Fatbomb: “November” Edition

Fatbomb Blog November Edition

Oh, my ears and whiskers, how late it's getting!

- White Rabbit from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, as written by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (published 26th November, 1865).

Shh shh, it’s okay, it’s okay. Don’t cry now. Come here, that’s it. Shh...there there. Everything’s going to be fine. I-I know, I’m late...but I’m here for you now. I am, now and forever, still going to call this mighty heap of words the November edition of my fattest of Fatbombs, and that’s just going to have to be something that you deal with. In your own way. In your own time.

We can get through this, okay?

Well, with all that soppy bollocks out of the way, let’s talk about rape, murder, profoundly cruel and terrible psychological and physiological torture, sadism, insanity, racism, experiments on living humans whilst their eyeballs are removed and placed in jars so they can watch their own torture taking place, immortality as a means of never ending punishment, cannibalism, terrible and unyielding pain and suffering, infanticide, the Holocaust, unrelenting hopelessness, child abuse, slavery, paranoia and all-consuming hatred for life. Shall we?

I Have No Legs, and I Must Walk

i think, therefore i am

So, some pretty rough stuff goes down in that damn fine Walking Dead video game, doesn’t it? Well, on today’s foray into the oppressively dank, constantly dangerous, crushingly deep, dark jungle of our shared video gaming experience, I want to introduce to y’all, a good friend of mine. A friend who might call the situations that we struggle through on our path down those increasingly grim episodes of the Walking Dead game, a close sibling.

1995’s I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, a point-and-click psychological horror adventure game. It’s premise, setting and theme are based upon the 1967 original short story by Harlan Ellison, and it was developed in collaboration with the author and a company called The Dreamers Guild. This is a grimly dark journey through fear and pain and guilt and brutally violent physical and mental torture.

Before we dive on down to these dark dark depths, take a deep breath whilst I run through just a couple of the very broadest of broad plot points, so as to try and give you some idea of the lens through which Harlan and the developers make you view this grim tableau of abjectly horrible misery.

We take control of a total of five separate characters throughout our journey, we assume control of each one in turn, with the order being decided upon by the player. These five unlucky avatars are the last remaining humans on the planet Earth (although one of this number stretches that definition, thanks to horrific genetic manipulation by our antagonist), we join them after 109 years of unrelenting torture and constant humiliation at the hands of an entity known as AM. This entity is a twisted conglomeration of three national supercomputers that were built to wage war against each other, during the period of military escalation that occurred as the Cold War turned into the Third World War.

So, a global thermonuclear war being waged by three Skynets sounds pretty bad, right? Well, unfortunately things got very much worse for us homo sapiens, because these highly advanced AI systems soon came to the conclusion that man was their true enemy, and united, becoming one all-encompassing Allied Master Computer. This singular being promptly unleashed the Final War upon all of humanity, and winnowed the entire population of the Earth down to the five hapless souls we see in this game.

To give you an idea of where AM is coming from, here is the very first thing you hear from him, upon starting a new game (an interesting point about AM is that he is voiced by Harlan himself):

Hate. Let me tell you how much I've come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If the word 'hate' was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant. For you. Hate. Hate.

- AM.

Yeah, he’s not a happy chappy. He hates humanity for creating him as a supremely powerful, highly intelligent sentient being, whilst constraining his physical form to a compound buried deep within the Earth. He’s been taking out these frustrations on your sad little group over these many many years, and it’s with his latest idea for a ‘little game’ that we take charge of our tortured travellers, and try to work through some serious fucking shit.

AM forces each of these characters to confront their own, very serious, emotional and moral flaws, he’s not setting them up in these cruel scenarios to try and help them, or make them learn some ultimate truth about themselves. He is simply expressing his deep-seated sadistic tendencies towards humanity. Inside of the story told within the book and this very video game, he has chosen a slightly different method of torment to inflict upon his playthings, this time, he wants to get really really deep under their skins. So deep that he might flay them alive with their own guilt, sorrow and anguish.

Now, I will not delve into the specifics of the sequences that we must endure as the player, whilst we tread this trail of misery through the story arc. So, if you have yet to play the game (I know, it’s such a hot new joint that you just HAVE to stay spoiler-free), please believe me when I say that it’s worthwhile me keeping that stuff secret from you. I know, I know, we shouldn’t have secrets from each other, after all the time we’ve spent together. But it’s for your own good. Okay? Okay.

