Reignite

I don't normally do a) songs by new* artists, or b) tributes to other things. But holy frak.

*New = started after I was born. I am a completely unapologetic classic rock snob.

Dragon Age

I want to love Dragon Age: Origins. I really do.  The Mass Effect franchise was awesome and I figured BioWare could do it again. Yeah, combat's a royal pain compared to Mass Effect (basically you're SoL if your caster doesn't have enough crowd-control spells, and those same spells have an annoying tendency to inflict friendly fire), but the characters are just as well developed, if not better.

But if this isn't the definition of Guide Dang It, I don't know what is.

...also, I'm a Rogue (which in retrospect was a huge freaking mistake but I'm not about to just junk seven hours of gameplay so I can go back and start all over again as a class that can actually fight). I backstab. Why the hell do they make me solo a massive dungeon? I mean, the classes in Mass Effect are balanced enough for you to solo Arrival, but that's simply not true here, unless I'm building my character entirely wrong, in which case screw them for not making the "right" build more obvious. I've taken the difficulty level down to Easy and I have absolutely no regrets about it.

...unless we go to the stars

RIP.

Brave New World

by Iron Maiden

Evil vs Stupid: The Genophage

This is the first in what I hope will become a series of essays about the Mass Effect franchise. Rather than do what I've done in every post with the "Mass Effect" tag up until this point, i.e, bitch about the third game's ending, I want to discuss certain aspects of the game's 'verse.  And as I've previously stated that the best part of Mass Effect 3, by a wide margin, was the game's first act, where you are forced to determine the fate of the krogan, I thought I'd start there.

What prompted this essay? Well, as you know, I'm (slowly) making my way through the first season of Babylon 5, and the episode "Signs and Portents" is the most recent one I've seen. Here we're introduced to a character named Morden, who is pretty obviously evil, in contrast to Mass Effect's Mordin, who is good, but only for certain values of "good."

And it was this comment, certain values of "good," that made me want to revisit the topic of the Genophage and rant to you about it.  Buckle up, dear reader.

Introductory stuff (go ahead and skip if you were paying attention to virtually anything Wrex said in Mass Effect or Mass Effect 3): 1,500(ish) years ago, the Krogan Rebellions were brought to a sudden end when the turians deployed the salarian-made Genophage against the krogan. The Genophage is utterly incurable (until we need a miracle in the third game and a cure drops out of nowhere for us), and is basically, if inaccurately, referred to as a sterility plague. Only one in 1,000 pregnancies will actually make it to term. This hasn't completely killed off the krogan, however, because not only are they stupid difficult to kill (unless it's during a cutscene), but their lifespans are unbelievably long. (It's implied that Wrex was born around the time the Genophage was deployed, which puts him at 1,500ish.)

Now, why do I say Mordin is only good for certain values of "good?" Because his entire arc in Mass Effect 2 and 3 revolves around the fact that he modified the Genophage because the krogan were beginning to adapt to it (and by the time the third game rolls around, he's clearly struggling with that decision, however much he might try to hand-wave it away as "the best solution with avaliable data"). A renegade Shepard can ask why Mordin didn't just modify the Genophage to completely wipe the krogan out, instead of maintaining what another character calls "the gentle genocide." Mordin gives some answer about not being completely evil.

And that's where the title of this essay comes in. At the close of the Krogan Rebellions, the turians and salarians had three options. They had the evil option, which would be to us a virus like the Genophage to completely wipe the krogan out (the Destroy option, if you will). They had the stupid option, which would be to lie down and let the krogan steamroll them (alas, there were no glowy holograms to shoot). Or they had the evil and stupid option, which was to use the Genophage.

So let me get this straight. Your solution to an entire species of marauding, nigh-impossible-to-kill sentient monsters was to deploy a virus that had no effect whatsoever on their combat abilities and denied them any hope for a future? Really?

So if you knew your civilization was utterly doomed, would you a) rationally surrender, or b) gather as many of your buddies as you could and launch a suicide attack on the people responsible in an effort to take them down too?

Hell, even Wrex, who Mordin acknowledges is one of only two people preventing the Krogan Rebellions from repeating,* gave up on trying to build a future for his people for an extremely long time.

*Yes, Mordin doesn't phrase it quite like that. It's very obvious, in either of the renegade endings to his arc (either if you shoot him, or especially if you convince him to sabotage the cure), that his guilt has interfered with his judgment.

