Margo Monday! Give Me Some Credit

So! As you go through matches, you get credits, right? Even the Alliance understands that a mother got to get paid.

Bioware helpfully lets you use your credits to buy packs, random grab bags of items.

You can, of course, spend, like, real money on them, but ... why.

Besides, you can't see what's in the packs, so it's much smarter to spend Bioware Funbux on them.

The most useful, I feel like, are the packs that give you medigel, just because I die a lot so that's good times. I also like rockets, because I like firing the rocket launcher. I'm a person of simple tastes.

There's other cool stuff in the packages, though.

No really, you can get new characters! Please imagine them coming out of the box, just as I've drawn here.

And sometimes? You get boned.

My favorite is the upgrade that lets you change the skin tone on a quarian.

There is an upgrade that lets you change the skin tone on a quarian. You think about that.

Margo Monday!

So how does a multiplayer match actually work?

There are 10 waves, plus an extraction wave. For rounds 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8 and 9, you beat up all the bad guys on the map.

Waves 3, 6 and 10 are special in that the game will give you a co-op mission to complete before you complete all the bad guys on the map.

There's several tasks, the game will pick one at random. For example, you might have to hack a terminal and send data to the Alliance.

Once you're close enough to the terminal, your character's omnitool will light up and the game will put up a circular blue field around the terminal. If you stay in this field, your character's omnitool can connect to the terminal and send data. Step out of the field, the omnitool disconnects.

The more omnitools that are uploading, the faster this goes. Meaning, you want all four players in the field, uploading as much as they can.

Which of course means that you'll always play with at least one dick who won't get in the field for love nor money.

see 'cause there's stuff to kill and he's gotta get the most

i hear the amount of kills you get is equal to your penis length

Margo Monday!

Get it? See, because the TV is out of panel, and I'm on XBox Live. I've got the headset on, that's how you know. ART.

People who hate on Margo are pisses. I play Margo and only Margo, haters need to step back. I mean, in return, I don't go into gold matches or anything where my class would matter, so don't be a shit to my main lady.

For fun, let's look at the main game lobby.

And fuck me, I want you to look at it for a very long time, because that drawing took me FOREVER. Fuckin'a that was obnoxious. I'd sell that as a print if Bioware wouldn't sue the teeth out of me any of you all would buy shit art.

But see over on the right where you can see everyone's class? That's a special feature Bioware put in so that shitty people can yell at you for playing something awesome.

There's really only one class that I've noticed spells trouble.

Holy GODDDDDDDDDDDDDD anyone who plays human male soldier can fuck right off. You see a Level 1 Human Male Soldier, you take my advice and you back right out. They're always useless bros who want to take all the kills and not help out the team in any way. Hey! Turd! It used to be called Mass Effect TEAM ASSAULT, no one cares if you get the most kills!

Besides, you can be literally anything in the Mass Effect universe. Even if you don't have any of the rad aliens unlocked, you can still be an engineer or some shit. Still, if you've got it, why the hell wouldn't you be a quarian? Now's your chance!

What the hell is the logic train here?!

Margo Monday! Vanguards.

"Hey, Bean," you scream at the monitor, to great effect, "When you play Mass Effect Multiplayer, why the hell don't you play God's Class, also known as vanguard?"

I started to! I did. When you first start, you only have human characters unlocked, so I started myself a girl human vanguard.

... in purple. Everything must be purple. Always.

So anyway, there I am charging shit, right?

When the game first shipped, you could charge through walls and shit. Whoops.

Oh and hey, by the way, it would be a matter of time before you'd float up through the geometry (or possibly down through) and get stuck at the top (or bottom) of the map.

Husbando~ saw this picture and asked if this was a picture of the first level of Mario 3. Thank you, Husbando~, because Mario 3 fucking had asari in it.

Anyway, please enjoy this dramatic reenactment of playing vanguard in Mass Effect 3.

... I think they patched it, but I have Margo now.

Margo Monday!

The traditional method of playing asari adept is to level up stasis until you get stasis bubble, then fire that motherfucker indiscriminately. It freezes enemies and holds them still.

Then, you whack your target with pull or warp and cause a biotic explosion that kills what it touches.

