I mentioned this the other day: I've been playing through Disco Elysium on Xbox, and really enjoying it. With the added narration of The Final Cut edition, it's almost like listening to an audiobook. A really strange audiobook.
That's the thing about this game, though... it's so weird! It reminds me of books like Neuromancer or other William Gibson novels. It draws you in with its foreignness. The world is there, and it definitely exists - whether or not you understand it.
Oftentimes in games like this, I get turned off by too much world-building. I want to see the game through, and not live in its world for a moment.
Disco Elysium is not that, though. It's just all very interesting and connected, and so far, I love it.
I love the Forza Horizon series, and I've been looking forward to the fifth game in the series ever since it was revealed at E3 earlier this year. Taking a virtual trip to Mexico is going to be a blast!
Since it's out on Game Pass, I'll be starting the pre-load soon, and ready to play at launch on November 9th!
I finished Mass Effect: Andromeda last night, so now I'm putting in some time with Disco Elysium, a game I've been meaning to play for a while, and which I was excited to see make its way to Xbox recently. I feel like I don't know what I'm doing in this game, but it's fun nonetheless. And the full narration/dialog is excellent.
I still need to finish up The Artful Escape, which I started a few weeks ago, when it came out.
My game backlog is ridiculous, and Game Pass isn't helping.
After yesterday's post, I sat down and played through the final mission of Mass Effect: Andromeda. I expected the last mission to be a massive affair that would take an hour or two to complete, but 40 minutes later, I was zipping through the credits and playing through the epilogue.
In a way, I was sort of relieved. I like an epic ending, but it can feel like a slog if you're not ready for it. When I played through the remastered Mass Effect trilogy a few months ago, the final run at the end of the series felt like it went on forever - and towards the end, I wanted to take a break, but I didn't want to leave the game in a state where I couldn't save my progress, so I had to power through it.
As with my other game reviews, there are spoilers below!
So four years after this game was released - and I played it first, right when it launched - I came back, started anew, and played through just about every part of the game.
And honestly, it was a lot of fun! I kind of wish I hadn't waited so long to play it now.
The game's story starts off pretty dry, and it did not hold my attention initially in either playthrough. I didn't make it all that far in my first attempt to play this game however, so this time I pushed on - and as the adventure unfolded, I found things got more interesting.
The movement and combat in Andromeda feels a bit squirrely compared to the original games, and it took a lot of time for me to get used to it. The first hour of the game wasn't enough to make it feel natural, and I had to turn aim-assist on to get it to feel right. Once I had grown my arsenal of weapons and powers enough to experiment though, it all just clicked. Instead of feeling tedious, combat felt fun. And I appreciate all the modern touches BioWare added to the formula to help progress things, like fast-travel, compass waypoints, an aggressive auto-save system, etc.
I hated the Angara in the early part of the game. They felt shallow compared the alien races in the original Mass Effect trilogy, and their character design just rubbed me the wrong way. But as with the story, the Angara also grew on me as I played. When it was revealed that the Kett were turning Angara into other Kett via genetic mutations, I felt empathy for their horror. When it was revealed that the Angara were created by an alien AI to inhabit the cluster, I felt sorry for them. It was a long journey for me, but... I sort of like them now. Even though I still don't like how they look.
Andromeda is a big game, and it took me over 70 hours to finish it. Towards the end, there was a lot of back-and-forth going on, where I had to visit and revisit Elaaden and Kadara in particular, and that got annoying. I'm glad that BioWare made it so you can skip the animations zooming around each local part of the cluster, which I don't think was in the game originally. It's cool to watch some of them all the way through, but you have to do way too much of this to not be able to skip it at some point.
I liked that the game had a diverse set of characters throughout. The people around the Nexus and the Initiative outposts look like all types of people. I wish the same work had been put into differentiating the alien races, like the Asari, who - aside from Peebee, who looks like a blue Ninja Turtle - all inexplicably look exactly the same. This was not true in the original Mass Effect trilogy.
My original Andromeda run was started with a dopey looking white guy as my Ryder, and this time I picked a character who looked very different from that, to see how it might affect the way I play or how it might impact the story. It did make things more interesting to me, I think, because the character didn't feel as generic to me. Some of the voicework for Sara Ryder was funky, but overall it was a great experience.
