Morality in a video game - Dragon's Age: Origins

There's a part in the Warden's Keep expansion of Dragon's Age: Origins where you're given a pretty complex moral dilemna.
You're in a demon-infested old fortress slaughtering the undead when you run into a demon who's taken possesion of a long dead general. The demon doesn't attack you. It asks for parley and explains that in possesing the general, it has taken the general's memories as well and were it not for the barrier that's keeping the demon in the tower, it would go out to all the places in the general's memories just to experience everything and feed on some mortal souls in the process. The demon says that it will close the breach in the barrier between this world and the demon world if you agree to let it go out into the world. It's a trade of one loose demon to prevent a mass exodus. The demon sends you into a tower and tells you to kill everything in it: "grind the tower into dust if you can."
You then meet the counter-proposal, an old mage who has been experimenting on his soldiers, fellow men, and demons for over a hundred years to extend his life and grant him greater power. His excuse is that he's been fighting the demons in the tower and keeping them from going out into the world.
The game gives you a chance to decide for yourself after hearing both parties stories. I found the mage to be the more evil of the two, but I had a few secondary motives.
1. The demon also promised to reveal the location of a secret stash of gold if you helped it.
2. I wanted to get the most amount of experience points out of the whole situation.*
3. I wanted to see if I could kill the old mage badass. The demon seemed like less of a challenge.
4. It's a video game, not real life.

I ended up killiing the mage and helping the demon. (Actually I would have killed the demon and mage both if I thought I could get the stash and kill the demon in order to get max experience points. The game tends to not let you attack people you talk to unless you're given an "attack" dialogue option). I did it for the cash. I did it for the experience and the glory. I figured one demon let out into the real world wasn't going to cause as much trouble as a power-crazed mage willing to sacrifice his fellow man to live longer. Actually the game world has a lot of different groups that hunt demons, so it's possible to assume that others could have eventually taken the demon down, and I felt sorry for the demon a little bit. Demons and spirts are trapped in a world called The Fade where anything they think becomes reality but they lack the imagination to make anything other than what they already see.

Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

Demons are obsessed with the human world because there's so much there that they don't have. The Fade has no hardships for one with great power, but the hardships of the natural world give humanity its complexity, imagination, and ingenuity. I felt sorry for the demon, but in the back of the mind I was thinking, "The game won't remember this."

In the same way that you crash into someone's car in GTA or some other Rockstar game, and you don't get out and trade insurance information. That car is gonna dissapear after you travel a certain amount of feet away. Games constantly erase and recreate people. I let this demon out, I'm not likely to see the consequences of that action because it's a game. One character said later, "You've probably not seen the last of that demon," and I actually got excited like "Ooh! I wonder what happens. I wonder what it will do." At the end of your time playing a game, you turn it off and maybe a choice you've made in a game haunts you later. This has happened to me. I have lived down actions in games for days, wracked with guilt (In Arcanum, many players have confessed to killing the nice old man near the beginning of the game who lets the player stay in his house in the forest and gives you some work to do. The old man gives a fair amount of experience and a very useful item when killed and there's no one around to see you do it. Guilt.)

The other thing that's interesting about this whole situation is the context. In the game world, the whole country is about to be attacked by a dragon and its goblin horde. The attack can only be stopped if your character can kill the dragon and stop the invasion, which makes you pretty damn important in the moral relativism of things and the more powerful you can become, the better the chance you can save the world. What's are the lives of one demon's victims worth compared with the lives of the country and continent?

Complicated moral choices like this make a game like this interesting as hell even though it's just a game. Compare that with a movie where the male lead chooses to side with the mage only to be betrayed and attacked. Stupid male lead. I wouldn't have done things that way. Stupid male lead, your belief in codes of honor is going to get a lot of people killed.

Compare this whole situation with another game I recently forced myself to stop playing (I stupidly pledge to finish any game I start no matter it's cost in time) called Yakuza 3 where the game crammed the moral good of being an overbearing parent and not judging people by their looks down my throat. The moral decision above was part of an optional quest. The following was part of the main story, as in I had to willingly press buttons and spend time to go through the long cutscenes and pointless walking from area to another in order to progress the game and I thereafter forced myself to find a new game to play.

