I try to get out for a ‘big’ trip every Mayday and Hallowe’en, pull Christmas at home and … well that usually eats all my time. This year, I had the idea to sit still for the summer and see… then offers impossible to refuse seem to sprout like weeds in my inbox and all of a sudden things like ‘a normal sunday at home’ become unusual times. This is far from a problem, I’m just shocked at how my year suddenly snapped into focus in the past month. This is that effect of ‘time passing more quickly as you get older’ right? I guess like sliding down an inverse parabola, its a barely noticeable slope… then all of a sudden you’re staring straight down and the bottom is flying up to you.

I’ve taken on an ambitious project, one that I’m not quite sure I’m up to – scepticism has been expressed – but I think its worth trying; the worst consequence of failure is just the lost time, success could be glorious… Fortune Favours the Bold and all that. I realise now that the culture shock of the past half year had knocked me into a defensive crouch and I need to shake that off and just get moving again – because to do nothing is to just let the time fall though my fingers – ending up in the same place as to try and fail but without the chance of success.

Let me take a moment to apologise for the inherent cryptic… rambly… nature of all this. Speak ye not aloud on the internets and all that but my point from all this is:
1. decision trees – they’re a great tool to sort out things :)
2. keeping a fairly detailed six/eight month look ahead has saved my bacon repeatedly in the past, I recommend it.

Its eating my life. I’ve ground a Tauren Warrior up to L38, ten levels of that are thanks to two dungeon dives lead by the Wanderer butchering everything with his l85 Orc as myself & Mr. E trailed behind frantically trousering loot and trying not to attract any attention. The big things thats struck me is how much more painful this all would have been if I hadn’t had the rest of the gang to a) hand me a pile of gold and b) a stack of big bags on day one. Slot juggling all the loot and bits from mining, fishing and engineering would have been such a pain in the ass without all those bags. Also, I’ve run down my gold stash by about 70gps, the majority of which was blown on a pile of Moss Agates for engineering and a recipe for mudfish so I could actually level my cooking with fishing.

I’m not loving it the same way as I *love* Civilization, Homeworld, Mass Effect, etc but its got me hooked. I’m putting in four hour stretches traipsing about hills punching gorillas to mine iron because thats all I can level on. If someones going to tell me that there are spiderboots that let you climb steep slopes, I’m going to be pissed. Right now once I get to a flying mount then that’ll be it, all these people looking for help can kiss my ass, I’ll be HALOing in to grab their ores and dissappearing. Also; I’m getting to the point of hating the Alliance, ganking bastards. Iron zones tend to be hazardous, but I’ve my engineering up until I need magecloth and mithril materials now, so looks like I’m going to have to start sneaking into high level zones to loot metals again. This was what I was doing at the start in the Stranglethorn Cape – happily with a Kodo you can outrun a pirate on foot no matter what level he is.

I like some of the little quests; I find I wander about off course a lot trying to find my way up hills to that bloody node thats just out of reach. Fishing is another one that drags you off into wierd places, and one i liked was finding Princess Poobah off on Jaguero Isle. I could just see this battered tauren prospector listening to this tauren princess wittering on about needing her shoes back from King Kong down the coast and thinking “if you weren’t standing on that gold lode, no chance”. Also, now that I’ve found theres a point I’m shooting every random critter I can find – beaches and crabs are fairly efficient.

Certainly solves the ‘what will I do til Mass Effect 3′ question.

Civ turned up after that and its ebbed and flowed over time but I’ve logged thirteen hour days empire building on every version, every expansion pack since Civ 1.

The first one that worried me myself was Buffy, where you could for a time shuffle across channels – Sky, BBC, Channel 4 – such that you watched four or five hours on a Friday (I think) in a row. The false memories of conversations with these people who did not exist was when I decided it was time to ease up.

Harry Potter briefly – mostly the worrying thing there was the fanfic. Buffy/Harry crossover fanfic. Reams of it.

Mass Effect is getting there for me now, but I have discovered the counter! Revert back to earlier fandoms; short out those neurons wherever they are. Thus for the past fortnight I have been rereading the Potter series, going to the movie and digging out the old Drop in the Ocean crossover fanfics. Which oddly, lead me back to Spoils of Vanity, which I must say was actually rather good in its good bits – and has inspired me to get back to writing again on Book Two (own original stuff).

Which is a good result so I’m going to chalk up this fight fandom with fandom strategem as a success. Goodnight, internet.