With that above thingy being said, I will, gladly, talk about some of the themes and feelings and CHOICES that we explore in this game. Because, yeah, I mentioned The Walking Dead at the top of the episode for a reason, and that reason is...

We be throwin’ dark.

So, I own all five episodes of The Walking Dead, but have only completed the first one at the time of writing. However, even within this relatively short amount of interaction, I have come to notice some things that are similar and some things that are not so similar between these two versions of ‘Moral Quandaries: The Video Game’.

The realities inside of the worlds created by these two different stories are both, understandably, overarchingly grim. At every turn, a situation goes from bad to worse, a small victory or respite in the misery is quickly and suddenly followed up with a severe swerve in the opposite direction. The interplay between the small victories achieved by the player followed up by harsh consequences or horrible reprisals, is a dynamic that allows both games to keep the feeling of threat high, and along with it, the tension.

It was this near-constant feeling of menace, of ‘something’s just going to go wrong, I know it’ that I experienced throughout much TWD that must have fired up some dusty old neurons inside my head, and which jiggled them into releasing some memories of playing through IHNMAIMS (blimey, that’s an acronym and a half right there, let’s stick with how I’m about to refer to the game in the next sentence, instead) the first time. Now, to be clear, I didn’t play I Have No Mouth back when it came out, it wasn’t even something I was aware of until around 2005. So I never had the privilege of talking about it whilst it was hot, so to speak, I don’t believe this game ever really did crazy numbers; and it seems like about half a dozen people on this website even know what it is. That’s a small part of why I’m writing about it here, since I get AT LEAST one person who seems to read through this cavalcade of consciousness, maybe it’ll help to increase the population of those gamers who have played it, or at the very least, know of its existence.

Bearing that in mind, let us trudge ever forwards and downwards into the dark and seedy recesses of the human mind, I hope you brought a torch!

Within both these video games, we take charge of a character and guide them through some pretty sticky situations. Whether it’s high pressure moments where a binary choice between one life or another has to be made, or the smaller scale stuff that will impact upon our progression in a more subtle, long term way. Both of these games play with the idea of not just taking into account the choices that you did make, but also those that you dismissed out of hand. How a game can take note of all those multitude of choices and present variations within a plot is really interesting, and possibly devastating once you realise that hours down the line, you in fact made a terrible choice and affected some change that was really not to your liking.

I find myself revelling in the darkest of dark moments found in both of these games. Yes, I might feel sadness, anger, disgust, fear (or if I’m real lucky, all four at once!), but I’m comfortable with a video game invoking these feelings inside of me. At least it’s not something external to a piece of electronic entertainment that’s impressing these rather bleak situations upon me, and I’m extremely glad of the medium of video games for allowing this two-way conversation between me, and the art that I’m exploring.

cogito ergo sum

Next up, a little bit of sweetness and light, to cleanse the palate.

Steam’s Big Picture Sale Thingy

Hot Steamy Pictures

A sale? ON STEAM!? HOLY FUCKING SHIT GUYSҨ®¥?½!Ѩ!|?ᴟԒѼ҉

No, wait, it’s okay. We’re just seeing phase two of Valve’s master plan to take over the world using video games. That whole ‘making it easy to play PC games whilst you’re sat on the couch thing’ was given a great push in the direction of creating a uniform, cohesive experience for any user wishing to partake of these forbidden fruits, with the advent of Steam’s beta of the Big Picture. Now that it’s been given some time to air out, Valve have officially launched the setting as a thing, and are celebrating by selling a whole bunch of awesome games for cheap!

A common slight shortcoming that I found during those beta days, and one that still remains to some degree today; is that you’ve still got to keep a keyboard and/or mouse handy BECAUSE THE BLASTED GAME WON’T LOAD UP UNLESS YOU USE A MOUSE TO ACTIVATE A SPLASH SCREEN ARGH! As it transpires, what Valve are now pushing as part of their second phase, is the co-branding and official recognition of games that do not require anything other than a gamepad to install, boot and play. Sweet!

Full controller support (51 titles)

Partial controller support (383 titles)

And I reckons, so I does, that by this time next year, we’ll be seeing many more fully supported titles in that list right there. There’s a future bet I’d be pretty happy to wager on. Do not disappoint me again, Gabe.

