Mad Dogs and Englishmen

I may play this game again, which is probably the fastest turn around I've had for a game since the only game I had was Baldur's Gate, and I'm sure I interpersed that with a few games of Ultimate Windows Games (Solitare, Hearts, Freecell and Minesweeper, get through all without losing a single game), just so i can understand it better in context.

Because I Was Not Giving A Fuck when I played in the first time, i spent about half the game swearing at everyone and everything, insulting to Colombians' dress-sense, accent, views, values, religion and habits of leaving food and money everywhere, stealing everything that wasn't nailed down, turning on every tap I could find in the hope that the city would run out of water and die (until I got to Battleship bay and saw how friggin' pointless that was). I would have taken a piss in every drink I could have found and kicked kids to the ground and teabagged them until they drowned if the game had given me the option. Look at all the fucks I give! They are nonexistant! I am in your city, fucking your shit! Booker DeWitt shits in your salad and slaps you in the face with your own testicles you inbred proto-Nazi scum.

I kept it up until the end of the game (until the asylum bit, where everything got a bit too nasty to laugh at) only by that time I was swearing at DeWitt as often as the setting.Y'know, I am not taking the word of a fucking Pinkerton as to whether a rebellion is moral or not. After I realised the Pinkerton badge actually belonged to DeWitt I had him jump off roofs for a bit to teach him a lesson. But you'd have thought the game believes DeWitt was the ultimate voice of morality (well, him and Elizabeth. A Pinkerton and a girl who'd be eaten alive on the streets of Paris and have her bones spat out to line the catacombs, woo, colour me impressed) the way they bend the plot into pretzels to try and get me to think( Some vague spoilers (nothing game-breaking) )

If you've been active in the gamer community recently you'll have heard about the insane batshit mess that surrounded Feminist Frequency's kickstarter for her 'Tropes vs Women in video games' series. I won't go into that much, ebcause far better people already have and this topic has been kicked to death worse than puppies by Spider Jerusalem.

What I do want to say is to point out my experience that yes, these things do matter and have an active impact on the world around us.

The example that really sticks out in my mind was on a comments section of a newspaper website (can't remember which) which was talking about the US bill allowing women in combat situations. Given that it was not a gaming blog I was really surprised that there were a lot of comments making the same joke: "Well, it worked at the battle of Hoover dam."

If you get this reference then yay, we play the same games. For those who don't, it's a reference to the game Fallout New Vegas in which there is a battle between the pretty much villianous Ceasar's Legion, and the pretty much good New California Republic (or NCR for short) over Hoover dam. The makers of the game, Obsidian, had included a lot of female soldiers in the NCR, and the game had generally good female representation all around. Not absolutely stellar, but pretty good.

And as a result, quite a few people were (jokingly) using that as a reason that in real life women should be allowed in front line combat.

These things matter. Kudos for Obsidian for making the effort.

I'm buying that fucking DLC extended ending and giving you arsehats ONE LAST CHANCE to get this right.

If all of this by some act of bloody god or Reaper SOMEHOW turns up something worthwhile, I might just write up my ME3 transcript.

With ME3, I avoided spoilers at all costs. But I would have had to be blind not to notice some people were taking offence at the ending. I went 'okay, this is a Phantom Menace situation. The fans could never have been satisfied, so they're whining'. I heard the ending was a bit wtf, but I could dig that. To be honest; I have a lot invested in that series. I had a character I loved, a world (galaxy) I loved, and NPCs I loved. I friggin' cried when one of them died!

So I wasn't going to hate the ending, I was going to give it every break such a wonderful series deserved. I was going to enjoy this game, dammit!

I hated the ending.

This game is going to kill me.

Because that game just made a shitload of decisions for me that Mirek wouldn't have made if you stuck a gun to his head.

Is coming out tomorrow. I haven't reserved my copy, but if I don't get it straight away I can always download it off Steam, or wait a few days. Anyhow, I've been wanting to ramble about my thoughts on the upcoming Reaper war.

Basically, I think in every way, the Mass Effect galaxy has never been a better position to trounce the Reapers. The Reapers are in the worst position they've been in since they started this cycle of genocide, which is due to a number of factors.

