Mass Effect review

The latest game I've played has been like a revelation for me! I am a science fiction fan, and also a fan of role-playing games, and guess what game has both of those elements? Mass Effect was created by BioWare, the same guys that made Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and most recently, Dragon Age: Origins (and Mass Effect 2) After I realized how much I had played Mass Effect (I beat the game THREE TIMES and then this morning I caught myself about a third of the way through the fourth) I knew that it was it. Mass Effect was totally the game I've always been looking for. When I bought it, it sounded vaguely familiar, and for a month after I got it (caught it on sale for $14.99 by-the-way :p I wish I could catch Mass Effect 2 on sale for even $34.99) it was just like every other game I buy, I spend up to $20 and get a game that sits on my virtual shelf until I decide it's taking up too much space and delete it (only to be downloaded again a week later)

Well, anyways, the thing about Mass Effect that I really enjoy is the fact that you play it once, and you are like "heh that was pretty good" then you play it a second time and alter the settings just a tad bit, and then you find yourself thinking, "I don't remember this part!" and then a few familiar things happen, then you get some crazy achievement, and you go like "wow how did I not get that achievement the first time!" This is obviously, though, a feature that most role-playing games have, called re-playability.

Another great thing is the controls. You can assign abilities to certain hot-keys, and it's got a quick-save feature! Plus it has an instant pause you can use during combat to assess the situation a little bit, and you can also switch weapons and use abilities from that screen. One annoying thing is the automatic cover system. You'll want to be careful when walking up close to walls and things or you'll turn around and duck... while your enemy is in a critical position and it'll just take 3 shots to down him, and now you are stuck up against this stupid wall! The cover is sometimes useful when you are facing a ton of enemies, your shields go down or your weapon overheats so you take cover and use some first aid or wait for your weapon/tech/biotic abilities to recharge. It would be a lot better if there was a hotkey to do this though, instead of automatic.



My absolute favorite part of this game was definitely the storyline! Drew Karpyshyn was even good enough to write books that extend the storyline for you and really make you feel like part of the action! I don't want to give you too many details on the storyline, to avoid spoilers and mad people, but I will say that it's an awesome storyline. You can start out as a male or female, you can select your background (but that only changes one sidequest and gives you a couple extra renegade/paragon points) and you can select your class. The class part is the best, I first played as a soldier... that was pretty fun, then I played as an infiltrator, that was ALSO pretty fun, but I couldn't use assault rifle/shotgun :( (you can after unlocking an achievement like making 250 kills with a shotgun or assault rifle, the same with sniper rifle) My favorite, was the sentinel. It combines biotic and tech powers, so no weapons (unless you get that achievement I mentioned above) but biotic/tech is like pwnage!

Mass Effect was a great game, AWESOME voice acting (well female shepherd was awesome, but male shepherd was kind of dull. Everything else was also pretty good but I didn't hear it during EVERY single conversation so I can't put my finger on anything else.) great storyline, great re-playability. The graphics weren't exactly up to par, but the biotic/tech animations were still some pretty great stuff! I give Mass Effect a 9.5!

February Anticipated Games

Since November, we have only seen a few nice game releases, including Dragon Age: Origins and CoD: Modern Warfare 2 of course. There was also James Cameron's Avatar: The Game and DiRT 2, and a couple of other games, but Christmas seems like a dead season for new games (but don't get me wrong, everything shows up in a big gulp right before Christmas) Well February seems to pick up the pace again. Mass Effect 2 is an amazing game (I have only read countless articles and watched tens of YouTube trailers) and probably to only notable game release of January 2010.

Well now we are in February, and if you are looking for a new game, you've come to the right place. Several games have been anticipated for a while, and are finally being released in February. These games include: Star Trek Online, Bioshock 2, Everquest II: Sentinel's Fate, Napoleon: Total War, and even though it is being released on March 2nd which is not in February, I have decided for the sake of this blog entry to also include Battlefield: Bad Company 2 because it is just that epic! I have not been following the release of games for very often, but in my own research, I have noted down that a lot of these are sequels, or expansions to existing games. Hopefully you were able to notice this too because, well... except for Star Trek Online and Napoleon: Total War, all of those games include a '2' or 'II', and in the case of Sentinel's Fate, it happens to be an add-on to a sequel!

