Menyou and I

Welcome to MSPixel's 150th post!

I know cutscenes are kind of my bread and butter around here, but I like it when I get to talk about the gameplay. The beginning of Mass Effect 3 is hard, because there's so damn little gameplay. But hey, Menae gifts you with a turret right at the start!

Of course, my vanguard ass does great with it.

... I try so hard each week to use preview images without swearing in them. That one ... that one is not it.

KAY SO THAT WAS HARD TO DRAW.

(You guys, I got followed today by a tumblr dedicated to gaming art. HA HA HA.)

Like Garrus said, these are brutes. The reapers thought it would be funny to stick krogan and turian parts together and see what happens. These things are a bitch and a half to kill.

So of course, I start out by using shadow strike --

-- fuck no I don't.

Vanguard lyfe!

But Bioware gave us something new to use! Are you ready for this shit?

Wave hello to the omniblade! Get up on some enemy's shit, hold B, and Shepard's omnitool will flip out a switchblade and knife a bitch! (Vanguards and adepts actually don't get one, so just pretend this illustration is informational.)

True story, while playing this part, my game glitched out and Garrus started walking backwards. Husbando thinks it had soemthing to do with the targeting -- the game forgot it was playing a sort of cut scene, had Garrus target something random, and just didn't think to turn it around.

HEY YOU GUYS I GUESS HE'S MOON WALKING!

Shut up. I'm hilarious.

... I find it interesting that Garrus' family is part of the Mass Effect story, even as bit players, but we never get to see them. I thought for sure Solana Vakarian was going to pop up in ME3, but she doesn't.

Anyway, we then come into a field of brutes, which of course means we've hit our final destination.

And holy shit, I mean there's like a hundred brutes. Don't make me draw them. I'm copy/pasting that one brute I drew for like the rest of the game, hope that's cool.

And wouldn't you know, Victus is just, like, chillaxing in the middle of everything.

... Palaven Command didn't send the guy a text or a spacebook message or anything? Don't you think you'd want to tell, you know, the guy you elected primearch?

Hold the fuck up, don't the krogans hate turians for neutering and spaying them? Y'all played with all four of their balls, I'm not sure this is gonna work.

Thanks Garrus. Dick.

NEXT TIME: Some quality time with on the Normandy.

SATURDAY POST! Shepard's Casual Clothes

We're at the point now in the game when things are a little more open. Nice!

The game allows you to customize your armor at various stations in the Normandy. Your first order of business is to customize something brightly obnoxious.

If your armor isn't full on dayglo, I don't even know you.

By the way, welcome to the armor/clothing customization screen. Shepard stands over to the left and shuffles slightly. It's a computer animation trick, I heard some Pixar guy talk about it once: computer animated characters (such as those in video games) have to stay moving. If they stop, they look dead.

... which is great until you try to take pictures with a camera phone and they come out sorta blurry. Sorry, I should have used the capture software.

Anyway, Shepard doesn't always wear her armor. You can actually go through and pick what she wears when she's on the ship (and now, new in Mass Effect 3, on the Citadel too). Let's look at the choices!

This is the default, it's what Shepard was wearing in the brig. These are standard issue Alliance fatigues.

These are dress blues! You see officers wearing them a lot. The rank insignia is pretty random, but obviously Shepard has the commander insignia.

This, uh. This is the colonist outfit. (You can see me trying to draw it in this entry.) I never understood why the space colonists all wore one outfit, and why that outfit. Wouldn't you want something on your shoulders to protect you from the environment? And also, the Normandy isn't a colony, why would Shepard wear this around the Normandy?

I think it was a case of, "Fuck it, we have the resources, let's toss it in."

These are a variant on the fatigues. I like them, but I have no idea what the hell they are or why they're in here.

Story time! There was a collector's edition of Mass Effect 3, which we have. (Husbando~'s birthday was a few days away from ME3's release, so it was his birthday present.) The collector's edition came with an extra outfit, seen here:

Yeah, it's that hoody. I was excited for this, but I think I like the idea better than the execution. I mean, I know it's a lot of people's favorite, I just don't know that this is how a ship captain dresses. That's how you dress when no one's going to see you. It might have been better if the hoodie fit, as is, it just looks like Shepard's having a fat day.

One last one! Guy Shepard's last outfit was a leather jacket! Isn't that cool? We all know girl Shepard will get something equally as --

... fuck.

Um, so. I always pick the dress blues. Shepard's the captain, that's what captains wear. I'll try and draw her in them when I remember.

Menae: I'm Still Mad About Stuff

"Damn, is she going to let go of the peanut butter thing now that we're in a new game?" No. I never let go of anything. Where the hell are the mass effects in this game?

Anyway, we've got ourselves a primearch to rescue, so let's go to Palaven.

... or, more like, Menae (say: men eye). Menae is Palaven's moon. The turians figured that if they were going to kick some reaper ass, they could start out on their moon, because it was further away from all the goods.

"Hey, wait!" thousands of Mass Effect nerds cried. "We've been waiting three games now, and Palaven's a pretty central location to the series. We don't get to see Palaven?" Nope. Sorry. Maybe Mass Effect 4 will be about the First Contact War, but until then, we'll just have to have memories of Mass Effect Evolution to keep us warm at night.

Let us land.

That black burning husk in the distance is Palaven. That orange splotch is Palaven's capital city, where the reapers are currently reaping the fuck out of some shit.

"Hey, wait!" you may be asking. "I thought we were fighting on Menae to keep reapers off Palaven?" Yes. We are. Look, I don't know any more, let's go talk to the first turian we see. We'll ask him for the primearch, deliver the primearch to the summit, get the troops we need, beat the reapers, and get the good ending!

are you kidding meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Fucking hell, really, we all get to sit around and pick our shit chutes while Palaven command tries to send us a name via, what, MSN fucking messenger? Holy crapola, who the hell are we going to get to fix --

But soft! What light through yonder --

Yeah, okay, this is the part where I play cute because I'm trying to pretend none of us have played this before, and I'm all, "oh my, we're on a whole planet full of turians and we might know this guy, whoever could he be, oh wow so mystery," but fuck it, you know and I know who I'm going to shittily draw in the next panel.

surprise

Garrus got new armor for Mass Effect 3! Bioware specifically designed it so that I couldn't draw it, it was nice of them. I naturally assume that Bioware makes all of their decisions based around MSPixel.

... wait, general?

The ingame explanation is that Garrus "yelled a lot" (really) so they made him a general. There's a hundred things, I think, that I will never be able to explain about Mass Effect.

Hey, wait! Let's go through our character introductions, because I'm still mad!

• Oh man, general! That's so cool how you know so much shit about reapers! You should probably be, like, the most important guy on Palaven.
• Oh wow, shadow broker! While you're busy careening through space doing a favor for the Alliance, why don't you toast some Cerberus baddies with a well-placed double tap?
• SAVING THE PLANET'S KIND OF HARD WHEN YOU'RE THE SIZE OF AN ACTUAL PLANET AREN'T YOU COMMANDER HAM

Cool! Garrus is going to take us to the primearch! Let's follow him over the war-torn landscape of Palaven.

... wait, we have four party members. Unless Gaspar is going to teleport straight to Menae, I'm not sure how --

There we go. Thanks, Joker.

NEXT TIME: they do not use mass effects

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.