I did notice that sometimes - as in real life! - the game's camera seemed to be calibrated to lighter skin tones, and so in cutscenes with a dark background, my Ryder would occasionally get lost in darkness.
There are a lot of little problems like that in this game, when you really start looking. People clipping through objects, animations that jump, the occasional repeated audio cue. But as I noted above, this is a big game, and it's hard to ferret out all of those issues, so I get it. None of them, save for one weird bug very early on, ever stopped me from progressing.
Having played through this game now and enjoyed it, I'm sad it was in such a bad state at launch. BioWare did a good job fixing things, but the damage was done, and many probably remember this only as a bad game/experience, which is a shame.
Mass Effect: Andromeda is a good entry to the Mass Effect universe. I wish things had gone differently so that we might have seen what adventures the Ryder siblings were off to next.
With Inktober behind me, I'm back to chronicling my adventures in games, game development, and other art. This time, I'm reporting in on my progress with Mass Effect: Andromeda, which I've been chipping away at each night.
I'm happy to say that I'm about done with the game - the mission I'm about to start has informed me that I can continue exploring the Heleus cluster once I've finished it, which I assume means it's the final conflict. I've put in a little over 70 hours at this point, diligently completing every side mission and exploring every location, sometimes to the point where a night's session is spent almost entirely running around the Nexus, talking to various NPC's and closing out quests.
I'll write about this more soon, but I've enjoyed most of my time with Andromeda. It took a long time for me to really warm up to it, but I've had fun with the missions, and the story turned out to be pretty interesting. I've gone from hating the Angara to feeling sorry for them, though the final mission may add a further twist to their plight - we shall see, I guess.
I'm going to go try to finish things up. It feels good to be free of my daily illustrations for a moment!
Since I can't seem to just play a single game at a time anymore, I've begun working through The Artful Escape in between sessions of Mass Effect Andromeda.
And why not? It's on Game Pass, and it's new, interesting, and fun. It was right there, waiting for me to try!
Anyway, it's something a little outside my normal type of game - although so far, it's very minimally like a traditional music/rhythm game. I'm hoping that the "Simon Says" portions don't get too difficult, because I'd like to see it through.
The visuals are trippy. The story is silly and light. The music is loud. I'm into it!
This is sort of a little thing (pun intended) but I find the scale in Mass Effect Andromeda to be much more appreciable than in the original trilogy.
Once you establish Podromos on the first explorable planet, Eos, you get a really good sense of the sheer size of things with your ship touched down next to the newly bustling colony. The ship is huge, but is still dwarfed by the collection of portable structures and equipment around it. And that's all settled in a small valley in one section of Eos.
It's cool to see/hear the shuttles coming and going, and each pod is packed with all sorts of tech doodads that really lend the world a believability that Mass Effect 1-3, having been made for older hardware, didn't often achieve. Especially the first game, where outposts on alien worlds were almost always just one or two simple, boxy buildings that were devoid of nearly all decoration.
There is, perhaps, a little more intimacy in the previous games because of this limitation - even the camera hugs Shepard closer, and with a tighter FOV - so the grand views of Andromeda aren't without their faults.
I have to give credit where credit is due, though. Mass Effect Andromeda is often a pretty game, if nothing else.
With Psychonauts 2 and Life Is Strange: True Colors finished, I'm back on Mass Effect Andromeda again.
I'm settling into a rhythm with this game now, and I don't hate it at all - running around planets and clearing out tasks to improve their viability is a bit mindless, but still fun. The lore of this game isn't as exciting as the original Mass Effect trilogy because all of those games is conveniently swept under the rug with this one.
There are definitely some things that bother me about this game though, particularly the graphics. I know I touched on this before, but I can't get over how weird some of the alien races look. Even the Asari (aside from Peebee) all seem to have this weird, dopey/sleepy look to them that grates on me.
Why do they all look like this? It's such a strange, pointless departure from the original games.
I still hate the Angara more, though. They look like the result of a bad plastic surgery.
I completed Mass Effect 3 for the second time, finishing out the remastered Legendary Edition trilogy. Like Mass Effect 2, I had almost no recollection of playing the original game 9 years ago, and so it felt like a new experience, save for a few bits here and there that had stuck with me.
Like my other posts, there might be spoilers in here. So if for some reason you've not played these games yet, it's a good time to stop reading.