Now notice that one of the games that doesn't include a 2 in it is Star Trek Online. That, however, is totally fine! I mean who wouldn't want to play a game called Star Trek after seeing the movie? Well not me because I'm not a huge fan of online games anymore: Either you want to keep doing the same thing over and over, or everyone else wants to do the same thing over and everyone else is really good AND you either suck at the game or you get addicted.. In other words, they are addictive. Anyways, Star Trek Online looks like a pretty sick game. As far as I can tell from previews, there is quite a bit of combat, and something I thought was really cool is the fact that you can create your own species!!! Wouldn't that be awesome? Create a species, and describe how you came into the galaxy (like you discovered some Mass Effect relay in the 22nd century... Wait that sounds like the humans in a game I like called "Mass Effect"!) Star Trek Online has revealed that the monthly cost will be $14.99, similar to several other popular MMOs. It was created by the same people that brought you City of Heroes, City of Villains and Champions Online so it should be an interesting game!

The other game that doesn't include a '2' in it is still a new addition to an ever-so-popular series, the Total War series. This is an awesome set of games, albeit strategy games (I haven't grown accustom to this genre of games, but it still looks awesome anyways!) A new feature present in Napoleon which wasn't included in the other Total War games is a new multiplayer mode. While I haven't played many strategy games, I certainly don't remember ever seeing a multiplayer strategy game before! It may just be because of my recluse-ness to those types of video games. Anyways Napoleon: Total War is enticing to me, just the fact that there are several gameplay modes and historic battles you can play through (my History class has turned me into a little bit of a history fanatic... Yes, I have started reading "U.S. History for Dummies")

Now we have two of those games out of the way, I'd like to talk about Bioshock.. TWO! Bioshock in my opinion was a really interesting sci-fi game. The website is a real treat to the eyes, but I'm almost certain the website is nothing compared to the game. The original Bioshock had some really great graphics, an interesting storyline and some unique features creating a gameplay which you couldn't experience twice. Now the sequel, Bioshock 2 claims to take you back to the underwater city of Rapture to re-experience the unique elements of the games setting. The game also features multiplayer modes, which obviously don't appeal to me because I suck at multiplayer BUT that's probably one of the best features in the game, I mean who doesn't enjoy shooting the crap out of other people online? 2K Games did a great job with the first and they sure got my attention in this sequel.

The other game worth mentioning is Everquest II: Sentinel's Fate. No, I didn't forget Battlefield: Bad Company 2, I am just not writing about it this month. That is for next month. Anyways, the Everquest game is a nice MMO for multiple audiences, it incorporates those nice fantasy features that everyone loves, and of course it's got a bazillion expansion packs. The only game I would ever pay monthly for is a game that is always being improved on. (Imagine paying even a dollar a month to play Half Life 2; it lasts for a while but after playing it for a year or 6 and only getting two new episodes, not to mention the multiplayer which gets old too unless you start modding) This happens to be the 6th expansion (9th if you count the three adventure packs) and it features a new level-cap, new dungeons, hundreds of new quests and thousands of new items, an plenty of new land to explore and quest on.

Now, my disclaimer, I haven't played more than about 5 hours each of the original BioShock, I've never played any Total War games (but I've watched plenty of previews of most of them) and I've never played any Everquest (well I got about an hour into a free trial and lost my password.... long long ago...) and I've only played small portions of City of Villains and Champions Online. Therefore, I am not the most knowledgeable on any of the above mentioned games BUT I can still give you my opinion and save you an hour or two of extra research (which you are likely to do anyways because of your curiosity :p)

Left 4 Dead review

I didn't buy Left 4 Dead until a couple of weeks before the release of Left 4 Dead 2, when you could get the package with both for about 65 bucks, so I played about 30 hours of it and that's it but I still got over half the achievements and completed all the campaigns, so I can at least say something about the game. When I bought Left 4 Dead, I wasn't expecting it to be as good and fun as it really was, I figured all you ever do is shoot zombies, that's gotta get annoying after a while (and it did, but I got my moneys' worth so I'm happy).

