Friday, January 31, 2014

Mass Effect: Dragon Age Inquisition

First, some video game news: Nintendo is bringing original gangster DS games to the WiiU Virtual Console!

... Nintendo, honey, stop hotboxing. It's doing something to you.

okay everyone shut up it's mass effect now

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Before we go cure the genophage, we're going to take care of another sidequest. Primearch Victus asked us to go check on a team of turians on Tuchanka who were on a mission that went south. Also, Victus' kid (Lt. Victus) is the one in charge of the mission.

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THANK YOU GABRIS. Who, by the way, serves as out Guide to Turian Culture And Politics if we bring him around.

Planetside:

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... does Dragon Age actually have dragons in it?

... LAWD, if Mass Effect has no mass effects and Dragon Age has no dragons in it, someone needs to go check on Bioware.

... holy shit, Jade Empire has no jade in it. YOU GUYS, BIOWARE HAS BEEN HOTBOXING WITH NINTENDO.

Okay, anyway, the harvester. It's a big ass dragon thing. I'm damn serious, it's straight out of Dragon Age, if Dragon Age had dragons. Wait, hang on, if Mass Effect has dragons, does Dragon Age have mass effects?

YOU GUYS I FIGURED OUT THE PLOT OF DRAGON AGE INQUISITION EVERYONE GO HOME

Fun fact: if you're quick, when you hit the second harvester, you know what you can do?

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Anyway, blast them to get to Lt. Victus.

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NEXT WEEK: mages and templars

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

The Rachni Queen Returns

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So here we are, bummin' around caves, burnin' webs and eggs and weird alien computer barriers and shit.

... wait, what was that last one? Who the hell put that around here?

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Anyway, Grunt and buddies are able to get through because we just took out that barrier.

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Thanks, pal.

Shepard et all find a narrow passage and crawl through it. On the other side:

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There's a fight that we go through to drop all the barriers. Hey, can you figure out what's behind the barriers?

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(Ahem.)

Fuckin'a, we took care of her in Mass Effect 1! ... actually, if you kill the rachni queen in ME1, I'm pretty sure her stunt double appears here.

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This is a choice that affects your war assets. Here's how I understand it:

  • If the rachni queen survived Mass Effect 1 and you let her live here, you get rachni workers to work on the crucible, worth 100 points.
  • If the rachni queen survived Mass Effect 1 and you let her die here, you get Arlak, worth 25 points.
  • If you save the stunt double queen, you get both Arlak company AND workers for 125 points, but after a few missions she goes nuts and knocks 100 off your war assets.
  • You probably still get Arlak company for 25 points if you kill the stunt double, but I couldn't prove that one in court.
Honestly, though, these side missions don't affect your final score too much, I promise you're not going to be kicking yourself for 75 points in the end. Pick what you want.

Me, I'm going to paragon this shit:

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Grunt shows up and gets us out:

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Saturday, January 25, 2014

SATURDAY POST: The Definitive Yes Indeed Top Ten Best Games Ever List Part 2

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YAY let's finish this!

NUMBER 5: EARTHBOUND, SNES

I'm one of those people.

I'm one of those people that owns Earthbound, the original SNES Earthbound cartridge. I'm not selling it. I know it's worth like $300. I don't care.

I still have the guide. It still smells, like banana and pizza and burnt charcoal, and I was one of those kids who dug through the guide and just read the newspaper articles and the stories cover to cover, like a real book, because it more or less was. I used to religiously participate in Camp Earthbound. I followed Tomato's translation of Mother 3, and celebrated the day it came out. Hell, I was right in the middle of the party when Earthbound came to WiiU.

You know I bought a Nintendo 64 hoping for Earthbound 64? Ocarina of Time was my consolation prize, but I still remember sitting there playing it and thinking, "Wow, this is great, and when Earthbound 64 comes out, it's going to be even better!" I know Mother 3 is the spiritual Earthbound 64, but ... it's not the same, man.

Earthbound on its own is fun, since it's an odd little take on JRPGs -- it's got the same systems in place, but it's light and funny and the main hero's just some schlub kid, what the hell? But once you look into it and discover its history, that it's a Dragon Warrior parody that's actually meant to be read aloud (try it, seriously, try reading Earthbound out loud, you'll see what I mean), I think that makes it more loveable.

... at least promise me you'll love it more than Nintendo of America, Jesus H.

NUMBER 4: LEGEND OF MANA, ORIGINAL PLAYSTATION

"Hey, Bean, don't you mean Secret of Mana?" Nope. I like this one better. It's my secret mission in life to see that everyone plays this thing.

I think the first thing that drew me to this was ... okay, it was that you can play as a girl, and that's so damn rare, but after that, it's the customization. You can pick your weapon, you can change at any time. You can pick where you live. Hell, you can pick your whole map. You can pick your party, you can pick your pet, or a robot if you'd rather.

You can pick which stories you do! You don't have to do them all, after all. Hell, you can pick how you beat the game, because there's three different fucking ways to do it, all totally different from each other. I suspect that Legend of Mana is what Square wanted Secret of Mana to be, before Secret of Mana got shunted off to the Super Nintendo.

Also, I like to think of Little Cactus as the first MSPixeler.

NUMBER 3: XENOGEARS, ORIGINAL PLAYSTATION

"Hey, Bean, if Square made it in the 1990s, you played it, is that what I understand?" Yeah, pretty much.

