In Space No One Can Hear You Squee

There aren't many videogames that can make (force) me to experience the Kübler-Ross model so in that respect alone Mass Effect 2 is a particularly memorable romp.

The original Mass Effect was also unique in that I was willing to grant it the highly coveted "Casey Merit Badge of Feigned Major Flaw Ignorance" - a rare and shiny certificate that legitimately allows me to declare something "One of My Favourite Games of All Time" despite the fact that its combat is placid and clinical; textures pop in roughly three days behind schedule; turgid elevator journeys have replaced fully acceptable loading screens; any mission that isn't part of the main quest takes place on a bland mess of geography; you traverse said topography in a jet-powered jeep made of jelly; said jeep can't fire on anything on a plane even slighly lower than itself and the inventory system makes me feel like going to sleep... forever.

Ugh... and this is from the improved PC version *shiver*

It earned this badge because well - despite all that... it was delicious. Adequate sustenance for the Doctor Who marathon. Wholesome, Bioware-baked RPG cake - the like of which I hadn't absorbed for years. The voice acting was a soothing remedy for the perils experienced at the hands of whatever evil fuckery Bethesda inflicts on their voice actors. The plot and writing was NOT shit, which is still a difficult thing to find these days. Sure, the crew had a few weak spots here and there (I'm looking at you, the thankfully late Kaidan "Carth" Alenko) - but overall Bioware managed (again - the cheeky bastards) to put me in charge of people I generally gave a toss about.

Mass Effect 2 really does credit to the word "sequel". It irons out every, single, God damn thing that was wrong with the first one while improving every, single, God damn thing that was good in the first one. The elevators are replaced with loading screens; the MAKO is dead; side missions are original and unpredictable, usually involving a fleshed out, self contained story; the inventory system is piss-easy; combat actually resembles a shooter and Kaidan is dead (if you let him die)!

Wow, it's almost like a game this time!

Thoughts of the old crew quickly dissipated when presented with the ragtag loveliness of the new bunch - even Jacob turned out to be remotely interesting. Oh, and Garrus has a robot half-jaw - so that's an improvement.

Ah, the crew. There lies the most powerful element in the entire game. I Care - with a capital LOVE - about these people. More so than anything I have ever played, watched or read. Using a process I can only perceive as some kind of -mancy, Bioware has made me feel personally and uniquely attached to and responsible for these people, not to mention make me feel that I have sole ownership of a ship that millions of other people are flying around a million other galaxies. It is scathingly beautiful to learn that the aliens and robots in Mass Effect 2 are infinitely more human than your standard videogame protagonist. If Marcus Fenix badly wrote himself into this universe he would find himself given a Dunce cap and told to sit in the corner.

He broke a window in my cargo bay and never apoligised.

This sense of attachment reached its pinnacle not more than twelve hours ago. Having forced myself into not glimpsing at a single FAQ - I went into the subtly titled "Suicide Mission" with the intention of playing it by ear. Letting my incredible command skills get my entire crew through the gauntlet unscathed. I purchased every upgrade. I gained the loyalty of every single character. I knew Miranda wasn't talking to me ever since I told her I prefer skin-head biotics to Michael Jackson lookalikes - but I thought if I kept her in my immediate squad she'd get through okay.

So, the sticky bastards blow 'oles in ma' ship - hijack me' crew and bugger off. I set off after them through that relay like a really snappy analogy, safe in the knowledge that I would save them all... and I wasn't doing it for the Achievement.

What a complete fucking bloodbath.

Assuming that brute strength and weapon damage was the deciding factor in this hootenanny - I put Grunt in charge of the Fire Team (he was a Krogan and had a big gun) and shoved Legion through a molten vent to hack the door (he was made of metal and his brain is a computer). Everything was going shiny. We blasted our way through Horde after Horde, thinking noting could go wrong. Then we reach the door and shit gets real. During what is easily the most unbearably tense, eye-gougingly uncontrollable cutscene I have ever been forced to sit through (the door slides shut millimetre by millimetre) a living wave of ex-prothean flesh smashes into my squad. It's been a long time since I've literally jumped up shouting "GET AWAY FROM THE FUCKING DOOR! FOR FUCKS SAKE GET AWAY FROM THE FUCKING DOOR! LEGION! I'LL FUCKING HOLD THEM THE FUCK OFF! LEGION, FUCKING GET THROUGH THE FUCKING DOOR! LEGION! LEGION! FUCKING NOW!".

