Today in Effecting Masses
So a few weeks ago I borrowed Mass Effect 2 (Mass Harder) from Canker_canison at the Browncoat t-shirt shindig.
It's turned out to be a lot of fun, but I find myself comparing it to Fallout 3 a lot, and it lags a bit behind that game.
Gameplay is lots of fun, although it's all almost entirely twitch based; you don't have an option to turn on VATS and skip the laborious FPS component.
The fact you have to take cover (even behind well labeled "fragile crates") to do well at the game is a definite feature of gameplay, but I’m still fond of recklessly charging into the enemy’s guns like a whirling dervish of destruction.
I'm finding the game world to be smaller than F3's, even though it's the galaxy as opposed to some of Maryland and DC.
ME feels a lot more of a train game. You fly your space plane through the galaxy, making friends with your NPCs fighting evil. Each mission is very rigid. You walk down a path, fight bad guys, find clues, walk down another path, fight more bad guys, etc, meet boss, defeat boss, get xp, go back to ship.
Occasionally, you can buy fish. Yay!
F3's advantage was that many of the missions felt detached from the main narrative. In ME2, everything is designed to help you get ready for the final suicide mission. Now, there are little side missions, but they're very brief. In F3, you could continue searching for your missing father and attempt to fulfill the destiny he'd pursued, but you could also just go around shooting stuff, helping people, killing mutant bears, or shooting cars to make them explode in beautiful mushroom clouds.
I think one of the big things is that you had to walk everyone in F3, at least initially. You can eventually fast travel, but to begin, you walk from place to place. And it's a nuclear hell, with random mutant and raider attacks. It felt big and real. The world could be explored, one step at a time.
In ME2, you just fly from place to place. The vast majority of the galaxy's planets are only accessible as places to shoot probes at and steal resources from. Admittedly, that’s believable, since having you able to land on every planet in the game would be dumb. They just feel a little unbelievable.
Not that, once again, ME2 isn't awesome. It's also huge, and I am sure that the anxiety I feel in having hundreds of pages of unread codex entries will be comforting to the developers who cried bloody tears into them (not as comforting as if I'd actually READ them, but whaddayagonnado?).
ME2's lock picking and hacking minigames are a little more fun than F3's.
I'm also finding that, even if you're trying to be a good guy, occasionally someone really, really needs a punch in the face. It’s a damn good thing there’s no 24 video game (that doesn’t suck).
It's turned out to be a lot of fun, but I find myself comparing it to Fallout 3 a lot, and it lags a bit behind that game.
Gameplay is lots of fun, although it's all almost entirely twitch based; you don't have an option to turn on VATS and skip the laborious FPS component.
The fact you have to take cover (even behind well labeled "fragile crates") to do well at the game is a definite feature of gameplay, but I’m still fond of recklessly charging into the enemy’s guns like a whirling dervish of destruction.
I'm finding the game world to be smaller than F3's, even though it's the galaxy as opposed to some of Maryland and DC.
ME feels a lot more of a train game. You fly your space plane through the galaxy, making friends with your NPCs fighting evil. Each mission is very rigid. You walk down a path, fight bad guys, find clues, walk down another path, fight more bad guys, etc, meet boss, defeat boss, get xp, go back to ship.
Occasionally, you can buy fish. Yay!
F3's advantage was that many of the missions felt detached from the main narrative. In ME2, everything is designed to help you get ready for the final suicide mission. Now, there are little side missions, but they're very brief. In F3, you could continue searching for your missing father and attempt to fulfill the destiny he'd pursued, but you could also just go around shooting stuff, helping people, killing mutant bears, or shooting cars to make them explode in beautiful mushroom clouds.
I think one of the big things is that you had to walk everyone in F3, at least initially. You can eventually fast travel, but to begin, you walk from place to place. And it's a nuclear hell, with random mutant and raider attacks. It felt big and real. The world could be explored, one step at a time.
In ME2, you just fly from place to place. The vast majority of the galaxy's planets are only accessible as places to shoot probes at and steal resources from. Admittedly, that’s believable, since having you able to land on every planet in the game would be dumb. They just feel a little unbelievable.
Not that, once again, ME2 isn't awesome. It's also huge, and I am sure that the anxiety I feel in having hundreds of pages of unread codex entries will be comforting to the developers who cried bloody tears into them (not as comforting as if I'd actually READ them, but whaddayagonnado?).
ME2's lock picking and hacking minigames are a little more fun than F3's.
I'm also finding that, even if you're trying to be a good guy, occasionally someone really, really needs a punch in the face. It’s a damn good thing there’s no 24 video game (that doesn’t suck).