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Review On the 2nd day of Christmas, I got Mass Effect
- Thread starter DarkUnderlord
- Start date
Silellak
Cipher
Lurkar said:
Heh, no shit. I will openly admit to enjoying Mass Effect a great deal, but anything involving the MAKO can fuck right off.
I can see why people suggest to stay clear of the filler missions. There's apparently exactly three things to do: Scan planets on the galaxy map to discover random shit for a statistic, land on planet and ride the Mako to find the same random shit, assault a base/outpost that has ALWAYS THE SAME FUCKING LAYOUT consisting of one big room full of random crates that make no sense being there other than provide cover for the obligatory shootout.
On the other hand, I just finished the plot mission on Ferus or whatever the name and was pleasantly surprised:
Generally, the fun stems from chosing the badass dialogue option and seeing Shepard's "extreme" reaction. There's a few hillarious moments when he pulls his gun at someone out of nowhere or grabs collars and tosses people around. Wish they had realized the potential for self-irony and taken it even further; as it is there's still plenty of boring "serious" dialogue to fill teh gaps.
On the other hand, I just finished the plot mission on Ferus or whatever the name and was pleasantly surprised:
You investigate an attack on a human colony. Turns out the colonists are enslaved by the <s>Illithid</s> an ancient lifeform. You are given toxic grenades to take out the colonists without killing them but you get the option to exterminate them anyway just because. Some thought provoking moments there. I just wonder if the confrontation with the Thorian goes differently depending on how you decide to deal with the colonists.
Generally, the fun stems from chosing the badass dialogue option and seeing Shepard's "extreme" reaction. There's a few hillarious moments when he pulls his gun at someone out of nowhere or grabs collars and tosses people around. Wish they had realized the potential for self-irony and taken it even further; as it is there's still plenty of boring "serious" dialogue to fill teh gaps.
hiver
Guest
No, Thorian confrontation is always the same.
Good mission though. And the next one in those labs aint bad but the bugs were to damn easy and a cliche at that.
Those few good ones make you hate the rest of it even more.
-edit- errr...shit , shouldnt write anything when my brain is shutting down. Spelling corrected...
Good mission though. And the next one in those labs aint bad but the bugs were to damn easy and a cliche at that.
Those few good ones make you hate the rest of it even more.
-edit- errr...shit , shouldnt write anything when my brain is shutting down. Spelling corrected...
MetalCraze
Arcane
Cloaked Figure said:
You are a cool but dumb space marine who kills robots. The game starts with you killing robots, then you go to another planet - kill more robots, then you learn that robots kill everyone just for the lulz and the galaxy is doomed, then you go to another planet and kill yet more robots and finally you kill more robots again and save the galaxy. You also grab some collars and kill more robots in the same looking mines and buildings along the road.
Bioware knows how to make their games ridiculously fun.
Oh and you also get to ride Mako with which you kill more robots, but most of the time you are trying to drive it while it continues to jump like a retard with Wii controller.
Edward_R_Murrow said:
Mass Effect combat may have been somewhat simple in most places, but it was pretty damned fun. I enjoyed the way it handled walls and such where your character would put their backs to the wall if they had their guns drawn and would shoot from around cover. I was actually missing the combat from Mass Effect when I was playing Fallout 3.
The Rambling Sage
Scholar
- Joined
- Oct 8, 2006
- Messages
- 452
skyway said:
I am the only one who thinks Bioware was trying to pull a Shivan and failed miserably? That must be the worst case of the "it is just a videogame" school of thought in recent years, if not ever.
inwoker
Arcane
And no gigantic boss robot in the end? That sucks.skyway said:
MetalCraze
Arcane
Lesifoere said:
Shivan is a race from Freespace series that was killing everyone without any reason. But Volition managed to hold a balance between "lame excuse" and "why are they doing that - MYSTARY" by constantly giving a player little hints about Shivans being an intelligent race that stayed in contact with human rebels for some unknown reasons. - much like in ME. Except Bioware did it much worse - by hiding behind lame excuses aka "you just won't understand why we are doing this" (literally) while Volition never made such stupid mistake. Basically Shivans were there just to give you a motivation to shoot at something while being a gunmeat like in old games where enemies were just enemies and you never asked why you have to kill those guys because it was just a videogame.
Silellak
Cipher
skyway said:
God, I fucking LOVE the Freespace games.
People bitch about the death of the CRPG, but I weep for the death of the space sim. Such a fantastic genre.
PennyAnte
Liturgist
I agree, and I enjoyed the game overall. I still even replay it sometimes. Although for my part, I could have done without the squadmates entirely in combat. They're sometimes in the way, and if not, often basically useless. There definitely needs to be better squad control or AI next time around. I would have preferred a more Deus Ex-ish lone agent approach, but then again, that could be said for a lot of games.Saint_Proverbius said:
MetalCraze
Arcane
What I liked about Freespace series much is that the ending of the 2nd game felt like the idea from Strugatsky's "Roadside Picnic" (where aliens just had a picnic without noticing smaller human race like humans don't notice ants - and went further).