So that's why using the Genophage was stupid. Why was it evil? How many pregnancies never made it to term? How many krogan died in brutal experiments aimed at curing it? Do I need to go on?

In conclusion, other than to give Wrex a unique backstory, I can't think of a good reason for the Genophage. Either wipe them all out or don't. Don't leave around a handful of extremely pissed-off survivors with nothing to live for.

Today's run

2.4 miles in 23 minutes. I could do three in that time six years ago.

Last week, a friend invited me to a 5k walk/run at Thanksgiving. He's got a problem with his leg that prevents him from running competitively, and I figured if he was doing it, I had no excuse not to. So I'd like to thank him for the impetus to get off my lazy butt and get back in shape.

(Why 2.4 miles? That's the distance from my apartment, onto campus, around the football stadium, and back again.)

Have a good weekend

This has been running through my head all day.

It's the little things

Yesterday I posted a random observation on Facebook. I say "random" because it was of the rare non-political variety. It got a "like" from a grade-school friend, a high-school friend, and a college friend.

I call that winning.

Next up: dragging the Shepard who just beat ME1 on insanity into ME2, burning through that game as quickly as possible to level up to level 30, and then doing an insanity ME2 run. Yikes.

(The grinding run will also be an excellent opportunity to do some throwaway junk I've never been able to bring myself to do before, like log some Suicide Mission deaths.)

ME1 Insanity complete

I'm tempted to say "it was a tad too easy" but I died three times climbing up the Citadel Tower. Once because the Krogan Battlemaster knocked me down with biotics and another krogan blugeoned me to death before I could stand up, once because I pulled an Archangel and took a rocket in the face, and once because... um... I don't really know why. I was underneath the geth gunship and Shepard just abruptly keeled over and died.

Team Fortress 2 has this great feature where the camera shows you the enemy that killed you. I kind of miss it when BS like that happens in the Mass Effect games.

Like Darth Vader, only less badass

Today's run confirmed what I've suspected for a few years now but have been afraid to test to find out for sure. I am badly out of shape.

(wheeze, wheeze, wheeze)

ME1 insanity, part 3

In which Bring Down the Sky and Virmire were completed.

Even though the Mako's cannon sucks on higher difficulty, its shields are strong enough for you to just drive past most of the enemies on Virmire. (And I'm Level 57 by this point, so I give exactly no fraks about experience.)

Enemies are getting smarter and spamming Damping on me. This is, as a certain salarian said, problematic.

There were two fights in Bring Down the Sky that were exceedingly tedious on Insanity: the second bunker (where a bunch of rocket drones come out to attack you one at a time), and the initial fight inside the main compound (because the enemies kept spawning on the other side of the stage, I guess).

In contrast, the krogan rush at the end of Virmire (immediately after Endangered Human Squadmate #1 calls for help, you're funneled into this long hallway with a few geth and three krogan at the other end) was fun, because I had a Singularity that expires only a second or so before it re-charges. And I had Liara with me for this part. So we just tied everyone up at the far end by using Throw followed by Singularity, and let Garrus slowly grind them down.

(I can understand why every power gets the same recharge meter in the sequels; it's kind of bizzare to be able to create an artificial black hole, yank enemies off their feet, put an enemy in stasis, and hurtle a squad of baddies across the room all in the span of about three seconds. That said, there's less reason to use different powers in 2 and 3 when Group Pull, followed by Unstable Warp, takes care of just about everything.)

Fighting Saren on his hover-glider as an Adept (with Liara in your squad) can be annoying, since he's immune to most biotic powers. Well, he ain't immune to Warp or Stasis. (And I took the "murder enemies while they're still in Stasis" class evolution, because I'm just a monster.)

Still, I'm having too easy a time of this (and completing BDtS again gave me Colossus X armor, so between that and my recharges-before-it-expires barrier, I am invincible now). May need to do another Insanity runthrough as a different class. Or Insanity on ME2 as an Adept. No wait, I actually like my life.

Dear Bioware

please put this back in ME3. (I swear, when I get the time, I'm doing an entire "Damn you, cutting room floor!" post.)

Random stuff Mass Effect 3 never resolved

Note that this is not necessarily a complaint. There's just a lot of stuff in the first two games that never have any repercussions in the third.