I’ve paid the Twilight series little mind, given that everything I’ve heard about it has been crap, but I, xaosseed, heartily approve the above-linked. Sic ‘em, Buffy, stake him right through his weepy heart…

Death To The World

Death May Die

The flat is pretty ritzy. Views aren’t great but I don’t care. If I’m sitting on my terrace its because I’m reading the papers, so whatevers behind the papers isn’t important. I’ve inherited five planters filled with dead soil, I should stick some ferns or something in them but I’m not there yet. I had lots of fun trying to figure out why half my plugs didn’t work and half my wall switches did nothing (because the wall switches turn on the plugs across the room) but I got there in the end and bought floor standing lamps to be the ‘room lights’ for the study/guestroom. The rest of the people in the block are mostly little old ladies or women of a certain age so the under floor heating (centrally controlled) is set to furnace. I tend to come home and throw open the windows to purge the heat to a merely ‘stifling’ level.

Work has started to indoctrinate colleagues to cookies.

Guest capacity has been arranged; primary is study with fold out bed, lights and other reasonable comforts like curtains. Secondary is the living room. Where the couch folds out to a bed but there are as yet no curtains and the building across the road is a school. I’m getting fed up of people looking at me if I want to have my lunch on my terrace on a weekend; its a weekend; I’m fully dressed, its my balcony, y’all can fuck off. However, if you want to come visit and feel a compulsion to sleep in the nip; please let me know so steps can be taken.

The work is good, I was trying to think earlier about what I could be doing that would be better and honestly apart from doing exactly the same with a more awesome and sexy team, I can’t think of something; its very cool and interesting and the team is great but that they’re all up to their necks in kids so not much happening after hours.

It is the one thing I’m missing about PHC, the camaraderie and the age bracket of the peer group – there they were peers, here they’re a few years older and firmly on the ‘plus kids’ path. I guess its only to be expected, anyone who doesn’t have dependants has been packed off to somewhere grim. Life in the Village down south – everyone living with two minutes of each other – was also cool; genuine old school community. I can see how it’ll be like that here though once I get a grip on the language. Already I can recognise half the people on the bus in the morning, the staff at my local know my name, I run into people I know on the streets even though I know all of a half dozen people here. The French are somewhat like cats in this respect, they’re not very good with strangers but you just have to let them get used to you being there in the background and then they’re fine. Cats are an excellent reference for many things in fact. Hmm, there may be a lucrative self help book in there somewhere…

To conclude; have extricate myself from down south, Savage won the deadpool and am now ensconced in the land of fine wines and cheeses. Skiiing and Scuba are on the to do list after learning the lingo. Life is not to bad at all here.

Sure, if you’re not with La famiglia you’re unlikely to just be passing though – but Biarritz is just an hour up the road, Ryanair flies there too.

Well not really spoiler warning but hell, I don’t want to even risk it. Two things. Three. First – hurray! Awesome! Penny Arcade said ‘narrative juggernaut’ and I whole heartedly concur. I loved the story this time around.

Second – Hurray! Useable melee attack button! In fact the combat interface as a whole is rather nice, even if the gun technology has gotten a little retarded* the ‘I’m about to die’ indicator of meat injury – past shield damage – is this sort of pulsing encroaching veiny ring around the screen. This gets properly intense when you’re in the thick of a fire fight and are trying to scramble for cover. Combine this with the new melee button and you get moments of pure awesome where faced with a asari biotic about to blow the last half-inch of life out of you, it makes more sense to storm the position and beat them to death with the butt of your rifle because that keeps them too off balance to unleash force lightning on you…

Third – and this is the spoilerish bit – your Secretary? Comms Ensign? Whatever – pretty much parks herself at your terminal and coo’s ‘take me captain, I’m yours’ if you talk to her at all. This… well again … oh let me start from the beginning.

I figured out a few things a couple of months ago – that you could play ME1 again as a character, how to make the DLC’s work out here in the back of beyond etc, which all lead to me playing back through ME1 with an eye to exactly how it would crop up in ME2. I took Renegade John, who I’d thought had gotten a short shrift the first time around. This time he just went full-auto renegade – pretty much hunt down your rabid dog (Saren) by unleashing a fiercer one (Shepard). This was a lot more fun – ass kicking and crushing things, following Ubers ethos that was something like an Imperial Inquisitor; if I’m here, the time for ‘due process’ and such like is past. A Spectre getting called in means people are going to die. God will know his own.