When a game seems like work or a pointless assembly that you have to sit through for work, then you shouldn't be playing it.

The main character has retired from his life of being a Yakuza gangster (for further reference see Yakuza 1 & the much less fun Yakuza 2) in order to run the orphanage he was raised in. In the orphanage, a young darker -skinned boy takes a liking to an older lighter-skinned girl and wants to take her to the movies, but unfortunately she doesn't seem to reciprocate. The gangster and his friend go out to buy the darker-skinned (sorry to repeat this so often but it will be important to the story later) younger boy new clothes to wow the older girl. Neither the gangster nor the friend knows anything about fashion, so the new clothes don't work (given a choice, this player would have tabled that idea from the start although it does give a short cutscene of a little boy dressed up in a cowboy hat and t-shirt made from the American flag. Giggle. Giggle.). The older girl gives the younger boy the cold shoulder and instead goes out with her friends. The gangster, being a sound father figure with nothing else to do with his time, then decides to follow the girl into town to see what she's doing with her friends (the player's skill involved here is exploring the town to find out where the goddamn movie theater is as the map does not explicitly state where it is. The player feels proud of his/her ability to randomly roam around until a cutscene triggers.). The gangster catches up with the girl and her friends about to enter a movie theater, but after catching sight of the older girl's stain from being scalded by a stove, the girl's friends call her ugly and push her to the ground (you would think that her friends would have seen and accepted the scar before, but then you'd be forgetting that some games/movies have convenient memories about their characters prior to the game/movie's beginning). The friends enter the movie theater, leaving the older girl crying in a public street. The gangster is about to intercede when the darker-skinned younger boy steps in and comforts the older girl saying "You're scarred on your arm? Look at me! I'm scarred and dark all over!" The gangster talks it over with his friend and believes that the older girl will understand the younger boy's feelings now. The two are seen talking together amicably.

This is not a bad lesson in itself, but it's a very shallow discussion of a very deep problem. Not to mention heavy-handed and preaching to the choir and what makes it less effective as a morality preaching technique is there was no choice on the part of the player whatsoever nor did the situation seem realistic in the context of urban Japan. Discrimination is subtle. Most kids know better than to openly and violently attack someone they see as lesser than themselves because of physical characteristics, and our lead is so worried about his charges experiencing heartbreak that he follows them and breaches their privacy instead of waiting for them to come to him for help. It's flat. It's unimaginative and feels unrealistic. It's also not very interesting for the player as the player can do nothing in this situation but watch his/her avatar make decisions for him/her. It's something you would see in a movie rather than something you might play in a video game.

IT TOOK OVER AN HOUR OF DULL EYES AND SLACK POSTURE TO GET THROUGH THIS AND THERE WAS NO BRAWLING WHATSOEVER WITHIN THAT TIME WHICH IS THE GAME'S ENTIRE DRAW! STREET BRAWLS! SMASH PEOPLE THROUGH WINDOWS! USE A TRAFFIC CONE TO BASH SKULLS! BE MOTHERFUCKING GANGSTA! IN A CUTSCENE OF THE FIRST GAME, THE MAIN CHARACTER USES A DOORMAN AS A HUMAN SHIELD AGAINST AN UZI BURST THEN THROWS THE DOORMAN AT THE UZI-WIELDER TO SUBDUE HIM! THEN THE PLAYER FIGHTS A SERIES OF GOONS! THE CHARACTER HAS A HEAT GAUGE THAT POWERS UP WHEN YOU DO COOL STUFF AND MISSY ELLIOT'S "I'm really really hot" WAS ON AND I WAS REALLY INTO BUSTING HEADS AT THAT MOMENT! THAT'S GOOD GAMING, SON!

Then you could compare all of this with a game like God of War where the player can't make moral choice either, but is instead drawn to the game by the morality of the character a.k.a. throw the blame on others and go kill them, but Kratos is a more complicated character. Born a Spartan, his only recourse for pain and regret is murder, and by the end of the third game he starts to understand "more murder, more problems" and begins to accept that he's his own greatest enemy, but where does that leave you? How does one escape one's habits and forgive oneself? The fourth game is coming out sometime.