Doctor Michele.  Regardless of whether or not you did her sidequest in the first game, she's there in the third.

The Terra Firma Party. Not like I'm going to endorse a flaming racist when there's a krogan who already pulled a gun on me once standing right behind me and Ashley lost the Virmire Coin Toss, but I was still expecting something to happen here. (There was a newscast in the second game that was left on the cutting room floor.)

The Negotiator. That guy who asks you to buy drugs for him. Granted, about two hours later, the entire political structure of the Galaxy is utterly upended, so whatever treaty he was working on is small beans in comparison.

Everything you did on Noveria. If Gianna lives, you meet her in the second game. If you gave Qu'iin the evidence, he sends you a message in the second game. Now, Noveria is (sploiler alert) right next door to Cerberus Central, and given all the rigmarole you went through in the first game (when you could have just delivered Opold's package to the Administrator and have been on your merry), it would have been nice to see some payoff.

The Negotiation. Depending on whether you were extremely renegade or not, there's one less warlord running around out there in the Traverse. (Incidentally, this was my renegade Shep's epiphany moment: this is what happens to the Alliance's Dirty Little Secrets when they get off the leash. They send other Dirty Little Secrets to clean up the mess. It made her temporary defection to Cerberus that much easier.) Anyway, since the third game revolves around negotiations and whatnot, you'd think somebody would bring up that whole incident where the last time you did some negotiating, you eventually got bored and riddled the other party with holes. (Wow, I made it through that entire entry without an Episode II reference.)

Major Kyle. Look, people, we're letting Jack be a teacher. In a war where no cost is too high, does it make any sense at all to completely ignore the Colonel Kurtz ripoff?

Corporal Toombs. Promised to kill you in the second game. Completely gone in the third.

Talitha, and also Kate Bowman. I'm not going to include Zabaleta or that random gangster from the other two backgrounds, but it would have been nice to have Talitha (and also Kate Bowman) show up. Especially during one of those times when some batarian dirtbag whines about what you did to the Bahak system. (Hell, it'd be kind of funny if Kate randomly shows up during Balak's cameo and snaps his neck, thus preventing you from getting the batarian fleet.)

Helena Blake, and also Fist. Even some random news alert like we got with Rana Thanoptis or Shiala or Kal'Reegar or Aresh would have been better than silence. (I would mention that guy you can save at the beginning of the Archangel mission, but I'm holding out hope that he'll be in the Retake Omega DLC. Where he will die two minutes into the mission in a pointless blaze of glory.)

Vido Santiago. Cut content suggests that Zaeed let him be eaten by a Harvester. Damn you, cutting room!

Sidonis. The other "betrayed one of your squadmates, leading to that squadmate getting half his face shot off and having a loyalty mission all about hunting the betrayer and putting him down" character is likewise absent.

New weekend tradition

Yup, posting YouTube videos of songs I really like.

Without intending blasphemy, hearing this song for the first time was kind of like a religious experience.

I think I finally figured out what my biggest problem with Mass Effect 3 is

Whether or not you play multiplayer has a bigger impact on the story than whether or not you stayed faithful to your ME1 love interest.

ME1 insanity playthrough, part 2

So thorian creepers are bullet sinks, but mind-controlled colonists are not. Apparently I managed to kill two of them with a Singularity. (I was trying to draw them together so a single gas grenade could stun both of them.)

Also, although I generally think that the physics engine in 1 is superior to 2 (because in 1 I can lift crates off the ground, whereas in 2 all I can do is break them), I would have appreciated the ability to do pull/throw combos throughout the thorian battle.

Now comes the tedious part where I fly around the galaxy doing the few side-quests I care about before I go to Virmire.

Leviathan review

"Or best case scenario, it's about as useful as the Rachni Queen."
-Me, regarding Leviathan.

First off: if you're stuck on a ladder on the second mission, aim as high as you can and walk forward. You'll get down eventually.

(By the way, between this and the face import glitch, you'd really think a company that cared about its clients would work out the bugs before they release stuff, right?)

Second off: this mission was available too soon. They kept Shadow Broker back for the second half of the game in ME2 for the simple fact that this was a darker mission. You were given Overlord right off the bat because at the beginning of that game you didn't trust Cerberus, and Overlord certainly gave you no reason to do so. But Shadow Broker and Arrival both really tear away Paragon!Shep's black-and-white approach to the galaxy, and so it's appropriate to leave them for later in the game as Shepard sinks into complacency regarding Cerberus and so on.

