Normandy: The Sex Boat

You really think I was kidding about calling it The Sex Boat, don't you!

Do you remember my theorem that the Mass Effect games were the horniest games ever made? Of course you do. I didn't draw blue tits for nothing, damnit.

One of my goals is to attempt to find the very spot where the writers said, "Fuck it, from here on out, every thing we do is horny." We're not there yet, but it amps up quite a bit in this section.

I'll start with the less horny stuff, though, and work my way up.

I realize the irony of starting with EDI. That's okay.

True facts: sometimes I get mixed up and call Siri EDI. They're like the same damn thing.

Cerberus developed EDI for the purposes Miranda outlined right above. But, still, we're in the 2180s, and AIs? Not really a huggy uggy love thing. Remember, that's how the quarians lost an entire planet.

They never show it, but you know EDI listens just about as well as Siri. I always have to repeat myself like 500 times. She's all, "You have no appointments today!" and I'm all, "I SAID SET A TIMER DAMNIT."

So, how's Joker taking all this?

Oil and water, children, oil and water. Joker's a capable pilot, he doesn't need EDI. He's not happy with her sitting there, watching, and occasionally reporting back to The Illusive Man. Get use to this, it'll only come up like a hundred more times.

EDI keeps making references to functions she has that are locked off. She doesn't know what they are and she can't access them. If Shepard tries to ask anything else?

She really really lights up red like that! It's freaky! Good thing Cerberus knows how to resurrect people, because EDI's going to wind up killing the damn crew in their sleep!

Fuck. That is stressful. We ought to go talk to someone about this. Like ... hmm. I wonder if the ship has a psychologist, Star Trek style?

I mean, come on, what is Mass Effect if not legally distinct Star Trek?

Meet Kelly Chambers, the ship's yeoman/psychologist. I mean, it's a suicide mission we're going on, Cerberus can at least spring for the good stuff. She's very perky and happy to see you and horny as hell.

Aww, I shouldn't have struck that last part out, it's totally accurate.

(I like to imagine Shepard getting constant shit for her neon orange hair. I mean, come on, it's neon fucking orange.)

Speaking of pretending things about Shepard, I don't mean to impose a sexuality on your Shepard (you know, if you can bring yourself to give that big a shit over what dialogue options you pick for your video game character), but I'm going to go ahead and highly recommend you flirt with Kelly for Mass Effect 3 purposes.

Oh Shepard! Oh you, what with your inviting the ship's yeoman up to your cabin to do things in the shower! I bet that won't happen again!

Now, let us shift focus. The first time I played Mass Effect 2, I felt pretty bad for Shepard, because she had to, um, keep herself amused during the Bioware Trademark Sex Scene in ME1. Poor girlie. Well, hell, we can get a little som'som' this time around, right?

Jacob's a damn sight nicer than Kaidan anyway. I mean, he's better looking, anyway. Also? He doesn't spend every waking moment creeping up on Shepard. Let's try this.

ahahahahah you guys do not do this

Let's talk game mechanics for a second. Were this a traditional Bioware game, every time a character spoke, the screen would flip to a black bar view. The character's dialogue line would appear in the top black bar, and if the game wanted input, you could pick a line of dialouge for Shepard/Wu/Warden/Revan to say.

Mass Effect premiered the dialogue wheel. Now, during cut scenes, you'll see the camera show the NPCs, possibly over Shepard's shoulder, while the dialogue appears at the bottom.

When the game wants input, it will show Shepard's face (usually at an angle for some reason) and a dialogue wheel that you can pick stuff off of.

Generally, the paragon/light side/way of the open palm option is on the top and the renegade/dark side/way of the closed fist is on the bottom. (What the hell is it called in Dragon Age? I've totally forgotten.)

In the old games with the black bar system, since the lead character wasn't voiced, you had to assume that the entire line was what the character said. The dialogue wheel in Mass Effect only shows short phrases. Once you pick it, Shepard will say the full line. This might have to do with the fact that I'm pretty sure Shepard is the first Bioware hero to be fully voiced, but don't quote me on that. I may have made that up.

Okay, so, if we were talking to Jacob:

Okay, fine. This is a Bioware game, if I want to get in that jumpsuit, I've got to pick paragon options. Bioware characters don't fuck dicks. (Wait, what did I just say?) All those options look pretty innocuous, but the upper option is likely the most paragon, so let's roll with it.

UM.

THAT'S A LITTLE DIFFERENT FROM HI, SHEPARD.

THAT'S A LITTLE DIFFERENT.