The Last Starfighter was a terrible weapon that wiped out an entire race a la Ender's Game, Xenocide, etc.

Research - Demon's Souls, Dragon's Age, Another World, IWBtG (RPGs in general)

Demon's souls is getting a lot of hype for being difficult. I'm now hooked on difficult as easy feels like watching TV or the latest  Hollywood movie. A game that gets me killed must be a good game except Another World pisses me off because it seems to be mostly about remembering patterns rather than acting quickly given a set of advantages/disadvantages. Another World is kinda like I Wanna Be the Guy.

Well, actually, if you look it up online Demon's Souls is kinda like both of them, but your character can be made to be a lot more capable over time.

You start off having to rely on shield ripostes and backstabs, but then as you rapidly make yourself a slash-and-go killer things get easier until they get harder again when you're fighting large festering giants with giant clubs that knock you off your balance as you trudge through a poisonous swamp (that poisons you and then poisons you again after you've gotten better but is the only way to get through the level. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcXLyMVz-nI). After finishing your first playthrough, the game lets you play again with your beefed-up character only the enemies are much more beefed up and the game has a concept of diminishing returns where the benefits of raising stats past 40 become incremental.
Demon's Souls lets you improve your stats by collecting the souls of your dead enemies. You can improve strength which lets you equip heavier equipment. You can improve endurance which allows you to strike with your weapon more often, run farther, and dodge more times. You can improve dexterity which reduces fall damage and boosts the attack power of some weapons. Magic boost magic power. Intelligence boosts total magic points. Faith boosts magic defense and Miracle powers (which are like magic but connected to the realm's religion). There are shitloads of things to do with the demon's souls that you get, but as time goes on it takes more and more to improve your stats.
I spent thirty hours trying to balance having an armored character who could use magic and still dodge and have a big shield before finding one sword that boosted my sword damage by my magic stat. Great, but I wasted all the stat boosts in too many different categories and now the enemies are harder and I'm fucked and every time you die you lose all your souls unless you can reach the spot where you died and I keep dying where this specter shoots a beamgun of light from his spectral bullshit and it knocks you off the ledge.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oBq0ef2V7Y&feature=watch_response
So there's two or three nights where I'm sitting down hoping to relax and have a little fun where instead I die at the same place every time and lose my souls and have nothing to show for the time I've used.
So, at this point I casually threw my controller against the wall.
FUCK THIS SHIT!
Demon's Souls is a great game, but to complete the game without research (a.k.a. Gamefaqs, Gamespot, Demon'sSoulswiki), relying solely on trial-and-error requires more time than your average working adult has to spend on a video game.
I just got my refurbished PS3 and a copy of Dragon's Age: Origins. I will not make the same mistake again. I've read three guides already about the character I want to make and in doing so have ruined parts of the plot, but saved myself tens of hours (a.k.a. several nights) of frustration in trial-and-error and reboot.
Shit pays off.

Alex Rogan (a.k.a. The Last Starfighter) can make it through Demon's Souls 1-5 at Soul Level 7 upside-down with his underwear on his head and Mom screaming at him to come eat Dinner already.

Basement of the Last Starfighter

A quick couple of changes to focus on what the blog's been about. Yep. When MS(g)B gets going, we'll make a new site.

