What I Played Today: February 17

Mass Effect, Shadow Complex

I completed Shadow Complex today. The ending came sooner than I expected, mainly because the final boss fight didn’t actually require any skills that I had acquired throughout the game, but rather to stand in six different areas and push B while avoiding all the shit that’s going down around you. An expected route, I suppose, but you just showed us the Big Bad! Put him a big suit with a large knife or something and then I can shoot at him. For ten minutes! That would be...actually, no, that wouldn’t be fun. Whatever. Now it’s time to wander around and find all the items, which should be fun enough, mainly because the map system makes it obvious where I should go to search for them. Um...hurray.

I also got past the big obstacle that stopped me playing Mass Effect the first time (strategy: oh shit run away! Okay, okay, we’re good. Oh shit run away again!). I saved the asari woman from the forces of geth and the exploding volcano, and we chatted for a bit, and man did it become obvious that this was Tolkien in space with blue tits. The asari are sexy blue lady elves, the krogans are dwarves that happen to be taller than everyone instead of shorter, and turians are rangers with crazy faces. I know it’s hard to wander away from the usual traits, because there are only so many and trying to be different for difference’s sake is just as bad an offense, but I really wish we didn’t have to do the scene where the long-living race and/or alien has to explain to the poor simple humans what it’s like to live a long time. It’s boring, and I think everyone whose been around long enough already knows about the “perils of immortality” and all that nonsense. We get it. We, as humans, cannot comprehend such things, even though it is, in fact, humans writing this so we actually have no damn idea so the big lessons usually rings pretty hollow.

Sorry, got off a bit off base there. Let’s just say, it’s getting a bit exciting now, and I should try to get through this as best I can before I need to return it to its rightful owner in late March, which means that it’ll be a while before I pull out the other game I got from Gamefly, Dragon Age, because it’s going to be more of the same, but in fantasyland, and I don’t really want to play the same game twice at the same time. So it looks like I have a project. Hopefully nobody gets bored when I talk about Mass Effect every day.