Mass Effect 2

Over the weekend I beat Mass Effect 2 and was surprisingly disappointed.  I'd heard a lot about the series, especially with the third installment just recently releasing, and figured I'd test my mettle against it.  I mean, it's made by BioWare and it's hard to pass up any of their games.  I expected something like Dragon Age, really, and that's what I got.  The problem is that it felt like it was dumbed down more than it should have been.

Looks like it's pretty epic, right?

My main problem with the game is its length; it's just too damn short.  I beat this game in under 20 hours, and that's just barely the minimum for today's RPG standards.  Yeah, this isn't strictly an RPG, but hey, the genre is RPG-Shooter so I'd expect at least 20 full gaming hours.  This includes the main storyline AND all of the side quests that I could get my hands on, not including the paid DLC.  Part of the problem may be that I had the game on Normal, but I died a few times, and if I'm being forced to turn up the difficulty to get myself to die more often so that I can play the game longer, there's something horrifyingly wrong.  One good thing about the short game is that you can beat it once and then load your character back up at the start for round 2.  In my opinion, though, that's not a replacement for a longer, more robust line of main and side quests.

This gets really old, really quickly.

Exploration is such a waste of time in this game.  In most RPGs, when you explore you discover new fights, new items, and a myriad of new quests to begin.  In this game, however, you go from planet to planet and your exploration only gets you the occasional surface mission and some resources.  Resources are great, and are required to get the best upgrades, but the process to get them is so damn slow and boring that it's not worth it.  You have to use a scanner to look over the surface of the planet and then launch a probe when you find a significant source of materials.  There are so many planets to explore that this gets tiresome; it was fun the first few times, but I found myself wishing for something more exciting very quickly.  There's also a few times that you zoom around on the planet in a vehicle and gather data, which is fun, but there are less than ten missions involving that.

The character customization is decent and reminds me of Dragon Age.  Since the two games came out at roughly the same time, that's not surprising at all.  There's also a good array of characters and classes, giving quite a bit of replay value.  I'm disappointed that you can't swap classes when you start your second run-through with a character that you've beaten the game with.  You can retrain your powers using your resources, but there's no option to retrain class that I've seen so far.  The game play is akin to Gears of War or Operation Raccoon City, and the cover system is pretty smooth.  One thing that bugs me about it though is when you need to move over cover: you need to get into cover and then climb up.  Why not just have a climb button or a vault option?  I don't want to get into cover when there are no enemies around, I just want to get up to the next platform!

I like all of the different species in the game; they add spice!

One final thing to gripe about are the planets that have towns.  There are just a few of them, and each one is really small.  It is relieving to not have to fly your ship around and scan for things to do, though.  The shops allow you to buy upgrades, and the townspeople usually give you some side quests to perform.  The inhabited areas are also where you will find all of the missions taking place.

This game has its flaws, sure, but I still had fun playing it.  It has a good story and addictive game play; it just falls short of being a great game.  The exploration mini-game can be unbearable, some of the controls are awkward, and the areas you can explore on foot are just too small.  It's possible that the DLC would increase the game time and world considerably, but I don't know that I want to shell out the Microsoft Points for them.  All of that being said, I think I'll still check out Mass Effect 3 to see if they fixed any of the flaws that I found.

Day Two: Downloadable Content and Magic Sword

Downloadable Content, or DLC for short, has to be one of the most insidious items ever created for human entertainment.  Take, for instance, a game like Fallout 3.  If you aren't satisfied with the 20+ hours of game time already built in, why not spend $10 on DLC that will extend the game's life to 25?  It'll add a bunch of new weapons, armor, and perks!  Yeehaw!

Those of you who've purchased DLC know the deadly truth, though, that the first purchase is only a gateway.  Once you've gotten those few extra perks and quests, you just can't live without getting every single DLC pack that exists.  I'd make some vague reference to Pokemon, about having to catch 'em all, but I'm just not in the mood.  We all try to rationalize this with vague excuses like, "You can't have all of these new weapons without new quests to try them on!  And with all of these new quests, I'm going to need this other pack so that I can make my own ammo!"  Pretty soon you're looking at credit card debt of $3000 and a potentially serious psychological disorder.  As far as I'm aware, there's no cure.

My trek through the wasteland has been delayed until next week, so expect some more random gaming thoughts until then.  I have to compile more data before I have anything to say that anyone will actually give two shits about.

The other thing on my mind today is Magic Sword.  From what I can tell, the game is an arcade port to the SNES.  I've been playing it a bit on my phone and though the controls are lacking, which isn't the fault of the game, I'm happy to say that it's a good waste of my time when it's needed.  It kind of reminds me of a horrible, nightmarish cross between Golden Axe and Zelda 2.  You climb a tower as some kind of Fabio reject and fight enemies, gather items, and defeat bosses to earn points.  Along the way you gather approximately a million keys to open random doors.  Seriously, every fucking enemy seems to have a key... which makes total sense to me.  What skeleton or minotaur doesn't want their own room with a lock?  Anyway, so the points you earn really don't do diddly squat.  I think that you're able to get some extra lives, but really it's just the old arcade gimmick:  Earn more points then your friends and show off your nerdy power.  Of course today these scores mean absolutely nothing.  Back then they meant very little as well.  Who in their right mind bought a game for the Super Nintendo whose main goal was to earn points?  After Atari, gamers were looking for an experience where you could conquer your enemies and overcome obstacles.  A scoring system just no longer works like it used to, besides, what kind of sense does that make in real life?  If we were all scored on a system like Magic Sword, I guarantee we wouldn't have any extra lives.