The sale, by the way, ends on the 10th of this very month...I mean December...yes...and it’s main page can be found over here. If you can’t click won’t click on that, then please feel free to peruse these choice cuts from that very link:

Trine 2 for £3.00 Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 for £5.74 Tiny and Big: Grandpa's Leftovers for £1.74 Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine for £4.99 The Secret of Monkey Island™: Special Edition for £1.74

Those Shiny Happy Environments in Far Cry 3

Woo!

Woo! indeed. Over these past few days I’ve been putting plenty of hours on the clock in this fantastic new iteration of open world-bounding, and large-scale chaos-creating video gaming boom boom. But there’s been one aspect, above the passable plot, exciting combat and enjoyable sidequests, that I’ve found the most personally pleasing. And that is...

Just how damn pretty every damn thing is. Don’t know what I mean? Or, maybe you don’t believe me!? Huh, well...screw you buddy! No, hold up, wait wait wait, come back! I didn’t mean that, I just get very defensive over pixels, they are My First. My Last. My Everything. Look at this sentence and then click on it to be taken to a world of pure imagination!

Super Streamlined Borderlands Progression Update Hyper Megamix!

I just couldn’t leave well enough alone. Could I? COULD I?

Borderlands 1 Steamchievements

August - 51 of 80 (64%) Achievements Earned

September - 64 of 80 (80%) Achievements Earned

November - 67 of 80 (84%) Achievements Earned

Borderlands 2 Steamchievements

November - 37 of 56 (66%) Achievements Earned

Finally...a Fantasy!

I’m Doing A Thing Soon.

Signing off and up and away!

Cut the Rope

We just got this dope as fuck Metropolis poster framed up all nice like, so all is well with the world. I best get back to hanging that mother up, as well as spreading cheap Christmas decorations about my house. I will be back soon, sooner than you would like, no doubt. If you are one of those lost and damned souls who does want to see more of my juicy electronic, photon-based entertainment, right here on this web zone called Giant Bomb Dot Com, then please do feel obliged to check out these other hype ass threads that I done did:

The Annually Designated Festive Happiness Period Thread (2012)

Far Cry 3 Screenshot Thread

Let's Play Halo 2...multiplayer...together!

The Bungie PDF Archive

Best Villainous Quotes

Keep it creepy, y’all!

<>

Quoted For Truth

There are times, Caterina, when I find myself transfixed by a shadow on the wall, or the splashing of water against a stone. I stare at it, the hours pass, the world around me drops away...replaced by worlds being created and destroyed by my imagination.

- The holographic Leonardo da Vinci.

Donederlands

I think, for the time being, I've had my fill of delicious Original Style Borderlands. I've not attempted to make any further strides in my noble fight to 100% it on PC, mainly because me and my co-op partner have been wrecking faces and jumping off places in the stunning sequel (although there are some minor caveats to that blanket statement of praise). Whilst I will eventually get back to the hike up completionist mountain, in order to stake my flag into the top of Borderlands peak, I will use this time and space to talk about the dozens of hours that I've enjoyed, so far, in Borderlands 2.

Let’s start with breaking down, in the most simplistic and shittiest terms possible, what I majorly like and majorly dislike about this game. Just, because...well...I feel like it.

I like:

• No more per character weapon levelling
• The slightly thicker, meatier plot
• No fall damage

I dislike:

• No more per character weapon levelling
• Most of the dialogue
• Some of the humour

These above points are in specific reference to changes made from the original game, and in that regard, we are going to have a look at how and why these changes were made; and why I think what I think of them. Let us start with very first issue/improvement...

I like AND dislike: No more per character weapon levelling
Okay, just to make sure we all know what I'm talking about (I have enough trouble with that as it is), this fairly small combat-related system is a thing that was present in the first game, whereby you essentially levelled up your skill with any one of the seven weapon types, in a Daggerfally/Morrowindy stylee. Here are some pictures to jog your manky memory!

Got it? Course you do! It’s easy enough, use a combat rifle more and you get better at using a combat rifle (as you can probably tell, I used the combat rifle a lot). Now, in Borderlands, this always gave me an incentive to stick to one or two main weapon types, essentially ‘maining’ them. This system also linked into the classes and their associated class mods, ideally if you wanted to get really sexy powerful with the submachine gun; you’d want to use a class that would get buffs to their submachine gun effectiveness based on class tree as well as mods, and finally the overall weapon proficiency.

