That Sounds Familiar

Welcome to a(nother) new section of this blog, That Sounds Familiar, in which I give you two pieces of music that sound awfully familiar. (And yes, I'm going to retroactively apply this tag to the Mass Effect/Babylon 5 post and the Rains of Castamere/For A Few Dollars More post.)

Anyway, there's this...

And then this...

The Iron Maiden song was written by Adrian Smith, who borrowed the opening riff, with permission, from a good friend of his in White Spirit. That friend was... Janick Gers, who replaced Smith when he left Maiden.

Small world.

HotS Plot

So I wanna see if I got this straight.

Amon, the Dark Voice, was revived because Raynor de-infested Kerrigan because Zeratul told him to do it because otherwise Amon would wipe out all life in the Universe.

Wiping out all life in the Universe while you're dead is quite a feat.

What is dead may never die.

You may have noticed that my blogging of "A Dance with Dragons" has stopped

and is not likely to resume.

As you probably know, Books Two and Three contain several chapters in which Arya wanders about the war-torn countryside and various characters opine about the effects of the war on the little people. Book Four does the exact same thing with Brienne. So far no problem, because this trend was in place before the War on Terror. And yes, nothing whatsoever happened in the Brienne chapters, but it wouldn't be A Song of Ice and Fire without one character dragging us away from the main action and dicking around in the middle of nowhere (Bran in AGoT*, Dany and Arya in ACoK, and Jaime in ASoS - not saying these chapters are bad, just that they do not move the main plot forward, at all).

*After his second chapter, obviously. Getting thrown out a window and paralyzed for life because you saw the Queen shagging her own brother is a pretty important plot development.

But I cannot read another Daenerys chapter in A Dance with Dragons. It's so blatant in its political subtext that it is in fact text.

A quick refresher: a foreign ruler with a foreign religion and a foreign custom has conquered a backwater city in the middle of the desert and is trying to bring some semblance of civilization to it. The ruler's greatest weapons are unavailable because they're too destructive and would make everyone hate the ruler. Meanwhile, in A Dance With Dragons, Daenerys (the USA) conquered Meereen (Iraq) and now has to try to hold it against its own population without the help of her dragons (nukes) which would just eat (nuke) everyone.

Look, I have no problem with political subtext per se. I like Battlestar Galactica and the Third Doctor's run on Doctor Who. I have a problem with political subtext springing up where it did not previously exist. As I said, the travelogues in Books 2-4 showed us the sort of collateral damage endemic to all wars. If there were suddenly security checkpoints where the Red Priests of R'hllor found a way to look at you nekkid, then yeah that would be different. But there wasn't any political subtext directed at one specific event until ADwD. Surely there was some other way of demonstrating that Daenerys was completely inept at learning how to be a queen.

Let me put it this way. If Tyrion Lannister had spent the entirety of A Storm of Swords building a railroad from King's Landing to Casterly Rock and then defending it against a corrupt government aided by his own family, would you still like the book?

So yeah, in a nutshell, my problem is that GRRM decided to turn Dany Targaryen into Dagny Taggart. 

I will keep reading. But already this one has found its way into last place in the series.

HotS campaign II

So I finished the campaign. Please remember in my discussion below that I am not actually very good at the game; I understand the theory, but have a hard time putting it into practice.

Grumbles: no Nydus worm. Seriously, spamming Nydus worms late-game makes things more epic. Also you have to choose between Brood Lords and Vipers; you can't have both. The last level's a bitch and a half, but still a cake walk compared to Wings of Liberty's final level. So many levels force you to get at least one macro Hatch because there just aren't enough expansions.  Final cutscene OH LOOK I CAN FLY NOW followed by most of the lines from the trailer but strung together differently so as to change the entire meaning. Oh and hero units hotkeyed to F3 screws with my camera assignments, because I don't go for that Shift-F4 nonsense.

Cheers: Sarah Kerrigan is far and away my favorite video-game sociopath. Yes that's a hideously narrow category, but come on. Running around with her and wrecking shit is infinitely more fun than the turtle-fest that pretty much every WoL mission turned into. Even the gimmicky missions were generally more fun; spreading Creep as fast as you can > outrunning the world's slowest supernova. The music is f*cking awesome. Especially the fact that some of it shows up in multiplayer and just brings back memories.

Stupid mistakes I made: in the penultimate level you have to control two different groups fighting their way down two different maps, more or less. I hotkeyed the second group to 5 (because all my hatches are hotkeyed to 1, my main army to 2, and my heroes to 3 and 4). Muscle memory screwed me and sent my 2 army into a death zone more than once. Also I took the Deep Burrow evolution for the Swarm Hosts, meaning I could teleport them across the map to anywhere that had creep, which is a great idea for defense... and then neglected to use them at all on the final mission, when my jerk enemies kept harassing the only expansion I could grab in the first 20 minutes.

Most useful Kerrigan ability: Oh God there are so many to choose from. So you know what? I'm not going to name just one. Her dash attack grants a passive bonus to her movement speed, allowing her to stay near the front lines, and Spawn Banelings (when you have Splitter and Regenerative Acid) makes clusters of enemies that much easier. Hell, if you're at a lull, you can spawn Banes and have them go scout for you. No skin off your nose! Apocalypse + Broodlings is also absurdly fun.

And that in a nutshell is why this expansion wins. It was so much fun.

Blizzard, I salute you.

HotS III: Le Campaign, Parte Uno

Yeeeeeeeeeah.

So.

The first thing to say is that unlike Wings of Liberty, where yeah you could upgrade the various units and make them kind of OP, the whole point of the single-player campaign in Heart of the Swarm seems to be "get these ridiculous upgrades and then point them at the enemy and steamroll his entire army."

