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.

I’m considering plan Ω.

In the interim I have made a brave step out into the internets. Apparently, in addition to serving stolen movies and tv shows, the internet can be used for commerce – auctions, in fact. I had been aware of this fact, but had never before taken the leap.

I’m not a big person for deals, I prefer to just get things that I want, and I am reasonably happy to pay the asking price. It’s not a big thrill for me to get a lot of money off, in fact a protracted negotiation takes a lot of the fun out of it for me.

In any case, the first auction that I bid on was a new pair of noise-cancelling earbuds, the Sennheiser CX 400s. I have to say I am extremely pleased. I am not used to the eBay way – I prefer the way online merchants send you extensive messages informing you of the location of your packages. Instead I got no word from my kind internet merchant until the ‘phones arrived this morning. Still, all’s well that ends well.

The earphones themselves are excellent – they eliminate almost all noise, and I am sure with additional fiddling I could totally eliminate the outside world. This is the perfect time for doing so, as I have to write the most important document of my life over the next few months.

The bass response is excellent in the CX 400s, and I find that they make me want to keep turning the volume up because the sound is so nice – a dangerous habit. Still, this combined with listening to Ikimono Gakari should keep me on the non-violent side of insane.

Engadget
TechCrunch

The big problem for me is that the book is not broken. In fact it’s about as popular as ever. So while I can see this being useful for certain types of document, I can’t see it replacing the novel. But for manuals, guides, reference books – things that are read out of order or in small chunks, books that benefit from being searchable and generally shorter items such as blogs or articles it could be useful.

The price is $400 at the moment which is a lot (iPhone or a Kindle?). And this is the sort of functionality that I want to have in existing things that I own – I don’t want to have new bespoke e-reading device weighing me down.

What’s good about it?

• It can still be read in bright daylight (how many expensive laptops still can’t do this?).
• It has a long battery life and batteries are easily replaced.
• It’s small and light.
• Amazon remembers what you’ve bought so if you lose it or it gets wiped you can re-download your e-books.
• You can get RSS and Blogs.
• It has free EV-DO wireless so you don’t need to hook it up to your PC
• While it has its own Kindle format it supports pdfs and word docs

Overall, the film was 2-3 langers*** out of 5. The CGI and set-pieces were of a high standard, and they managed a cool enough anthropomorphised sand-monster without him looking too much like Morph. The script was a bit of a shocker though, it wavers badly in long sections, running out time it didn’t need to take. There is some tremendously heavy telegraphing, and a lot of scenes are backwards (where motivations are explained in advance and explicitly, then the illustrating shot is left at the end for a kind of belt-and-braces exposition).

Topher Grace does a very good job of not being Eric and makes good use of what he’s been given. It’s kind of a pity he took Venom now that Toby Maguire looks like he’s gone.

I definitely felt better about the movie than Savage did. I guess a lot of my dislikes had been vented before (I think Kirsten Dunst is a horrible choice for MJ), and this movie is a bit more confident in playing for laughs and indulging action. I’d say that overall it’s better than 2, but that it can’t compete with the freshness of 1. There are some *terrible* bits in the middle that almost killed it for me, bu
t I just can’t hate this movie as much as I did Ghost Rider or… that movie.

I reckon it comes down to this: I would go see Spiderman 4 based on this movie, and you can’t say much fairer than that.

* Only, kidding, I’m not Xaos :D
** Nickname as yet undetermined, better half status certain.
*** I don’t have the graphic to hand, sadly.

My relationship with iTunes has been an on-and-off one. Sometimes I love it, sometimes it makes me froth with screaming hatred. However, Winamp, my traditional player of choice, has become increasingly shite. First there was a skinning fiasco, then the team was shredded, then bugs appeared aplenty. Now the stupid thing won’t even quit properly.

I really need tremendously little from an MP3 playing program. I don’t have the patience or measure of sense to go to the trouble of creating actual playlists, so I tend to just flick through directories whacking files onto the queue and then shuffle them. iTunes can sort of do that – so it’s sort of ok.

I tried some legal music too. I downloaded a song from Arctic Monkeys which I am rather pleased about, and one from Jack Johnson. The ITMS doesn’t have a great navigation metaphor, it’s hard to navigate through items that are cross-related (for example moving between different artists in a collaboration to their individual work).

Still, legal music is just as easy as illegal. I might as well opt for the legal version when I can get it. Right?

Incidentally, the video functions are outstanding. The screen is really high-definition and bright. I have Bubba-Ho-Tep on my iPod, as well as a Leeroy Jenkins video straight from Google Video – who will encode any of their videos iPod (or PSP) ready.

The PMP revolution is here…

If you’re on Windows Videora is the tool to overthrow the oppressors! Freedom!

This continued through high school until I was given a proper Daytimer (large book planner thing, not actually the Daytimer system but the Franklin Covey ensemble). I lugged it around and used it religiously until I received my first Palm Pilot, which I fell in love with and used until the day it died. The next day I ran out and bought a new Palm, the Tungsten E.

When it died under warranty, Best Buy’s shoddy handling of the situation (making me wait six weeks to be told exactly what I’d said at the beginning: they couldn’t fix it and they’d just replace it) resulted in the end of my Palm addiction. The battery life was frightening and it was just too likely to fail for me to trust it.

My ability to remember things, however, had not improved over the years. I’ve been reduced to scrawling dates on the fridge white board and hoping I’d notice when something was coming up.

There is a web-based solution. 30 Boxes.

This nifty little app, apparently still in beta, will let you quickly add events, make them repeat (though I haven’t yet figured out how to set a time limit on the repeat, so it thinks I have to teach recitation Friday mornings forever), and tag them. So if I want to quickly find out what work or teaching or musical obligations I have I can highlight them.

Spiffy.

Meanwhile, I continue to yearn for a method for backspacing through carriage returns in the wp blog post field without making the field jump to the beginning of the entry. I thought upgrades were supposed to make things better…