I mean it, Shepard sounds fucking NASTY every time she talks to Jacob. It's like she's in heat or some bullshit. I can't take it. I get second hand embarrassment. Hell, I get third and fourth hand embarrassment.

Oh? Oh? Do you not believe me? BAP, watch it on YouTube. I'll paypal you a dollar if you keep a straight face during the whole thing.

I got to where I couldn't talk to Jacob at all. Shepard could ask the guy what the weather was like that day and it would sound like something out of a sexual harassment video.

Jacob is perhaps the most unfortunate character in the Mass Effect universe. Not only is Shepard a fucking pervoid who tries to climb his leg every time they speak, he's pretty provably the least interesting. I mean, his whole story is that he's a soldier. He used to work for the Alliance. Now he's with Cerberus. Ta daa.

He can quickly be defined as "nice guy." Let's ... let's list the other characters that we'll be picking up along the way.

• A toddler killing machine.
• A naked woman. Really.
• The chick from the Asian remake of Ocean's 11.
• Shepard's armor.
• The guy that invented the genophage.
• A sexual vampire hunter.
• A quarian princess.
• A lizard monk.
• Shepard if Shepard was a dude who didn't have a face.
• Batman Jesus.

Pretty much every single one of those made you sit up and go, "Oh, fuck, really? I want to know more about what the hell she's talking about!" Or at least, "She's lying," which, no, I'm not.

But when you put "pretty decent guy" next to sex vampires and Batman Jesus, he just can't stand up to that.

Enough of my complaining. Let's go do something cool.

NEXT TIME: We'll do something less perverted. Like go to a strip club.

There will be a day when you realize that I'm not exaggerating in the slightest.

Freedom's Progress: Fingle's Quarry

Cool people get the title!

So last we left Miranda, Jacob and the Shep, they were on their way to a remote Cerberus space station. Miranda directs Shepard to go talk to The Illusive Man. Also known as Jack Harper. We're clear on that now, right? Good, I'd like to stop saying it.

No one ever speaks to Brother Tim directly, though, so Shepard has to be body scanned. She appears in his chambers as a hologram.

... *cough* For whatever reason, The Illusive Man has full color holograms, but I'm using MSPaint here, and MSPaint doesn't have any kind of filter to make a color picture look like a hologram, so you're just going to have to handle Mass Effect 1 style holograms for these scenes.

Also, how the hell did I make The Illusive Man look like a priest? There is shitty art and there's what you all see on this blog, you guys, I swear to hell.

Oh, hey, those eyes? They really glow blue in the game. You can guess why, right? Seriously, I figured it out in like ten minutes. I can't say exactly why right now, though, without spoiling the shit out of the next game.

Enough jibbering. I play paragon, so my conversations between TIM and Shepard always shake out like so:

shepard honey you're going to wear that finger out

So anyway, Shepard's like, "Go fuck yourself." And Tim's all, "Whoa, hey, hey, slow your roll, we're on the same side. The council thinks the reaper threat ended with Sovereign, but you and I, we know better."

And Shepard's all, "Go fuck yourself."

And Tim's like, "Okay, you know what? There's this human colony called Freedom's Progress. Go on a fact finding trip, see what you see there, come back, tell me what you think."

And Shepard's like, "Sure, but go fuck yourself."

So Shepard, Miranda and Jacob all blow off to ... where the hell was it? Fingle's Quarry. Yes.

Fuck! Robot guys! We should take care of them!

Hey, I promised I'd tell you why Miranda was my best Huggy Uggy Mass Effect 2 Friend 5ever, right? Most people don't like her because she has a fantastic ass. Look, I don't know, nerds are weird people. I don't hold her ass against her. Instead --

Okay. You know how I keep saying you need to play vanguard? Here's why. Gimmie a sec, we'll get back to Miranda. When you're a vanguard, all you do is pick a guy out on the map,

And then you hit Y on the controller.

And then Shepard, not shitting, DIVES ACROSS THE FUCKING MAP AND HEADBUTTS THE GUY IN A GIANT BIOTIC BLUR. You name me a bigger badass in science fiction history! You can't! You fucking can't! Jim Kirk comes close with his Polish hammer technique, but damn. She HEADBUTTS. HER. WAY. through the game.

If the guy doesn't go down after a headbutt? God gave you fists, child, use them. I'm serious, I spend the entire game headbutting and punching bad guys. I don't use guns. I don't even know the names of any of them. Why would I? Shepard has two guns, they're called her arms, for which she uses for punching.

This works great if the guy has a red health bar, but sometimes they've got a yellow or a purple health bar or something. This means they've got some kind of shield, and a headbutt won't do. You almost have to use finesse.

