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.

That’s a great advantage for me, because I really don’t have much interest in sport, and outside of office hours the radio is pretty much wall-to-wall sports shows.

I thought I might share my links to some of the shows that I listen to, for the benefit of most and the detriment of some.

Arguably the best tech podcast from the UK was LugRadio, but it’s dead now.

• The first recommendation is This Week in Tech, which is presented by the Mr. Rogers of Podcasting, Leo Laporte. TWiT is the flagship of a whole huge list of podcasts and live content, with Laporte in the middle. He was a presenter on G4/TechTV along with Kevin Rose and others, and he makes extensive use of that echo chamber network to get good guests. http://twit.tv/twit
• The Second recommendation is actually a radio show, but since there is no NPR station in Ireland, I opt for the This American Life podcast. It’s lefty and urban-centered, but the stories they tell are usually fascinating, and they stick with topics for more depth than most journalism gives. Recent episodes have included a great overview of the financial crash, and a day spent with the employees and customers of a rest stop off the interstate. The main component in all their stories is a first-hand account from the people involved. It feels more genuine and more interesting than a third party account. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Podcast.aspx
• This American Life put me on to The Moth, which is a story-telling forum where people give accounts of outlandish events in their lives, like participating naked in an on-stage Bacchanal at Burning Man, or the tale of a lone American woman crossing through African civil war territory and what happens when the soldiers stop the truck and take her away. The stories seem more fantastic, but the requirement that they be told without notes makes them spontaneous and amusing. http://www.themoth.org/podcast
• This Week in Law is hosted by Denise Howell, and is a podcast about legal issues that have come up in the tech domain. It’s particularly interesting to get the lawyer’s-eye-view on DRM, copyright and cases like the recent MySpace Harassment Saga. http://www.twit.tv/twil
• The Economist and The Guardian both have excellent podcast directories with content both short and long. http://audiovideo.economist.com/ http://www.guardian.co.uk/podcasts
• Finally, two gaming podcasts are worth a listen. All Games Considered won the Ennies for best podcast, and they seem to get really good interviews and coverage of what’s going on in the P’n'P RPG world. Yog Radio is specifically concerned with Call of Cthulhu and includes some brilliant guest talks and coverage of scenarios and source books. http://www.agcpodcast.info/ http://www.yog-sothoth.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=60

Of course, you need proof of address to get a PPS number too. They recommend using a recent bank statement. For a moment, I thought I was in a classic Catch-22 situation. Upon a moment’s quiet reflection and a quiet reminder that Ireland is a good and reasonable place, I stumbled upon a solution.

The Social Welfare office will not bat an eyelash if you show up with your passport, residency card, and your Irish spouse’s proof of address. I brought my marriage cert to provide the crucial link between me and my spouse, something I considered necessary given we have different surnames, but the civil servant waved it away and said “We don’t need your marriage cert, this is fine.” Apparently being able to place your hands on a piece of mail is both necessary and sufficient for proving one lives in Ireland.

Then again, it might have been that the mail I chose was a confirmation letter regarding the wire of money from my American bank account to the Wanderer’s Irish one. Wires are serious business, as was the quantity of money being wired. (Pro tip: If you’re wiring money abroad, verify the receiving bank can deal with foreign currency and wire the money in your home currency. The rate will be better. Free money is a good thing.)

The stars have been aligned for me this week. Registration was painless and almost enjoyable. The weather has been sunny and mild, even straying into Angelino levels of lovely. And when I showed up at the Social Welfare office armed with hours and hours of knitting, expecting to queue behind hundreds of dole/welfare recipients signing for their cheques, there was no one there save a cheerful civil servant who watched me take a ticket, then called me over. The entire PPS number application process took about ten minutes, and that was only because I took the time to fill out the form in legible block capitals.

Now I really don’t have an excuse for not finding a job.

That was my first mistake.

Now, let me just stop you goddamn Linux people now. Fuck off. I’m not installing Linux. If you want to preach the virtues of Ubuntu or whatever, go to some loser techie site, and do it there. I really don’t care. Really. (Editor’s Note: And if she wanted Linux on that machine, she’d install it herself.)

We finally decided that this past weekend was a good time to do the deed. So we got all set up. The first obstacle was that amount of crap on her machine. It’s an older system: a Dell Inspiron 1150, with a 30b HDD packed to the rafters with knitting patterns and Power Point slides. So, gotta get ‘em off. So, I’m transferring away and Bam. “Your estimated wait time is 2430 hours.” Right…so assuming I don’t have an entire goddamn season to spend on this, I’d need to figure out what the hell is going on. I guessed it was just misreading the file sizes, said “Whatever,” and let it tick. The whole thing took about 4 hours to backup and verify. Fair enough. Of course, once everything is backed up, Dixie pointed out, “Oh, you didn’t need to back that up.” Well…shit. What’s done is done, and it’s better to have the file and not need it, etc.

So, that went relatively smoothly. Next came the Actual Installation. “Where are the installation CDs?” After producing several CDs of applications that came with the computer, the laptop’s owner concluded she did not, in fact, have the Windows installation CDs.

Bollocks.

Right. No CDs. Well, we can order ‘em from Dell, but it’ll cost an arm and a leg, and will take forever. On top of that, it’s freaking XP Home. No, no, no…this will not do. Then it turn out that Caltech has a site license for XP. Yay! Everything is saved. What’s better, one of our friends has already burned a copy and we can yoink it. The day is saved, right?

