Ethiopia

My war against France has not been going well. Rather than continue the pointless war of attrition thanks to my absurdly long supply lines, I’m working on discovering Mathematics, building catapults, and then capturing France.

Khmer Empire

With the sacking of Thessalonica, the Holy Roman Empire is no more. I learned from Eric that Justinian even made an impassioned plea to him to try and save his empire by going to war against me. He wisely wanted nothing to do with my army of horse archers and chariots and Justinian met his end. It wasn’t fair, but life isn’t fair.

Another lovely side effect of the destruction of the HRE was that I gained the Great Wall wonder. You can see the breadth of my empire in the screen below. Note my mighty barbarian-repelling wall. Marvel at how useless it is since it lies mostly in the interior of my empire. Also note that the Mongolians are settling above me. Whether or not I should kill them is still a question in my mind.

I also became Buddhist in this game since I captured the Buddhist Holy City of Constantinople (I know, haha). My work will be to spread its influence as soon as I can.

Portugal

The most pressing problems in Portugal are the oncoming barbarian swarms.

Other than that, Kublai Khan refuses to make peace, so my struggle continues. He attacked a swordsman and an axeman outside of his city with maybe six attackers and I miraculously fended them off. Thanks to that, the city will be mine next turn. Bwahahahahaha. Wish you made peace now, huh?

There are these little moments in Dragon Quest that are so lighthearted and ridiculous in the context of the tension of the narrative that I can’t help but laugh out loud. Tasked with re-entering the fairy kingdom to find a replacement Golden Orb, I noticed a cat outside a house. I don’t often talk to the animals in RPGs, but I’m sometimes struck with the desire to do so. This time the cat actually spoke. He told Dan that he was a magician disguised as a cat trying to get access to the fairy kingdom and asked Dan not to blow his cover. It’s tiny and insignificant, but it’s the little details like this that make me love Dragon Quest V. Yuji Horii is all about the small things.

Dan met with the Fairy Queen with the intention of getting a new Golden Orb, but instead found out that their attempts to make a new one had failed. They could only make a worthless imitation. However, all was not lost. A magical plan was hatched that only Dan could undertake and complete. By using a magical painting, Dan was able to travel back in time to Whealbrook, where I realized that I was not paying enough attention in the early game at all. Why did I realize this? Because I suddenly remembered interacting with a man dressed rather like me in purple in Whealbrook before. This man asked to see Dan’s Golden Orb and gave him some words of encouragement. The cleverness of it was almost too much. Future Dan had come back in time and swapped the real Golden Orb with the fake Golden Bauble. Ladja failed at his mission: he actually destroyed a fake all those years ago.

Beyond that, it’s also neat to get to talk with other people in the past and learn how they felt about Dan and Pankraz. Dan could even go and talk to Pankraz himself and fail at trying to convince him not to go to Coburg. It’s a well thought out sequence that doesn’t feel that cheap for a time travel story. I just love how Dan takes the time to tell his past self to stay strong and hold on. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to meet my past self after enduring the great multitudes of pain and sorrow that Dan has endured. What did Dan from the past tell Future Dan in response? “I won’t give up no matter how hard it gets, just like you said”

Golden Orb in hand, Dan returns to Castle Zenithia and raises it back into the heavens, awakening the actual Zenithians living within the magical castle. These winged dudes inform Dan that his next task would be reviving the Zenithian Dragon, which involves going to the Talon Tower and meeting up with some old enemies bent on stopping Dan’s progress…

Mega64 can be pretty hit or miss for me, but this was just hilarious and spot on. “Let’s go listen to some Weezer albums!”

They’ve really got my feelings on Sonic down pat.

After yet another long hiatus in this series, we continue where we left off: Dan, his children, and Sancho are en route to the hometown of Dan’s mother, Mada, but have decided to take a few detours along the way to see some of the people Dan hadn’t seen in the eight years he was a statue.

At one point Dan went into an inn in Whealbrook and had a nice chat with an old lady. Incidentally, her only line of dialog was to tell me that whenever hard times struck, she was able to get by thanks to being able to watch her daughter grow up. I wanted to laugh at how pointed the comment was, but I found myself struck by how tragic it was that Dan was denied that simple pleasure. Here was Yuji Horii reminding me that family is something worth fighting for, especially considering that Dan had next to no childhood and didn’t get to raise his own children either.