One time, I was playing with three other salarian infiltrators. Infiltrators are a shitty boring class characters who like to take their time and snipe nicely.

I figured out what to do pretty quick.

Yup, Margo was a pretty popular lady that day.

(Hey, if you want to play with either me or husbando~, our XBL gamer tag is Jean Sibelius!)

Welcome to Margo Monday!

MSPIXEL ON A MONDAY?! WHAT FRESH HELL IS THIS

Look, we can't get out of discussing Mass Effect 3 without discussing multiplayer. Bioware won't let us, we won't have the war assets!

Enough of me being shitty. Who wants a Bioware history lesson? You do! You do!

Mass Effect Team Assault was to be a downloadable stand-alone multiplayer game outside of the trilogy, developed by Bioware Montreal. Think Mario Kart or Mario Party in addition to Mario 1, 2 and 3. Instead of a kart racer or minigame collection (how amazing would a mass effect kart racer or mini game collection be BY THE WAY), Team Assault was meant to be a first person co op thing.

Then, EA, Mass Effect 3's publisher, demanded that all its games (to include ME3) have multiplayer.

Fuck, said Bioware. The Montreal team then had to send their assets to the main team in Edmonton, and Team Assault got rolled into Mass Effect 3.

Fast forward to Valentine's Day, 2012, when Bioware kindly promised us all a Mass Effect demo. Millions of nerds were then asked the age old question: sex or video games?

...

Yeah, okay, so after a dinner at White Castle (you shut your ass it's a thing), husbando~ and I drove home at about 90 MPH to get to a demo brought to us by someone who would rather us say 145 KPH.

And here's the thing: single player was fine, fun in fact, but multiplayer?

The entire Internet reacted in exactly this manner:

Look, I love Mass Effect, it's in my Top 5 All Time Games Ever if not my Top 3. But it's a game you have to love in spite of its weirdness, its plot holes, and the fact that charge doesn't always fire when I press Y.

But the multiplayer? The multiplayer, children. It's, like, an actually good and cogent game. It's the same reaction you'd have if Square Enix made something that was more than teenage bullshit and belts. I mean, historically, they only pull that shit off like once a decade.

Huh, the last multiplayer game Bioware made was Neverwinter Nights, I guess they were overdue? I secretly hope Dragon Age 3 has multiplayer. I mean, I hate Dragon Age, but if the multiplayer's half as good as Mass Effect 3's, y'all Dragon Age fans are going to be in a good place.

One of the rad as hell features of Mass Effect 3: Not Team Assault is that you can play nearly any race in the Mass Effect universe. Sadly, they left out hanar and elcor, but everything else is fair game. Even the volus. I thought about it for thirty whole seconds and made my character Margo an adept. I made a neat little back story for Margo, making her Shepard's older sister who was interested in helping out the war effort, since it was a family thing for her and all.

Anyway, Shepard's sister Margo:

What? That's Shepard's sister, Margo T'Shepard.

I fucking love Margo, she's like a litmus test for Mass Effect nerds:

• Wait, Margo's an asari! She can't be Shepard's sister!: Ey yo, there's this game called Mass Effect, you really ought to play it.
• Bean, that is fucking hilarious.: We could totally party.
• Bean, that's not possible, Shepard's an only child! Also, the First Contact war happened after Shepard was born, ergo ... My fingers are in my ears and I have a serious case of no1curr.

That's what Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer looks like: a bunch of alien bros beatin' up on baddies.

You, meanwhile, get extra MSPixel, because our new buddy Margo is going to bringing you a short comic every Monday to help me show off multiplayer. Hooray!

If you'd like to suggest an idea/tell me a multiplayer story for Margo Monday, please feel free in the comments!

We have to play multiplayer to raise our EMS score for the MSPixel playthough of Mass Effect 3. If you'd like to play with either husbando~ or I, we share an XBox Live account, friend us at Jean Sibelius. Be warned: I'm fairly awful (and I really only like playing Margo!), so I'm going to be useless on gold or platinum. Husbando~ plays multiplayer like he's gettin' paid, so he's pretty good. Our N7 score is like ten billion because of him.