Humanoid

I'll play the name-the-influence game from the facetious non-scifi fan: Planet of the Apes .....as in what Bioware did to the franchise. You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell! Also - Soylent Green.

I was going to kick in $30 but then I scrolled down and saw LARGE BOX. I LOVE large boxes, the bigger the better. The day games transitioned from large boxes to laughably feeble barely-larger-than-DVD-case boxes was the most tragic day in human civilisation.

If the game had been released a decade ago (identical except with graphics of that era) I probably would have ignored it. Now though, it's probably my call for best CRPG of the millennium (slightly misleading because of the length of the millennium this far), and best 3D CRPG ever. My tastes have drifted a lot, and instead of the micromanagement-obsessed, more-is-better gamer trying to collect the largest, most optimal party possible, I look for more personal experiences. Nowadays I want a game where I still need to think, but not analyse. Where I can find, but not search. Fight but not strategise. Yes, I'd prefer it with (at times significantly) less combat. Yes I'd prefer to be able to sit back at times instead of trying to anticipate a future QTE. Yes I'd prefer a more condensed UI. But put against its competition as a package, I'd take it over any other current game available in stores now.

The implication being that there's just the one path throughout, but choices just add or subtract a bit of scenery outside the train window as you steam past. (Then taking the analogy to its logical conclusion, the train runs off the wrecked wooden bridge at the end )

I daresay that first instance is a perfect example of C&NC - choice and non-consequence. No matter what you do, an equivalent replacement gets drafted in so the plot direction can proceed with zero effective alteration. A number of other spoilers I've read seem to indicate this is pretty much the most common way of dealing with the living/dead status of all the NPCs in the previous games - though that Wrex one seems a little bit better than the norm. (I've gone into don't-care-about-spoilers mode now and just reading freely since I've decided to just wait it out a while)

With a 5-screen wide setup perhaps. Or the player character is wearing blinkers.

In WC1 there were paths to the winning route up to the third-last "bad" mission set. Wing Commander 2 was similar but I forget the detail. Wing Commander 3 was pretty harsh with being able to go on the unwinnable path from relatively early on.

Leads me to thinking now that ME3 would have been a perfect game to reintroduce the concept of the losing path. Fail a key mission and deal with the consequences instead of being made to reload.

Yeah, Mjoll Facelift mod Now if only there was a quest to help her wipe out the Thieves' Guild - feels like cut content given how it's the first thing you're presented with upon entering Riften. Instead almost all the thieves are marked essential - some for the most trivial reasons - which is particularly jarring given the option exists for the Dark Brotherhood. In the case of the latter, sure it may cut you off from a lot of potential content for a relatively rushed alternative option, but it's a valid option nonetheless.

Yeah the flat bonus perks higher in the tree are barely better than the base level ones - 25% per perk with restrictions or 20% without restrictions tends to be the common setup. Couple things to bear in mind though: armour rating is capped at 80%/567 armour points - beyond that it does nothing for you. Given it's not tricky to reach even with light armour, it's generally not worth maxing out the relevant tree. Second is that I believe there is still a bug with pickpocketing such that increasing pockpocket skill past a certain point actually decreases success rate with high value items so you'd only want to take the minimum possible points affecting success rate to progress up the perk tree. And for more powergamey but mostly obvious perk advice, ignore the worthless Speech and Lockpicking trees, and only choose one side of the smithing tree instead of going up both branches.

I don't expect DLC to modify the ending either, since it would be an admission of fault (I was suitably amused at WoW Cataclysm's raid boss designer interviewed recently claiming the almost-globally acknowledged worst boss of the game as an example of good design) - but it does leave them with a handy out in the event they want to Dallas the plotline in a later sequel. To an extent they've painted themselves into a corner here because with each subsequent entry into the ME series thus far, they've made the game universe more of a personal story about Sheptard and less about the viability of the gameworld beyond the character. The culmination of this approach is seen with the "Take back the Earth" marketing focus of the current game - contrast to the initial setup where it would have made nary a difference to the plot or the setting if the Earth had been declared destroyed from the outset. If the focus groups dictate that further success would be dependent on continuing the formula, I doubt anyone the Bioware would resist overmuch, Something similar happened to that other once-massive EA space opera franchise - Wing Commander. Call the original arc completed, try for a fresh start with a new player character and new alien threat, set it up for a brand new trilogy. Didn't go down so well and the new trilogy was aborted at the first hurdle.

