I’ve also found it odd in the past when John doesn’t seem to recognise the lineage of adventure games in other genres, like action games and RPGs. Resident Evil and Zelda, for instance, two massive franchises, which both include combine this with that puzzles and use the right item here type stuff. Now, clearly this isn’t a pure adventure game, but then stuff like Indy always had a punch-em-up side to them.

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John discusses his experiences with Mass Effect 2 so far, exploring some of the more interesting ideas behind this game, and the tongue-in-cheek mocking within the game of some of BioWare’s sillier previous moments. John incorrectly recalls a quest from ME1, but he’s talking about this article.

Actually, it was this article he was thinking about. The couple in Mass Effect 2 sending up the earlier quest are located in the Sirta Foundation on the Citadel if anyone is interested in tracking them down.

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I liked that they had a couple of conversation beats in there as well, which was a nice touch. But yeah, pretty epic.

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Glad to hear it and spread the word. It’s been quite functional for quite some time (over a year and a bit at least), but this meme that it ‘doesn’t work’ just won’t go away because certain internet trolls won’t drop it.

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That being said I had a good laugh at the banter and the discourse was right up my alley. The idea of a non-shooty game is appealing on some level but so complex and time consuming in it’s making I don’t see anyone doing a proper job of it. In shooting you add some ragdoll physics and some form of hitbox damage modeling this or that and you’re cutting edge. How do you improve upon reality, of which we’re all experts, politicians aside. And let’s face it, most of us will never mow down thousands of Nazi-zombies in our given lives so it’s abstract at best, all we need to know is vaguely which end spews the bangy bits.

A game based on not shooting at things would be picked apart by our brain at every step. “That’s not how you make ramen!” “Why can’t I just smack object A with object B, why the hell do I need to find object C?” “Kick everything over!” “Why won’t half this crap move?” Where as in the shooting game all you have to usually do is apply said shooting thing to said object/person/objectified person and shoot.

Blathering aside, Portal seemed to fair ok, but it was more about puzzles and you quasi-shot things. With gravity. I also believe cake was mentioned.

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Basically, the act of killing and the act of sex in real life have enormous amounts of emotional, cultural, and consequential implications to them that are very difficult for videogames to explore. Both can simplified in a purely mechanical, abstracted fashion (most violent games for killing, click-to-thrust flash games for sex), but it is considered more inappropriate to do so for sex as it is for killing. And I think that’s because as Dean says, most of us have had sex (or at least romance), and few of us have killed.

Of course, this is magnified even more when it comes to mere conversation, as we all have had at least one conversation with a live human being (even if its only on RPS comment threads! =)

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Granted, ME2 does a fairly good job of making it seem a lot more fluid, and thankfully the “Goodbye.” choices are no longer so abrupt (most times),

Liara: “My mother betrayed me and everything I love.”
Shepard: “I should go.”

Then immediately walk away. I kinda feel like in a real situation, a guy would get snubbed after pulling a stunt like that.

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Really enjoyed your latest podcast but there was one thing I thought I’d mention. I’ve played mass effect 1 but nowhere enar to compeltion (i borrowed it from a friend). I did not use my save from ME1 for ME2.

Thi, apparantly, makes me mentally unhinged. Thanks for that RPS. There are a couple of reasons why I didn’t complete/get ME1 before playing ME2. I couldn’t afford the purchase of two games, as a student. Secondly, if I only have the money to buy one of them I decided to get the one that’s combat system didn’t suck and that I felt (and read) would be the better game. Spending 20+ suffering through a game and then not have the money to buy the next one seemed stupid to me.

I understand that the 2nd game may make more of a connection to you if you palyed the first game but I picked up the story easily enough and never really felt like I was missing out. Alot of the criticisms levelled at it in your podcast seem superficial especially about the character creation. Why not let people who improt their characters edit them a bit? I’m sure after playing ME1 they might want to just make at least a few changes to his apperance.

Note that I’m not against the Character importer, its amazing for people who owned the first game, but I didn’t and can’t at the moment, and that’s that.

I’m really enjoying the game so far and hope to complete it for ME3.

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