Hello everyone,
Day 7 – what’s behind the door ?
A red trooper today. Apparently this is a Sith Trooper from the last movie. Do red troopers shoot faster ? Does this make them miss even more ? Maybe the red ones are the ones expected to get shot first ?
So … about that game ? Mass Effect hit the gaming scene and took it by storm in 2007. Gosh, that long ago ? You entered the game as the leader of the ground marines of the SRV Normandy, a brand new experimental stealth frigate dispatched to check out trouble on the colony of Eden Prime.
The cornerstone making this gaming universe different was Element Zero, a mysterious compound that allowed changes of mass. The science never makes sense but what it really means is characters that can shoot goops of light from their hands and otherwise be a little bit superhuman. Oh and it also helps mass accelerators if the mass is reduced to near zero. Pew Pew and light speed becomes possible.
A previously unknown set of alien entities is uncovered and their purpose is to return every 50,000 years or so and eliminate all spacefaring life in the galaxy. Their reasoning is that they have to prevent some almighty calamity coming in the distant future.
(Maybe they stole that background idea from the Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space trilogy, although the reasoning for the AI enemy there is properly explained)
Oh and you get a message from the last remnants of the previous cycle with a map that you can’t decipher.
It was a great series in its day too. The original story went from discovery in Mass Effect 1, to story development in Mass Effect 2 and then all hell breaks loose in Mass Effect 3.
However. The branching storyline was a bit messed up and they couldn’t pull off an ending that satisfied the hype.
I played through the first two games quite a number of times. Loved them to bits. The prologue of Mass Effect 2 was jaw dropping. (I’m not going to say much more because it’s a mammoth spoiler for games that have a remastering coming soon).
But while I did play through Mass Effect 3 once, I tried going back to it and couldn’t stay with it. There are a number of reasons for that, the big one being knowing the ending, knowing the emotional hoops that it puts the player through and knowing that some of the most beloved characters don’t make it.
It’s also because they messed up the continuation as well. Things that should not have been broken were massively broken in Mass Effect 3, like the quest system. The biggest complaint there was that it would send you to places that you just couldn’t get to in the game at that point.
It’s a really controversial opinion but the Mass Effect game I’ll play next is …
Yep. It’s Mass Effect Andromeda.
Pretty game. It arrived in a broken state but patches improved it and it was a very solid, well presented game when I played it earlier this year. And I massively enjoyed it too. I’d thoroughly recommend it to people who like a little (well, a lot) of story with their shooter.
But I think the reason I most like it is that whereas the first 3 games were leading to an apocalyptic future, this one is the opposite. Your people arrive in the Andromeda galaxy after a long voyage to find …
Chaos and mayhem. Instead of golden worlds, we have a dark matter scourge spreading across the Helius Cluster. It has damaged the worlds and you drop on to a planet hostile to human life, with aliens already there who are definitely not interested in having a cup of tea and talking things over.
That sets up the situation pretty well. But it manages to emerge from that doom and gloom to have you fighting for a better future to build from.
I liked that. And I’ll be playing it again sometime probably early 2021. (Deus Ex HR and maybe Prey first).
I think that’s it for today.
Stay safe, be well everyone.