Nepenthe

Just terribly saddened by the miserably obvious cheap shot and the fact that it's true.

Meanwhile, spending the saturday working on my dissertation and sipping on some 18yo Glenlivet. Never drink whiskey under the age of consent, kids. Happy word's autocorrect also no longer chokes on big documents on the new computer, it's coming in handy.

I find linking to the in-game codex a lot harder than to an accurate online copy of it.

http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Codex/UPDATE:_Bring_Down_the_Sky

Actually as a source it's probably more correct because its before the game starts. It's addressing the player of the game directly. If it's wrong then its a god awful ****-up to be so wrong with the very first thing the player sees in the game. Then again you have the VS not long after who can't seem to tell the difference between a Dread and a Cruiser (that on is a confirmed mistake). It's a one sentence abbreviation of the backstory, I think it's allowed to be a little hyperbolical to convince new players of the direness of the situation. I'm sure they've accepted that somebody willing to pay $ 5 for the game will moan about it for weeks beforehand, before making the conscious decision.

Noober: "How about now?"

More practical info: Someone's datamined the demo and some dialogue (with Ashley/Kaidan) referring to me1/2 choices has been chopped from the beginning. Stupid, but hopefully limited to just the demo. Heavy melee observes a similar lock as the biotic/tech powers do, so once you get the hang of it, it shouldn't be as useless as it was to me.

It seems to be rather silly to suggest that the role of humans (or americans) is insignificant, when every species of the Galaxy speaks american already.. They've only been part of the inter-galactic community for 30 years and it's already the official language of the galaxy, more than that it has completed wiped out any other language apart from two words that Tali still remember.. You need to crack open the in-game codex and read about the automatic translation software. Besides, Broshep is definitely Canadian!

Finnish, English, French, Swedish, Spanish and Greek. Studied German in junior high, dropped it, have regretted it since, so German would be pretty high on the list of languages I'd like to learn.

But it's also made clear in the intro of ME3 that every 50,000 years the Reapers come along to cleanse the Galaxy of all Organic life. They can't both be correct.... Yes, and the abbreviated version in the intro is incorrect. Can we move on, now?

I wish mine were a book reading generation. This really says more about the decline of sci-fi as a genre than it does about mass effect. Films are made and books are published but its all weak and dependent on old glory (just like ME, although it is a homage of sorts so that gets it a free pass). When the space race optimism in Odyssey 2001 and anti-utopian pessimism of Blade Runner had run their course, sci fi was basically finished. With the end of the cold war ideologies lost their draw and serious projections of a future society died with them. The dominant, unspoken illusion now is that we live in the best possible society so we don't need imaginary futures any more. Sci-fi kicked the bucket and fantasy stepped in its shoes (the success of LotR, Harry P, Twilight). Sadly fantasy is in every possible way, a step backwards, mostly a collection of fairy tales for grownups (isn't it obvious how many fantasy novels are instant bestsellers now, but how sci-fi is nowhere to be found?). But that's exactly what people like the one that wrote the article need, a toy to be dangled in front of their noses, to fill their empty minds and imaginations. Because thinking and any sort of cerebral experience is so out of fashion. Transhumanists are trying to pick up sci-fi but they have little new to offer and its mostly packaged in the obsolete idea of unconditional faith in the power of science to set everything right. PS: The article is ridiculous on so many levels its not even worth exploring. In happier times people would be fired after writing this sort of garbage. I CBA to read the article, but I can agree with your thoughts on the matter. Especially re the homage nature of ME, which does get glossed over for good (seemingly in this case) or bad ("it's... derivative!"), but your points on the stagnation of sci fi are very valid. Frankly am a bit surprised there hasn't been a resurgence of cyberpunk, the time would be ripe for it.