I would not have made this mission available until at least Act Two, when the synthetic/organic conflict really starts to take over the story. This is when the geth/quarian arc comes to the fore, and it would be really appropriate to get the Leviathan mission at this point.

Or alternatively, I would have waited until the fairly anemic third act to pad it out a bit (though in fairness, 3 is the only game in the trilogy with a very clear dividing line between acts 2 and 3; you could argue that ME2's third act doesn't start until the Reaper IFF comes online, and if you're aiming to save everyone, that won't happen until you only have two missions left).

Enough pedantry. What did I think of the DLC itself?

Well, the underwater segment was about as boring as the final minute or so of actual gameplay of ME3 itself, for pretty much the same reason. All you're doing is getting to the scene of the final confrontation very slowly. And before you spout off some nonsense about building tension, this is a video game. The moment Harbinger flew off and I regained control of Shepard, I knew that I wasn't going to have to fight a traditional final boss like that. The moment I realized the Underwater ATLAS didn't have any weapons, I knew I wouldn't be fighting Leviathan, either.

[Mild spoilers in the next paragraph]

Then there were the logical flaws. Like why in the hell Leviathan would have mind-controlled that one mining facility for ten freaking years. I thought the idea was that Leviathan was trying to stay hidden. Why not mind-control the people who found the artifact to "accidentally" rig a core meltdown? That would take care of all the evidence and let you get back to sleeping.

Shepard confirmed Dr. Bryson's theories? What? The whole thing in 2 was that nobody believed Shepard. If there had been somebody out there who thought the Reapers were real, wouldn't the Illusive Man have made an attempt to rope them into Cerberus? So now you're asking me to believe that Admiral Hackett has enough pull to pour a bunch of credits into a project to research something everyone else believes is a myth, but not enough pull to do some more poking around the Prothean Archives on Mars and find the blueprints for the Crucible?  ...actually, wait, that makes perfect sense. The government is just as stupid in 2185 as it is in 2012.

Sorry, editorializing there.

[spoilers in the next paragraph]

Or, um, why anyone else would trust Leviathan when it/they go around being all "We are the apex, you will all serve us." Remember, Act One of this game was all about the salarians freaking out about another war with an aggressive species once the Reapers were dealt with. What, does that not matter with this second race of space Cthulhus? Especially given Leviathan's relationship with the Reapers? Are they controlling everyone's minds already?

All right. What did I like about this?

Surprisingly, the recycled music. I ripped ME3 itself to shreds for this, and I still think I'm right there. But every re-mix here was appropriate. A slowed down version of "Prothean Beacon" as you investigate the lab, looking for clues about a long-dead civilization. A slowed-down version of the music from Jacob's loyalty mission as you wander around an area populated by people under the influence of mind control. A remix of the Overlord theme as Ann Bryson talks about her father (basically that theme now means "family, science, and tragedy." And let's be honest, it's one of the most beautiful themes in science-fiction history, and any part of the game that uses it appropriately gets a +1 from me).

The entire first level (minus the escort-the-drone part) was great, even though I'm still not sure how the Reapers always knew where to go. The whole tone of that was perfect, and the performances of the mind-controlled characters was appropriately unnerving. If you found the datapad from 10 years ago before the big reveal, more power to you. It was like finding the Prothean video log in 2 before you did the Collector Ship mission.

I liked that EDI and James had more to do, although it's not too surprising that they were the ones chosen for the investigation scenes. Garrus and Tali might be dead, either Ash or Kaidan will be dead, and there's been just a bit of backlash against Liara hogging the spotlight in so much of 3.

I loved the certain item you can take back to the Normandy with you.

Even though I wasn't particularly impressed by the attempt to build tension during the underwater segment, it did remind me of The Abyss, which isn't a bad thing.

And finally there's the final investigation scene, where Ann Bryson decides to act as a conduit so you can trace Leviathan. While I think she comes to the decision to let herself be mind-raped again way too easily, I love how that scene plays out.

So yeah, it's worth it.

EA turns its back on single-player games

As if this wasn't obvious from the blatant recycling of multiplayer stuff in the Leviathan DLC. Or the blatant lie that you wouldn't have to do any multiplayer to get the "best" ending in the original cut of Mass Effect 3. (Because waking up horribly burned in a pile of rubble on a ruined planet is apparently preferable to either of the other two outcomes...?)