Bang.

Dead.

Forever.

Not even a weepy, dying, arm held gasp.

"LEEEEEEEEEGGGGGGIIIOOONNNN!!!"

It sucked. Hard. It sucked as badly as when Grunt gets shot in similar circumstances not ten minutes later. I'm feeling a lot less heroic. You could say I feel like a useless sack of shit. The fact that I survived the assault made it even worse. I'm not being soppy - but I was genuinely prepared to let Séan Shepard die if the rest of the team could live. But no. Legion and Grunt died. Miranda - the only one I was worried about - came out of that ship with scarcely a hair out of place. This was horrible - I needed someone to blame.

At first I denied it had even happened. That as the credits threatened to roll, Legion and Grunt would show up in an escape pod. A bit bloodied but otherwise breathing. When that didn't happen I moved on to anger. I blamed everyone but myself. I even blamed Bioware for tying the fates of my crew into an arbitrary, invisible yes/no system that was impossible to ascertain in advance. Then I told myself - it was no biggie. A quick scan of an FAQ and a file reload could bring them back for the dead. But no. I am not willing to cheapen the demise of two of my men by utilising an ability mere mortals do not posses.

What stage of grief am I at now? Depression. In case you hadn't noticed. Hopefully, soon enough I can reach acceptance. I can promise myself that in MY Mass Effect universe - Legion and Grunt died during an assault on the Collector home world. They died because their cocksure Commander thought that a bigger gun was more important than leadership skills. This save will be the one that I bring with me in Mass Effect 3, as well as the faces of those I murdered by quick thinking. I'll do this to give Bioware the salute they deserve for doing what Peter Molyneux can only bullshit about.

For the fallen.

The Robo-Kindergarten-Cop and iPad

I just want to start this post off by saying that I think the iPad looks pretty cool, it is the closest thing to a Starfleet pad that we have got so far, in fact, I think it may be more advanced than those, so at least we have something futuristic. The coolest thing about it, apart from it being shiny and stylish, is that i could imagine having the thing hooked up to a screen wirelessly and doing some sort of presentation on it, highlighting text, drawing little notes, that sort of thing on this pad in your hands while everyone is sitting at the conference table going ooh, future, kind of like something out of minority report i guess, although not as much as project fatal mistake.

The long awaited Media Multi-Verse Crisis War is about to begin, reality will shift and things will happen that really shouldn't...

The Robo-Kindergarten-Cop - Detective John Kimble is back, and this time it is most definitely personal, he has been assigned to track down Clarence Boddicker who the police believe may be trying to find his ex-wife and their son "Junior".

Kimble infiltrates the boys school and becomes the Kintergarten Cop once again, he is partnered with Anne Lewis who has been recently transfered from Detroit to help Kimble catch Clarence. Clarence eventually shows and is able to kidnap Junior but Kimble pursues him and is able to corner him in an alley. However, Clarence has lured Kimble here and a gang of his thugs lie in wait, he gives the word and Kimble is blasted into a mess of red corn syrup and paper mache. Clarence and his thugs depart with the kid and Anne finds Kimble barely alive in the alley. Kimble is declared dead in hospital, but several weeks later rumours begin to spread throughout the police force that a new project is underway, the project is named Project Robo-Kindergarten-Cop.

Kimbles body is implanted with the latest in robotic cybernetics and nanotechnology to create the ultimate police officer, his programming is governed by three directives: say "Halt, you..", Kill Perp and finally say "are under arrest". He is sent back to the school where it turns out Junior has been brought home and Clarence has given up his life of crime, he apologises to RKC and even invites him to a celebration in his honour, a party. RKC doesn't back down so easily though, he pulls out his absrudly large hand cannon and before you know it, Clarence is a puddle on the floor, "See you at the party Clarence!" he smugly quotes. Junior is sent into a state of permanent shock and terror as the pieces of his father cover the walls, but RKC reassures him, "If you ever need me, I'll be back...".

RKC leaves the school to save more lives and is suddenly sucked into a tear in the space-time continuum, where will our story go, only time will tell, so...goodnight, and goodluck.

Really?

Really Apple?

Reeeeeaaaaly?

Who the fuck is this for?

Seriously - answer me - who the fuck do you think is going to buy this?!

Apple: Roughly 250,000,000 people.

Me: ... shut up.

p.s. proper post incoming

UPDATE: IT HAS NO USB PORTS?!

