The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Hey, now I don’t look so much like a liar! Neat! Also, at some point this next week, in case I don’t make another post, I’m going to be moving servers to, well, a server I’m in control of instead of Droid. Wish me luck with that. If there’s some sort of interference in service, that’s probably why. Hopefully everything should just drop into Cpanel flawlessly as Droid told me.

ANYWAY, Mass Effect is an RPG-ish experience from Bioware. This indicates several things: There are a lot of dialog choices and a lot of dialog with your party, who tend to be fairly well-rounded characters (though, personally, Obsidian’s takes on Bioware’s games have created more interesting characters, at least to me. But they’re both good.) and have a lot to say about themselves and the world. All of this is pretty separate from the whole “game” aspect, which has dungeon crawling and shooting many a robot and person though a variety of locales.
There’s like TONS of dialog in this game, and it’s all voice-acted, even your own stuff. Instead of picking a phrase and having the character respond to that phrase, you pick a general idea and your character says something along those lines. It actually works really well. Your choices get to be short and to the point, like “Kill him,” “We should save him,” “That’s illegal,” and so on, but what Shepard says is much more satisfying than that… something like, if you picked “Kill him,” Shepard would say something like “You switch sides too often. I can’t allow you to survive.” and then pull a gun on them and shoot them. It’s neat. Anyway, all of the dialog is great, but that’s to be expected. There are no annoying voice actors in the game, and both Male and Female Shepard sound right. It’s awesome.
Technically, however, the game has flaws… since the 360 does not necessarily have a hard drive, the game has to work REALLY HARD to run without using any HD space as a swap file or whatever. The disc is spinning CONSTANTLY while you play, and it sometimes takes a few seconds for textures to pop in… so you’ll be talking to a character, and all of the sudden, BAM, the texture on the wall behind them or on their clothing will just appear. It’s not annoying outside of dialog, though… I never really noticed it anywhere else, though I’m sure it happened. The menu system is god-awful as well. The game forces an inventory limit on you, and then makes it near impossible to navigate your items in order to manage them. It’s really quite frustrating.
These issues, though, don’t break the game. The story is cliche, but well written, and the dialog great, like I said. The combat is pretty good as well. The combat controls an awful lot like a Gears of War with magic. You can dash up to cover, pop out from behind it to shoot a few shots, and then hide again. You have four different weapons, but depending on your class, you’ll suck with some of them because you can’t train in them. This isn’t much of a problem. I used the pistol for most of the game, and it was still powerful and satisfying. I didn’t feel I was missing anything by not being able to use the Assault Rifle or Shotgun well. Holding down the right bumper lets you use your various abilities from a pause ring menu, and it works well. I was an Infiltrator, so I mostly had Tech attacks, but they were really satisfying. They all dealt damage as well as shut down one thing… Overload shut down their shields, Sabotage overheated their weapons so they couldn’t fire for awhile, and Dampening kept them from doing their “spells” for awhile. The weapon combat abilities like Marksman and Shield Boost were very handy as well, Shield Boost especially because I had such high shields because of my class. The combat starts out hard, but gets pretty damn easy by the end of the game if you go out of your way to do some side quests to improve your skills and equipment. In the end game, unless I happened to run out in front of a missile Turmulent or something, I was pretty well completely safe. The last boss was still satisfyingly hard, though not frustrating, which I appreciated.
The vehicle combat, though, is not nearly as refined. It’s fun the first few times you get to blow shit up in the Mako, but some stupid decisions quickly come to your attention. Shields in on-foot combat start to regenerate after a couple seconds of you not being shot… if you’re patient and take cover for awhile, you can recharge them completely, and it doesn’t take so long as to annoy you, but still long enough that you have to be careful. The Mako’s shields are completely annoying. They recharge glacially slow if you lose them. Like 5-10 minutes for a full charge. I sat an enjoyed a Frosty the other day, and it STILL wasn’t completely charged by the time I finished. You can repair the hull and armor portion of the Mako, but it is something like 25 percent of it’s max health, the rest being shields, so you still can’t get into too much combat without being screwed unless you let the shields recharge. Additionally, the aiming sight for the gun is a weird transparent grey. This disappears on almost all backgrounds in the game, so you can’t aim worth anything for absolutely no reason. It’s really annoying.
All in all, though, Mass Effect is flawed. Yet, it has so much charm and so much… good… going for it that I really didn’t care too often as I played through it. I hope all the stupidity is worked out in the sequel, but as is, it’s a great Sci-Fi RPG experience on the 360, and almost certainly worth your attention if you like Bioware’s games, or feel the need for an RPG that isn’t sillystupid like Blue Dragon.

Another one down… still need to write something about Mario Galaxy, though. Oh well, I’ll get there. Maybe next sunday…