Mmyeah, it's not linked to just the 70s, and using the US as an example, (IIRC, again not in a position to check references) Hell's Angels were founded by returning WW2 veterans. Thus adding your own brand of stupid to this thread. I might've just been a conscript outside a war zone, but a retarded blanket statement like that makes my rather well-suppressed temper flare up. Yeah, slave labour which costs about 45000 a year to maintain (not violent offenders, who cost more). Then does an unreliable menial job which a machine could do better and cheaper. I don't think slaves have been an economic option outside mining for about 200 years! Meh, those people would cost the society a lot more if not incarcerated. Of course this from the liberal nordic prison systems, where you have to be a major pain in the ass to ever go near a prison.

I like it a lot too, unfortunately Samara's recruitment is one of my least favourite ones (I'm not sure why, I think I always do it at the stage where the core recruitment/loyalty treadmill starts getting a bit stale), which tends to ruin the whole thing for me.

It increases the owning country's exclusive economic zone - which typically means more fish and oil. In this case, oil, or a high possibility of finding some, does seem to be the primary motivator.

IIRC, even the credit crawl for Missing Link says "we're just getting started!" but nothing's been released since then. For all we know the game's success could have resulted in scrapping any DLC plans and fast-tracking a sequel... which could be good or bad. I think a lot of people would benefit from your experience

A highly successful prototype and time has passed in-universe. There's a webcomic that ties Arrival and ME3 together, I can google it for you when I'm back home. But I can see why they chose to start in medias res, the explanation might come up when talking with Vega/in the codex later on. I'm not believing anything I hear re who's coming back in what capacity, bio have played those cards really close to the chest as well as suggested that they might be breaking away from their traditional "recruit&hold" system. That could be wishful thinking on my part, as I've seen the powers for a shortish list of characters, which recycle nearly all the bonus powers from me2 (while adding new ones - every npc has 2 bonus powers as you can see from the demo). Btw. I find the division of people claiming to not be interested in the game obsessing over minute details in it amusing at best, terrifying at worst.

There's multiple versions of each ending, which vary based on your previous actions.

There's a webcomic that ties arrival and me3 together, basically Shepard goes into the brig after nuking the batarian system (with Vega tasked to watch over him), while the Alliance grabs Cerberus's super frigate to experiment with. I'm pretty sure that there's another Normandy class scout frigate (or several) mentioned in ME2, but I can't find a reference for it.

Guess the vein in my forehead was getting a bit prominent, the office is sending me on a nice conference trip into the Netherlands for a couple of days. I'll get to hit the excellent Whisky store at Schiphol on the way back, barring any wanker actually successfully blowing the place up in between.

Oh, I seem to have left the handbag I was swinging in this thread. I'll just pick it up and go on a holiday for a couple of days, come back mellower than ever. I'll leave you with this, though:

What? You download the stuff from bioware social/registered game promotions, you don't need to go anywhere near any of their stores. Or from anywhere really, it'll do the authentication automatically. I had trouble with my login information a few months back. I actually ended up calling customer support. They were fairly helpful and I was able to setup a new login with my old registered games. Not that I can see, although I think I recal they hid the DLC download secton somewhere hard to find. I see options to download patches and options to buy DLCs. Nothing to get you to a list of DLC downloads. I hope they haven't associated my email with authentication, then I'm screwed. Was a hotmail that got hacked and I can't get into it. http://social.bioware.com/user_entitlements.php

Don't have an argument? That's OK, ad hominem works just as well! I obviously did a poor job of teaching that expression to you earlier in this thread, since you keep misusing it. Everything worth saying on the matter was said several pages ago, I only regret not having the self-restraint of stopping back then. Well, apart from Hurlie's comment above. Guess it was just me, then.

You come off sounding awfully elitist. Welcome to the Gaming Hipster Community.

You're basically saying "I disliked the old system because I don't like strategy in my shooter." The new system basically reduces the fairly complex question of which power to use when (and, of course, if you act stupidly and blow them all at once you'll suffer for it) to the utterly mindless question of "which button do I press every six seconds?" Having a hard time seeing how having the option of "shooting my load" makes it more strategic vis-a-vis global cooldown, where I have to actually choose between, say, a buff or an attack. This is just another case of you guys personally preferring the other and trying to turn the other into some kind of mistake in game design. Isn't your example in fact more appropriate to an individual cooldown, where the individual cooldown makes your decisions for what powers to use?