What I’m Playing: Mass Effect 2 (Part 2)

General Game-related Blathering, ,

Last time, I wrote about my opinions (I wouldn’t dare call it a “review”) in general. This time, like I promised, I’ll give each of the team member characters a short look, and explain why I like them, or why I don’t.

Miranda: I disliked her before she even opened her mouth (don’t shoot people without my consent!). It only went downhill from there. I’m not sure whether she has problems with my female Shepard, but it feels like she’s trying to wage a bitch battle. Her loyalty mission didn’t make her any more likable in my eyes. So you ran away from your father? That’s cool. But you hated him so much that you kidnapped your sister so she would grow up away from him? I think we passed the border into creepy territory somewhere there.

Jacob: I don’t dislike him. That said, I don’t like him either. I simply don’t care for him, he felt like a boring character. Generic mercenary/soldier type, not much behind the facade. Nah thanks. The loyalty mission concerning his father wasn’t bad, it just felt… weird. Like “60ies Star Trek episodes” weird. Other than that, I nearly hit on Jacob by mistake. Managed to get out of that predicament, though.

Mordin: Now this is probably my favorite character on the crew. He starts out as scientist-doctor-gunslinger. That’s not a completely new and revolutionary character type, but rare enough that you haven’t seen it ad nauseam. His back story is what really made him great, though. You find out that he has been on a secret project to improve the genophage, and is then confronted with the consequences of this decision during his loyalty mission. The development from staunchly in favor of his decision, over rationalization, to acceptance that it might have been morally wrong in the end is done quite well, and superbly well if you keep in mind this is a computer game (who, like it or not, are still typically lacking finesse in character development).

Garrus: Another favorite. He’s become darker since he left C-Sec, but not too dark in the “dark and brooding is sooo cool and mature” trope kind of way. In fact, my main problem with Garrus is that we don’t see more of him. In both games, I had him on my team on almost every mission, and there were a lot more offhand remarks from him in part 1. In addition, his loyalty mission is only so-so. It’s good, but for one of my favorite characters, I would’ve preferred something more involved. Oh well. I will see more of him soon, though. I decided to romance him. I was sad I couldn’t do that in part 1 already, given the awful choices back then. Their “love” story is a quirky mix of feelings and awkwardness, especially when Garrus tells you how he needs to do some research on how this is supposed to work. Mordin also chimes in and tells you he forwarded some reading material to your quarters, to make sure there are no accidents and injuries. Thanks, Mordin. That was slightly disturbing and insensitive – in fact, it felt a bit like a parent-teenager talk about birds and bees gone awry – but still thanks for caring that much.

Thane: Assassin with a conscience, a perfect memory, and a terminal illness. Oh, he also left his son when he was young and wants to reunite with him before he dies. Trope-o-meter: over 9000. Next!

Zaeed: Assassin/mercenary with no conscience, no perfect memory, and no terminal illness. Wants to go on a suicide mission to earn money. Wait, that’s even worse than Thane. There’s also the fact that he’s deep in my personal uncanny valley. He looks like someone I know (minus the scars), but I can’t put my finger on who it is.

Grunt: I have to admit, I have a sweet spot for the Krogan. Grunt is a bit of an odd one out, since he was bred and raised in a tube, which means he has problems fitting into Krogan society, what without a clan and all. Thankfully, Wrex, by now chief of the Urdnot clan, comes to rescue. Good thing Shepard and he are still on friendly terms. You’ll help Wrex get accepted into the clan during his loyalty mission, and learn a lot about how Wrex tries to reform Krogan society. I’m really looking forward to ME3 in that respect, I hope it won’t disappoint me and give some more insights of how the whole Rachni-Krogan-Turian-Salarian-genophage arc will continue. I have to admit, Grunt himself is a quite shallow character, although I felt there was at least a little bit of development due to the clan acceptance. But I could accept that since it meant more Krogan-focused stories.

Tali’Zorah: While Grunt got a Krogan bonus, Tali’Zorah has to fight against the Quarian malus. For some reason, the whole Quarian story and culture never interested me that much. Her loyalty mission gave a nice insight into the internals of Quarian culture, which I liked. Still, they’re more on the fringes of my interest, and so is Tali’Zorah. Creating a group of artificial intelligences that they cannot control, then tried to fight, only to be driven off their homeworld… tough luck? I wonder how the Quarian–Geth struggles will continue in ME3.