- They're running behind schedule. They were planning to have invaded years, if not decades ago. This might not been a big deal for millenia old sentient spacecraft, but it's a HUGE deal for everyone else. Organic progress is fast, and I don't think the Reapers can even hope to match that advance. I strongly suspect the 50,000 year limit is there for the reason that beyond that, the organic's technology would have advanced too far for the Reapers to be certain of a quick and painless victory - and that the organics would have started figuring out how Mass Relays work. That was the case with the Protheans, and the same now. Every year organics havr before the Reapers arrive means the technology gap is closing.

- Exposure to Reaper technology. The second Normandy has a main gun modeled from Soveriegn's. That is seriously bad news for the Reapers. Just from studying the bits of Soveriegn, and after ME2 the schematics for the Reaper fetoid, the current races of the galaxy have made not only an important technological advance, they have a good idea how Reapers work, and, more importantly, how they break.

- A Stalingrad situation. This ties into the above points as well. The reason the Reapers didn't just charge in to attack in ME1, and why they tried the Reaper fetoid approach in ME2 is that if they didn't, they'd be giving up their biggest advantage: taking the Citadel and the Mass Relays. They do that, and it's over. No one has a chance. Thanks to the Protheans and our good commander, however, they no longer have that option. They're running out of pawns. The Keepers aren't listening, the Collectors are gone, the Geth are known enemies (and after ME2, gone as well) and the galaxy is slowly coming to recognise them as a threat.

Due to the two above points, the Reapers can't afford to wait. In the time it would take the fuss to die down (and Commander Shepard to just die, even of old age) the races of the galaxy might well have realised how the Mass Relays work, what the Reapers are and how the Citadel functions. They'd have a hard time trying to make that plan work again.

So they've landed on the only option they have (Mirek Shepard would like to note for the record that another option is just to leave well alone and stop the cycle of destruction. Opinion noted sir.) to go in guns blazing and kill everyone before everything gets even worse. Then they can have time to sit back and dicuss ways to never let this happen again, ever.

But first, they have to win, and that doesn't look easy right now. instead of zooming in and knocking out the seat of government, they're having to creep in from the edges, fighting through inceasingly heavy forces, forced to use Mass Relays to get anywhere, and being unable to shut them off so the organics can still maintain travel and communications through the star systems and evacuate populations and resources away from the Reaper fleets. Meanwhile, points one and two will be in full force. Nothing spurs innovation like a desperate war, and if the races of the galaxy can slow the Reapers long enough, I expect from sheer exposure to their tactics and studies of their dead, an efficient weapon against Reapers could be constructed in a very short time. As well as means to protect from indoctrination and so on.

And as to why, if all this stands, is the Reaper's first target Earth? Well, look at us:



If we're not the first port of call, we're pretty close. Add how Commander Shepard's right pissed them off recently, no wonder Earth's a target. Exposed, on the outskirts, not surprising at all.

(Mirek Shepard's take on this is that if he has to sacrifice everyone in the galaxy to make sure the next batch of intelligent life can live without Reapers, that's acceptable losses, so one small planet is nothing)

So yeah, there are reasonable ground for hope. More of a chance than everyone who came before had.

Then again, the Reapers are three mile long super-intelligent mech-chuthulus, just one of which took down the combined fleets of just about everyone, so even with all that, it's going to be a rought ride.

I love this game.

(ps, no spoilers until I make a post saying I've finished the game)

Not sure how many of you know the game Psychonauts. Here's a review of it by a game commentator to give you the gist. All I can say is that it's even funnier than he makes it sound. Anyway, recently, the maker of the game, Tim Schafer, mentioned in an interview for a gaming website that he would love to make a sequel, if 'someone could led him a few million'.

Enter Notch, creator of the epic time-waster Minecraft: "How many million?"

Anyway, Notch decided to pledge something like 500,000 dollars (give or take a few zeros), and to round off the figure, they decided to ask the gaming community (many of whom regard Psychonauts as one of the great games of the medium) to donate as much as they could, with the goal of raising $400,000 in a month.

It's been two days.

It hit $65,000 in an hour.

It hit the target in eight hours.

The total is now approaching 1.5 million dollars.

I foresee that games developers around the world are currently kicking themselves in the nuts for not having jumped in while they had the chance :DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

Anyway, if you're a fan, or just want to help the game along and get a free copy, donate here.