NO USB PORTS!?!?!

... WHO IS THIS FOR?!

REEAAAARRRRGGGHHH!

Wonderboy's Triple Trailer Tour de Force of Twenty Ten!

The hour is late and I fear that If I do not tell the world about these 3 trailers before my time is up, then all hope may be lost, for the soldiers at Sector Haven have all but been slain and now the demons march on the fortress...

...wait, what?

Sorry about that, I have just finished Bayonetta(Super Stylish)and Darksiders(Apocalypse, Nuff Said) so I am in a kind of Demons and Angels kind of mood I guess, or did I really travel to an alternate dimension where Hell and Heaven are fighting an endless war on earth, only time will tell.

So, here is the rundown of my favourite 3 trailers for movies of this year!

3)The A-Team

2)Kick-Ass

1)Clash of the Titans


Yeah, so there they are, I hope you noticed that two of these star Liam Neeson. I am really looking forward to seeing more from Sam Worthington and I am sure that all three of these movies will... Kick-Ass!

As an aside, I invite Jamie and to a lesser extent Sean to post something, there has to be something interesting you can provide the readers, no?

Wonderboy's Massively Malevolent Trailer of Massive Effect...2

Before I get to the rundown of best trailer for 2010, I thought I would put up this amazing little number from the awesome guys who brought you that SW:TOR cinematic trailer. It is pretty cool, and shows off some of the characters pretty well, Grunt and Thane, Whoop!



Yeah, so bring on Mass Effect 2, my second most anticipated title of 2010, and it comes out in 3 weeks!

also, SPOILER WARNING!

(Courtesy of Brad Shoemaker of Giant Bomb)If you didn't kill Wrex in ME1 then when you go to the Krogan homeworld in ME2 he is now the king of all Krogan...Shepard.

ESND : The final one of these, they don't seem to add anything special, I could just finish off my posts with some kind of trademark phrase, how about... We aim to digress?

Come... Gather 'round the Techno-Fire

C'mere you young pups - 'mere over to your Grandad and he'll tell you some darn 'tooting stories! Woo - whee! I gotta tells ya - back in ma youth I dint have me even the slightest inklin that I'd reach the shiny ol' day of January 1st 2057! Man - we got us some kerazy shit in these 'ere parts! How about them fanshy throat implantsh that let's ee speak with a Southern drawl at the flip of a switch! *flips throat-switch to "off" position* Most exhilarating!

I spent the advent of the year 2010 bemoaning the apparent lack of significant progress in the "cool sci-fi shit" department during the passing decade. I did this while manipulating a virtual man trapped in a TV screen which displays more detail than the human eye can notice. Then I continued said bemoaning with others spread across the globe without the assistance of wires - by using a service which can be effectively described as an untempered, uncensored ethereal database which contains every single shred of human knowledge which can be simultaneously accessed and edited by billions of people at a time.. Then I had a Pop Tart. That shit be cool too, yo.

How many films had I seen that opened with "It is the year 2005..." or "In the first years of the 21st Century" which featured giant fucking robots or hoverboards n' shit? Then - all of a sudden - there it was. 2010. It was easy to bemoan the lack of progress when you grew up expecting to have your own pet dinosaur by the time you were eighteen. You don't notice progress when you're travelling relevant to the causal nexus - know what I mean? The only way the future seems like the future is if you go there from the past - otherwise it just feels like what it is - the Present. What's wrong, Séan Jr. Jr. - what's with the confused look? Go get your Grandad another whiskey!

So anyway, there we were - ringing in the New Year with some co-op zombie killing and some really shit lager when it hit us like Jackson Pollock hitting a tree - we were gonna be 20 soon (Jamie first). Needless to say - existentialism ensued.

"Dude, kids who are - like - 11, weren't alive when Final Fantasy VII came out"

"Whooooaaaaaaa..."

That's the problem with living in a self-contained social bubble where your only frame of reference is release dates - time starts moving really fucking fast. Ten years might seem irrelevant to you folks but to people like me - who measures progress by polygon counts - it's like "HOLY SHIT, YOU WENT FROM A PRIMARY COLOURED, SPIKY HAIRED BUFFOON TO A LIFE LIKE CGI NINJA IN LESS THAN A DECADE!"

When you're using the release of Kingdom Hearts II to work out your age you know you're in trouble.