Electro-nic a.k.a. Fly to Korea and check into a WoW clinic

I'm unemployed these days, or, to my credit, I'm waiting for the notification of a second interview. In the meantime I could be giving private lessons or searching for other work, but I've found laying around listening to music and playing Tactics Ogre is pulling me deeper and deeper into the shallow hole of Tactical RPGs. Why shallow? Because at some point the fact that you could have let the game play itself (there's an option to turn on the AI for your characters) for the last sixty or so hours hits you like a shovel to the back of your head and you wake up wondering where your time has gone taking meager satisfaction in the fact that the AI is often dumb as bricks frequently adding unnecessary time between your character's turns, attacking the strongest unit with the weakest weapons, wasting items, or having a mage charge blindly into a beserker's axe.
I recently wiped the floor with my mother at Scrabble (non-sequitor that eventually will have a point), and she noted that it was surprising that someone who often spoke another language was quite good at using English. I neglected to respond with "learning a foreign language generally improves the knowledge of your first language and, more importantly games are what I do. Scrabble is less about linguistic ability and more about short game (maximizing points per turn) and long game (keeping vowels and consonants balanced in your letter tray while waiting to use higher scoring letters on multiplier spaces). Valkyrie Profile is a dungeon crawler where you have limited time to train characters to send to Valhalla so playing the game becomes about maximizing the amount of experience you get per battle by organizing the combination of your party's attacks so that your characters either hit enemies up into or in the air almost every attack. The enemies drop experience crystals when they are hit into the air. These crystals multiply the total number of experience points you receive in each fight. Fighting battles like this becomes very tedious. My characters in that game are now several levels above the enemies and while I usually could finish an encounter in one turn, it pays more to farm crystals and this process takes about three times as much time.
Last night, all I could dream about was Tactics Ogre. Two months ago I was almost yelling at my girlfriend because she was keeping me from playing Valkyrie Profile. A month ago I was being really awkward with friends because I wanted to play Dead Space 2 every night all night. In high school, I had a similar addiction to the .Hack and KOTOR series where in a week I had finished a game that took developers years to make. Back then we said we were hooked on the electronic nicotine or the electro-nic.
Now, I have so many things I want to do like get buff; learn to play the guitar and drums; read books; and hang out with people, but I'm hooked on staying in and playing games. It's the thing I've done the most consistently in my life, and is consequently the easiest thing to do and, for some reason, still the most fun thing to do. I found seven or more other games on the internet that I've wanted to play for a long time, and thank god for the godless sin of pirating because I can play them affordably. The other thing I've been doing is going through a song collection of almost 30000 while playing said games, and that is something I've wanted to do for a long time. Before I was playing games and watching TV shows, and that was great too. I've seen some good stuff that I'm happy with and I'm glad to say that I don't need to watch TV anymore. It's better as a group activity like when watching Thai soaps with the girlfriend and family.

So, as much as I'm sad that I've used so much time to play games I think it's always worked for me. Every time I start a new game I feel somewhat intimidated (albeit wildly excited) by the game's system and the possibilities it represents, which is a similar feeling when first experiencing anything new. I feel less challenged by new things as given time I always seem to find some way to get a handle on it.

The other solution to the electro-nic problem is the Less-is-More approach that I found great in The 3rd Birthday (PE3). It's essentially a squad-based 3rd person RPG where you change the unit you control by "diving" into another unit's body. Unlike Ghost Recon or some of those other games that were really popular but I never appreciated when they were popular, when you are not controlling a unit that unit becomes as silly as a toddler and will frequently do tactically stupid shit that causes that unit to die quickly [Sidenote: I didn't like Ghost Recon so much 'cause the AI-controlled units kept stealing my kills. I should get over this.]. You can remedy this by diving into that unit or aiming your selected weapon at an enemy (The Twisted!) and waiting for a "Crossfire" gauge to charge. When the gauge is full, all units in the area who are behind cover will fire simultaneously and continuously on that particular enemy until the gauge runs down again. You are also given certain genetic abilities which are passive (like an energy shield that provides some defense from attacks) or have a chance to activate when you fulfill certain conditions (Crisis Core has a similar system). The chance these powers have to activate depends on their level and the game's difficulty. At higher levels, the powers are less likely to activate. You also have a Liberation gauge which activates after your character sustains or deals a certain amount of damage depending on the weapon (pistols raise the liberation gauge higher). You also have the ability to buy and customize weapons that you bring along with you into the body you've died (yeah, it's a little bit of a weird concept). There are five basic types of weapons (pistols, rifles, shotguns, sniper rifles, grenade launchers, and the special type like a machine gun or laser weapon). Some weapons are powerful than others. Other weapons have a higher impact on your enemy and allow you to perform an "overdive kill" where you dive into your enemy's body and attempt to implode it from the inside. Sniper rifles allow you to target weakpoints on an enemy's body. Hitting these weakpoints has a high impact on the enemy that also allows you to perform an "overdive kill."
Does it sound intense? I fucking thought it was. It's also damn hard to figure out when to use what and why and how and a bitch to level up your passive and activated special powers, but the game itself only has five levels. Rather than spend all the time to create a longer experience, the developing team focused on making a really-refined short experience. They tried their damndest to make an interesting if not somewhat confusing and bizarre story. The music in the game is great. The voice-acting is pretty damn good. The scenarios in the game are varied and well thought out. I was find with playing the same parts over and over again because I enjoyed the experience of it all. It also gave me an excuse to put the PSP down every once and a while before repeating a sequence. I feel like a better gamer after completing that game.
So, I don't get why people didn't like it. I really liked it. I still wanna beat it on "Genocide" difficulty where they give you an even smaller tactical advantage over The Twisted.