That little aside completed, Dan went on over to Mostroferrato to help out my father-in-law with a little problem he was having. Suddenly the task he set me on earlier in the game (check on a jar in a tower) made sense. There was an ancient evil sealed away in that jar by Rodrigo Briscoletti’s ancestors that he was tasked with protecting. When Dan went on over to check on it again, he found that the seal was broken. Immediately following that, a giant moose monster (Bjørn the Behemoose (haha)) rose from the sea, walked across the ocean, and attacked my party in a pretty cool-looking in-engine cutscene. After a hard-fought conflict, Bjørn was bested and resealed, saving my in-laws from certain doom and netting me the Ultimate Key.

A quick aside:

Looking at the boxart for this game, it seems that the “canon” choice for the Hero (Dan) is to marry Bianca since she’s the only option featured on the boxart and the Hero’s children are also blond in most of the official artwork.

Dan finally made his way to his mother’s hometown, Lofty Peak, and learned about her role in the events that had taken place. Madalena is being held in the Demon World by Grandmaster Nimzo. From there she was doing her best to protect the other world. In order to seal off the evil in the world, Dan would have to continue to gather up the Zenithian armaments with the Zenithian Hero, Dave.

Dan’s first step would be to find and restore the Castle of Zenithia, which seems to be submerged under water. On his way to the castle, he met a man named Dr. Agon (pay attention to this, it will be important later). As he descended underground and to the throne room, Dan and company discovered that there would be a problem with raising the castle. They needed the Golden Orb to do this. If you don’t remember, this was the same orb that Dan and Bianca found adventuring as children and that the Bishop Ladja smashed shortly after killing Pankraz. Dr. Agon suggested that the party go talk to the fairies…

Despite relatively good reviews from most outlets, Heavy Rain is something of a negative topic among bloggers. I’ve seen most come down on it’s mechanics being anti-immersive and some just outright hate the game and the way it is played. I haven’t finished the thing myself yet, but I’m not quite in the hate camp yet. I played Quantic Dream’s last offering, Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophesy in the States), so I knew precisely what I was getting and I’m enjoying that so far. It’s not perfect, but what game is?

The thing that I find most interesting is that there are almost no fail states in the game. Characters can die, lose challenges, get arrested, but nothing causes a game over. Game over comes when the game narrative is over, which is a great idea for what amounts to an interactive movie. I’ve strongly resisted the urge to restart chapters where I failed to do what was required of me two or three times now and only restarted once because a path that seemed like it was viable was invisible walled, causing me to fail. I thought that was unfair.

My biggest complaint has to do with the uncanny valley. So many of the models and shots in this game are perfect or near photo-realistic that the things that aren’t (mouths during dialogue, certain textures, cloth) just pull me waaaaay far out. The voice acting is also obviously European in places where it doesn’t make sense and they also make some strange errors about the way US cities work based on how European cities work.

I’m also not a fan of the tank-style control scheme, but what are you gonna do there? It is what it is.

Ethiopia

My campaign against de Gaulle has hit a bit of an impasse as his city has too many defenders (four archers) while my supply lines are way too far to resupply my front. A war of attrition has broken out instead and I’ve started pillaging French resources (Iron was the first to go) to ensure that an effective offense could not be mounted against me while I await reinforcements. I’ve also got workers building roads toward the heart of my territory in an effort to speed along the troops. This bloody encounter won’t end for quite some time, I’m sure.

Khmer Empire

This game is definitely going in my favor.

Justinian’s lackadaisical military attitude toward his neighbors to the south has turned into his undoing. Once My force of chariots was completed, we marched upon Constantinople, which was hilariously defended by a sole archer. The city fell easily to our assault and we moved onward to Thessalonica, but found our forces inadequate to take on the next city. We’ve also discovered a new city to the NE of Angkor Thom. They will follow Thessalonica once we’re able to reinforce our troops with horse archers.

Another great development was the discovery of copper in Angkor Thom’s borders. We will have that mined soon and be ready to take on the world next.

Portugal

My most troublesome game has started to produce some fruits. The discovery of Masonry allowed me to quarry the stone resources nearby, which buoyed me to the completion of the Pyramids before my rivals, allowing me to adopt Hereditary Rule and grow my cities past size 4 or 5. I also discovered Iron Working, leading to a rather fortuitous event.

That’s right, I’ve now entered a metal age in Portugal and I will be using that to my advantage in my campaign against Kublai Khan. It will be some time before I’m ready for the next part of my offensive, but his foolish soldiers refuse to end the conflict, so he must die.