Played though the newly added ‘When the Sky Falls’ DLC as part of this – it fit my ‘humans in imminent peril’ criteria for diversion from the mission so that was ok. Butchered everyone, lost the hostages, never mind. Lost Kaiden and Wrex on Virmire this time around – then pitched up in bed with the Asari. From there to the finale was truly awesome to see the difference between trying to do it as a low level dude the first time around and not on a second loop as the same class of character. Being able to *scare* the bad guy was cool.

But that was just prep. Set up for ME2** if you will. First time in I did it in what I like to think of as ‘Mass Effect the proper way’ – which is play through with what you think are the correct decisions, without trying to meta game it. Some times that means you stop someone from shooting someone, defend the helpless and find the dudes fish. Other times it means you chuck that fucker off a mega-scraper, beat a confession out of a suspect and leave the guys father to go down for a crime he didn’t commit. Its all about saving the galaxy – no, I don’t have time for that trivia or yes, thats a nasty threat that needs to be stopped.

So, I started as Renegade John once again and carried on as before. Started up, wandered around a bit, figured out what the hell was going on and had some issues. John had his head in a strange place by the end of ur-renegade ME 1 playthru. The first minute of ME2 is the Normandy getting shredded by The Big Bad. John wakes up in a regen tank… somewhat disturbed by this… as he wandered around, trying to untangle what the hell and getting no support from the fucking council despite hauling their lame asses out of the fire he gets access to another ship with all the aforementioned stuff – including Ensign Perky. Renegade John’s attitude has always been ‘end not the means’ but even then, theres a piratey line you don’t cross and banging one of your crew on the railing of the astro-nav console is on the far side of it.

Trailing about doing missions, I was struck again by ME’s judgement. The option to ‘take the soul-sucking monster for a concubine’ isn’t something a renegade does, its something someone terminally stupid would do! For the love of little apples, ‘we’re here to hunt it because it kills what it mates with’ does not logically lead to ‘hey sexy monster, lets get it on’. I did like that this time it was slightly more reasonable to get to know your crew this time. The characters of the shipmates are great – some I liked a lot, others not so much, but that was intentional according to the designers. There were some character related options I did miss; you were shoe-horned a bit into your attitudes towards certain things I could have done with an ‘ah fuck it’ option at a few places. Particularly some of your old crew – Liara and Ashley/Kaiden (depending) both give you static that you don’t stick around to argue and I’d have made other arguments. F’rinstance you wake up in Cerberus clutches but say you head straight to the Alliance they don’t want to know you, and you don’t get the option to tell Cerberus to bugger off and then have to take bullshit from people about working for Cerberus when you’re not allowed leave! But… I think thats a good indication of the depth of character interaction. I also liked that they let the fact that all these different people were stuffed on a ship come out – sometimes you’ve to go break up fights between some of the polar opposites, which is fun and also satisfying because its sensible that something like that should happen. You can have sensible conversations with a lot of the ordinary crew too which is very cool.

As before though, Renegade John doing it ‘properly’ gets the short end of the stick compared to the angelic Paragon Jane; where John was forced to make some tough calls because hadn’t gotten high enough in either renegade or paragon to unlock certain persuasive skills, Jane could just pull a Picard and make people magically see reason by the same stage in the game as all her choices had been Paragon. (Mostly. Sometimes even the best of people can’t resist stabbing up a brigand with an arc welder while his back is turned).

I loved the settings; again like the beach on Virmire, I would have loved to just wander around on some of the settings, they seemed awesome beyond awesome. The overheard conversations are fantastic, great little slices of life. Some of them are hilarious, some are kind of sad (asari girl who’s going to live a thousand years talking to her short-lived salarian step-dad about remembering him when he’s gone) but the amount of time I spent hanging around earwigging on randomers is a very good sign of how good those little pieces are. Some reviews had it that the settings were linear but given that the even slightly more open ones lead to me wandering around (as you would) trying to figure out where exactly in some giant skyscraper city you’d find an X-widget. I think the linearity was a good idea; look at all the chaos and adventure packed into just earth, in just our era. Imagine trying to sift out the signal from the noise on multiple worlds of significantly higher complexity. Thanks, but I’ll pass on that bit of realism.