Call Miranda. She's got a bunch of abilities tailored to stripping shields. Like overload! It works great on machines, such as hacked security mechs.

And once Miranda does her thing?

Miranda lets me headbutt things more. I don't care if she has a fantastic ass, I don't care if she works for Cerberus, I don't even care if she comes in my house and shits in the oven. We make things go boom. I love Miranda. I always take her and SpoilerCharacter everywhere in the game.

So Shepard and pals headbutt their way through ... where the fuck was it? Flannigan's Valley until they come across --

Oh, no way! Hey Tali! I like your new outfit. Good to see you've changed clothes at least once in two years!

This scene brings up something weird about Mass Effect 2: no one seems to give a shit that Shepard came the fuck back to life. Think about it. If your dead relatives or friends or pets or whatever just sort of rolled up and was like, hey, you're looking well, how's stuff at work? You wouldn't be like, oh, hey, my manager sucks but what do you do, you'd be like, "THE EVER LIVING FUCK I BURIED YOUR ASS."

Tali probably has the strongest reaction out of all the ME1 cast, and she's more or less, "Hey, you're alive? That's weird. So, how's kicks?"

Tali brought a small quarian squad to investigate the same shit Shepard's there for. There was a quarian named Veetor who was on pilgrimage on ... fuck ... Fliddle's Backside? Yes, Fliddle's Backside. When the humans disappeared, did Veetor disappear too? Hell, I don't know. But Tali and Shepard can team up and find out!

no worries miranda you'll always have me

Hey, here's a fun Easter egg for you: if you have Shepard ask the other quarians why they hate Cerberus, one of them will make a reference to Ascension, specifically one of the scenes I left out because I'm a lazy piece of shit I didn't want to spoil it. Rad!

Tali and Shepard agree to split up to see who can find Veetor. When Shepard gets about ten steps away from Tali, Tali radios in to say that her crew went on ahead without her in an attempt to keep Veetor from Shepard. Uh, sure, howdy do to you bastards too.

Unfortunately, Tali's rogue squad runs straight into a big ass security robot. This all happens off camera over the space of like five seconds, there's very little if anything to draw. Tali manages to reroute the mech over to Shepard, so that maybe she can take care of it.

Of course, Shepard's a vanguard, so this is nothing.

What? Of course I charged the mech. I play vanguard. Go big or go home.

A few steps away from there (Flipper's Nipple is not very big), we come across Veetor.

Veetor's a quarian with a few social problems. Crowds scare him, people scare him, and after the shit he's seen, he is not well.

He's in a dark room alone staring at some screens while twitching. Oh man, Bioware successfully predicted bronies!

Shepard spooks him, and Veetor manages to give up what he was working on: piecing together the security footage of what happened to Fuddie's Duddy.

The game is a little bit round about with this information, so let me spell it out for you: remember the collectors, those slavers we read about back in Ascension? They cook around the Terminus systems (Mass Effect's own Neutral Zone) and find human colonies. The little flies you see on Veetor's screen? Those seekers run around and paralyze people, and then the collectors, those pointy headed dudes Miranda's all freaked out about, pick the humans up and cart them off somewhere past something called The Omega 4 Relay.

Why? Fuck, I don't know, we're probably going to have to play the damn game longer than twenty minutes to find that out.

A better question: why don't the collectors kill the humans when they pick them up? They must be using them, but for what?

And then, why aren't they using other aliens? The Terminus systems have a zillion different alien species. Hell, the place is crawling with batarians, they could start with those guys. Hell, they could have even grabbed Veetor there, but they didn't. It must be something unique to humans, but what the hell would that be? Hair?

Tali comes in and gets in a slap fight with Miranda over what to do with Veetor: Miranda wants Cerberus to study him, but Tali wants Veetor to get medical attention back at the fleet. Shepard can pick who gets Veetor. I always send him with Tali.

So then, we must report back to the Illusive Man.

Welp. Brother Tim then makes A Deal about how Shepard will need people.

Um ... but ... sorry Shepard, they're gone.

You can go over this with The Illusive Man if you don't buy it, but we'll run down it real quick:

Tali refused to leave Freewater Sleuce with Shepard, because, you know, Cerberus. She said she had her own mission to finish. Hmm, I bet that won't come up again.

No one can find Garrus. He disappeared after Shepard's death and kept himself quite hidden. He may not even still be alive.

Ashley is working with the Alliance. She got promoted, so that's good news, but the Alliance and Cerberus don't really get along, so that's a Thing.

Wrex went back to Tuchanka. He's working to unite the krogan clans to fix this genophage bullshit. Uniting krogans for the purpose of fucking is a full time gross job.