I also discovered sailing, which might seem strange, except that it allows commerce across rivers and oceans, opening up trade routes to both China and Persia.

Normally I would be loathe to such things as cultural crossover in Portuguese lands, but a direct link to Shanghai, which seems to have both the Hindu and Jewish religions swimming around there, might actually help out with culture spread in my cities. I’ve got to start building up my armies now if I want to stand a chance against Kublai Khan.

…like many mechanisms of this kind your choices tend to come down to being an omnibenevolent supercherub or the Goddamned devil.

-Jerry “Tycho” Holkins

WARNING: SPOILERS

A member of your crew was double-crossed before he joined you. Eleven of his friends died as a result of that treachery and he wants revenge on the killer. Do you: A) Indulge his obsession and allow him to murder in cold blood when his target least expects it or, B) Convince him that his obsessive revenge will not bring him the closure he desires by obstructing his revenge attempt.

Later on a member of your crew who has been hunting a serial killer for hundreds of years asks you to help her bring said criminal to justice. The killer is a genetic aberration in her species who kills everyone she mates with (her species can mate with any species) and derives both power and an almost narcotic effect from her murders. There’s also the extra angle that this killer is the daughter of your party member, a woman who birthed three such monsters and had the other two locked away in isolation for the simple crime of their genes. Do you A) side with your crew and murder this killer to end her spree or B) side with the killer and kill your crewmate, ultimately gaining this serial killer as a party member and allowing her to escape free after your mission.

One of these two represents an actual moral choice worth thinking about while the other is noticeably less complex and, consequently, far less interesting. It may not be as obvious a choice as mass murder a crowd or buy them all ice cream, but it’s still pretty basic when you look at it. Will revenge really give Garrus closure? Does letting Sidonis live with his guilt represent a greater punishment? These are things we’ve confronted plenty of times before in these games. “Murder or mercy” is the bread and butter of the morality system, but it’s been seven years since Knights of the Old Republic and we need to up the ante here a little (Yes, I’m aware that morality systems have existed long before KoTOR. Giant Bomb lists 168 of them). In fact, Dragon Age: Origins, another Bioware game that came out in 2009, featured a system that puts this game’s choices to shame.

Perhaps it’s because DA:O was in development since 2004 (that’s five years to its release in 2009) while Mass Effect 2 has only a scant three years under its belt, but almost everything about the “morality system” in Dragon Age far exceeds what’s available to the player in ME2. To start with, Dragon Age dispenses with the notion of good/evil points. Your actions don’t move a light side/dark side meter up or down, they simply have consequences. More importantly, those consequences are pretty brutal no matter which outcome you select. Not to digress too far, but my character in DA:O was a Casteless Dwarf, something akin to the burakumin of Japan, and her sister was a concubine for one of the noble families elevated in status because she produced a son (dwarves in this universe inherit caste from the same-sex parent). When I returned to the dwarf homeland, there was a bitter power struggle going on and it was up to me to choose to help who I thought should continue the disputed royal line. The obvious heir was a brutal man rumored to be the one who poisoned the his brother (and rightful heir to the throne) in the first place, but he was in favor of reform of the caste system and contact with the outside world. He was also my sister’s husband. The other candidate was in favor of a strong assembly (the legislative body) and, while he was a traditionalist, he was well-respected and, more importantly, not rumored to be a murderer. It then became a question of supporting a despotic butcher who would work to improve equality at the expense of representation (and also keep my family at a higher status) or a more traditional ruler who would rule without bloodshed, but keep my caste down and stay isolationist (not to mention assure that my sister’s place in society would be compromised). In the end I chose to side with my family, but I almost immediately regretted it when the man I chose ordered the execution of his rival immediately following his appointment. Not long after, the assembly was also dissolved. I made a hard choice that had no real good results for everyone and that’s ultimately what real life is about: grey areas.

