Properly Calibrated

Thousands of spam comments ago, I wrote here. I’m going to attempt to do so again.

My original effort ground to a halt when I promised you, the (likely) non-existent reader, a categorical rundown of Mass Effect’s myriad rough edges. I believe my mistake was in believing I would do the necessary legwork to squeeze out anything more than stream-of-consciousness notes.

So, let’s you and me be straight here. I’m not gonna do research. I’m not here to chronicle; I’m here to jot.

And so:

Two days ago, I fully accepted my role as Husband, and did what any Husband does at least five times in his life: I bought an expensive exercise machine. For generations, Husbands have prostrated their slightly well-fed bodies before fantastical beings of iron and rubber, wallets and egos upheld in submission. Throw money at it, and wish for blessings in pectoral form.

Look, I bought a Wii, okay? I spent $400 total MSRP for a 3-year-old piece of hardware that was outdated 3 years ago. (Nintendo are geniuses.)

I bought it for EA Sports Active. I tried the 20 Minute Heap Of Failure Introductory Workout two days ago and my shoulders are still sore. The thought of a 30 Day Challenge weakens my already-sore knees. I tremble before my bland, flabby avatar.

I don’t know where this road will head, but at least the object gathering dust is small, white, and plastic, instead of giant, black, and metal. I don’t have a garage, anyway.

My character in Mass Effect specializes in pistols & sniper rifles. I picked up a High Explosive Ammo upgrade at one point, which increases damage something like 400%, but also allows for far fewer shots before overheating (Mass Effect’s replacement for ammo clips).

Packed onto my sniper rifle (which only allowed 1.8 shots per overheat cycle anyway), it becomes a small howitzer. A sniper rifle with a 6-foot explosion radius means many instances of Geth flying through the air while disintegrating into char. Pure comedy.

I finished Mass Effect last night just barely under level 50 (which would have garnered me an achievement, oh well). The story arc gets an A+ for pacing; the Last Segment Of The Game is very clearly defined, and allows you plenty of space to finish up your side-quest list before heading off to the final battle. (Compare to: Fallout 3, where I didn’t realize I had entered TLSOTG until it was too late.)

While the main quest & storyline were clearly given every bit of polish they deserved, almost everything else in Mass Effect has the distinct feeling of being unfinished in one way or another. I have a list. I’ll write about it tomorrow. Today, though, nothing but praise.

Spent a couple of hours knocking out some secondary quests for Mass Effect. Saved a few dozen lives, came to terms with my horrific military past, that sort of thing.

Spent some time on the planet Ontarom finding some scientists. Turns out they were at the map marker labeled “Underground Facility.” That map, it never lies.

Let’s be clear here: I’m all about modularity in construction. If prefab houses wouldn’t get egged in any typical American neighborhood (and if typical American contractors knew how to build them), I’d be the proud owner of an aluminum and plate-glass box. Apparently the builders in Mass Effect think similarly, as OuterSpaceCo Inc. appears to offer one model of Above Ground Dwelling and one model of Underground Dwelling, both with one choice of layout, complete with semi-permanent crate-themed interior decoration.

Speaking of things that BioWare probably would have finished if they’d had the time and/or inclination (you’ll notice that there are a lot of these):

I had previously thought Eletania’s monkey colonies were pushing the parallel envelopes of crazy and lame, but Onteron has topped them with its native herd of — wait for it — horses with arms. I don’t know how else to describe it. As I remember it, they were essentially normal horses, but with human-like vestigial arms growing out of their general shoulder area. Two arms, kind of hanging there. I decided to dub them Tardicorns.

The game HUD also bracketed them with a “Talk” prompt, as if I could converse with these proto-magical creatures. Unfortunately, either BioWare glossed over the Tardicorn conversation tree in favor of polishing the voice acting (a completely acceptable decision), or Tardicorns are just jerks who like to ignore perfectly friendly spacefolk.

I smushed one on accident when I backed the Mako out of their valley. Can’t say I felt guilty. Stupid Tardicorns.

A few more hours of Mass Effect today. It’s so good that I haven’t even taken time off to attempt another futile run at a Geometry Wars 2 achievement. I haven’t even popped in Burnout Paradise and fantasized ways to smush DJ Atomica with my car.

Now that I’m back on the main quest line for a bit, things have gone back to being tight, well-written, and polished. So what if there were monkeys on Eletania — there are survivors, warships, creatures, and plot-points galore on Feros. However, although this game may be getting on in age, I’m still averse to spoiling the plot for my incredibly modest readership, so I’ll describe my latest impression in more general terms.

Knights Of The Old Republic was, for better or worse, nothing more than a Star Wars game, and I say this as an incredibly loyal twentieth-century Star Wars fan. The story may have been set thousands of years in the past, but renaming the R2 unit and throwing on an extra leg does not a new galaxy make. KOTOR was a Star Wars story, and the Star Wars canon, is (to put it lightly) somewhat fleshed out already.

Mass Effect is different. It’s 100% new and original, and after playing this far, I’ve seen creatures and been told stories that would have never meshed with the Star Wars universe. The detail given to every species, planet, and scientific justification is Firefly-esque in its level of tender, loving care.