SPOILER!! Not that FS has any good story.
Basically you don't save anything in the game, in fact your forces lose in the end - and Shivans just move on into the other galaxy not noticing humans much like ants - I don't want to spoiler that much but they needed to make that way to move further.
And Volition did a nice job to make that look good and not lame.
SPOILER!! Not that FS has any good story.
Basically you don't save anything in the game, in fact your forces lose in the end - and Shivans just move on into the other galaxy not noticing humans much like ants - I don't want to spoiler that much but they needed to make that way to move further.
And Volition did a nice job to make that look good and not lame.
The Rambling Sage
Scholar
- Joined
- Oct 8, 2006
- Messages
- 452
Lesifoere said:
Lots of Mass Effect and Freespace spoilers ahead:
In Mass Effect you discover the evil robots from beyond the cold, empty intergalatic space just come every now and then and kill everything in their way. When you ask "Why?" the answer the games gives you is "Who cares?", and it is both implied and said they are alien and old and uncomprehensible for us simple mortals.
This seemed to me like a try to pull a "Shivan". The Shivan are the "Evil Aliens" in the Freespace games: Basicly they appear out of nowhere when a civilization has reached a certain level of development and send them the way of the Dodo. They are alien, ancient, and uncomprehensible for us simple mortals. And even the way to defeat them is found in the ruins of the last civilization they turned to ashes, a way this civilization found when it was already too late for them to do fuck all. Sounds familiar?
The Freespace games, however, did it well. The Shivans ARE mysterious, alien, and uncomprehensible. They do not go around doing the "Mwahaha" number - They do not speak, they do not brag, they do not create personality cults. Some groups DO create personality cults around them, the Hammer of Light being the most prominent example, but the Shivans themselves do not care. They just go around happily burning planets and killing fleets. In the second game, though, they do actually comunicate with "us", but neither the player nor the alliance ever get to know WHAT they said, since the one they comunicated with was an admiral gone far beyond "rogue".
More so, in the second one they aren't even trying to genocide the Alliance. In fact, to this day no one knows what the fuck they were trying to do. They just sort of came and we were in the way, so they fucked us up the ass and then went their own way while having such a mamoth fleet they could have just steamrolled the entire alliance five times over with little casualties.
It doesn't sound like much when i write it, but in the games it is masterfully done. You feel you are fighting an alien, uncomprehensible, almost unstopable enemy in an uphill battle you can't even dream of winning once and for all. The fact that in freespace you a just some random pilot trying to do your best and not the hero upon whose shoulders the fate of the universe rests helps to get and keep that feeling. The first battles against them even have you in deep shit, with your ship not being able to even scratch the painting of their most basic fighters, and through both games most battles are either defensive ones, damage control ones, or let's win time ones. You never feel you have the upper hand, nor that you are facing a fair fight. The alliance is fucked and you know it the entire time, the entire war is about survival and is taking a heavy toll.
When i was playing Mass Effect the constant feeling, specially at the end, was "They tried to pull some Shivans out of their asses and failed miserably". Maybe it is just me, but it seems almost the same concept done with far less taste and style and then given to some really bad writers. It never had the urgency, the fear, the uphill battle, the part about winning time. Even at the end of Mass Effect, when it is implied all this have just begun, it is not menacing. We won, and what we lost? Zero. We even WON things.
Maybe it is the "trilogy" idiocy, but well... So far the thing is pretty ridiculous.
This seemed to me like a try to pull a "Shivan". The Shivan are the "Evil Aliens" in the Freespace games: Basicly they appear out of nowhere when a civilization has reached a certain level of development and send them the way of the Dodo. They are alien, ancient, and uncomprehensible for us simple mortals. And even the way to defeat them is found in the ruins of the last civilization they turned to ashes, a way this civilization found when it was already too late for them to do fuck all. Sounds familiar?
The Freespace games, however, did it well. The Shivans ARE mysterious, alien, and uncomprehensible. They do not go around doing the "Mwahaha" number - They do not speak, they do not brag, they do not create personality cults. Some groups DO create personality cults around them, the Hammer of Light being the most prominent example, but the Shivans themselves do not care. They just go around happily burning planets and killing fleets. In the second game, though, they do actually comunicate with "us", but neither the player nor the alliance ever get to know WHAT they said, since the one they comunicated with was an admiral gone far beyond "rogue".
More so, in the second one they aren't even trying to genocide the Alliance. In fact, to this day no one knows what the fuck they were trying to do. They just sort of came and we were in the way, so they fucked us up the ass and then went their own way while having such a mamoth fleet they could have just steamrolled the entire alliance five times over with little casualties.
It doesn't sound like much when i write it, but in the games it is masterfully done. You feel you are fighting an alien, uncomprehensible, almost unstopable enemy in an uphill battle you can't even dream of winning once and for all. The fact that in freespace you a just some random pilot trying to do your best and not the hero upon whose shoulders the fate of the universe rests helps to get and keep that feeling. The first battles against them even have you in deep shit, with your ship not being able to even scratch the painting of their most basic fighters, and through both games most battles are either defensive ones, damage control ones, or let's win time ones. You never feel you have the upper hand, nor that you are facing a fair fight. The alliance is fucked and you know it the entire time, the entire war is about survival and is taking a heavy toll.