Back to the question of whether or not to kill Morinth or Samara, here is another interesting moral decision. Samara made irresponsible choices and had not one Ardat-Yakshi (that’s what it’s called) offspring, but three. Morinth’s crimes, at this point, were many, but her only choices in life were to live as a prisoner or to run and live as a hunted criminal. Even then, if you’re like me you’re thinking that this really isn’t that much of a decision. It amounts to supporting a serial killer or supporting an irresponsible mother looking to bring her daughter to justice. No matter how bad I feel for Morinth’s predicament, I, personally, couldn’t support her because she’s a sociopath and a murderer. That’s the real rub with the Mass Effect universe. Despite how good it is, despite how great the narrative is, and despite how much I love the games, its decisions are a constant disappointment boiling down to, in most cases, “murder or mercy”. Dragon Age constantly forced me to choose between “murder and murder”. Kill one person who had good and bad qualities or kill another with the same qualities. I’m not saying that all real decisions in games have to revolve around murder, there were some legitimately tough choices to make in the first Mass Effect (that still ultimately boiled down to “m or m” on a grand scale), like whether or not to kill a terrorist or let him walk free (his hostages will die if you kill him) or whether or not to spare the Racchni or commit xenocide, but even they skirted around the much more important decision of whether or not to utilize the cure for the Krogan genophage. Your only option is to destroy it. (SIDEBAR: The Krogan people were forcibly infected with a genetic rewrite that causes 0.999 of all Krogran pregnancies to end in stillbirth (SIDEBAR: The Krogan reproduce very rapidly and are quite aggressive)).

This is a tremendous missed opportunity. Sure, the genophage is addressed in ME2 since it’s a central part of the Krogan species’ identity, but even then the decisions you make are irrelevant. If you destroy the work done to correct the genophage (again), the scientist in your team claims that it doesn’t matter anyway, since he could easily duplicate all of the results if he had to. Saving it or destroying it seems to have no real impact on the world of the game. Granted, I don’t need to control my destiny to such a fine level in the games I play, but when Bioware goes out of its way to explicitly claim that my decisions have a large, direct impact on the world, I begin to expect my decisions to make a difference. Even the major choices I made in the first game seem to only have cosmetic effects on the second. I might get a non-story-relevant message from a character stunned to learn that I was still alive or thanking me for saving them back then, but then there’s this one side quest that played out the exact same way no matter what I decided in Mass Effect, except that the character model talking to me and the spoken dialog were slightly different.

Yes, I realize that decisions having a real effect make the world exponentially more complicated, but you shouldn’t promise what you can’t deliver.

“[Mature] really has two meanings when we apply it to media. One is ‘not appropriate for children’ and the other is ‘exploring subject matter in a sophisticated fashion. Ironically, the word mature when applied to games tends to have a very childish connotation.”

-Eric Caponi of Bethesda Softworks

In late September of 2009 a Mass Effect 2 trailer highlighting Subject Zero was put out as part of the ME2 hype machine.

Needless to say, I became very concerned. It definitely did not fit in with the Bioware aesthetic and it felt like it was trying too hard to be edgy. This was the “maturity” that I’m always up in arms about and I was pretty worried that Bioware was going to take a serious misstep with their “dark second chapter”. After playing the whole game through, I’m confident in saying that Subject Zero and the characters in this “edgy” game were more or less about what you’d expect from Bioware in that they are decidedly not two-dimensional and are actually interesting. That’s not to say that Bioware didn’t make a few mistakes with its decision to go darker for this second game (they even redid their logo in blood red…it’s almost funny).

Subject Zero (AKA Jack) may have a “seriously abused child” story that fleshes her out and makes her character actually make sense, but that doesn’t mean that they made no mistakes with Jack. Her outfit, if you could even call it that, is absolutely ridiculous. It feels like a grab for the adolescent attention span by making her dress in what amounts to a pair of pants, some belts, and tattoos (if it wasn’t so blatantly sexual, it could be a Nomura design). When will game designers learn that dressing women in this way is not cool or interesting? All they’re doing is enforcing the stereotype and furthering the divide between gamer and non-gamer. Who could possibly see the way that Jack is dressed and think it was designed for anyone older than a 13-year-old male?

The other Bioware attempts at making the game more dark, serious, and mature seem to have been carried out much better than Subject Zero. Every planet or space station that is explored is appropriately seedy and grimy. Gone are the sterile, clean blues of the Mass Effect Citadel. In its place we have reds-orange slums, planets so dominated by commerce that slavery is legal, prison ships, and war-torn wastelands. Running into the formerly naïve and innocent Liara T’Soni from the first game is jarring and depressing when you see how she has become ruthless, cold, and calculated in her efforts to bring down the Shadow Broker. Even Shepard has changed in the eyes of the galactic community thanks to his involvement with the shady Cerberus terrorist organization.