Left 4 Dead has several different game play modes, first of all Single Player which is the worst of all of them because your only friends are three computer players who don't know how to play worth crap. You can play Easy, Normal, Advanced or Expert difficulties and single player is only worth playing on easy to get an idea of how the map is, so that when you are playing multiplayer you don't suck so bad. If you can beat single player on advanced or expert difficulty, you either have no life, you are cheating, or you are extremely good at FPS games (which implies that you have no life)

The next mode to look at is Campaign. It is almost like single-player, but it's co-operative online, so instead of having three computers for friends, you can play with anyone online. I would start out playing expert though or you'll find yourself getting vote-kicked an awful lot. Campaign is where most of the achievements are it seems, and it's also the place where you'll probably make the most friends :)

Survival mode is kind of fun, but it's also a little lame. All you do is try to stay alive in hot spots as long as possible, and defend from attacking zombies. If one person out of your 4-man team screws up, it can ruin it for everyone which means it may be hard to find a nice team. At first it seemed like I was always the person messing everything up, but I've gotten better.

Versus mode: my most-hated mode and most peoples favorite mode! I am not much of a multi-player versus mode in any game. If you don't play 24/7, you usually suck, and if you suck it's not fun, especially when it takes a long time to be as good as everyone else!

Anyways, I think this is a really really great game, but if you are thinking about buying it: get Left 4 Dead 2 instead. You won't miss anything.

Need for Speed: Undercover

So this past week, with a snow day and all I found Need For Speed: Undercover on Steam for only 10 bucks. According to my usual spending habits, I went ahead and coughed up a couple to try this out. Well after playing it about 25 hours total over the past week, I am now writing my official review on it. I'm probably going to post the review below on a couple of other sites as well.

I've always liked racing games, Need for Speed: Underground, and Underground 2 weren't too bad in my opinion, I played them on the Gamecube, so I never had compatibility issues of course, but they definitely were fun. Since then the only racing I've done is Mario Kart: Double Dash and Mario Kart Wii (plus a little Mario Kart DS, I love Mario Kart) So I went ahead and downloaded and installed Undercover, the very first thing I noticed is it ran with an average of 10 fps at max settings (and mind you, I'm running an AMD Athlon X2 64, with 3GB RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT. I played it on Windows 7 Professional) so I turned the settings all down to low and achieved about 30 FPS. Even with this I still received a few spikes, especially when rounding turns and making jumps.

So really my only criticism's are here: the game seems to be poorly coded, the graphics are nothing extreme but my 9800 GT is hardly able to handle it! The other thing is, in being a racing game where you are usually moving at about 200 MPH or higher, you would expect the collision system to be made JUST FOR high-speed races right? Well I notice that when hitting things like light poles and cones at anything over 150 MPH, it appeared you went right through it and then both the sound, and the action of the cone falling over were delayed. But as far as that collision thing goes, I guess I am just picky!

The game has several achievements, and if I had any friends that were actively playing NFS, it would be fun to try to get the different achievements before them, and beat them in private races! The storyline is fairly short (I beat it within 14 hours of playing!) but you can still redo all the races and try to "Dominate" all of them by getting a really good time. The career mode does die down a little quickly though. Now it's fun to hop on a few times a week for about an hour to race against other people online, but the game's replayability level is very low. Overall the game is fairly easy and probably geared toward any casual gamer, and for the hard-core gamers like myself there is always online multiplayer!

If you are thinking about buying this, go ahead and do so if you can get it for 10 or 15 bucks, it is worth the small price. If you think you are a hard-core gamer though, you should probably check out some other racing game.