If you make a tighter game shorter, it will be more fulfilling. Parasite Eve 1 was short and still a great game. Fighting an evil floating mitochondria bitch in a New York City carriage with the horses pulling on carriage on fire and screaming like hell was an outstanding experience. Dead Space 2 was shorter than its predecessor but the battles were intense and it was fucking scary throughout. Portal 1 was short, but fucking on-point.

Less is more.

Moving' Swiftly (g)aming Badassly.

The Older Gamer - Resistance: Retribution

I turned 24 yesterday, which makes me older but not old. As I have almost reached my mid 20s, it's important to take a bit of stock and think about what habits I should keep or shed, and...video games aren't going to be one of those for a while. I will be the adult playing the gun game at the arcade, greeted and pestered by his mallrat students. I will be the guy who pulls out a PSP in the back of a taxi or sitting on a train. That's me and if you're reading this, maybe it's you too. I've been playing games since Nintendo now and I've seen video games change. They're implemented more into other everyday devices like cellphones or social networks like Facebook. Video games are easier to play and more attractive either in their lifelike or surreal presentation. The biggest change for me is I want to be challenged.
When I was younger, I could never understand the idea of a hard mode. Why the hell would I want to repeat the same level over and over just to make sure I "got it right?" And the answer I've found is that it (A) makes the game last longer, (B) it brings a level of realism to the game to be seemingly disadvantaged against overwhelming odds, and (C) it is more in line with the developers' idea of how the game should be played because the player must learn to use any advantage given to his disposal. The best example of (C) I can think of is Baldur's Gate 2 where the toughest battles are won by the smallest margins.
Resistance: Retribution is another really good example. Unlike the ps3 iterations where you play a human/chimera hybrid in Resistance: Retribution you're human, a grunt. What makes your character special is his diehard determination to avenge his brother by killing every alien fucker to step in his sights. To win the game on its highest difficulty, you have to learn how to use each weapon and its secondary function, but also when to use said weapon and when ammo is short you better have a backup plan. In doing this, I found myself drawn further into the game. Running out into the middle of combat was suicide. Firing non-stop instead of carefully timing bursts from cover got me killed quite often. It felt more real. One of the bosses is a human/chimera hybrid who taunts you with his new power. Your character's response is "Do you know how many chimera I've killed? Today alone?" and I agreed, "Do you know, shitbitch? A fucking lot! And they weren't no pushovers neither." If you've read Preacher, think of that last fight between Cassidy and Preacher.
In many ways, starting and finishing a game is like finishing a school project so that at the end, you grade yourself on how well you've done. If you've beaten it on easy, you can say "I got to the end. I beat that," but it's a lot more satisfying if you can say, "That game had nothing I couldn't handle." I think that's a bit more rare. I definitely got lucky sometimes in Retribution, but I spent an hour and a half with the final boss, getting down the pattern of pushing the button to knock down the boss' shields without getting hit or fried to death by her bighead lightning bullshit then doing as much damage as I could before she raised her shields back up and I had to deal with a swarm of lesser enemies then knocking her shields down again, doing as much damage to her as possible, then dealing with the swarms, and taking off the last of her health. As a bonus handicap, I had to deal with my PSP's quirky joypad which likes to get stuck so that the character takes a dainty stroll instead of running for his life.
I've watched kids play games and cringed at their lack of timing and strategy, their lack of regard for how long an attack will take and how vulnerable they are while performing said attack, their willful refusal to use the block button, their mismanaged hand-eye coordination that pushes buttons out of fear and excitement instead of as a result of cool collected concentration. So, yeah, I still play games, but I don't play them like a child. The games I play are hard and I make them harder, so I'm fucking good unless you're talking about FIFA or something where I have no idea how to get the stupid ball in the goal and I still think slide-tackling the goalie is funny as fuck.