Jack: Hate. Her. So. Much. You thought Thane and Zaeed were paper-thin characters? Meet Jack. Poor poor girl was experimented on as a child, and that left her with horrible marks that now make her hate everybody. Which she shows by being extremely antisocial, insulting people, and killing whenever she can. Her greatest wish in life? To blow up the facility she was raised. *yawn*

Legion: I’ve just met him (it?), haven’t even done its loyalty mission yet, so I can’t say much. I fear though that you might meet too late in the game to see much character development. If that thing even has some sort of “character”.

So there you are. A list of why I do or don’t like the team characters. Sadly, there are more instances of the latter than the former. But I found enough interesting ones to form a team, and I guess that’s all that matters. I can happily go back to ignoring most of them and focus on those that I like.

What I’m Playing: Mass Effect 2 (Part1)

General Game-related Blathering, ,

Yes, it’s another post in my ongoing series of “games I play years after they were released, because I heard about them at some point, and they were cheap on Steam”. I was pretty happy with the first part when I played it in December. Overall, that also holds true for the successor. To give the rest of the post some perspective, I’ve played about half to two-thirds through the game so far, I think. I did most of the missions (recruitment, loyalty, and side) up to the Reaper IFF.

Compared to part 1, there is an interesting mix of things that were simplified, and those that were made more complex. Combat, for example: Your teammates seem a lot more durable than in the first part, but maybe that’s because controlling them is a lot easier than back then. Instead of four commands (stay, group up, attack, move to position), you only got two (move, group up), and I hardly ever use them. My teammates seem smarter in their judgment. Overall, combat also feels easier than in the first part. Adrenaline is a very overpowered ability, if it allows someone like me, always bad at FPSs, to kill enemies by headshots more often than not. This time around, I never needed to reduce combat difficulty.

Control still sucks. In fact, it’s gotten worse. ME1 had keyboard hotkeys for some of the useful information screens (journal, squad). Mass Effect 2 again shows the godawful porting that console games get these days. Whenever I want to look at any of the screens that had a keyboard shortcut in part 1, I now have to hit Escape, then choose the desired screen from a menu with my mouse. Eww. The worst offender in that regard was the “Cerberus network” (I’ll probably talk about that and DLCs at a later point). To enter your credentials, you had to click the username field, type in your name. Click on the password field, enter password. Click on “Accept” button. Tab button? What’s this? Consoles don’t have it, so it must suck!

The research system is something I really like. It encourages exploration. If anything, I’d love to have more resource requirements to encourage it even more. I never had to go out of my way to farm resources, could always stay in those systems that I had to visit for missions anyway.

On the other hand, the number of weapons was severely reduced compared to ME1, and armor was completely removed. Yes, most weapons you could buy sucked, so you focused on the few models that didn’t, and which ones you could buy from vendors was luck-based. Still, I liked the choice and illusion of a bustling weapons market. Maybe ME3 could give us larger tech trees? I’d be all for that. But then, I play Civilization-type games, and I’m sure not all ME players do.

The story line is a bit of a dual-edged sword to me. Some parts of the story really irk me, like the involvement with Cerberus (who I try to stab in the back whenever possible), or the main story. I hope something interesting will come of the collector tie-in; so far, the story dawdles along without too much motivation. The side missions are nice, though. You have to do a mission for each team member to recruit them, and later revisit their back story via a “loyalty” mission that gives you some more insight into them. And that’s in spite of the fact I really dislike most of my crew members (or because of that?). But more about that next time.

Fitocracy and the Light Side of Gamification

General Game-related Blathering,

Gamification – the concept of using techniques designed for games to engage audiences in other fields – fascinates me. The premise is that by tacking features such as leader boards, achievements, and levels onto other activities, you make them more attractive to people. And it seems that this can be a very powerful tool. In the wrong hands, one can try to pull people into money-making schemes (money-making for the designer, not the ones falling for him), to the point of addiction for some of your victims.

On the other hand, you can reach fascinating goals by harnessing the power of gamification. Last year, the “game” Foldit found solutions for complex protein folding problems in biochemistry via gamification and pulling in non-experts to “play” Foldit. Sadly, I’m neither a biologist nor a chemist, so I can’t say anything about the scientific value other than “oh, shiny balls of molecular yarn!”. I had the papers about the game design part on my desk for two months before I went on vacation in Japan. Then I put them away and forgot about them until today. Damn. Starting from next week, work will pick up again. Talk about timing.