Total Supreme Space Dungeon Siege Commander

I don't follow whether these War Assets affect gameplay or narrative throughout the game at all or if they're basically just the variable in a giant switch statement at the end of the game that determines which ending movie to play. i.e. Does coming into various key plot points "unprepared" actually have an adverse effect on the next segment of the game? It seems precious little incentive to me if the whole much-talked-about mechanic was simply a substitute for a quick youtube search.

Heh, I did word that a bit ambiguously - but I meant mod and scope outside the context of gameplay - and Gorgon's answer is pretty much what I expected the answer to be. At any rate, the vibe I get from the discussions here and elsewhere is that if I consider ME1 and 2 as brief, entertaining romps with guns and a bit extra (which I do) then ME3 can hardly be seen to be delivering any less, and usually delivers more. If I try to view the predecessors as the dawn of some new epic paradigm in world design (which I don't) then ME3 may feel like a cheap cop-out.

Get an SSD, sure, it's the biggest single upgrade one can do to their machine. SSD durability is also not affected by reads, just the writes, and when it "dies" due to wear it is still accessible in read mode. In typical desktop usage scenarios this time to "death" is well over a decade. BUT! Yes there are catches. You are on WinXP which is double-handicapping you with its addressable memory limitation (unless you're using the buggy WinXP-64) so you're probably stuck with ~3GB usable RAM, and in terms of upgrading. WinXP is not SSD-aware - a surmountable issue, but a chore when the OS can't do automatic housekeeping on the disk. Further, and perhaps more fundamental, is why you feel the need to have your disks scanned with that kind of regularity. There's a certain point past which security software becomes indistinguishable from malware due to its impact on the user experience - it's easy to become so paranoid about security that it ends up hampering your system's usability more than any virus could ever hope to. You might also want to consider a hardware firewall perhaps, so you can ditch the somewhat cumbersome BitDefender. Unfortunately it's going to turn out to be a bit of a shopping list following all the above advice but I maintain the trade is completely worth the cost in terms of the control and pure usability that you gain. No one with a decent library of games really buys an SSD to house *all* of them, just a number of select ones. It's also trivial to create symbolic links to transparently move an existing installation to the SSD. This is particularly useful for Steam (it baffles me how after all this time it's still incapable of putting your games anywhere but in the Steam directory) where typically you wouldn't want or be able to fit the entire library on fast storage.

I wouldn't imagine it too hard to make a provisional Game of the Decade when the decade is a mere 14-and-a-bit months old. I haven't made the plunge yet since I've had some non-gaming distractions keeping me busy but no doubt it'll return soon. Most likely it'll come down to whether I can wait a month or so for the Witcher 2 EE with sundry other things and tackle this later. Normally this would be "waiting for the rough edges to be polished out" time, but as it sounds relatively glitch-free already (aside from some logic errors along the lines of supposedly dead people reappearing in later cutscenes) it's more a question of how much DLC bastardry they'll be planning between now and then. I'm not a huge bigger-picture-world-oriented gamer but I do need it to provide a coherent reason to pursue the main questline - hence while endings are relatively irrelevant, there needs to be reasonable in-character motivation (the reason I found DA:O unfinishable). Anyway, before I get lost in a sea of rambling on - is there any scope at all for modding in this instalment or is it all pretty much locked down like its predecessors?