For a long time this was my favorite. Xenogears is one of those games that you play for the story (even though the gameplay is pretty good), and holy holy holy shit what a story. Even though it does have plenty of anime bullshit in it (there are giant fighting robots in it for fuck's sake), it has a way of not being too mired in it, unlike some other RPGs from the same pedigree. *coughcoughXENOSAGAcoughcough*

It's complex, but complexity isn't in there just for the sake of being fake ass deep, does that make sense? It's not Kingdom Hearts. I just wish Square had the money and time for that second disk.

It also is probably the most misunderstood game in the history of the world -- it's surprisingly theist, but this is the Internet, what are you going to do?

Probably move on to another game, like so:

NUMBER 2: MASS EFFECT SERIES, VARIOUS PLATFORMS

If you didn't think Mass Effect wasn't going to make this list, I don't know what to do with you. Look, if I wind up sewing a costume from a piece of media? That's high fucking praise. It inspired an entire video game blog out of me.

So anyway, I think you've all had a fine introduction to Mass Effect, the horniest, drinkingest, ball-swingingest game they've ever made. If you manage to find a scene where someone's not talking about fucking, or actually actively fucking, it's probably a combat scene where you're charging headfirst into a combat mech sixty nine times your size, of course it's sixty nine times because this is Mass Effect, damn you. But yeah, Shepard's the only video game protagonist I can name that beats dudes off down with her own head, because she's that much of a badass.

So here's to Shepard, the only Canadian on my extremely Japanimu list, may she continue not having any actual mass effects in her game until the reapers eat us all.

... there is one other stand out from Mass Effect: it's the only game on my list I can share with Husbando~. If he even smells a little bit of anime on something, he bails. I had to make him read Dangan Ronpa at gunpoint. Actually, I nearly had to make him play Mass Effect at gunpoint. He heard that it was by Bioware, and Bioware makes those arrr peee geeeeeeeeeeeees, and that totally wasn't Halo, so.

He nearly climbed me when he saw Mass Effect in action, however.

.... if I had to pick a Mass Effect, it might be 2. The story's the most fun in that one. Mass Effect 1 is SUPER SERIAL, Mass Effect 3 is ... Mass Effect 3. But I dearly love the combat in ME3 and the cohesiveness of ME1, so I still stand by my "The Mass EFfect Series" pick.

What the fuck could possibly beat out Mass Effect?

NUMBER 1: CHRONO TRIGGER, SUPER NINTENDO

"Oh yeah, that game you reference all the damn time when you're talking about Mass Effect." Ta daaaaa.

I love retro games, and I love RPGs, and there's something nice about the two put together: the limited resources make for a very delicate presentation. Characters couldn't go on huge soliloquies or visit ten bazillion places, there just wasn't room on the cart.

The story of Chrono Trigger is already a tender one: the world's dying. More than that, time is dying. Everything's marching forward to an inevitable Day of Lavos, 1999, and we're all fucked. But the limited SNES resources forced Square to take a story about the planet choking itself to death and tell it in a very ethereal way. Final Fantasy 6 is in a very similar position, but Chrono Trigger did it better.

I'm playing Radiant Historia currently. Everyone says it's Chrono Trigger's successor, and I can see that, since there's so many similarities between the two. They completely occupy the same brain space. But Radiant Historia has the resources to be bigger and grander, and it takes advantage of that. I can't really fault it for that, but it then loops back around and loses what made Chrono Trigger so special.

Also, Lucca was a badass. So was Frog.

Friday, January 24, 2014

The Third Krogan

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We could, if we wanted, go barreling right to Tuchanka and wrap this game section up, but I have a better idea. Wrex and Victus will both give us sidequests, so let's see what's going on there.

Wrex has lost a group of krogans called Arlak company while they were off investigating stuff. Let's go see if we can find them.

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No fuckin' way, hi Grunt!

... if you haven't figured it out, we're going to get to do sidequests with the vast majority of the Mass Effect 2 cast. They never join our party, but they do pop up in cut scenes.

I am the only living person who actually prefers that they don't join my party. Most people disagree, and I get that. I've got Gabris and Leeara, I'm fine. Another character would mess up my flow. They wouldn't cut into my party's exp, would they?

I would have been cool with Grunt being character #4 in my party, though. I still wish we'd gotten four character parties. I say that about every three character party video game ever made, we should give up and move on.

Grunt's waiting for us to investigate some trailers. Trailers are Mass Effect shorthand for temporary housing, I think. It means they didn't have to model tents.

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So there's our plot: we're down in the hole, Grunt is up on top, and we'll fight along side each other. I wish there was more cooperation between the two groups, but not everything can be Ico, so.

Hey, about that gun Shepard just lifted off a corpse:

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It shoots fire!

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It'll burn down the webbing around the level!

... why the fuck is there webbing in this level?

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There's these little fucking pods all over that spit acid if you get close to them. They suck. Luckily:

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... you do, however, have to stand and slowly pop each one, one by one. It suuuuuuuuuuuuucks. But getting hit by acid suuuuuuuuuuuucks more. You I know I ran out of ammo on this level one time? That suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuckeddddddddd.

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Say hello to the ravagers! They also suck!

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They'll spit out these little bug things called scavangers at you.

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And I mean, you can charge it --

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But those pink bellies on the ravagers explode into acid.

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And then, while the acid burns through Shepard's armor, the scavangers come up on her and explode on her. Happy Friday, everyone!