Now, I like to think I'm slightly better with the Zerg than I am with the other two races... but when Roaches, Banelings, and Kerrigan herself can all spawn extra units, and Zerglings respawn at no extra cost, basically all you have to do is point them in the right direction and watch madness happen.

Sour about that Hydra speed upgrade, though.

So I've been playing the game on Hard, and have had two missions now (the Chrysalis one and the Harry Potter one) where at the end I just gave up on defending my base and let the clock run out.  Then there was another mission (the one where you go around gathering all the eggs) where I broke the system by just walking straight into the enemy base with a giant army.  Uh, what I'm saying is that the difficulty curve is epically skewed.

Alternatively, that there's no clear indication of what order to do the missions in. See, the first two levels that were available were Ice-world and Char, and I did Ice-world because Roaches and Hydras are more important to me than Banelings and Aberrations. And once Ice-world was done, Zerus opened up, so I did Zerus. So yeah I reinfested Kerrigan like six missions into the game. But that last mission on Zerus was too tough for me (because again I'm not actually all that good at this game, or at least at Zerg micro), so I had to take the difficulty down to Normal. Then I went to Char, where the very next mission was the one where I steamrolled straight into the enemy base (on Hard).

I had this problem with the original Mass Effect too. As soon as I got control of the Normandy, my brain said "Noveria = novice. Go there." And what followed was about five hours of acidic death and frustration.

Now, I prefer games that give you multiple missions to go on at once. That way if one challenge is too difficult, you can go do something else for a while, hone your skills, level up, and come back. I'm not complaining about that. I'd just like some indication as to the level of difficulty I'm about to face. (Not that going to Zerus later would have helped, since you don't get to pick Kerrigan's abilities for that mission, nor do you get your specially mutated units.)

What about the story?  Well the beginning is overly sappy. Just as Dumas laid the injustices on thick and heavy in The Count of Monte Cristo to justify Edmond's epic revenge scheme, here Blizzard lays on the romance so that when (it looks like) Raynor dies, Kerrigan has this whole epic revenge arc to go through. It took me a little while to warm up to this approach, but I do like the notion that Kerrigan reluctantly becomes the Queen of Blades again. Or the Primal Queen. Or whatever she's calling herself now. The scene on the shuttle where the Zergling comes in and she realizes that it's the only way to get revenge is perfect. It's just...

Everything in the trailers suggested that Kerrigan was pissed to be human again, that she was going to break out of the facility Raynor and Valerian stuck her in, that she was going to beat up Raynor (and not a shapeshifter that looked like him... though I did like it when Duran took the form of Ghost-Kerrigan and they impaled each other. No idea if that mission's available before Kerrigan reinfests herself... but because Char's available right from the get-go, they had to have done some cutscenes twice, once with Zerglock Kerrigan and one with Primal Queen Kerrigan. 

Which reminds me: I really appreciate the fact that more than four cutscenes are fully rendered.  That was a nice improvement. I finally got to see what Horner looks like in ultra-quality graphics, for example.

Oh, and I'm pissed that Warfield died. What does Blizzard have against my favorite tertiary characters?

Mass Effect 3: Citadel

Okay, it had several parts I loved, two parts that were frustrating - one in a good way, one in a "I hate the jerk who thought this was entertainment" way - a plot twist that was silly, a plot twist that was brilliant, and the first boss battle since Saren way back in ME1 that hit the "enjoyably difficult" sweet spot. Ironically, of all the difficult parts of this DLC, the one that I hated was the only one that I couldn't have changed by dialing the difficulty back from Hardcore to Normal. It was cheese-tastic, but also satisfying in a way that no DLC since Shadow Broker has been.

And there's a simple reason for that last part.

It's personal. Whereas Shadow Broker was about Liara (not that I'm complaining), this DLC is all about Shepard.

Spoilers aplenty after the jump.

Citadel II

So the trailer's up today and it looks like Thane will be represented via Kolyat. Also Sam Traynor's in there, so it looks like even the non-squad love interests are making an appearance.

I have to admit I'm kinda psyched for this. Yeah Omega wasn't exactly Lair of the Shadow Broker II but the whole "it adds nothing to the story of the main game" critique ignores the fact that the story of Mass Effect 3 is by far the weakest story in the trilogy. I'm really interested to see how Blizzard caps this all off.

So. I have two Shepards either right before or right after the Cerberus Coup - I still have to get my Sentinel through the Coup, and I want to lock the Soldier's romance in before I start the Citadel mission just in case there's any romance-affected dialogue like there was in Leviathan. I've got an Engineer on Cronos Station right now, but I believe I have a backup save from right before the point of no return so I can see what it looks like once the entire ME2 squad has been "saved." I'm working my way through 2 with a Vanguard, but he's going to be a little while. And I have an Infiltrator in Act 3, but I think I screwed up and he's going to get Miranda killed at the end of the next mission. So yeah, I'm going to be able to play through this thing just a few times. (I can't play as an Adept in 3 because the biotic power targeting sucks turian ass.)

Making fun of POTUS

I just did a thing over on the political blog about how this is stupid. But sometimes I like being stupid.

So...

Once we get up to 88 miles per hour, we will have wormsign the likes of which God has never seen.

I don't know about you, but George Lazenby was my favorite Doctor Who.

We are the Borg. You will be exterminated. Cuz at this point I'm pretty much the Queen Bitch of the Universe.

"You are Number Six." "Who is Number One?" "Brother Cavil."

"You've never heard of Serenity? It's the ship that made the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs."

I really like that movie where Han Solo was hunting Cylons.

Also the one Starship Troopers film with Sigourney Weaver in it.

And that video game where Kerrigan fights the Reapers.

And Deep Space Nine, at least once they had that guy from Tron take over as the commander.