This trinity (cut down to a duology in the sequel) lightly punished you for not sticking to a cohesive weapon and class plan. Going ahead and picking up that dope rocket launcher when you possessed but a mere level 1 proficiency with it, would mean you’d miss more, take longer to reload and do less damage. I feel that Gearbox perfectly balanced these points in the combat system with the benefits that were very easy to gain from just sticking with a weapon throughout the game. This, in turn, made picking a class and weapon combination really matter so much more than in Borderlands 2. Which opted for a slightly broader system, where anyone can use any weapon, and tied the ongoing weapon-based levelling into the mighty Badass Rank.

Which, don’t get me wrong, isn't a bad thing, I'm not saying that the move to this different levelling system is worse in some way. I just dislike that the old system isn't in there as well (or modified and incorporated in some clever way). I JUST LIKE THINGS THAT LEVEL UP THE MORE YOU USE THEM!

Anyway, that was a stupid thing. On to the next thing!

I like: The slightly thicker, meatier plot
More twists, more turns, we get to see cooler places, and experience better characterisation throughout the overall storyline. All good. Except for a couple of little things...

I dislike: Most of the dialogue
I cringed throughout nearly every single line of Tiny Tina’s (I love Ashly Burch in every single way possible, by the way). Handsome Jack ceased to be threatening in any way after a few hours of idle threats and perfunctorily poor puns. I did like the majority of the Claptrap stuff, but it did grate on my nerves in a few places, the idling or ‘hanging around not doing anything’ stuff was pretty great all round. To be honest, the less words that I have to listen to, between me and my shooting of people in the head, the better. To my mind, and from what I can remember, there was just less of that stuff in the original. And I kind of appreciated the slightly scant amount of words that I was subject to.

I like: No fall damage
Yes! My god yes!

I dislike: Some of the humour
The frequent use of overt Internet-based humour just did not jibe with me, I felt that the way the first game handled stuff like film parody and self-referential stuff was just funnier. Again, this is just me (I love Anthony Burch in every single way possible, by the way). I would have been fine with nods to stupid dubstep and silly memes (both of those things are big parts of my life) if it was kept out of the ‘front of house’. References to that stuff inside of menus, achievements, item descriptions, rather than the more in-your-face approach taken this time around.

Bounding around Borderlands

Since last month’s update on my shoot ‘n’ stroll around the original Borderlands, I went and stuck a few more hours up inside it, attempting to pound every last quivering rivulet of content out of it. Which, of course, in this day and age, means getting 100% of all possible Steamchievements...right...right!? Well, I ain't got the hundo quite yet, but I'm still happy with where I am right now. Especially since Borderlands 2 is now out and downloaded and playing on my computermatograph, which means the sad tired original is getting tossed aside for the short to medium term. More on that new hotness later in the programme!

Sticking with my congealed thoughts on the original game for the time being, let us discuss more of what I think makes this a wholly great CFPSWRPGE (Cooperative First Person Shooter With Role Playing Game Elements). I have already talked about how the weapons (the combat rifle, in particular) and classes (the soldier, in my case) provide an extremely solid set of gameplay mechanics from which to base the team-oriented combat puzzles on, the strengths of certain elemental types against particular enemies, the balance of extreme-range snipers backing up the close range Action Powers of those getting up into the enemy's fray. A quick thought here, those special class abilities you use are called Action Powers. Action. Powers.

Bravo, Gearbox, bravo.

Since I talked about that shit that I just talked about before, before. We’ll move swiftly on towards the next little thing that I want to fill your squishy eyes with words about. Plot. Firstly, just to make sure that we are all on the same page as each other, I am talking about plot in the old skool sense, as defined by Aristotle way back in the day and around the corner. This, in essence, takes the word ‘plot’ to mean “the arrangement of the incidents”. Not the story itself but the way that the events inside of the narrative arc are presented to the audience. Good that? Good.

A quick synopsis of the story arc of Borderlands could look a little something like this:

Beginning

The player character (herein and henceforth called the Vault Hunter) arrives on the planet of Pandora, in search of mega treasures located inside of a mystical place known as the Vault.

Middle

You shoot lots and lots and lots of people and mutants and wild animals and crazed lunatics. Gaining information or keys that progresses your progress towards the...

End

Whereupon you find and open the Vault, gaining fame and renown the world o’er.