Mass Effect 2 also benefits from the complex social situations set up by the lore itself. Credit is definitely well deserved for those responsible for the universe’s depth and background. Alien cultures are fleshed out and the interaction between them, humanity, and themselves feels genuine and interesting. In fact, aside from the fact that humanity seems like a brilliant race able to work wonders that others cannot (no doubt an extension of that same “white is might” mentality that is subconsciously behind Avatar, Pocahontas, Dances With Wolves, etc.), I find that we’re treated appropriately for an up-and-coming species that is rapidly stepping on so many toes. Actually, let’s take my parenthetical a little further: why is humanity a special species here? Why are we the only ones to accurately see the threat of Saren and The Collectors? in a galactic community featuring multiple sentient species, it hardly seems probable that the only one that is like the current Western world is humanity. Then again, why would aliens be anything like us, culturally? Why would future humanity continue to be so dominated by white men? These questions are kind of wandering around, so let me just say that having a token non-western cast that ensured inclusiveness might have seemed pander-y anyway. Next paragraph!

While we’re talking about tropes, I also find myself wondering about the impact that the trilogy structure on the story of ME2. The first game had a story that revolved around mind control, domination, and indoctrination that culminated in a plot twist about the real enemy and the insidious nature of the greatest scientific technologies that sentient life depended on. It had weight and purpose and things happened. ME2 seems to drag along, treading water the whole way. Your crew’s various backgrounds and backstories take center stage, but at the expense of anything that legitimately moves the plot forward save for two things: 1. You learn that The Collectors are genetically modified Protheans being manipulated by the Reapers and 2. You learn that a human-inspired Reaper is in the works (and you destroy it). All that says is that the Reapers have decided that humanity is its only legitimate threat and worthy of being adopted into their strange genetic-mechanical history, but that ultimately means nothing. Not one thing that happens in this chapter of the trilogy can compare to the Reaper bombshell of the first game. In terms of story, ME2 is just ME1.5 (or ME1.125).

Mechanics is where ME2 takes major strides away from ME1, but in a direction that is both welcome and distressing. Mass Effect was a serviceable third-person shooter with a super-clunky inventory and interface and unfun vehicle sections. It sounds harsh, but it really wasn’t all that bad for a freshman effort by an RPG company to make a shooter (notice the caveats!) and it was helped along by its strong narrative and much stronger conversation systems. ME2 brings what some might call a pretty good shooter to the table along with all the baggage that such a thing merits. Gone are many of the RPG elements of the first game (weapon skill, a glut of powers and passive skills, statistic-determined shot accuracy, and ammo types) and in are oversimplified options and a streamlined story structure to go with it. In a sense, Bioware did something right by avoiding pairing the slow, deliberate pace of the first game with the new, frenetic shooter engine, but at the cost of the weight of the narrative.

As I said before, the story is nothing to write home about and I attribute that mostly to the new mission structure that the game is hampered with. Each little action section takes place in an instanced area outside of the normal exploratory zones, lasts 20-30 minutes, finishes up whatever relevant story points are specific to that mission only, and then dumps the player out to a Mission Complete summary of their exploits as presented to the Illusive Man. I’m not sure what it is about the clear separation of action spaces and non-action spaces that peeves me so much, but I imagine it has everything to do with the way that the story parts were just as integrated with the action throughout most of Mass Effect. One sidequest in the original had me engaged in a firefight in the same exact place I’d just bought armor from half an hour ago. ME2 has rooms that the player can only access to start up their missions when said mission is available. There were very few locked doors in the first game. If I see one in ME2, I know a sidequest will take me there later. The zones in ME2 are merely hubs with shops and non-combat quests.

Combat quests are bizarrely chosen as the main mode of exposition in the game, which I’d normally be ok with, except that their focus is so laser-focused on whichever crew member’s backstory it is revealing that the third member of your party is often ignored. I couldn’t help but wonder why the game didn’t take advantage of my entire three-man squad in these story interaction moments since it’s always been my favorite part of Bioware games. For example, on Samara’s conversation-heavy loyalty quest, your third companion might as well not be there and he/she/it actually seems to disappear once it begins with no real explanation. He/she/it was there before we went into the apartment to investigate the murder, but then I didn’t see him/her/it again until after the mission. The lack of companion interaction is simply inexcusable after the shining examples set forth in the first game and Dragon Age: Origins. At any given quiet moment in DA:O, two of the companions following the Grey Warden can spontaneously burst into conversation about something. These talks are multi-topic connected affairs that have a complete arc to them throughout your travels. Mass Effect relegated these mostly to elevator rides around different places where they were there to help deal with the dead time in their concealed loading screens. Aside from one moment that I had to trigger in the Citadel by having two specific party members with me, there was not one bit of witty banter or conversation between my companions. I know this is supposed to be the “dark, serious second chapter”, but lighten up guys. We don’t have to spend our entire mission in steely, concentrated silence. A quip here or there would be more than welcome.

