linear, and monochrome.

Let’s list the missions in the game. Industrial corridor shooter levels are in bold. Levels which are lively and varied are in italics. Areas that are a mixed bag are in unadorned text.

Core missions:

Project Lazarus
Freedom’s progress
Horizon Colony
Investigate Collector Ship
Dead Reaper
Collector Base

Recruitment & loyalty missions:

Recruit Garrus
Recruit Tali
Recruit Thane
Recruit Jack
Recruit Samara
Recruit Mordin
Recruit Grunt
Garrus: Eye for an Eye
Grunt: Rite of Passage
Jack: Subject Zero
Jacob: The Gift of Greatness
Legion: A House Divided
Miranda: The Prodigal
Mordin: Old Blood
Samara: The Ardat-Yakshi
Tali: Treason
Thane: Sins of the Father

I’m sure some people will argue with a few of my classifications one way or the other. Maybe Garrus: Eye for an Eye and Miranda: The Prodigal should be in bold because most of the action takes place in a warehouse far away from the interesting bits of the Citadel. Maybe Recruit Tali should be given credit for being colorful and well-lit, even through it was a sea of concrete and industrial crates. We can bicker over individual entries, but I think the trend is clear.

Again, we see the Jekyll & Hyde nature of this game. Omega, Illium, and the Citadel are all bright, colorful, and feel lived-in. (By space opera standards.) But once the shooting starts it’s like we’re playing a late 90’s first person shooter – warehouses, crates, and nondescript industrial stuff. What happened to places like Virmire and IIlos? Does every battle need to be close-quarters? There was no reason to smother players in crates like this.

You could argue that Mass Effect 2 has just as many interesting areas as Mass Effect 1, but since it’s a far larger game the overall percent is worse. Still, it would have been really nice to mix things up with an ice world. Or some alien ruins. Or a beach. Grasslands. More residential stuff. Gardens or temples. I think the game just has too dang much industrial scenery.

Lair of the Shadow Broker was really, really good, in that it presented spaces that looked plausibly residential, detailed, and interesting. (At least, until your reached the titular lair.)

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

If I changed my tone as quickly as the game, then everything I wrote about Mass Effect 2 would look like this:

I am sick and tired of these fun and witty side quests with the ridiculous characters and their bullshit plot twists that engage you, challenge you, and make you puke your guts out because of how stupid the logic is and how the game becomes a shining example of a deep, rewarding, and sometimes intellectual role-playing brown corridor shooter.

I really do like Tali’s loyalty mission, and I have to say we didn’t really do it justice. There just isn’t enough time, and our format doesn’t really work all that well for long conversations laced with political intrigue.

I think the game has five really strong sections:

1) Tali’s loyalty mission
2) Legion’s loyalty mission
3) Mordin’s loyalty mission
4) Thane’s loyalty mission
5) The part where Guybrush is thrown into the sea and has to hold his breath for ten minutes.

By contrast, there’s only one part of the game that really falls flat:

1) Everything else

I’m kidding, of course. Thane’s mission wasn’t all that impressive.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.