Here again, where Renegade John had gone through it on ‘its the mission, stupid!’ and taken no chances with leaving live enemies behind, Paragon Jane had turned over every rock in the galaxy (even gone to new systems to find new rocks that might be unturned), fetched every stuck kitten out of its tree and councilled every stim addict and addled pregnant woman she could find. Thus, John went through, found stuff and did things, and then Jane would find the same rooms now stuffed full of people she’d helped or let live or variously touched before – crooks gone straight (John had executed them), psychic message-drones from reincarnated aliens (John had dissolved the reincarnation in acid), and addled fanbois trying to save the galaxy (John had menaced and pistol-whipped them iirc). Janes inbox also filled with random messages from people she’d helped and again had people falling over her to ‘come look me up when you finish doing whatever it is you do’.

The radio news has improved significantly between ME1 and ME2, from being kind of dull to being fantastic, often mentioning things that Jane had done in her previous adventures. The news on the scumpit of Omega was particularly brilliant, given they don’t like humans at all. Actually, one thing I do remember now – Illium, the asari planet – after wandering around for too long Jane was becoming twitchy at the ‘valley of the valley girls’ squeakiness. Didn’t affect me while I was playing John. Odd.

Missions. Mostly pretty good – I liked the unusual ones a lot too – a sneaky one with Kasumi, a sort of extended club crawl for Samarra, a stalk with Thane. All the rest were various frag fests on various terrain, fair enough, but I think a few more ‘Mission Impossible’ style ones like the finale where you can utilise the fact that you’ve got a spaceship, a shuttle, a hovertank and a buttload of spec ops people could be fun – even if its just a ‘fit the peg to the hole’ style of common sense and maybe a show down. I have to say I thought the main finale was a bit… odd, I don’t think their big reveal had the oomph they thought it had, to me it was just ‘wuh? really?’ but never mind. Essentially I thought their final mcguffin could have been given a different and far more satisfactory form, especially since they’d achieved some admirably grim and spooky settings and set pieces on some of the interim story missions. Difficulty through out was good; challenging enough that I hurt my hand pounding on the desk in frustration on more than one occassion, this is good, I want mileage out of a game. The various bad guys were interesting, the howling zombie husk hordes have gotten significantly nastier for ME2.

So basically the game splits in three blocs – main arc missions, recruitment missions and sidequests. The recruitment missions come in pairs of aquire team member and assist team member tidy up loose ends prior to suicide run. John, on ‘its the mission stupid’, again (again!) made the cardinal error of believing his briefings that ‘its of the utmost urgency’ that he go retrieve the SignalWidget. So he did. This then slightly later triggers the Kicker. Now, sensibly, the Kicker opens the Finale but also has a clock built into it. John was set to go deal with it but a bunch of the team were complaining about unfinished business. He threat assessed, dealt with the ones that were Clear and Present (you, with the plan to cripple a geth beachhead, we’ll do that – you, with the sickness, take some pills we may not survive this anyway), then set off to fix the Finale. Alas, he’d done too much before setting off on it, so by the time he did it, even doing quite well, the whole expedition turned into a blood bath with massive casualties, both recruited operatives and among the crew.

So, when the credits rolled and the option to continue or restart came up, I hit continue to do some of the missions I skipped…. and then was horrified to find it really was a ghost ship. Those two crew who were usually thick as gossiping thieves in the crew quarters? One of them didn’t make it, the other one just sits there alone now. Ensign Perky? Eaten. The wisecracking heatsink crew? Eaten. The two scots engineers who had some of the best lines in the game? Now theres just one of them. It was like the Ship of the Dead, I swear any sense of victory or satisfaction turned to ash.

Thus, replaying as Paragon Jane I ignored the boss mans prompt entirely, made sure that every single one of my crew were recruited and all tucked in snugly in the ship with loose ends tied up, closure achieved and various wayward children stomped on (yes, this was the Paragon path, I swear). Similarly, Jane looted the galaxy for ores and cash to make sure that the ship was kitted out and that everyone was holstering state-of-the-art and nothing less. Thus, when the Kicker came up again she struck a dramatic pose on the bridge and said “Do it NAU!’ sending the ship racing through the gates of hell and putting high cal cryo rounds from her Widow anti-tank rifle though the heads of anyone who got in her way. So, mission accomplished with much the same outcome***, except Jane returns to a ship full of cheering crew (even if Ensign Perky was a bit traumatised by nearly being liquidated) and sets out saving the galaxy again, this time with her squeeze on tap in the captains stateroom (Private sector – has its benefits over the old public sector Alliance Navy). Again. Even where this time John got the girl, it seemed cold comfort.

