Virmire: Whoa, Hey, There Was A Plot?

Let me be honest.

I knew when I started this blog that I was going to have to draw some cray shit.

"Is there any way to make Mass Effect less horny?" I asked. Really!

But in the end, there's no way to do that. To perv is to mass effect, such is the essence of the story.

I mean, even though my art is truly, truly shitty, I kind of hope I can work out ways to work in new things, like different poses. Such is a puzzle, but I persevere.

Still, is there a way to avoid being known for drawing anything truly horny?

Or worse, to actually draw something awful?

These are things I worry about. Let's hope I don't resort to shitty Internet memes.

Okay, so the council -- remember those bastards? -- call Le Shep up and they're like, "Hey, we think Saren -- " -- remember that guy? -- " -- is on this backwater shithole called Virmire, go check it out if you want to advance the plot since you already did the Three Bioware Story Worlds (c) (tm)." Right, see, because the game actually does have a little more plot than "krogans have four balls." They have four balls, by the way. Don't make me draw them.

pause

I know some of you haven't played Mass Effect. That's fine. Well, no it isn't, go out and play it! I've been leaving smallish chunks of the game out just so that you'll discover them for yourself and be as delighted as the rest of the Internet was when they first played with Aveena or told off Presley or whatever.

There are three huge spoilers on Virmire. You need to trust me, here: I am leaving all three out.

Yup, even that one. The one you're thinking about.

So, the next blog posts that follow (Virmire will take three) will be ... enh, sort of truthful? Not really, because I'm writing around all these spoilers. If you pick up and play the game after reading this, I'm going to strongly advise you go check a walkthrough and spoil yourself, but hell, it's your choice. I know a lot of people who didn't, though, and were sorely disappointed with how Virmire shook out.

Speaking of: Virmire can end in several different ways, depending. This is one way.

So anyway, the Normandy's supposed to land on Virmire next to a Salarian STG camp. (Salarian STG troops are like spec op groups. They're the dudes that genophaged the krogans.) But, the geth have set up these tower things that are blocking the ... uh ... equipment ... signal ...

Shut up, I didn't pay attention to the science.

So, they're blocking the Normandy's mass effects, maybe, probably not, and so Shep and pals get to drop in the Mako and take the towers out.

Oh, yeah: Virmire is a jungle planet. It's stupid beautiful, but it also means that you're going to be rolling around in water to get to the towers. In the mako. My heart sings with glee.

There's all these geth guys, and you're supposed to shoot them, but ahhahaha guns ahahahah mako, so I just run them all over. This actually happened to me.

They make these big ass geth called geth colossus, right? They look like big fucking spider horse geth guys.

So I went to ram the fucker, you know, like you do, which normally kills them. Instead, the ragdoll physics fucked up somehow, and the body just sort of ... fell on the mako. I drove all around, but I couldn't get the body off. It was wiggling and ...

It just looked unfortunate.

Eventually, you drive up to a structure that looks really familiar if you've played other shooters. Ahem. Shepard and pals get out and run inside to the control room.

I seriously expect to go and blue screen a console every single time I play Virmire. It looks and feels so much like a Halo level, y'all don't even know.

So anyway, the Normandy lands, and Shep goes to talk to the STG leader, Captain Kirrahe. (You can say it "Kir-rah-hee" or "Kir-rah-hay," apparently either is correct?)

See, the salarians discovererd that Saren cured the genophage. Sweet! And he's got a secret krogan breeding facility to breed hundreds of angry, breedable krogan soldiers! Maybe not so sweet! Kirrahe sent a message to the council saying all that, plus the fact that he was bleeding men out the cloaca. Oh, by the way, salarians have a cloaca. The game makes this very clear. That's something you can add to that four ball sampler you're currently cross stitching.

The council got the message, but like it says in those two images I spent hours lovingly rendering, it got garbled, and the only thing the council could make out was "Saren" and "we're fucked". So, instead of the waves and waves of troops Kirrahe needed, he got Shepard. Awkward!

So, Kirrahe sets out his proposal: nuke the facility. Clean, simple, efficient. But, he's losing guys, so, err --

The game gives you a choice between Ashley or Kaidan. I have no idea why you can't send Tali or some shit, but there it is. It really truly doesn't matter who you chose, except for the fact that whoever you send with Kirrahe can't be in the party for storming the Virmire facility. Whatever, I always roll with Garrus and Liara, so I don't really need Ashley or Kaidan avaliable.

You can, naturally, guess who I always send, though.

So then we all gather for an inspirational speech.

If you've ever heard a Mass Effect nerd talk about holding the line? This is the scene. Congratulations, you're a nerd now too.

So the plan is that Kirrahe/Kaidan's team goes in and does, uh, something, and Shep and pals, also called "shadow team" for no real reason, sits in the lounge and enjoys hot cocoa goes in the back and kick's Saren in the nuts.