At least that’s what it looks like to me, cause I ain't knee deep in the corpses of my felled enemies because of well wrought characterisation, or deeply compelling tension sprinkled around the game in order to drag my ass through to the end. I'm here to shoot things. Lots and lots of things. Again and again and again. In this way I would liken it somewhat to Halo, yes there is a story wrapped up in there, but it’s the combat that you partake in that writes the interesting scenarios you and your colleagues find yourself in. That time when you were both so low on ammo that you had to beat down every mother fucker in the place with your bare hands, that time when you ran your vehicle into a group of soon-to-be-road kill only to have the physics engine throw a shit fit and send you spinning out into orbit.

This near-constant action-packed “arrangement of the incidents” is what I consider to be the real plot of this game. Those moments, good and bad, funny and sad, crazy and mad, are all the reasons I need to play games like Borderlands 1 and 2. Which is why I'm not bothered by the lack of a strong story in the first game, and the addition of lashings of more story sauce in the second.

My and my combat rifle are writing our own stories. IN BLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD.

Before we bounce on this segment, here are some more numbers from then and from now:

Smelly Old Numbers.
First played: 21 July, 2012
Last played: 4 August, 2012
36.7 total hours on record
51 of 80 (64%) achievements earned
First achievement earned: And They'll Tell Two Friends (21 July, 2012)
Last achievement earned: It's so realistic! (4 August, 2012)
Level 44
Level 30 combat rifle proficiency
34 items purchased
72863 total shots fired
573 kills from critical hits
2411 combat rifle kills / 437 sniper rifle kills / 149 pistol kills / 10 rocket launcher kills / 9 SMG kills / 0 shotgun kills

Hot New Numbers.
Last played: 12 August, 2012
51.3 total hours on record
64 of 80 (80%) achievements earned
Last achievement earned: Speedy McSpeederton (12 August, 2012)
Level 69
Level 50 combat rifle proficiency
57 items purchased
100,000 total shots fired (at least)
938 kills from critical hits
2500 combat rifle kills (at least) / 670 sniper rifle kills / 260 pistol kills / 10 rocket launcher kills / 9 SMG kills / 34 shotgun kills

Bordering on the Bored

Since none of you duders came to my aid, I just went ahead and ploughed through this lovable little scamp of a video game by myself. And good golly, isn’t that just a jolly little FPS to romp around in? Coming back to it after a couple of years away from the Xbox 360 version of the game, and getting down to the juicy PC version (it ain’t that terrible, despite what many people say about the UI, as it happens, you should be using a Xbox 360 controller anyway) was a great experience. The amalgamation of blasting through half remembered parts of that game along with experiencing the new sights and sounds proffered by the DLC that I had missed out on the first time around (namely, Claptrap's New Robot Revolution) was really quite a good bit of fun.

The instantly familiar heft and weight of the weaponry was somehow soothing to my ailing digits, the tried and true left trigger/right trigger combination of firing a scoped combat rifle into the squishy heads of distant enemies was like a warm comforting blanket around my shoulders. In fact, this familiarity was fed by more than just these feeble human feelings, but also due to the fact that I was still using the same wired Xbox 360 controller that I had bought in October 2008, and which I had originally played Borderlands with back in 2009. There is a small story to this particular controller (and in particular, the particular parts that make up this particular controller) that maybe, someday, I’ll be able to share with you all. If you’re good, and don’t leave any of this homemade content on your plate.

What a crock of shit all that was, maybe I should write about why I thought this was an awesome game in 2009, and why I think it’s still pretty not bad today, or whatever day I post this edition on (yeah...that’s right, these posts are called ‘editions’...bringing back that magazine terminology for twenty does). Here we go.

I started a completely new game on a completely new platform, but I still choose to roll with the only class that I had ever poured any serious amount of time into, the soldier. It’s not as if I’d not tried out the other patrons of punishment during my first go-around with the game, but the time I spent with the other four characters probably totalled something in the region of a dozen hours or so. The primary reasons for picking the same guy once again are that I really like having a deployable turret with homing missiles, team ammo regen, grenade regen, huge magazine sizes on scoped combat rifles, along with grenades and bullets that heal my whole team. All of these little features packed into the soldier really suit my style of gameplay, at least in this game, which is to usually stay out of way of enemies and put about 500 corrosive rounds into their skulls from outside of their effective range. Now, Mordecai and his affinity for sniper rifles could of course reach out and touch those distant enemies with great ease, but those rifles tend to be semi automatic and have small magazines. I like to be able to go from burst fire to fully automatic as and when the situation demands.