Thus ends ME2, with the teasers along some of the load screens of ‘hang on to your saved games to port to ME3′. Hurry the hell up Bioware! Though, from their pov, no hurry at all – I’m both shelling out for every DLC they drop and I even shelled out £50 for a Limited Edition Collectors version of the game just to get the DLC code for the limited armour and rifle. I am revenue stream for them, I’m guessing they’ll feed us DLC’s for a while yet. I can live with that :)

Mass Effect – if you haven’t played it (you shouldn’t have read this far) but do anyway.

* Two general technological things that hacked me off were the new ‘improved’ gun tech and the replacement of the Mako tank with the Hammerhead hovertank. First the gun-tech; I liked my old weapons; if they overheated up, then they took a while to cool down & become functional, you worked it into your strategies. Sometimes it was a pain, but you could always switch out to alternative weapons if the fighting was really thick. In ME2, all weapons use standard heat-sinks, basically universal ammo packs in function. The heat builds up as before but then you eject the heatsink and slap in another. Great, keeps a rapid rate of fire going… until you run out of heat sinks. This is gruesome if you’re using an Assault rifle which is supposed to be a storm of lead; multiple times I ran out of ammo for the rifle, then the shotgun and was reduced to plinking at the swine with my pistol. I could very much empathise with Zaeed’s long wistful discourse on his old assault rifle and how much he missed it. Solid step backwards in tech, plus I thought the old version with its ‘future, different’ feel was just more spacey and cool.

Second – Maaaako, come back all is forgiven. I was never one of the anti-Mako fanatics, especially since the replacement is ARSE! Again, maybe the maneuverability is better but the armament is crap, a rocket launching main gun, compared to the heavy railgun and coax machine gun of the Mako – in fact, all I want is my coax back, is that too much to ask? Why did you take it away in the first place!? When you’ve had to drive up to some stubborn Geth to pry him out of cover, you don’t want to pound him with high explosives – you want to shred him with machinegun fire or squish him under your tires. Oh yes, the Hammerhead doesn’t have tires. Boo. I want my Mako back.

** I finally got my grubby paws on it after a half dozen tries involving lots of different online and real stores and two different versions. Finally, finally I get it, install, start noodle about making sure the settings are optimised and that the online bit works, then I hit go. And stare at the screen as it flickers between two frames for a while before I realise, seeing this for the first time of course, that it had crashed. Never mind. Reboot. ME2 crashed a lot on me, at all sorts of random places, but I think it was mostly due to my machine over-heating.

*** The big choice at the end if ‘destroy the McGuffin or bring it back’ but doing it ‘properly’ I can’t think of any reason to bring it back. The entire game has been spent going site to site where research teams have been overcome and monsterised by dead and dormant pieces of kit from just these same people. Everything I’ve witnessed through out the two games says that contact with these technologies equals madness, death. Keeping it around and worse, flooding it with researchers/fodder is practically guaranteeing trouble. No way, not on my watch, boom was Johns thinking. Janes thinking ran more towards ‘even if I thought this was a good idea, you sir are an untrustworthy arse and you can kiss mine’ – Boom.

But seriously – a shuttle, for sale. How many movies have told us that some day we’re going to need to be able to use it in a hurry to save the earth from [insert problem here] so at least one of them should be properly mothballed somewhere. Though if its in the hangar next to the USAF’s 3rd Space Interceptor Squadron then I gets its not such a priority…

I am very glad though that Shuttle isn’t pulling a Concorde and being a big chunky evolutionary dead end. Its a damn shame we’ve no Concorde equivalent any more – have we passed Peak Supersonic Airliners? I do like Spaceship One and its various halfbrothers and cousins – they’re worthy successors to shuttle whereas Aires and Ariane are … just missing the point. One use rockets are not how we want to be tackling the gravity well. I’d far prefer we had a space elevator or zeppelin-mothership or some sort of magnetic launcher so we didn’t have to burn so much fuel getting fuel up the well but I’ll settle for whats there for now.

Effectively all her time since college has evaporated – she has no work experience despite being 6-10 years in (not sure exactly). Rumour has it she’s working these days in a field that requires no higher education and given that my appealing physical attributes are nil, this for me would be bad.

Thus, the ongoing embargo of truly interesting stuff goes on. Apologies to all. Invite me over some time and I’ll tell you a story but I’m not putting anything online.