As you go along, Kaidan will radio Shepard and give these vague little hints. These are sidequests, dumbass! Please trust me on this, you need to do them. Trust. Me.

Most of them involve shooting satellites down off towers. Fuck, I don't know, maybe Kaidan really hates DishTV. Maybe he used to work for Time Warner.

So Shep and buddies bust in the facility, and what do they see?

Oh, hey, rad, some of Kirrahe's old men! I wonder what they're --

Indoctronation? That's probably a word you should remember.

Okay, the game hasn't outright told us yet, but you've got enough pieces to start figuring some shit out. Didn't Benezia say that Saren could control people? Whisper in their mind? Probably, that's what happened to the salarians in the facility, especially since they keep bitching about voices controlling them.

Wasn't Saren controlling them with a magical floating space ship? Shit. Maybe we should find that ship.

Unfortunately, Shepard finds something else instead.

But, can you imagine? The thing that Shepard sees next? Totally beats out some lame beacon.

Gonna save it for another entry, though.

NEXT TIME: Magical space ships.

Tali: Dem Geth

~INFO DUMP!~

So, remember when I linked you to that quarian article, a long time ago, and told you to read it, and then you didn't? Quit lying, you know you didn't. It was pretty good times.

Real damn quick: the quarians made the geth. Yeah, really, it's THEIR fault for all those plastic robots you keep fighting.

At first, the geth were just regular robot guys, doing robot shit, helping the quarians out with manual labor, and then one geth was like, "Does this unit have a soul?"

So the quarians shit bricks -- they could do that back then, they weren't wearing the suits -- and tried to take all the geth apart. The geth rebelled so hard that they threw the quarians off their own homeworld.

And the council was like, "You fucknuts. No galactic political power for you!" which is why the quarians have no councilor. If you were wondering.

So anyway, thrown off their own planet, with their tails between their legs, (quarians might actually have tails, who knows?) they wander around the galaxy in these big ass ships called the flotilla. When a young quarian is of age, that is, 18ish, they leave their ship, go off on a pilgramidge to see the rest of the galaxy, and bring something back to a new ship, where they'll spend the rest of their lives. Their offering could be anything, really -- supplies, food, information, anything useful.

And now that I've retold the entire story of Battlestar Galactica, let us back to the Normandy.

Should you talk to Tali enough, she more or less infodumps on you just like I did. This time, you've got to get the mission from Admiral Hackett. He'll call Shep up while she's using the galaxy map, a bigass hologram on the Normandy that Shepard uses to naviage the universe. It has railings. I drew them. I'm proud, shut your ass.

Seriously, look at that. The level of art is upping, yo.

I just realized I keep flipping Tali's color scheme. So much for that 'good art' bullshit.

Since I brought up alien sex anyway (sorry 'bout that), I feel like we can't go on much farther without actually discussing Tali.

Is it fair to say I know a thing or two about Bioware games? I think we can go that far. The game I'm most familiar with, other than Le Effect du Mass itself, is Jade Empire. I know, that's like saying, "Man, I love the Beatles! George was my favorite," but there it is.

Jade Empire had two female characters: Dawn Star, the studious, quiet sort of lady, and Silk Fox, this super dark super secret assassin. I suspect that Tali was supposed to be Silk Fox initially, and Liara was to be Dawn Star. I mean, in Tali's intro cutscene, she very nearly takes care of Saren's men herself before Shepard comes in and fucks it up for her.

Tali and Liara gradually swap places as the series goes on. Did you notice that you can bang Liara, but not Tali? Bioware probably meant for Liara to be your blushing space waifu. I mean, for fuck's sake, she's 102, which is like "barely legal" for asari. That's the kind of shit that comes up in hentai games.

But if you play guy Shepard, you can (eventually) get with Tali in a pretty hilarious sequence.

Why?

The Internet happened.

People are going to get up my ass, and I'm going to say it anyway: there are guys on the Internet who are fucking creepy about Tali. Save your sanity, never ever ever google "tali sweat". Shit, never GIS Tali. Ever.

There's another (male) character that got the same treatment by female fans, but first of all it was on a much smaller, less creepy scale, and second of all, this is Tali's show, let's not take the spotlight off her.

But seriously. I have one guy friend who played as a girl Shepard, he gets a pass. EVERY OTHER MAN I HAVE KNOWN, brothers, friends, other lady's husbands, my own husband (who gets shit like every day over this), this is how they play Mass Effect:

"Hey," he'll ask, "what did you do today?"

"I didn't draw you on the Internet with a stick erection over a video game space lady, that's for sure," is probably how I'll reply.

Yeah, so, back to the mission, Hackett mentioned those four geth outposts? We're going to rock and roll up to those and kick some geth ASS.

There's lots of different planets! Like the red planet.