When i was playing Mass Effect the constant feeling, specially at the end, was "They tried to pull some Shivans out of their asses and failed miserably". Maybe it is just me, but it seems almost the same concept done with far less taste and style and then given to some really bad writers. It never had the urgency, the fear, the uphill battle, the part about winning time. Even at the end of Mass Effect, when it is implied all this have just begun, it is not menacing. We won, and what we lost? Zero. We even WON things.
Maybe it is the "trilogy" idiocy, but well... So far the thing is pretty ridiculous.
Sorry about the long, rambling rant. I love the Freespace games, and preaching about how great they are is always a pleasure. :wink:
MetalCraze
Arcane
Freespace2, much like OFP's campaign (the first 2/3 of it), is one of those games that give you that awesome feeling of "We won! We won! Yay!" just to learn a minute later that you are fucked even more than you could've thought. It is so awesome because of that.
And I was disappointed very much that the game ended so fast - and now think about those retards who cry "but if *short game* was longer it would've became boring!"
And I was disappointed very much that the game ended so fast - and now think about those retards who cry "but if *short game* was longer it would've became boring!"
Disconnected
Scholar
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2007
- Messages
- 609
Speaking of.. Any of you Freespace nerds know anything about FSOpen & FPort? I thought I'd gotten it working, but it bugged out when I started getting new weapons.
MetalCraze
Arcane
I have FS2Open with original campaign, second campaign and an expansion, version is from the end of 2007 (there were several versions of FS2Open though much like with Linux - same core, different remaining code - they were quite different, don't remember which one I've used)
I've completed everything without a single problem (except for lagging asteroids due to a bad bumpmap shader (you can turn it off just for those few missions) - but devs were working on that at that time).
Just remember to use nvidia drivers 93.71 or older because Nvidia fucked up OpenGL support in the newer versions.
I've completed everything without a single problem (except for lagging asteroids due to a bad bumpmap shader (you can turn it off just for those few missions) - but devs were working on that at that time).
Just remember to use nvidia drivers 93.71 or older because Nvidia fucked up OpenGL support in the newer versions.
hiver
Guest
Oh, yes of course a big black one who likes to say "Youre doomed" a lot.inwoker said:
If they didnt try to do Shivans, - nicely put Rambling sage btw -
they certanly tried to do some Fred Saberhagen and berserkers series which is ancient.
And failed.Especially when dealing with "reasoning" of the AIs themselves.
The difference between these two is that Shivans are organic beings but absolutely different then humans or Vasudans which look like cousin races compared to a Shivan.
God that game video where you see them first time is very good.
Fred Saberhagne berserkers are literally machines, usually in the form of big ships that wander around galaxy arms fighting the everlasting war against organic beings of any kind.
And they sometimes negotiate with organics if some other greater cause of exterminating more organics because of it is available.
These books today sound at best childish, compared to more modern Sci f written about same theme, but they are a perfect for such uninspiring cliche space opera at its worst - game as ME.
I thought combat mechanics nice at first. Nice possibilities which do suffer from some mistakes by your companions.
But it does have nice effect - spoiled in this game with cheesy biotic /force/ powers and the setting itself.
If it could be improved a bit and used in a more serious game it could be really good.
MetalCraze
Arcane
inwoker said:
There is a giantic boss robot in the end. This is Bioware we are talking about here. But you defeat it by defeating small robot which is somehow connected to the giantic boss robot, no one knows how though. Bioware's MYSTARY. Hey even the guy you chase around the galaxy turns into the robot in the end.
If anything Bioware has some ill robot fetish.
Fat Dragon
Arbiter
WOW!!! An action RPG where you get to have a lot of combat? Who saw that coming!?skyway said:
Fuck the haters. ME is awesome.
MetalCraze
Arcane
Yes an action RPGs where you kill the same looking enemies with the same stats again and again during all the game while constantly developing your own stats, turning yourself into a marine demi-god are meant to be awesome.
hiver
Guest
skyway said:
Lets not forget that Normandy shoots it with some strange blue bolt suddenly because it sure didnt shoot at anything anywhere in the rest of the game.
The other glaring logic hole are Mass relays.
Get this.
Ais built them so every organic race that comes along becomes dependent on them and uses too much similar technology so when the AIs decide to wake up and clean the galaxy all organics would be at low tech level compared to theirs. Cool right? Thats what you expect from AIs.
But shit! Ais have to use those same relays and oh what a surprise the MAIN ONE has a switch.
Imagine that.
Porta
Novice
Both game are great "american" shit, and in both game u can play only like Chuck Norris, or like Darth Wader - these fucking game are black and white fairy tale ...Cloaked Figure said:
If u want new, good, and realistic rpg, that ignore these Star Wars fairy tale naive bull shit, then grab The Witcher.
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