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.