We can’t talk about things removed from the game without mentioning the Single Worst Thing About Mass Effect 1, the Mako tank. It handled poorly, was used for boring exploration, and was completely out of place with the rest of the game. It was like it was the 90s again and every game needed a vehicle section (game designer protip: we REALLY don’t need vehicle sections shoehorned into our games). Worst of all, it was associated with planetary exploration, a boring slog through the terrain of each planet to look for mineral resources and other artifacts that existed to provide money and experience. One correct lesson was learned and the Mako was excised from the game. The designers didn’t quite understand that a lot of the Mako hatred stemmed from planet resource mining, so they retained mineral mining in a different form. If you were the commander of an interplanetary space ship and you needed to mine resources from a planet, would you want to manually scan the planets yourself before sending down a probe to retrieve the resources? No, of course not. You’d have your engineering and mining teams handle all of that busy work while you managed other parts of the ship. As the player, I’m ostensibly Commander Shepard. There’s no reason why I have to tell the probes whrere to go. I don’t want to and it bores the hell out of me. If one aspect of your game (upgrades) is inexorably tied to a cripplingly boring aspect of your game (planetary scanning), then I think you need to reevaluate the way that you’re handling that first aspect

For my final nitpick of the game, I’d like to say that a PC version of a game should always have scroll wheel functionality if your interface allows for scrolling. Why do I have to click on a down button to scroll text? When are we living, the stone age?

By now I’ve realized that it looks like I really don’t like this game. I’ve got a lot of negative things to say about it precisely because I feel like it missed so many opportunities to be really great instead of just great. I wasn’t kidding when I said that the shooter mechanics were a leap forward. Everything from shooting enemies to throwing around biotic powers just feels crunchier. There’s no sweeter feeling than launching a ball of biotic push energy at a curve and watching it impact with a target and launch him off a platform. No. Sweeter. Feeling.

The game also offers just enough variety in its loyalty missions to keep them from becoming too stale. Most of them are combat affairs, but some, like Thane and Samara’s, feature no combat at all while others, like Jack or Tali, have combat interrupted by long conversations of narrative sequences which connect the player with the characters a bit more. Even Grunt’s straight arena setting is punctuated by a battle with a thresher maw whose mechanics are not seen again anywhere else in the game.

Despite the lack of real story, the game does also feature the best characterization I’ve seen in a while for a “dirty dozen”-style narrative structure. Team member depth varies widely (Zaeed has no dialog tree associated with him at all while Jack, Miranda, and Thane all feature long backstories and conversation trees), but each member does have a defined arc that is sometimes unique, funny, or tragic (or all three). Even non-party member crewmates have dialog allotted to them in more meaningful ways that the prior crew of the Normandy. This is all in the service of motivating the player to save them, which is another great narrative choice by Bioware.

SHORT DIGRESSION WHOSE PURPOSE WILL BE APPARENT SOON…

Whenever we want to talk about ludonarrative dissonance, Final Fantasy VII will inevitably come up. In the late game there is a meteor set to strike the earth after a fixed time period…except it isn’t. The player can spend millions of hours racing and breeding chocobos while staying in inns (which should technically be advancing time by a full day) instead of progressing the story. There is no point where the meteor strikes because Cloud was too busy hanging out at the Golden Saucer playing a stupid snowboarding game. The narrative is at the player’s mercy.

Every person who plays Mass Effect 2 will have his crew (minus combat party members) abducted by The Collectors in the endgame. Most players probably think they can continue to fool around and expect to save the crew before they are killed. I completed all the sidequests expecting that I wouldn’t be able to return to them and in the interest of boosting my level higher. When I finally reached my crew in the endgame, all but one (or two…it’s not many) had been murdered. Granted, that one will always survive no matter how long you take breeding chocobos (aka: scanning minerals), but the rest of your crew is permadead, leaving your ship empty in the open-ended postgame.