Article here.

Well, thanks, guys. Friendless jerks like me won't buy your future titles, I guess.

See, I don't care about my Galactic Readiness Rating. (Granted, this is because I don't need it to get the blue ending, which fits the indoctrination theory, and because I don't think Shepard has magic anti-indoctrination power ah screw it)

If I actually believed that EA would stick with what had been done so far - that is to say, a solid single-player experience with some extra bells and whistles for people who wanted to use the multiplayer component - I wouldn't care so much. But I don't believe that they're going to stay stagnant and unchanging forever. If ME2 had no multiplayer elements, and ME3 had some, it's reasonable to assume that Not Mass Effect Honest will have more than some.

Mass Effect 1 Insanity playthrough has begun

As I start working on a Tennyson-filled Shepley fic I may or may not ever finish/share, I've also finally gotten around to trying to beat the original Mass Effect on Insanity difficulty. I built a level 50 Adept on a previous runthrough just for this occasion, and so far I'm having a fairly easy tedious time of it.

See, when you've got three different powers (Stasis, Lift, and Singularity) that can all immobilize/disable enemies for long periods of time (and armor upgrades and achievements that reduce the recharge times), the biggest challenge is filling these bullet sinks with enough holes to make them finally drop.

I am, however, patting myself on the back for taking Electronics as my bonus stat. It means I can run around with Ashley and Wrex and have them do all the shooting (Garrus is too fragile and besides, Wrex has Warp).

Of course, the Mako got horribly nerfed on harder difficulties. It's for this reason that I'm really not looking forward to the really Mako-heavy missions like BDtS and Virmire.

Of course, one of those is my next stop... unless I really want to eat robotic death on the Moon just to unlock an extra bit of dialogue with EDI in the third game. Because I've done Therum (immobilize the Battlemaster and let your squad worry about the geth) and Noveria (hit them with biotics before they hit you with acid/biotics), and I'm midway through Feros (Throw is your best friend) now.

B5: Born to the Purple

In which Ivanova smiles and the resident telepath fails utterly at her job. Also there are no green-skinned space babes in sight, but there is a bald chick. Special guest appearance by the original voice of Emperor Palpatine.

Important negotiations are under way, but Londo is distracted by a liason with Adira, the aforementioned not-green-skinned bald chick. Unfortunately, she's a slave to Trakis, a bad guy who's using her to get to Londo's "purple files," which hold the secrets of Centauri's ruling families. He orders her to get the secrets out of Londo's head with a mind probe.

(As this is Babylon 5 and not Doctor Who, I will abstain.)

After a strenuous day of negotiations, Sinclair takes the telepath Talia Winters out for dinner. Londo takes Adira out to dinner to the same restaurant. So Adira, who is planning to drug Londo and use a mind probe  on him later this evening, is sitting about 15 feed away from Talia. And she can't tell that Adira's really really conflicted about something. Now, given that the woman I'll be inevitably comparing her to once totalled a starship, I'm not going to come down too hard on Talia just yet, but it's still a startling oversight. It's not like that scene was in any way important to the resolution of the plot.

Well Adira has a change of heart at the last minute, prompting Trakis to go to Mantis-Man to track her down. Sinclair decides to side with Londo - presumably in order to maintain the status quo on the station - and arranges a trap for Trakis so that Talia can mind-read him and find out where he's holding Adira. Talia basically accomplishes this by telling Trakis not to think about where Adira is. So at the very least she's seen Inception.

There's a subplot about a rather massive hole in Ivanova's ice queen armor, which is great from a character perspective. I'll probably get deeper into it later on.

Refreshingly, the episode doesn't end with an action sequence between Sinclair and the villain of the week. The main guest star is also considerably more attractive than Badger's dad, which might also explain why I like this one more than the last one.

When are remakes okay?

1) When the original was in a foreign language.

Normally this will be a Japanese film turned into a Western. The Seven Samurai became The Magnificent Seven, and Yojimbo became A Fistful of Dollars.

2) When you significantly change several aspects of the story.

Two words: Battlestar Galactica. (Technically, this is a "re-imagining," not a "remake." Likewise, Star Trek the Star Trek, arguably.)

3) When no-one remembers the original.

Sorry, original 30s version of Scarface.

...and that's about it.