I like to fold it, fold it.

LFM protein folding, link gearscore and achievement for invite.

I’ve been trying for some time to come up with a good use case for gamification in my field of research (network architectures and protocol design), but so far, I haven’t had a “Eureka!” moment. I’ll keep it in the back of my mind though. It would surely make for a fascinating project.

Another use of gamification, and the trigger for this post, is Fitocracy. Last week, I got my invite mail. I had first heard of it last August in this xkcd comic. They were obviously overwhelmed by the feedback (xkcd wasn’t the only one that referenced them), so it took me more than 4 months to get my invite. I had forgotten about them in the meantime.

xkcd, my treat during morning coffee, three times a week.

I have to admit that weight is a bit of a problem for me. I slowly and steadily gained a lot of weight as a student, then bit the bullet after graduation. I went on a long-term low-level diet (nothing fancy, just “eat less”) during which I lost almost 30 kilos in 2 years, returning me well into “normal” BMI range. All diet, no sports, mostly because I’m just a “no sports” person. Most of them are just boring to me. If I could read while I do them… Anyway, I let my food control slip too often starting a year ago or so, and now I got more than 15 kilos back. Most of that needs to go, that’s my new year’s resolution. So that Fitocracy invite came at a good time.

I’m confused by their web interface though. Why can’t web designers never ever create useful interfaces? (And why am I using double-and-a-half negation?) Does it have any influence on the scoring if I update my weight? What activities are available for tracking? The search form is nice, but I’d love to also have a “browse” feature so I could say “that sounds interesting, I would’ve never thought of that”. Plus of course optimizing the work-to-reward ratio. I figure, if I do some sports simply because I want to grind Fitocracy levels efficiently, that might sound silly, but it’s better than not doing any sports. It’s almost like doing a daily quest or two. So far, the only “workout” (I use the term loosely) I logged was my walk home from work, which is a thing I typically do during summer, but rarely in winter. I didn’t log “walking stairs”, that felt too silly even to me. My office is on the second floor, our coffee machine is on the first floor. Guess how often I walk up and down those stairs every day?

So, I’m not totally convinced of Fitocracy yet, but I’ll give it a chance. I’m often overcritical of “games” in the beginning. If anybody is also on Fitocracy, give me a shout, I heard you can form groups and stuff.

Maybe once we’re high enough level, we can go slay a fat dragon.

Small Annoyances: Online Game Updating

Everquest II, General Game-related Blathering, Rift, World of Warcraft

This is one of the things that have always slightly annoyed me. Not enough to go into a rage, but enough to probably cause companies some financial loss here or there. The problem is that there are games that I can’t update if I don’t have a current subscription. Example: RIFT. I have to log in first, then I can update. But if I don’t have a subscription, I’ll get an error message when I try to log in. So if I wanted to play the game again, I’d have to resubscribe first, then update the game, then play. Seeing how I have no idea how much of an update that would be, I skipped the resubscription on more than one occasion because I feared that I’d spend all night updating. Same with SOE’s games (though with EQ2 now being subscription-less, this isn’t as much an issue any more than it used to be).

In fact, the only game I can think of that has a monthly subscription, but allows you to update regardless of your account status, is WoW. Blizzard got it right, yet again.

I don’t understand the reasoning behind the “no update without a subscription” policy either. Companies save some network traffic, but I would strongly assume that’s negligible compared to people creating traffic by a) playing the game, or b) downloading the whole several-gigabytes game (which you often enough can do without a subscription).

I regularly update my online games, even those that I haven’t touched in a while. Actually, especially those. Because I don’t want to have to wait through 3 hours of updates when I get the itch to play them again. Game companies, mark my words: if I want to play your game, I don’t want to wait through hours of updates.

Give me the option to update when I don’t want to play, so I don’t get discouraged by updating when I want to play.

Steam is nice to me

General Game-related Blathering

As you might know by now, I have a love-hate relationship with Steam. They have lots of games, especially old ones that are hard to come by otherwise. But their prices are insanely high. Unless they have sales, then their prices are insanely low. They have many cool games I’d like to play at some point. But some of them come with ugly restrictions if you happen to live in the wrong country.