I'm also a pretty shit driver.

Money-making Shouldn't make you (g)ive up your hobbies from Before,

Lynny not Brawny Johnson

The other sister

Square released Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep. It had some really poor writing, poor voice-acting, the characters were barely three dimensional, but otherwise it's a solid game. It's a Kingdom Hearts game. If you've played them before, you'll like this one. It's fun. It's colorful. Your attacks are damn cool. The enemies are kind of interesting. The ones I hate the most are the ones that throw shit at you continuously. The biggest difference from other Kingdom Hearts is that instead of only having basic magics and timed button presses to do special attacks, you choose, make, and utilize up to 8 out of over a hundred different attacks plus finish commands and if you use a set of certain commands your command style changes. You go from normal attacks to Diamond Dust, Wingblade, or Ghost Drive attacks. You can also d-link and use another character's attacks and finish commands. You can also Shotlock which is where you lock on to the enemies and shoot magic out of your keyblade or dash through them. If you don't play the game on its hardest difficulty, you are seriously overpowered compared to the enemies in the game. While playing through the story, you go to the same worlds as three different people. Each character has a different set of events in each world, but I did feel some bad deja vu at some points. Finishing all three parts unlocks a final episode and will make you badly want to play the next game.
In comparison, Crisis Core is Square's ugly, down syndrome baby. The story is bizarre and only really touching at those moments when Zack knows he's working for an evil company, but knows that the evil he's fighting is worse. Otherwise it's all pretty goddamn cliche. They keep making these FF7 games and movies, but they don't put in as much effort as they did into FF7 itself. The experience system is interesting as your character and materia level up at random according to a slot machine. Winning battles gives you points that will help you meld your materia, which become very important towards the end of the game. On top of the story, there are missions you can go to. There are about five different environments for this mission, and they aren't that unique. It's very similar to Mass Effect's side-mission system. Feels like laziness, poor craftmanship, deja vu, and all that when you compare it to other games with very unique side missions like...the original Final Fantasy 7, Ratchet & Clank, or Knights of the Old Republic. I still haven't finished the story yet. I'm at the point where I killed the main baddy, but now it looks like I actually didn't kill him.

Japan you need to relearn how to tell a good fucking story, and quit this cookie-cutter make really impressive visuals and good gameplay, but tie it together with a cheesy cliche story bullshit.

The same can be said for that new Alice movie, especially with that fucking Wizard of Oz ending.

Migrating to Southeast asia is hazardous to (g)aming Believers

Coming back - Condemmend, Mass Effect & Such

I stole my friend's Playstation 2, and got a chance to replay Onimusha 3, and it was fun for a while, but it had that Haze phenomenom. Something about the game just started to make it less and less interesting. Max Payne 2 was really fun to play again, but I stopped that after a bit too. So, I gave my friend his PS2 back, and picked up a copy of Bard's Tale, which was also fun until I got tired of hitting spacebar, waiting for The Bard to draw his bow back and charge up Arrow Storm (fires three arrows), and over and over again. I got tired of walking into non-descript dungeons facing vague clones of previous enemies. I got tired of summoning the same creatures over and over to fight. I replayed FF8 until my mistreated PSP wiped my data, and I cringed at the thought of doing it all over again.

I thought I was done with videogames. I started reading books. I liked Malus Darkblade a lot, but found it hard to find something that grabbed me as wholly. Mervus Peake's Gormenghast trilogy has amazing imagery, but also has a tendency to spend a whole page describing menial social interactions. I got into Stephen King's Dark Tower. The Gunslinger was incredible in its minimalism. A simple story, not too complicated descriptions but detailed, a unique world, and a unique voice for its main character. Intermittent pitfalls into cliches of Christ imagery and a boyish take on sexuality (a lonely barmaid with a scar throws herself at him, a gun in a vagina "purifies" a woman's womb), but an engaging story. But the next book was written years later and doesn't have the same voice. Written in 1987, it reads like an episode of "Tales from the Crypt." It's funny how people's speech has changed in twenty years or so.