There’s not enough of this in video games. If you’re telling me to hurry and do something, I’d better damn well have to hurry, because otherwise I feel cheated when I see the man behind the curtain. JRPGs may be the biggest offender in this dissonance, but it’s not alone. Consider the heavily scripted shooter where I can spot the “actors” up ahead standing stationary until I get close enough to trigger the event that kills them. I can stand for an eternity watching my comrades stand in an exposed corridor with shooters at the end, but they’ll never die until I get close. Counter that with Dead Rising and its brutal time system. If you wait until 1600 on Day 2 to save this one person, guess what? He won’t be there. The zombies killed him. If you don’t complete the next story objective before the timer runs out, the rest of the game is closed off to you. Events will no longer transpire in that way and you’d better reload your save. That makes perfect sense for a game where haste and time management are issues. When someone tells you to do something quickly, they mean it. I don’t like to be blatantly lied to. Mass Effect 2 is honest in that respect.

I guess that’s really all I have to say about Mass Effect 2. It’s a fine game that you should own, but it also brings up a lot of issues about game design that I hope Bioware confronts for the concluding chapter of the saga.

Contrary to what might be expected, I actually don’t pay much attention to news when I’m stuck in the house all week thanks to a snowstorm so this week’s update will just be about my Civ games.

Ethiopia

Perhaps my strongest civilization position comes with my first game as the Ethiopians. Thanks to lucky placement of resources, I’ve got access to copper in this civ, so I spent the last week producing Axemen to try and conquer Charles De Gaulle’s France to the Southwest of Ethiopia. After pumping out and moving four Axemen into French territory, it was finally time to attack Orleans.

The long struggle cost me most of my forces, but I was ultimately able to conquer Orleans. I probably should have razed it since it will have resource conflicts with Paris, but I’ll just have to make do with what I’ve got.

I plan to continue my conquest of France in this game and then focus on building up and expanding a bit. I’m falling behind on cultural technologies and I need to start building up my empire for real conquests down the road.

Khmer

Unfortunately for the Khmer empire, there seems to be a distinct lack of either copper or iron within my borders. Since that’s no way to wage a war, I instead decided to try and expand into some copper with some settlers and live peacefully until then. That was the plan until I noticed that Justinian moved some workers right on to my border. I couldn’t resist such a gamble, so I jumped into his borders and nabbed two free workers. I guess Justinian’s kind of a peace-monger, because he allowed me to sue for peace a few turns later.

Then he moved two more workers on to the border. You can guess what I did then. Again, we sued for peace a few turns later. Now he’s got an archer wandering around my borders and I’m wondering if an attack is imminent, but in the meanwhile, development of my empire is proceeding along rather quickly thanks to the four free workers.

In this game I’ve got some Chariots about to be produced to try and take over Justinian’s forces. Since chariots get a boost against Axemen, I might be able to get a tactical advantage against his technologically superior forces and have a relatively easy conquest.

Portugal

The problem game hasn’t gotten much better. I foolishly struck out against Kublai Khan in a gamble to try and catch him before he had copper-based units (since I certainly don’t have any). All I did was anger the Axemen who brutally murdered my Warriors. With no horses, copper, but maybe iron, this could get ugly since I have no way of really fighting back. Add to that Eric on the other side of my borders and things could get ugly.

I also couldn’t resist stealing a worker from Eric, which he didn’t notice for about five turns. We’ve made peace again since then.

I may be screwed in this game. I’m not quite sure how to proceed now since I haven’t got any real military tech to back me up. I’ve just got to pray that discovering Iron Working will reveal an iron cache somewhere nearby.

One of the first major features on this blog was a Villains of Final Fantasy series that ran for 13 weeks covering the main enemies of every numbered Final Fantasy game from I to XII including X-2. With Final Fantasy XIII launching in the states in just over a month, I figured it’s high time to give some recognition to the teams who are actually responsible for bringing those villains to justice and saving the world. I bring you the Heroes of Final Fantasy.

Week 1 – Final Fantasy I

The first real Final Fantasy story features four main characters in your party of heroes.

Firion

After witnessing the murder of his adoptive parents by the ruthless Empire, Firion did what any kid in these games would do and headed to join the Wild Rose Rebellion where he was uncharacteristically turned away for being too young. After proving himself to be worthy by slaying some beast or another, Firion and his pals are finally allowed into the Rebellion. Despite being the main character and the party leader, this game is arguably more about Leon in the same way that the Star Wars movies were ultimately about Darth Vader and not Luke.

Maria

Leon’s sister whose parents were also murdered at the start of the game. Throughout the story Maria is teamed up with Guy and Firion searching for Leon and opposing the Empire. Not much else to say beyond that.