Or this one 'pre-garden' planet. I think that's an actual space thing. There's lots of actual space things in Mass Effect, I just don't know enough space to help you out. I'm still waiting for, you know, the mass effect to happen.

This is a true story: the pre-garden planet has these really steep hills, and, well, mako. I was trying to find a place to park, but the mako won't let Shep and pals out unless it's on a good surface, and, well, there were none. I finally got to one. The game deposited Shepard next to the mako, and Tali and Garrus outside the mako on to thin air.

I'm not even kidding, they fell straight off, Bugs Bunny style.

Oh, and then you visit this planet with a thresher maw.

What's a thresher maw, you ask?

A thresher maw is a big giant fuck you from nature.

So, that was a fun game over for me. Moving on, you finally get inside this one geth base, and, I shit you not, quarian opera is playing. I've been through this series ... I don't know, too many times, and I can not even begin to tell you why the hell quarian opera.

(I've never seen that show, by the way. I'm going on what I've been told and what Google chokes up for me.)

Anyway, Shep grabs the data, and before transmitting it to Hackett, she makes Tali a copy and uploads it to Dropbox for her.

NEXT TIME: Less alien sex.

Garrus: Dr. Saleon

There's your fucking PSA for today. Quit eating shitty peanut butter. Shepard said so.

Going down our list of sidequests that other characters give you, next we come to the strange tale of Garrus.

Or, specifically, his strange tale of Dr. Saleon. Back when Garrus was working at C-Sec as a mall cop, which was like 20 minutes ago so damnit you really should remember, there was this dude named Dr. Saleon, who was in to organs in a big way.

dick joke

He'd harvest organs from poor people, or perhaps grow organs inside people, and then sell said organs for profit. Garrus makes a big deal about all the krogan testicles he sold. Some krogans thought that maybe if they got new balls, their genophage would be cured.

See, and they'd buy four of those balls.

Four.

The game will never in ten million years let the four ball thing go. You just wait til ME2, mister.

So anyway, Garrus manages to catch Saleon and his sacks and sacks of krogan testicles (he had a multiple of four, I'm sure.) I forgot how Garrus caught Saleon, maybe he shoplifted a Hot Topic? Anyway, for whatever reason, C-Sec wouldn't let him nail the guy on charges, so he got away.

The game makes this thing about Shepard being something of a mentor to Garrus ... it's not a huge thing, not like krogans having four nuts (they have four nuts, okay?), but it's in there. Shepard's responses to Garrus in ME1 shape two whole lines of dialogue in ME2, so choose wisely.

Garrus talks about wanting to shoot down Saleon's ship, which probably would have destroyed a huge section of the Citadel and taken out a zillion civilians, but lolwhatevs. He's pissy because C-Sec won't let him. Here's one of those 'Garrus shaping' decisions! Shepard can tell him that yes, he should have immolated countless of innocent bystanders, or she can react like a normal person.

Either way, Garrus has the coordinates to Saleon's ship, so let's traipse off and find some krogan balls.

The second the team sets foot in the ship, husks roll up. I really should have addressed husks by now, that's my fault. Let's fix this.

Stop laughing at my shitty husks!

Husks are Mass Effect's answer to zombies. They're humanoid ... icky ... dead looking things with blue lights all over them. Did Saleon make them? Maybe, but they were on Eden Prime too. Do the geth make husks? Does Saleon have a random geth army back there? Or does he just have geth balls? How many testicles does a geth have? None of you answer that, I'm happier not knowing. Mass Effect will address robot sex soon enough. (Really.)

Husks also go down like a little bitch when you use biotics, so. You did bring Liara, right?

Eventually, you roll up on Dr. Saleon. The game does something funny here ... one of you will be able to explain it, I'm sure, but I'm the one with the blog so let me just give you my extra shitty shot:

Garrus is like, "THAT'S HIM! Let's shoot and kill the bastard!" and Shep's like, whoa, champ, let's just turn him in instead, okay? No shooting and killing. Noooooooooo shooooooooooooting.

So then the game flips from dialogue to combat mode, and before I know what the hell is going on, Garrus shoots the guy. Seriously, three seconds flat and he's down.

Which gets this line out of Shepard:

Which then gets this line out of me:

And thus ends our tale of testicallia. That's a word now, okay? But never fear, I'll be back soon with more tales of balls. So many balls. Did you know? Wrex has a line in the game about a "turian's right nut", implying that turians have a left nut, which means that turians have at least two testicles. They could have three, I guess, but probably not four because then Wrex would have said something like "right center nut". This is assuming, of course, that the other aliens line their balls up laterally, which I guess turians do at least if they have a right and left testicle. Krogans, on the other hand, keep two of their four balls (they have four balls) inside.

FUCK YOU IF I HAVE TO KNOW THIS SHIT SO DO YOU.