Kaidan is a turd sack.

Liara is working with the Shadow Broker. We dealt with him really briefly in Mass Effect 1 -- he knows all the shit in the universe, and he sells information to other people.

So anyway, TIM disconnects from the call.

those are the best cerberus fatigues you're getting

no one promised you good art

So, uh. Since the last game, Joker's come down with a case of looking really Amish walk. I mean, he limps pretty bad, but he's mobile, which we were told was not possible for Mr. Moreau.

There's a fan theory that Cerberus fixed Joker up in exchange for his piloting services. But Cerberus brought Shepard back from the dead, don't you think they could fix him up to where he didn't limp? Come on. Personally, my guess is that Bioware didn't want to render crutches. It makes sense when you consider the spoiler spoiler spoiler later.

Anyway, Joker leads Shepard over to a window to show off this new ship that Cerberus built in a stunning Star Trek 1 style sequence. Hmm, it seems oddly familiar --

NEXT TIME: adventures on the sex boat

what

that's what they call it

the sex boat

Final Fantasy XIII: The Sheparding

All right! Shepard died last post, freeing me up to do Final Fantasy XIII. Let's do this!

Final Fantasy XIII was published by Square Enix a few years back. It tells the story of this pink haired chick named Lightening. Wave hello, Lightening!

Whoa, wait, that's not Lightening.

What the fuck is going on? Where's my damn frocobo?

THAT HAIR IS NOT PINK I DEMAND AN EXPLANATION.

... okay, fine. Shepard's dead, I didn't lie. But her body parts are still cooking around the galaxy, and someone's found them. They intend to eat them bring her back. Really.

See, they've got these surgeons, and they ... uh, reattach, ... um ... hambone connected to the thigh bone ...

Fuck it, maybe they use mass effects?

hahahhahahahha they never use mass effects.

The scene in our living room, during this trying time of watching Shepard get put back together:

I then had a striking moment of self awareness where I realized that I would actually be better off if I put down the controller and went to fuck around on the Internet for a while.

So anyway, back to my blog where I MSPaint a video game, let us move forward two years and twelve days later.

(I'll fill the gap in later for you, I promise, but for right now, just work with me.)

So anyway, Shepard gets her armor back on --

-- and starts through the tutorial level, shooting some rogue mechs. She eventually comes accross another human.

Wave hello to Jacob Taylor, everyone! This is the first party member that the game will give a name to. Shepard tries to question him, but he won't have it until the security droids are taken care of.

Jacob then tries to explain that it wasn't actually a slammin' party that Shepard woke up from. Shepard died. It's now two years and twelve days later.

Jacob also takes this moment to reveal that Shepard's on a Cerberus station, DUN DUN DUN. Shepard was resurrected by Cerberus, DUN DUN DUN. Hopefully the Alliance and the Council won't hold that against her (ahahhahahhaha).

Shepard and Jacob run through the station until they come across Lieutenant Bioware.

What? Of course he has a name, but this is the tutorial level. He may as well me Lieutenant Bioware.

Because this is a Bioware game, and he's an NPC. We all know what happens to Lieutenant Bioware.

HINT: he is not a romance option.

Lieutenant Bioware was the one that activated the security mechs. That lady with the gun? Her name is Miranda Lawson, and she does not take kindly to dumbasses who try to fuck up her projects. She was the one in charge of Shepard's revival.

Also? This is a grandly unpopular opinion, but I don't care: Miranda is my HUGGY UGGY TOTES BFF 5EVER in this game. I love the shit out of Miranda. I am the only one. We'll get to why in a bit.

Miranda says the station is screwed, but it's only important if Shepard survives, so she insists they all get on a shuttle to see The Illusive Man, whoever the hell that jackass is. Shepard's like, "But the other people?!" and Miranda's like, "Hush," so they all pile in and go into space.

FUN FACT: On the way, Miranda asks Shepard about some stuff, just to see if she got all the wires connected the right way. She'll ask about who Shepard reccomended for council, Udina or Anderson. This is because ME1 doesn't record who you picked. Seriously, it makes the save file with all your decisions in it right before the scene. Ta da! You can tell Miranda whatever the hell you feel like with no repercussions.

I don't go backsies, though, I always go ahead and say Anderson. Miranda tells you that Captain Anderson is now Councillor Anderson, but there's rumors going around that he was much happier as a soldier. Ouch, my feels.

The shuttles are weird looking things in the Mass Effect universe, they look like little puppy dogs or something.

Which is why they look like some straight horse shit when I try to draw them.

NEXT TIME: full frontal nudity