So, I thought I was done with video games, but it's been difficult to find something that eats free time and engages thought as well as a video game.

Found a copy of Condemned: Criminal Origins. Fucking satisfying, creepy thriller game. I really like that studio. FEAR was fun too. Melee combat that was difficult, asked the player to learn patterns and rhythmn to survive. Favorite weapon was the blade from a paper cutter. Nasty. Also nasty to hit big pig fuckers with shovels, but fuck you shitbags, I'm gonna survive.

Then after long fights with a non-genuine copy of Windows 7, torrented games, and shite pirated games (forgive me, children of game developers), I got Mass Effect working.

So, let's talk about it.

Mass Effect gives you experience by talking to folk, but sometimes the dialogue is fucking weak. Characters are rarely very deep and often talk very plainly about themselves, their race, or things you're interested in rather than things they would be interested in. Most times, you interrogate NPCs with questions rather than engaging them in what would be considered a normal conversation. Sure, you're in the military and when most civilians meet you, they're put off like if a cop randomly stopped you and asked you to chat. However, it would be much more engaging, challenging, and realistic if the charm and intimidate skills affected a NPC's first impression of you, and that, in turn, determined what information you were given. Like if conversation were more like Yakuza's bargirl mini-game.

Mass Effect also has a good/evil system where you can be a Galactic Vigilante (or M16, KGB, Gestapo, choose your favorite analogy for a council government's police force with little to no accountability to any civilian organization) that always upholds the law but gives people leeway to follow it (one time I got renegade points for insisting that a criminal go to prison instead of continuing to run a petty crimes ring) or an asshole more interested in achieving greater good objectives than saving lives. Sometimes you could have a strong argument against the game's definitions of good and evil.

Mass Effect also allows you to travel the galaxy, and, at first, I was excited and intimidated by the scope of the galaxies, but you slowly realize a sickening pattern. Go to a galaxy, run your mouse over each planet, survey planets for materials or land on the planets and...goddamnit.

Mass Effect is a shooting RPG with a vehicle. A Mako. An all-terrain buggy. A fucking...

There are cool segments where you race through huge facilities or fight your way into heavily-fortified forts, but you never get a chance to improve your vehicle. From the start of the game until the end, it has a machine gun and a cannon. You fire the cannon and wait for it to reload. You fire your machine gun until it overheats. You have jets that allow the mako to jump ten feet or so in the air that you are never able to improve, but...

Dear, God, but, most of your time in the Mako exploring exciting new frontiers is spent trying to drive over hills and mountains. Your Mako is dropped on to a planet (Read: a square map). There are two or three scattered objectives in your operational square. In between these two or three scattered objectives are mountains and hills and valleys and dear God, all you can really do to navigate over all of these mountains, valleys, hills, and blah blah blah is press forward and hope for the best. The jump jets often just throw you off the hill.

The planets all start to look the same after a while. This planet is red. This planet is green. They're all just sparsely-populated, rocky plains. You drive halfway across each map (an hour or more added to the journey because of the fucking hills and shit) to find probes filled with items, or artifacts that give little experience and money, or facilities, and after a while, you start to notice that the facilities are all the same too. They have the same twists and turns and the boxes used for cover are all in the same places. Half-Life 2 and Portal were awesome because each segment was noticeably different and interesting. The story segments (the maps and such) are noticeably different and interesting, but a lot of the game is this planet exploring thingy. I keep thinking, "Hey, what did you do when you played this game...?" and I usually think, "I drove the damn Mako up hills on different planets. All of which had Earth's gravity." Ooh, wouldn't it be cool if the gravity was different? At one point, in Mass Effect you go to Earth's moon, and gravity is still a bitch there as you try to drive up and down its beautiful craters.

