City of Guilds

The first pre-purchase beta weekend is nearly here! I'm in the planning stages of getting together a group of funky guys to talk about this game. Come on down and play with us, and let me know if you wanna be in a video or podcast or something.

Harbinger

Not that anyone is going to be reading this shit, I am still going to post within the bounds of the UK Video Game Spoilers Act 2003. As such, please be aware:

Here be spoilers for all three of the Mass Effect games. What do you mean you ain't finished them all? Get to it! It's okay, I'll wait...

There we go. Right, let's get on with the show!

Yeah, so, Mass Effect 3 was kind of a roller-coaster for most people wasn't it? A mostly great ride with a bit of a slow start, a gradual build up to a fast-paced, interesting and fun several hours (these are the bits where you are doing loop-the-loops and corkscrews and shit), followed by a frantic and climactic finale, which then resolves with you suffering a horrific ride malfunction and results in everyone dying and generally not having a fun time. Oh...wait...

I am not even going to get into the good and the bad and the ugly of the final sequences of the last game in one of this generation's greatest ever franchises (other than to say that I think BioWare could have done better, as they have demonstrated many times before). What I am going to do is gaze into the very window of a person's soul and talk about some cool/scary things. That person? The Illusive Man. And the window? His Paragon-blue eyes.

As demonstrated by the two above images, both the The Illusive Man (hereafter I'll refer to him simply as TIM) and Shepard sport (albeit optionally in games 2 and 3) these fairly obvious glowing eye thingies, which no one at any point in any of the games ever acknowledges or asks about, which is rather interesting. I mean, there are dozens of crazy looking doodads and flibberty gibbets stuck onto the various races throughout the game, and there are hundreds upon hundreds of individuals who you come across in your journey for galactic peace, and not a single one has ever been shown to have these sick looking glowing eye-rims.

As far as I'm aware you can only get the Renegade version of these eyes, as well as the accompanying 'scarring' in ME3, as stated in the game you are not yet fully healed from your re-constructive surgery and without acting nice to people (choosing the top-most options in dialogue wheels and the blue colour-coded Paragon options where available), you are basically letting the Dark Side flow through you and ravage your body in a outwardly physical manner. If you roll deep enough into the Renegade options you end up looking like you've got red hot magma boiling away just under your skin, combined with your Terminator eyes you look like the baddest badass that has ever existed IN THE ENTIRE GALAXY.

That brings me to my first major point, you can only ever become the evil-looking Shepard Commander in ME3, if you recall back to the second game there was the option for both sides of the moral scale to be represented through the medium of your face. You are in essence forced down the ruthless Renegade path if you want those sweet scars (there still exists the option to get your face completely scrubbed clean in the medbay). Now with the only other person in the galaxy boasting the Paragon version of this flair, it got me to a-thinkin...which side of the conflict is TIM really on, and which side does HE think he is on? And if the answer is that TIM is kinda a good guy, is it actually the case that the player-controlled character is actually travelling down the road of being a total dick.

The parallels that can be drawn between TIM and Saren are clear on a surface level, they have both fallen under the spell of Indoctrination (a single Reaper, Sovereign, in the case of Saren and an unspecified Reaper or Reapers with TIM). However, the major difference between the two is that Saren knows he is being Indoctrinated, and willingly submits to it, safe in the knowledge that Sovereign won't fully corrupt his mind due to the deterioration of his abilities and overall usefulness to the goal of opening up the Citadel for the impending invasion. TIM on the other hand, has trodden heavily down the path to the dark side in a really screwed up way, he uses salvaged Reaper/Collector technology to explore how he can essentially counter-Indoctrinate the Reapers (the little boy AI at the end of the game does indeed say that TIM could have technically done this, he happens to fail in this instance as his mind was already under the control of the Reapers). His experiments result in him killing thousands upon thousands of refugees as well as many members of his own personal army. Through TIM's eyes he is trying to get the upper hand on the Reapers, but in his eyes the Mass Effect moral scale still deems him as being a super-great guy!

The shenanigans that occur at the end of the game, with Shepard and Anderson and TIM in the control room of the Citadel, do show TIM finally snapping under the realisation that he being controlled (or so I hear, as a Renegade I just shot him as he was threatening to execute Anderson), yet his eyes have always stayed the same colour throughout two whole games. I doubt a case could be made for saying that TIM was Indoctrinated even in ME2, as he goes to great effort to keep Shepard's body out of the Collector's grubby hands. Maybe over the course of that game we are seeing TIM becoming a sleeper agent for the Reapers? Hmmm...

To explore this point more I'll be making a second post, maybe like a video review thing or maybe just words, I don't know yet. I just wanted to get something down that reminded me to talk about this rather odd little thing I noticed, even back in ME2 I thought it was cool/strange, there was this obviously dodgy dude with the same Paragon eyes as me, laying out the orders to do some rather kinky things. Anyhow, until next time, keelah se'lai.