I never could tell the why and when it happened but sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. I remember hired thugs following me in and out of a store for example, but also bandits who won't leave their fort. If I were to play the game again, I would recommend following either the recommendation to not do the quest to kill the first plot dragon until a bit later, or alternatively to follow the main quest immediately until the point you get the ability to fight them on even ground. Other stuff you might want to consider (besides the almost-universal SkyUI and Categorised Favorites) - the stuff I've come across sometimes too late, are: - Quality World Map mod that can show all roads on the map screen. - Either the Essential Horses or Cowardly Horses (depending on how much you thing the former is cheating) to counteract the tendency of horses to try to trample a dragon whenever they appear. - Fast Travel from indoors (Radiant) - the full version is obviously too exploitable, but the version that allows it from certain obvious places (chiefly the Thieves' Guild hideout) saves a lot of frustration and loading time. - One of the pickpocket mods that raises the maximum success cap - because a hard cap of 90% feels stupidly low.

Well Australia's version of dirt-cheap is the UK's full price - so as someone who imports the vast majority of their games, it's hardly ever about the price for me - after all half price junk is still junk - but about, ahem, non-sponsored feedback on it. Even then I still screw up badly, DXHR is still sitting on my shelf, never installed, four or five months after buying it.

I know it'll be plenty playable enough, but I'm not the type to generally buy new releases - probably the only one in the last couple of years being The Witcher 2. Going back I only bought Skyrim early February which is comparatively early for me, and New Vegas and Civ V were on similar timelines. Fallout 3 was over a year after release (and a total waste of money even at that). Indeed Mass Effect 2 I bought almost 6 months after release, in July '10 (going by dates in Windows uninstall list), and also 6 months for Alpha Protocol.

After quitting Skyrim, I spent about four hours today looking through my games - on my shelves, in boxes in the garage, on my hard drive, in my GoG and Steam accounts - and I couldn't find anything I felt like playing. I installed Lionheart (never played it before) and played for 10 minutes, installed Might and Magic 7 and didn't get past character creation, and downloaded Arcanum but lost the mood before even installing it. Ended up spending an hour just watching a Let's Play of Return to Zork (which I only remember as being too scary for me as a kid in the day). Guess I'd be extra-vulnerable to an ME3 sales pitch at the moment having been rained in for an idle weekend with nothing to play.

Or maybe fool around with it if/when Mr Morris at IT-HE publishes an anti-walkthrough. The reality though is that I almost never come back to unfinished games, which is why I probably haven't finished over half my library.

I put Skyrim down about a week ago and tried to get back to it today, obstensibly refreshed. Once Dwemer dungeon later and I was out again - there's a point where all the dungeon delving provided goes beyond the notion of providing content and into the realm of "gross misallocation of resources." I can appreciate that they're not all identikit clones of each other and they're to an extent hand-designed but there's a point where it all blends into the same repetitive haze. 5 dungeons in and you think there's some clever variations in them. 10 dungeons in and you start to see the themes recurring. 15 dungeons in and you feel you've seen all they have to show you. 20 dungeons in and you start asking yourself why you're still here. Wikipedia tells me there are 150 of them. Did no one in the development team stop to consider for a moment "Guys, is the answer to what the game is lacking another three-part dungeon?" "Is there nothing else Ted could be working on that would add some more variety in the game?" It's not meaningful content if all it makes you do is wish there was a "teleport to final set piece battle" for each of them. The rare quests like the above mentioned murder mystery investigation may have been implemented somewhat clumsily but were huge releases from the tedium, but unfortunately too few and far between. Anyway, in the end I got almost triple digit hours out of it so I can't say it's a bad purchase, but it's one I won't regret abandoning unfinished. I wish I could rewind my mind and replay from the start given some self-imposed rules (including selective cheating) I posted earlier and stop me ruining it for myself, but alas.

Like Orson Welles' famous monologue about the Swiss, mustn't let pesky detail in the way of a cheap shot.

iOS port would make more sense for Dragon Age 2. DA2 is built around the one Awesome button and how many buttons does the Iphone face have? Sorry, couldn't resist

They cancelled UO2 because it would have cannibalised the then aging UO's subscriber base, so it'd be a surprise if they pitted a competing sci-fi MMO against their recently-launched flagship. And as popular as ME is I wouldn't think it'd be able to achieve critical mass in terms of audience faster than Star Wars. ....unless they've given up on TOR already of course. (Personally I'd say if they want another MMO, resurrect Privateer Online )