Steam is trying to show some goodwill though. They gave me a refund on Fallout 3, which I bought without realizing said restrictions. It’s “only” Steam wallet instead of a real money refund, but oh well. I admit that it was at least partially my fault. And I’ll find games to spend the money on. Also, you supposedly can combine several methods of payment, so I will be able to spend the full refund, instead of being stuck with 2,13 €.

So +1 for Steam in that respect. Now excuse me, I’ll have to play some games again I bought on Steam, or I’ll never be able to catch up and finish all of them that I bought during Winter Sale before the next sale comes around.

Steam Language Woes

General Game-related Blathering

Off to a good start into the new year…

I guess my reading comprehension is not as good as I thought it was. I failed on this sentence:

Low Violence: German low violence version only available with German language

The way I interpreted it was “there exists a low-violence version, which you’ll get if you install the game in German”. Which isn’t a problem, because I play all my games in their original language if at all possible. Typically it is, because that means English. However, the way the sentence was meant was “if you buy this game in Germany, you’ll get a version that is low-violence, AND it will only be playable in German”. That is a problem. (The game in question is Fallout 3, by the way.)

I’m not even arguing for or against low-violence versions. I personally find them silly; just slap a higher age limit on it, and you’re done. However, this discussion, and the fabrication of special low-violence versions for the German market has been around for more than 15 years by now, probably more than 20. I’m just utterly tired of this debate, ground to exhaustion if you will, and have decided that if I find a cut unacceptable, I’ll just drive the 10 kilometers to the next game shop on the Dutch side of the border.

I fell into a trap I should’ve known better, too. I knew Steam had a very obedient (almost anticipatory) attitude to German game violence rules. Incidentally, that was one of the reasons I boycotted them for the longest time. I though they had gotten better over recently, though. Especially since these days, more games seem to pass through the cut process without any cutting at all, and still make it onto Steam. Past are the days where all enemy soldiers were replaced by robots, and people didn’t die, but just sat down because they were “exhausted”. I foolishly thought that these days, they figured if you are German and understand English well enough to follow the game, you’re mature enough to not be scarred for life by game violence. I guess the wheels don’t turn that fast.

So now I’m stuck with a language version I don’t want. The reason for this is that, while for books and to a certain degree for movies, the German translation industry is really good, it totally sucks when it comes to games. I guess most game companies try to get translation for as cheap as possible, and it shows. After several bad impressions, I decided I’ll never play a game again that has been localized.

I wrote a mail to Steam support, explaining myself, and asking for a refund. Let’s see how this plays out.

Office Forecast: Cloudy With a Chance of Spinies

Even More General Blathering, General Game-related Blathering,

I promised I’d make a photo as soon as I installed it, so here it is:

Lakitu cloud with Spiny

Careful when you enter, you'll be right in the drop zone.

It’s a Lakitu/Jugem plushie, with a Spiny/Togezō dangling underneath. It’s incredibly soft plush, which is totally wasted now that people won’t really touch it. It looks very cute though. I bought it at Kotobukiya in Akihabara, a shop that specializes in merchandise such as plushies, figurines, and plastic models that you assemble yourself. I just had to get it, and it also was cheaper than a similarly sized Mario on a Yoshi (I guess you pay popularity tax on that one).

I also like the joke that whenever somebody enters our office, he’ll now be standing under it. It’s like a nerd’s sword of Damocles, with the difference that our Lakitu is fixed in place, so you can evade it easily. It will also be interesting to see whether some people won’t know what it is. If any student doesn’t, I’ll thow him out. He should not be allowed to call himself a computer scientist if he doesn’t know the basics!

What I’m Playing: Mass Effect

General Game-related Blathering,

Or rather, what I played. I finished the game on the 23rd. I checked, and it seems to be the first Bioware game I ever played in earnest. (I had bought Baldur’s Gate at some point, years after its release, but never had the time to actually look at it.) Overall, I can say I was pretty happy and will look at more Bioware games in the future. Let me start with the bad things first, though, to end the post on a high note.

The Bad

The combat was a bit meh. That’s probably because I’m not any good at FPSs. What happened was that I started the game on Normal difficulty, and then got annoyed at the seemingly random deaths. I could play a combat scene four times, dying three times at different stages, only to finish the fourth time, but without any idea why it went better this time. My squad members also were quite useless, either standing around doing nothing, or getting killed almost immediately. I guess I just sucked at squad management. At some point I just got annoyed (still relatively early on) and switched to Easy. That helped, but almost a bit too much. Especially as the game went on and I got shock trooper specialization, I got nigh invincible. Even my squad members survived every now and then!