So yeah, we came a hell of a way in ten years - but we still didn't solve the big problems. We seemed to have spent slightly more money on talent show votes than research into nuclear fusion and we still seem to have a penchant for bombing the living, screaming, begging, defenceless, infantile SHIT out of each other, but hey - how 'bout them Phone Watches?! Holy pisswhistles - that's as close to a CODEX that I'm willing to go!

Well - I've seen a lot of crazy stuff since that day back at the start of 2010. I've seen the death of television; The Frosties Kid redefine music on the 2015 Charts Show; the audience of 'Britain's Got Talent 2023' tear Piers Morgan limb from limb; attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. All of it doesn't change the fact that there is one thing... literally - one thing, the only thing that can save humanity from itself - first contact with a peaceful alien race.

Here's hoping that the signal detected near Ursa Minor heralds that event. Here's hoping that the first, garbled transmission we were sent represents an outreached hand. Here's hoping that my favourite grandson - Séan Jr. Jr. will be there (all grown up) doing what I couldn't - being the first journalist on the scene. Everyone, raise your glasses to those visitors from the stars! Raise them to those beings whose name is the only thing we know of them! Raise them for a shining future! Raise them for the Jordax!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Totally Addicted to Pace

Borderlands - when you get right down to it - is pretty frikkin great. It doesn't have an incredible cast of voice actors - nor does it contain a plot of particular interest or artistic merit. It is a game where you shoot things. Rather frequently in fact. When you shoot these things you become more proficient... in the shooting of things. As far as game design is concerned this is a pretty fucking radical direction.

Many games these days seem to utilise this "shooting things" paradigm but rarely does there seem a point in doing so. In Modern Warfare 2, why was I shooting things? Well - the basic sensation of shooting a things I suppose but that's hardly a new experience. It certainly wasn't for the story. Christ, when it comes to the First Person Shooter I'm hardly ever doing it to see the story. After so many years of the same basic pattern, the same basic story and the same basic gameplay it is so overwhelmingly refreshing to play something as unpretentious and bare-boned as Borderlands. This is for the same reason that I've sank many more hours into EDF: 2017 than Gears of War 2.

Borderlands is a game that knows its place. It knows it was never likely to create a story worth shooting things for. What it does know is that the shooting of things is what's really important to that staple of the gaming diet - the FPS. By wrapping the simple and instantly gratifying act of gun-play around the frame of a Diablo-esque grind-fest, Gearbox has crafted a game that is constantly exhilarating - even when trudging back and forth between two featureless sheds in a featureless desert to claim your reward in dispatching yet another group of generic, apocalyptic bandits.

Every shot - and I mean every shot - contributes in some small way. Whether it be a kill towards a bounty quest, looting a shiny weapon, experience towards a level up, a minuscule increase in weapon proficiency or even just a couple of bucks and a round of ammo - every single shot you take means it's going to be more satisfying the next time you take a shot. If I can do all that in the company of friends - all the better. Suddenly, I don't care if the game doesn't feature Mindblowing Set Pieces (TM) or Visceral Gameplay (TM). All the Hans Zimmer in the world isn't going to alter the fact that once I've killed that first Insurgent I may as well have killed every Insurgent.

Thar be a lot of mouth-flapping around these 'ere parts concerning pacing in videogames. Usually, it seems that when people refer to pacing in a videogame they're referring to it in the same context as film. While this certainly applies to the more cinematic games out there - the Uncharted's and the Metal Gear's - this comparison seems wholly inappropiate when describing the basic device which distributes fun in most videogames. Pacing for me is about the regular distribution of power and gameplay features during the length of the game.

It's the melee combat in Crackdown - going from a puny mall guard who hits like a fly swatter to a hulking, law keeping behemoth capable of punching cars through the atmosphere. It's going from a Van de Graff generator in inFamous to an electrical demigod who could bitch-slap Raiden himself. It's going from a terrified EDF volunteer scarcely able to survive being sneezed on by an ant to a Homing Missile-armed badass capable of nonchalantly whistling his way out of a mushroom cloud. Likewise - with Borderlands it's all about jumping off the bus with a rusty peashooter gripped in you shaking fist and turning yourself into a cool, calm and thoroughly collected wastelander wielding a luminscient firearm that can melt your fucking soul.

All in all - this whole RPG x FPS things works a treat - but let's not all start doing it, hmm? I might just end up craving something like Modern Warfare 2 if every FPS from here on had an obligatory XP system bolted on.

... what's that about MW2's multiplayer?!