spending a week in space

[amw]

I have been on holiday all week. This week was a twofer of Children's Day and 清明節 Tomb Sweeping Day, so i took a couple days annual leave and made it a full week off. My plan was to do some traveling, although i was discouraged a bit when colleagues told me it'd be even harder to find a hotel over 清明 than it was over the 228 holiday. Well, i would

Comments

[king_of_apathy]

Sounds like a week well spent.

I never played the original Mass Effect, so started the series with 2. I was halfway through and liking it before I accidentally deleted my saved game and couldn't be bothered to start over.
Mass Effect 3 was great.
I know Mass Effect: Andromeda didn't get nearly the same love, but I still enjoyed that one too.

[amw]

Playing Mass Effect nowadays is admittedly a bit janky, even in the Legendary Edition. I think it's worth it for the story, though. The game feels the most focused and well-paced of three. I think think a lot of games tend to become a victim of their own success, so sequels get bigger and more ambitious and try to be more things to more people and in doing so they lost what made the original great.

That said, i enjoyed playing Mass Effect Andromeda too. I don't remember much of the story, though, which perhaps speaks to how "safe" it was. I do remember one aspect of playing it that stuck with me was that you are supposedly peaceful settlers but then you still have to kill hundreds of grunts to get through the storyline... Which is a common situation in computer games, but it felt weird and colonialist at times. Maybe i should go back and play it again.

[amw]

I just started a new game of Mass Effect Andromeda again to remember what it was all about and now i remember! The new galaxy being destroyed by that weird creeping dark matter infection! That was a great concept. And activating the ancient artifacts to clean up the environment, that felt epic too. Overall the game did have some good ideas, although clearly the themes didn't stick with me the way the ones from the original game did. I think it just didn't tell the story in a way that felt compelling to me, maybe because of the whole family melodrama angle which i found extremely tedious. Or maybe there were too many side missions to make it feel tightly plotted (similar kind of problem to Mass Effect 2 imo). I think i will play it again now. Either way the controls are a million times better than any of the previous trilogy. I wish it had been better received and gotten a follow-up. Although, from what i hear, there is a new Mass Effect game in the planning. Not clear yet whether it'll be Andromeda or Milky Way, though.

[king_of_apathy]

I'd forgotten all about the plot of Mass Effect: Andromeda until you mentioned it, so i guess it can't have made a huge impression on me! But i do remember it all played very smoothly.

I'm curious as to what Starfield on the new XBox will be like, but i still have a big backlog of games on the PS4 to get through, and not much time to play them, so that's likely a few years away for me!

[amw]

I thought i hadn't heard of Starfield, but i just checked Steam and apparently it's on my wishlist already! I also have a long gaming backlog, but i tend to play anything that's sci-fi and story-rich with the highest priority, which means a lot of my backlog is less sci-fi, and when i'm in a sci-fi mood i just sit there and look at it and go ugh can't be bothered. I've had some stuff that i bought but haven't played for years now (and even more that i haven't bought and just stuck on my wishlist for a decade in case maybe one day i would like to buy it...)