Guy/Gus

With even less backstory than everyone else, Gus is kind of a mystery aside from the fact that he and Firion are close friends. Oh yeah, he can also talk to beavers. No joke.

Leon

Despite spending most of the game as the Dark Knight and opposing the heroes, Leon is technically one of the good guys. When the Emperor is finally killed, Leon steps in to try and take over and he’s only stopped when the forces of hell depose him. Not too shabby.

Coolness:

Despite mostly being Star Wars ripoffs, these guys get points in my book for being cool enough to get invited into the Wild Rose Rebellion, which also has a pretty sweet name. Leon also has a Darth Vader thing going for most of the game, which is trite, but not too bad. Finally, Guy can talk to beavers. That’s worth at least 2 points there.

7/10

Hero Quotient:

Toppling an Empire is pretty big stuff, but that’s nothing compared to fighting said Emperor after he returns from Hell to destroy the world. Plus: what kind of hero team doesn’t talk to beavers? Still, it’s not too much beyond standard fare for these adventuring groups, so they only get average marks here.

6/10

In news that you never thought you’d ever hear again, a new Sonic sidescroller for the home consoles is set to hit this summer!

After countless missteps by Sega, it seems like they’ve finally listened to the fans and decided to release a sidescrolling Sonic game. Insane. Will it be any good? God help Sega if it isn’t. It will finally prove that the franchise should stay dead, but if the revival is successful, we could have a lot of fun headed our way soon.

Civ IV Game Progress

Progress has been somewhat hampered by busy schedules, weather, and partying, but we’ve started to move along in our respective Civ games and things should start to get busy soon. In the first game we started, Eric named me Zara Yaqob, a default name, and I was randomly selected to be the Ethiopians. I don’t have a lot of experience with these guys, but their Unique Unit (UU) and Building (UB) both come in the early game, so I’d better hope I find some opponents quick so that I can start attacking as soon as possible. I intelligently built a worker in this game first, so I’ll be able to start chopping down forests to speed up the production of my settler and start claiming some resources.

The little bit of exploration I’ve done shows that this is a very strange map type. It’s a flat world with no wraparound, so the leftmost border is it. Since I’m so close to it, this might be hell on my logistics if I try to wage a battle of any kind, but if I have plenty of opponents between me and the other edge of the world, I might just do ok.

My second game has me as the Khmer empire. If you observe closely, you can see the black outline of a city from the Holy Roman Empire (which was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire) crowding my borders.

Unfortunately for me, the Khmer’s UU doesn’t come until closer to the Middle Ages where it replaces War Elephants. That’s not to say that I won’t immediately try to conquer Justinian if I get the chance. Taking an extra city is just the boost I need to get a strong head start on Eric.

The third game has me playing as the Portuguese, Eric’s nemesis in his last major single player game. A civ definitely geared toward the middle to late game with its naval UU and Custom House UB, I’d actually be more than happy not to encounter too many AI before I have a chance to build up. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t see things my way.

I’ve met both the Persians and the Mongolians…great. At least I’m dealing with Kublai instead of Genghis, but that means that I’ve got two Civs with strong early-game UUs nearby. I’ve located the Mongolians, but I’m going to have to act fast to claim territory and conquer at least one of these guys if I want to stand a chance.

Also note that my score is way less in this game thanks to me taking an extra turn to optimize the location for Lisbon. We shall see what that extra turn of production will cost me. Should I get that settler out quickly enough, I can start to optimize my economy for war and make short work of at least one of these enemies. If I don’t, there’s no guarantee that Eric won’t come steamrolling in and conquer the three of us.

It should be no surprise to devoted readers of IBNttT that I love Civ IV. Over my gaming lifespan, I’d wager a guess that (WoW aside), I’ve probably sunk more hours into the Civ franchise than any other. The series is that good.

I can’t quite remember what sparked the most recent return by my brother to the game, but he started playing it again, sparking my interest yet again. If I didn’t already have Mass Effect 2 to sink time into, I’d be playing Civ IV like mad right now, I’ll tell you that. As a compromise I decided to start some Play By E-Mail (PBEM) games with him instead. Three games, to be exact. I plan to make weekly reports on these games and our status, hopefully without giving too much away to my enemies (I’m looking at you Eric). This can either be a terrible idea or a great one, depending on how well I do, so I’m pretty excited about it. Since we’re still at the once city stage with all three games, I won’t go into any detail today, but I might take some screenshots for tomorrow or next week and put some up.