Is it fuck. Strap yourselves in, bitches, we’ve only just begun.

The laptop refused to boot from the CD. I tried a 2nd CD that was burned, just in case. Nada. Hmm… Let’s see if it’s reading the CD at all: boot to Windows, pop in the CD, wait. The drive just spins there…trying to read. Like a newly blinded man clutching the last Harry Potter novel with a tear in his eye. Is the drive fuxxored? I pop in a DvD. “The Mummy” spins up right away and works fine. Right…I check the CD itself. Pop both of them into my (awesome) laptop. And voila! It reads. Right, so, it might be these burns. I try to recreate the CD on my system. Wrong again. The CD drive just faffs around again and doesn’t see anything.

“OK, Maybe it’ll only read CDs it makes itself,” I think. I’ve seen it before. We get the downloaded iso on the laptop, burn it to disk…and no. The drive doesn’t read shit. I take the newly burned CD out of her laptop, pop it in mine…and it works perfectly.

Let me repeat that.

I take the CD out of her system, which wrote the CD and doesn’t read it, and into mine, which reads it perfectly. That’s the equivalent of being able to [em]write[/em] Spanish, but not [em]read[/em] it. At this point my frustration was reaching the boiling point. I was about a .dll error message away from flinging the system out the window. We live on the ground floor, with vegetation all around, so the laptop would probably have been fine, but that wasn’t really on my mind at the time.

Right, so it looks like it’ll only read Official CD’s not Burns. All we have are burns. Ok…lets try the long bomb. Lets try the Bootable Flash Drive method.

After a bitchload of net surfing and forum posts, I got directed to this page. It requires that you download three files. First off, there is only one fucking place on the Internet to get these files. And it’s slow. Dog slow. Like “oh-my-god-I-could-have-fucking-written-this-program-faster-myself” slow. I eventually downloaded the files. I do what the site says and sure enough, after a few missteps, I have the prepped Flash drive (I used a 1 GB stick), and am ready to give this a try.

Success!!! We have the Windows Install. Huzzah. It’s all good now, right?

Ha ha.

So, as anyone who has done a Full XP Build can tell you, there are 2 parts to the install. The blue text-based part where you format and partition the drives and then copy the Install files to the newly pristine C Drive. Then there’s the GUI part that actually installs the OS. I will make a long story short and say it did the first part…but not the second.

So it partitioned the drive, formatted it blank…and that’s it. For those of you following along at home…at this point I had an expensive, laptop-shaped brick in front of me, and the urge to kill rising inside of me. Right, back on the Net, asking it in a variety of ways, “What the Fuck?” Where is the post that says “Hey Bob, I followed your instructions, and busted my wife’s laptop. Now I’m broke, divorced, and giving handjobs in the bathroom of the Olive Garden to pay for my Crack addiction. Any thoughts?”

Lo and behold, I did find something. Apparently there was a tick box under the formatting options that should have been pre-configured a particular way. It wasn’t. I set it up that way, and re-did from start.

10 hours, 2 gallons of sweat, and a string of curse words that would make a sailor blush later, and her laptop is up and running.

Never again.

Seem* familiar?

I only shudder to think what’s next.

*Incidentally, the real loituma site is gone (the rancid.fi domain). Internet history is fleeting.

I’m not quite sure, because its late and I’m muzzy but there must be something profound to be said about the time/money axis and the web; much like ‘free electricity’ like we know in the first world allows things like bit torrent running on always-on computers.

So, is the whole thing about mobile internet the fact that since the capital requirements for the web; power, connection, gizmo – are essentially nil, or at least a tiny increment after the start-up costs, and so now the fat to be trimmed is in time-to-access?

What will happen when time-increment to access digitised data is negligible? How much net overlay will people habitually use?

However, one can only listen to the back catalogue of Gamma Ray so many times and thus I have decided to turn to the Intarwubs. You there, intarwubs, tell me what good podcasts are out there – preferably music without talking – TED or Long Now Foundation, while excellent, are not what I am looking for.

Any and everything from Hayseed Dixie through some new Trance would be welcome. In particular, if someones got a line of where I could get Type O Negative – Cinnamon Girl (I have the 1min version from the Duke Nukem OST) that would be spiffy.

Also – I’ve decided to resharpen some of my sadly rusted guitar and piano skills – cause gee, not like I won’t have time. There’s a music room here with all sorts of stuff, which should provide entertainment – but if someones got a line on a good tab/score site that lets you download and print that would be good – so far its week five and no sign of any mail – not boding well for my ‘I can get books off Amazon’ plan…

I remember the Naked one giving a big schpiel to Savage and I about how if people can pirate, they will and not really having any ideas for how to avoid the logical conclusion here – revenue streams shrink, nothing but the lowest-common denominator dross gets made because they’re the only things that still have a large enough rump ‘non-piratey’ audience remaining.

To me it seems Sci-fi is the worst because its specialty anyway and its fans are most likely to understand and be able to rip them off and download them. I bet we’re in fact going to see wretched ‘backlash’ IP laws that make fair use into a gigantic hassle never mind being enlightened about using the web – but what is the model that would theoretically work?

Things stuffed full of product placements that are expected to be free? Walled garden models like iTunes? Is it a lost cause and soon we’ll have nothing but rubbish and reruns because nothing can get funding? Will it be that movies will make their money off the cinema, musicians off the concerts and merch with the ‘small screen’ written off as loss-leader?