But, all of this sidequesting gets you money and experience, which aint worth shit after a while. First of all, the game overloads you with items. Boxes and crates are everywhere and they give you enough items so that you could equip every single character you have with the best of each weapon, each upgrade, armor, and biotic or electrical amplifier, but why would you bother when you only use three of them at a time? At the beginning of the game, I drooled at the equipment in shops. Then I explored a shitload of planets, and half the items I got were twice as good as the ones in the shop, so I didn't buy anything or I didn't travel back to the shops to check out new supplies because of the load times required to travel back to the main shopping hub, which is an incidental realistic touch. If you were halfway across the galaxy, you probably wouldn't travel back to the main shopping hub every time you wanted to improve your equipment. Then there was an item cap. At 150 items, you either have to sell your inventory or turn it into gel that will decrpyt locks to get more items or repair your stupid fucking mako. Lame.

Sell or buy enough, and you unlock the Spectre gear, the best weapons in the game, and at that point, only armor, upgrades, and amps become worth your time to find.

And then experience starts to become more moot. Experience gets you talent points. Talent points go to improving your weapon skills or your powers. When you have the best weapons in the game, you don't really need to improve your weapons skills. The best weapons are accurate and have high damage which is what spending talent points improves. Then powers become less important because you don't really need to use them. Your weapons are killing folk fast and effectively. You have badass armor and good upgrades for it too. You rarely get hit because you kill most of what you come across quickly. When you do get hit, it barely hurts.

Some of the upgrades are interesting. Towards the end, you get high-explosive rounds that do more damage but increase weapon overheat and other rounds that decrease accuracy, but it's always easier to get a quicker kill than to disable then kill. If you were playing Baldur's Gate, where enemies are very evenly matched with you, then it becomes really important to disable and keep enemies from disabling you. Mass Effect only has about 10 or so powers, so the strategies for using powers are limited. Run into a room, use overload to disable shields, shoot to kill. Run into a room, lift an enemy, shoot the poor bastard as he falls down, move on to the next one. Run into a room with Asari commandos, damper them so they can't turn you into a crumpled mess on the floor, sabotage their weapons if you feel like it or just shoot them down.

At the beginning of the game, combat is super difficult, but it gets easier and easier. Your buddies are really good at taking enemies down, and enemies aren't quite matched to your abilities, but it isn't clear why. Either that or I played too many sidequests and now all the story missions are too easy.

Well, I've said what I wanted to say about this game, so I'll go beat it then add some comments.

It's ok. Planescape: Torment had a tighter story and dialogue. If every game had a good story like Planescape, I would still find something to complain about, or I would be too absorbed in games to socialize.

Maybe Some (g)ood shit will Be around soon

-Lucky Lindy

Final Fantasy XII

I spent most of last night talking about how great this game is.

It really sucks if you play it like an old-school RPG, but if you tune the fuck out of the gambits, it becomes this really cool challenge to balance attack and defense to pound monsters as fast and as hard as you can.

I hardly pay attention to the story though. It is kinda interesting, but The battle system took over that game. I'm hoping Final 13 will be a good mix of story and badass battle system.

I've been playing it with another teacher and we akined it to teaching English. You plan for a battle, give instructions, but then you have to keep careful watch to make sure those instructions are followed. Or you could say it was the same as a turn-based system, you just automatically program each turn like in American RPGs, the A lot of people talk about action games with RPG elements, and here we have an RPG that looks like an action game. It's like God of War with more commands.

I made a mistake in playing this game for the story. The characters are dead shallow. Two of the characters are just little kids and have little to do with the main story. One of them is Vaan.

I replayed (FF)7 and rocked it. I'm working on 8 now. 8 is super cool, but it's really easy to get super good magic at the beginning of the game. I think it gets harder, but right now it's fun 'cause I can test different battle styles out.

Disagea got super boring after a while, man. Mind-numbing dungeon crawlers are not for me. I can't defend FFXII as different, but with Disagea, doing really well seems more like a matter of patience not skill. Beating an RPG in less time is way more impressive than putting ridiculous amounts of hours in.

And that's this asshole's opinion.

-Lyndon's BigBig Porking Johnson

Manhunt

Been playing Manhunt and Manhunt 2 lately. They're actually pretty sweet. Was turned off by the gore for a bit, but I think the other parts of the game make it worth it. The enemies are hillarious and the stories are pretty interesting.

Check this out from Manhunt 2 (skip to the 7 minute count):

MS(g)B is your link for KittyWheelbarrowing

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The second.5 is a behind the scenes look at Kitty Wheelbarrow



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