Bombed and Wasted, and it's all just Diabolically Fine

Jesus Christ, I must stop writing headlines like Alex Navarro, oh wait, that reminds me of some news that happened to him and some other video gamey people you might have heard of.

THE GIANT BOMB DOT COM STAFF ARE MOVING BACK INTO THEIR OLD GAMESPOT OFFICES!?

The very same offices that Jeff and Ryan and Brad and Alex and Vinny all left upon the removal of Mr Gerstmann from his position as Editorial Director in 2007.

Oh, and Double fine are making a brand new point 'n' click adventure game for Windows, Mac and Linux

Oh, and inXile are making a brand new top-down RPG (a sequel to 1988's Wasteland), for WIndows, Mac and Linux.

Oh, and Diablo III now has a release date, and is available for pre-purchase right now! FUCK.

Oh, and the pre-purchase date for Guild Wars 2 was also announced. That says to me that we are really moving towards the end game in the development cycle for this monster of a MMORPG.

Oh, and Mass Effect 3, the sequel to one of the best video games of this generation came out just recently. That seems like something I should play...and it is!

Did I wake up in crazy town where all this wild stuff just happens upon the regular? Because it seems to me that shit just went all wild and awesome and weird in the space of about a week.

Back to the Front

Coming right back atcha! Rolling in hot off the heels...of...well me not having done an update for a good while, sorry! Even though I had planned to post at least a little something everyday, it turns out I have failed in that grand endeavour, however, it is through the flames of adversity that our revolve tempers like steel. Or something.

The long and short of this is that I will try my very best to improve my writing habits and my vidz. Some news that has spurned me back into action is the recent leaking of some details on everyone's favourite 16 player, competitive deathmatch FPS game (with experience based levelling system)...

SIM CITY 5

I can still vividly recall my many hours spent with the various versions of this fine gaming series, that funky jazz music, the crazy depth of intermingling all that technology, TAXATION. 2013 can't come soon enough!

Double fine and dandy

So, there's this video game company called Double Fine, and they have raised over $1,500,000 as development funds for a brand new point 'n' click adventure game. Funds, given freely unto them by fans, no venture capitalists, no loans, just normal people who believe in/trust/love Tim Schafer (as well as his band of merry men and women).

Now we have Mr Chris Avellone, of Obsidian Entertainment, making noises about possibly wanting to try to attempt some kind of similar thing at some point in the future.

Those guys down at Double Fine have created something very special with just their attempt at this endeavour, something that goes beyond just the software they are going to put out at the end of development, but they have gone and put ideas in people's heads. Very cool ideas. Inside cool people's heads.

I fuckin' love the video games.

Anno 2070 and on and on and on

So, I've been mucking around with producing some video content, namely a Long Look of the fantastic real time strategy game Anno 2070. I plan to get through the entire single player campaign of this thing whilst on tape, learning and tweaking things as I go, figuring out how to balance audio levels, syncing up video and audio tracks, selecting the best way to capture and encode console and PC footage and how to talk whilst playing a damn video game! I'm basically treating this as my 'learning on the job' training, I hope at some point in the future I'll be able to get all these things nailed down and be able to blast out hot polished content into your eagerly waiting faces.

Since I am on the subject of Anno 2070, we may as well jive for a minute on what I think about it, after putting around seven hours of playtime on the clock these will only be fledgling opinions and may well change over the course of the next 20 or 30 hours.

As far as RTS games go, this one differs a little from the norm (by that I mean the Command and Conquers and StarCrafts of this world). Here the focus is on a cycle of harvesting raw materials, processing them, turning them into useful products for construction or trade and then setting up supply lines with the AI characters on the map to boost your income/barter for the items that you need. This is placed over a familiar framework of city planning, taxation, management of power and food supplies, research and development as well as your inhabitant's happiness and safety.

With the emphasis on cultivation and trading rather than fast paced out-and-out warfare (although combat is a part of the game, in all my hours so far I have destroyed naught but one little pirate ship), you are guided down a slightly more gentle path in terms of pace and just how many actions you are expected to perform and respond to. This suits me just fine, as a big fan of those types of RTS games I am still more than willing to try something a little different from my usual experience, that being: Dawn of War, Homeworld, StarCraft, Command & Conquer, Dune II, Company of Heroes, Total Annihilation and Warcraft (other video games are available, or so I'm told).

I'm still finding my way with this game, but the more I play the more I feel like I'm learning a subtly different set of skills when compared to those aforementioned RTSes. I am, however, up to my ass in this one mission where my economy has just dropped right out from under me, I think I'm about 90 minutes into a mission that should have been completed in around 20. Whether it's just me or I've encountered a nasty bug, I don't know yet, can YOU help? /turns to point and look directly at you.

Fly me to the moon

I should buy a flight stick and a copy of DCS: A-10C Warthog.

I really shouldn't buy a flight stick and a copy of DCS: A-10C Warthog.

Quandary of the century.

Multiple hour-long videos showing my feeble attempts at getting the engines started would be something aright, it wouldn't be good, but it would be something.