That's right - this dude is back to finish the job he accidentally started two games ago.
It's funny - going into the Legendary Edition, most of my memories were of the first game, and I always considered that one my favorite by a long shot. I still look back on it fondly, but after playing them all once more, back-to-back, I feel a little different about it. Both ME2 and ME3 are excellent games, each telling an entertaining story, and each refining the experience in its own way. The sequels also feel more fleshed out and more focused than the first game, and just all around more polished. I'm not just a fan of the first game now; I'm a fan of the entire trilogy.
Emotion runs high in the third game. It opens with a full-scale Reaper invasion of Earth, and has Shepard flee in order to rally the other races of the galaxy to help stop the annihilation of all sentient life. At every turn you are reminded that the battle rages back home as you hop around space trying to make friends, recruit allies, and fight back the enemies.
The finality of it all is palpable, and this leads to many great moments in the story. For example, I'd had Garrus on my strike teams throughout all three games, and so at one point, when I took him up on some downtime at the Citadel, he and Shepard shared a really fun moment as they took turns shooting at clay pigeons. It was touching to see these two friends, who had been through so much, take a minute to appreciate each other as the fight of their lives loomed.
I also made a late-game decision to romance Liara, who Shepard had kept at arm's distance throughout the trilogy, and that lead to many satisfying sequences as the game drew to an end.
It was powerful to see all these characters grow throughout the series, and to show love for each other before taking on the final mission, which none may survive. It is a credit to all the work BioWare did with these games that those moments feel so real.
Weirdly, there is no boss fight at the end of ME3. That is something I did not remember. Instead, you face a series of difficult enemy encounters that lead up to the finale, where you can choose one of three potential futures for the entire galaxy. I was glad for no boss fight, but I still don't like the run-up to the end sequence. The AI you meet when you activate the Gauntlet is strange, and I don't like how it has to explain the entire story to you, to tie everything together. The story itself is fine though, and even though the ending of the game was altered a bit since the first time I played ME3, I didn't really feel like it needed it.
I chose to destroy the Reapers, along with all non-organic life, and it was good, though I was sad to see Legion be killed. I was surprised at the end, when after the Citadel was destroyed and all Shepard's friends had gathered to say goodbye, I was treated to one final scene where it is pretty heavily implied that Shepard survived the ordeal. That I had never seen before, but I guess you can get that small change to the ending if you manage to grow your defense force to a certain size.
So I did enjoy the game and conclusion pretty thoroughly, but I had a few gripes too, as usual.
I am still not a fan of the way Ashley Williams' appearance was changed. It still looks really overdone compared to her modest introduction on Eden Prime in the original game. I get that she has advanced in her career and gotten past Shepard, who she bonded with in ME1, but no other character in the game was redone in such a ham-fisted way. It's honestly distracting.
Though Ashley was the biggest change, I felt like all the women of Mass Effect were sexualized more, to lesser and greater extent. I'm not a prude, so I don't mind if games dare to venture into that territory - but after the modest start with ME1, where the focus was the story, and all the men and women had somewhat realistic proportions, ME3 (and to some extent ME2) just got sexier - for no reason other than, I'm assuming, to be more of a spectacle. This change isn't as prevalent in the Legendary Edition, since the characters all use the same model assets throughout the remaster, but it's something I noticed in my original playthrough and something that just felt off this time around as well.
Finally, though I appreciate all the added content the included DLC provides to the game, I didn't really care for the odd change in tone it carries with it. In one new sequence, you're lead on a wild goose chase around the Citadel after a failed assassination attempt on Shepard - okay, fair enough. This endeavor eventually includes every member of your crew in the same fight, which is fun, but throughout this segment, the characters make an endless series of action-movie type jokes. The jokes are funny, and I did have a good time hearing the lighter side of the crew, but this happens in the middle of saying goodbye to old crew members who you might never see again, working diplomacy between proud and jealous alien races, and preparing for what might be the final fight for all sentient life. It jut feels like too big a departure from the otherwise serious tone of the game.
Anyway, those are pretty minor complaints. I spent many, many hours playing through the Mass Effect Legendary Edition, and I loved the experience all over again. The Mass Effect trilogy is a masterpiece.
Now... maybe it's time to finally give Mass Effect: Andromeda a proper playthrough?