Control was pretty annoying overall. It was better than with many other console ports, but the game still could’ve made use of more keyboard shortcuts.

The romance stuff felt tacked on. About midway through, I couldn’t talk to Kaidan any more without ending up in sappy talk. I didn’t like him enough to let that get anywhere though, so I had to be very careful around Kaidan not to inadvertently end up with him.

Which ties in with another problem I had: Sometimes it wasn’t clear what effects a certain line in conversations would have. More than once I chose a reply, only to realize that the way Shepard put it was the opposite of what I wanted. A preview option would’ve been great here.

The final decision who to choose for the council. That felt manipulative. You had the choice between someone who had always tried to help you vs someone who had stabbed you in the back. Still, I think I’m happy with my choice (more about that later).

The Good

Real choice. That was very nice. Not all decisions were clear-cut, many situations weren’t black and white. It didn’t always work, but sometimes is better than never.

A good female character and model. I decided to play a female Shepard. The default model was thankfully very adequate, it didn’t suffer at all from the chainmail bikini water balloon problem. Jane Shepard is more a crossing of Ellen Ripley and Samus Aran than of Wonder Woman and generic fantasy elf no. 23. (Which incidentally reminds me of this interesting site; thanks to Toldain for the link. It seems that the more reasonable the armor of a woman, the lower the risk of weird stereotype body proportions.) I took the default model with very few changes and haven’t regretted that at all.

The story was for the most part interesting. Some of the side quests didn’t seem to go anywhere or have much reason. I think, for example, of the heritage armor that everybody agreed on in the end was a piece of crap. Overall, it was enjoyable, though. It wasn’t necessarily innovative, what with fighting the greatest threat to all life ever. But I liked the way it was transported, and the fact that not all decisions were obviously right or wrong added to that.

My Playthrough

This is more for documentation purposes. If you have played the game, too, you can compare your choices with mine. In case it’s not blindingly obvious, this section will be 100% spoilers.

I let the Rachni queen live. I didn’t see any reason to kill it, other than: “They’re bad, bad things. We fought them before and thought we had driven them extinct. You better make sure they don’t come back!” That wasn’t enough for me to kill off a whole species.

When I had to decide, I saved Kaidan. That was the only logical choice. I sent Ashley with the troops, because she’s a solider and Kaidan isn’t. So Kaidan is with the bomb, which is of utmost importance. The Salarians died as distraction, and you’re destroying what potentially is a cure for the genophage. You better reach your goal with those stakes.

Wrex lived. I didn’t see any reason to kill him. Everybody in his situation would protest. Also, he was, with Garrus, my squad throughout the game because I like the two characters most. It also gave a subtle tension between a race that’s on the verge of dying out, and the race that is responsible for that, even though that tension wasn’t very apparent between the two in the game.

I rescued the council, but only after I realized that my choice didn’t have any effect on the outcome of the citadel battle, and killing the council would lead to what looked like a human hegemony over everybody else, which didn’t sound good, seeing how humans are still upstarts compared to many other races. When asked who to suggest for the council, I deferred the decision. Shepard is a soldier, not a politician. It’s not her decision to make.

Next Up: Mass Effect 2

I actually started last night. I’ll probably finish it before I return to Oblivion. Mass Effect 1 at least didn’t feel very long, I finished it in less than 30 hours. (Not that I’m complaining, at 3,74 Euro that’s still a lot fun for little money.) I hope it’ll be just as good or better. I’m looking forward to more good story. My two big wishes coming from Mass Effect and having seen the intro to ME2: I want to find a cure for the genophage, and I want to break free from Cerberus as early as possible.

No WoW Motivation

World of Warcraft

I got a mail from Blizzard while I was in Japan. It was a promotional offer for 7 days of free game time, to be redeemed until 21st of December. (I’m sure I’m not the only one who got it.) I decided, ah, why not, it’s free game time, and I still can not play afterwards.  So I signed up for it on the 21st, the day after I returned.

I realized today that I hadn’t played at all. I had updated WoW (I had updated all my online games when I came back), but I hadn’t logged in. So I fired up WoW to play. Then I remembered I would need my authenticator. It’s on the shelf in the other room.

I decided I was too lazy to get up and get it.

I think that sums up my motivation for the game right now.