Mass Effect has a completely game-optional Codex, explaining all sorts of completely game-optional details. You may never read the Codex, but it’s there, available. I appreciate little details like that, just like I appreciate being able to steal every piece of silverware off of a dining room table in a Bethesda game. An uncompromisingly fleshed-out universe can be that extra bit of genuine spirit that can make a game really be something.

It’s important to note here that fleshing out a game is not the same as padding it. The Mass Effect codex is flesh. The monkeys? Marsupial, module-stealing padding.

I’m 11 hours into Mass Effect, and then this happens.

DISCOVERY: The monkey does not have the module.

I’m running around a valley, pressing A at lethargically plodding semi-elongated space monkeys on the planet Eletania (in the Hercules system), trying to find the module that one of them apparently stole from the downed satellite at which I had also just finished pressing A.

DISCOVERY: The monkey does not have the module.

Monkeys?

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Today, all I had time for was the Skate 2 demo.

I remember liking the Skate 1 demo (and have been waiting for it to drop in price ever since), and I have an intimate childhood bond with installments 1 through 3 of Tony Hawk Pro Skater, so Skate 2 is in the bag, right?

Well, maybe. I started up the demo, and was greeted with a character customization screen - my guy was lying on a dirty mattress, apparently ready to have his face rejiggered, Jack Nicholson’s-Joker-style. I hit A to flip my character to Female, and a dialog box slams onto the middle of the screen:

WARNING: ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO CHANGE YOUR GENDER?

Ominous. Turns out I really didn’t: all of the girls have volleyball-captain shoulders and look like homeless people. And so much for tweaking my homeless volleyball captain to look less homely — ‘character customization’ sliders appear to not do more than stretch one nose/ear/mouth model; not much room for subtlety here.

But it’s a skating game, not Tiger Woods ‘09, right? Who cares if my character looks like Martina Hingis after a night in a dumpster? Let’s thrash a sick sesh, dawg!

Speaking of which: for your amusement, I kept a list of phrases spoken by the various scuzzy types in the demo:

• “Killin’ lines, killer”
• “Convicted felon sesh”

After those two I forgot to keep listing, but you get the gist. Yep, turns out I’m fresh out of the slammer, which explains why I look like I’m fresh out of the slammer.

While all I have to compare to is the first Skate, my impressions of Skate 2 all fit into one of two categories: “Hey, this reminds me of Skate, sweet” and “Man, I hope this is tweaked in the full game”. The new features seem to have some kinks, or in some cases, just seem like they didn’t finish implementation.

For instance, initially it seems that dragging a dumpster will work well enough; just push Y to get off your board (years of Tony Hawk muscle memory meant I was constantly hopping off my board at inopportune times) and push LB to grab the side of a dumpster/table/rail. The camera then backs way up as your character leans back … and slides a dumpster around like The Hulk relocating a zamboni. My homeless person’s feet didn’t animate with the ground, you rotate the dumpster like it’s made out of origami paper, the gritty since of gravity that Skate does so well was shattered, and I was back in the world of modern Tony Hawk, having flashbacks to riding a blocky shopping cart down a hill in Alcatraz.

Once, as I was running around on foot, I pushed Y to zip the board back to my hand (choice to animate the board returning to the hand Jedi-style: bizarre) and it clonked me in the head, sending me flying. I’m not sure what to make of that. I also ended up with screwed-up sideways animations a few times — little glitches that would have seemed normal in the first Skate, but seem strange here, given that the skating mechanic itself seems virtually unchanged.

Overall, Skate 2 has reminded me how much I liked the mechanics from Skate, but it feels like Black Box is pushing the series outward rather than upward by adding on questionable mechanics. It may not hurt the series in the long run — I certainly hope not — but any step toward reducing their differentation to Tony Hawk is dangerous.

I’m sure Skate 2 will finally drive Skate 1’s price down, at which point I will definitely be purchasing.

Welcome to Properly Calibrated, unfortunate Google seekers. This is a blog where I (hopefully obsessively) chronicle my gaming exploits.

And by “exploits”, I merely mean “achievements”, not gameplay exploits.

And by “achievements”, I mean achievements in the general sense, not XBox Live Achievements™.

Clearly, most of the accomplishment-related positive-reinforcement words are well on their way to being repurposed by various companies.

After a few days battling the rocket drones and vehicular controls of Mass Effect (more on the later), I booted up the ol’ PS3 to rock some demos to the ground. Here’s why:

• My XBox has a flaccid, meager hard drive of 20 gigs is currently located somewhere under a pile of 5-meg-apiece Fallout 3 save files
• My PS3 has a mighty 80-gigabyte hard drive that occasionally whimpers in the night, weak from starvation
• PSN has different demos. Sometimes.

Oh yeah, and

• The PS3 will download stuff and then turn off automatically after. As far as I know, the 360 does no such thing. It’s considerate of the PS3 to realize its inherent capacity toward neglect and take steps to accommodate.

“You don’t wanna play? That’s cool, I’ll just turn myself out”
“You don’t wanna kiss? That’s cool, I’ll just see myself out”
“… drive myself home”
“… take my stuff and leave”
“maybe I’ll call you sometime, and we’ll hang? No? Maybe? Okay, maybe I’ll see you at the … grocery store …”

Poor PS3. I’d hug it, but it’s all pointy.

In any case, let’s talk about the demos I played tonight: Dead Space and Valkyria Chronicles. Verdict Sneak Peek: one of them sucks!

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