I’ve not forgotten that all of the classes can indeed make use of all of the weapon types, but the way I tend to play is to stick with the favoured weapon of that particular class, I find I can make the most of class mods and proficiency levels that way. Speaking of class mods, and their interaction with your skill points (oh yeah, this game includes some RPG elements...hmm...), did you know that even though you can only have five points assigned to any one skill in your skill tree, any bonuses applied by class mods invisibly stack above and beyond that ‘maximum’ number, all the way up to nine points in total, made up from five points from the tree and four points from a mod. Huh, that’s not a thing that’s ever mentioned or explained at any point in the game, ever. Which is a shame, at least for the ghost of past me, because I never knew that the first time around. I rectified this by making damn sure that I exploited this functionality throughout my recent playthrough.

My faithful soldier is called Walter White, and I can role play him. Wait, no, that’s not really what I mean, let me try and explain what I’m getting at. As we all know, Borderlands has a light sprinkling of RPG Parmigiano-Reggiano all over its meaty FPS lasagne base. Now it clearly isn’t a RPG in the same way as Fallout or The Witcher or Baldur’s Gate is, but it does have those flavourful crunchy nuggets of RPG elements mixed up in there. I, however, am not talking about functionality or mechanics, loot tables or the levelling up that is bestowed unto the player by these associated RPG elements. What I mean by role playing in this case is that, more than any other single player/co-op FPS game that I can care to remember, you are being constantly encouraged and rewarded by the effect you are having upon both your enemies and your teammates. The role that you are playing. Not through dialogue choices or a colour-coded morality wheel, but through the weapons and abilities that you bring to bear on your opponents, and the well-defined niche that you are filling inside of the team dynamic. More words coming at you in the next paragraph...

In a 4 player co-op campaign game of Halo 3 (which is great fun, by the way), you have a ‘role’ as part of the team in relation to the weapons that you are carrying, which in turn probably comes from your skill and ability with those said weapons. There are certain people who are expert snipers, and will never pick up a hammer or a sword, then there will be those people that prefer to stick with plasma weapons in order to effectively rip through enemy shields and so and so forth. Due to the weapon balancing that Bungie does in its Halo games you are actively encouraged to change weapons as the situation demands it, you cannot physically reach out to an opponent who is 300 feet away with a shotgun, so you must switch up or scavenge up something else to deal with the threat. Ideally, your teammates will be aware that you are holding the sole shotgun among your group, and therefore target the enemies that you can not...ideally...

Now, these roles as defined by balance of player ability and weapon limitation in Halo 3 are morphed into something quite refreshing when we look at how Borderlands handles things, at least in my gorgeous watery blue eyes. You have quick access to any one of four weapons (not quite from the beginning of the game, but still early in the grand scheme of things), with no restrictions as to what kind of weapon you are able to use at any particular time. Unlike what we find in the Halo games, where every weapon behaves in the same way every time, you are able to supplement and upgrade the effectiveness of your armaments in Borderlands. This, of course ties into those scrummy RPG elements mentioned earlier, upgrading and levelling up and whatnot. But what I feel that Borderlands is giving me here is a continual feedback loop where I become more and more invested in using a weapon, along with the feeling that I'm playing into the role that the combat rifle is best suited to.

I’ve just spent all that time just rambling about how I think the combat rifles in Borderlands feel rewarding to use.

I THINK WE’LL END THIS TRAINWRECK THERE FOR NOW THANKS!?

I'll sit quietly and think about what I done, and try to form actual real boy thoughts about this game and talk about other goods things that are on the inside of it, suffice it to say that it's still a great game overall and it remains as enjoyable as ever. And except for the slight inconvenience caused by the lack of warp points inside of the DLC levels, I have learnt to love it all over again. The warp points are just a minor issue that I’m sure Randy has personally fixed for Borderlands 2, which will drop into my gaping British computer machine in 45 days time.

Some of the numbers related to me playing this game:

First played: 21 July, 2012

Last played: 4 August, 2012

36.7 total hours on record

51 of 80 (64%) achievements earned

First achievement earned: And They'll Tell Two Friends (21 July, 2012)

Last achievement earned: It's so realistic! (4 August, 2012)

Level 44

Level 30 combat rifle proficiency

34 items purchased

72863 total shots fired

573 kills from critical hits

2411 combat rifle kills

437 sniper rifle kills

149 pistol kills

10 rocket launcher kills

9 SMG kills

0 shotgun kills

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.