Pages

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Have I passed the borders of geekitude?

I was driving the kids to school this morning and since my CD player only works when it feels like it (very sad, can't listen to my blast from the past Mortal Kombat The Album) I was playing music on my phone. No, that isnt the geeky part. Lately I'm pretty much exclusively listening to Miracle of Sound. What is Miracle of Sound? Well, more of a who...Guy named Gavin Dunne that writes songs about games. Really really good, catchy songs about games. Honestly, his song Commander Shepard is the reason I went back to playing Mass Effect 2 after feeling pretty "meh" about it when i first started. My kids and I run around the house singing "You can fight like a Krogan or run like a leopard but you'll never be better than Commander Shepard" constantly. This morning's tune of choice was Necromorph Soup. So yeah, There I was in my car with my midlife crisis red (now pinkish) bangs jammin to a song about Dead Space. Yeah....I'm cool. Just to cement my awesome geekiness I was rockin this shirt:
Indeed, my closet has suddenly gotten an influx of completely dorky, yet awesome pop culture/game related t-shirts. I went from being a high heels and barely there skirt girl to a Raiden T-shirt wearing soccer mom that jams to songs about video games. WTH happened? But, I'm good with that. Though I'm pretty sure I've crossed that border, point of no return. I will never be one of the cool kids. I'm a game nerd.

Speaking of game nerds...I have to address my previous post.
My husband wanted it noted that he HATED with the fire of 10,000 suns being Lucas Montbarron in Dungeon Siege 3. Because well, to keep it simple and to the point, Lucas controls like rancid ass, can't take a hit and sounds like he needs the stick removed from his ass. Also, there was a hilarious glitch somewhere around the second town where during a conversation cutscene his head was on his body backwards. Guess he wanted to admire his ridiculous dual scarves. Yeah, what I thought was a pretentious cape at first was indeed 2 stupidly odd sarves hanging from the back of his armour. what purpose did these serve? Did his cape snag on a tree and rip and he was just too busy getting lost on the battlefield and running from enemies to fix it? Or is this the manly high fashion of Ehb? No idea, but they were lame.

Ok, now that that's been addressed...

Yesterday I spent the day checking my door every hour for Deus Ex. Sometime around 4:30 or so, when i was   about to burst a blood vessel and ready to junkpunch the UPS guy, my game was finally delivered. I squealed like a kid at Disney, almost broke a nail opening the box and ran off to fire the Xbox up. In preparation for my adventure I dressed my Avatar Like Adam Jensen...yeah, she's badass.
So after figuring out that for some reason I have 2 codes for the same DLC and skimming the manual because I was too impatient to read it all, I started the game. It was going well, probably because I wasnt doing anything but watching the intro cutscene with the occasional moment where I had to walk forward. Gave me a chance to admire the odd but cool fashion of 2027 and to get used to the fact that Jensen's voice doesnt' fit his character much (I got over it after a bit). Then as is wont to happen in games, all hell broke loose and I was off to the races, well more specifically to the labs to find out what the drama was. This is where I began to realize something...I REALLY suck at stealth.

I managed to die in the first few fights over a dozen times. Oh, but you know, I thought, He's still normal right now, no awesome shades that are attached to his face. Yeah, well, Shit happened, and now i finally had my cool shades and other new things like shiny black arms.WOOT! I'm gonna shoot and shank some bad guys now! That's what I thought. 

What happened was this..I snuck behind some boxes, and he did the crouch dance...you know, where you forget what to press and he just crouches and stands up, crouches and stands up. Then I tried shooting, I shot the box I was hiding behind, bad camera angle. I shoot again, Jensen blindly shoots over the boxes, misses the bad guy and now i have 3 guys on my ass and I'm dead. Reload, try again. This time I sneak up behind guy A and knock him out, drag his body into a side alley like a good little stealth killer and sneak over to some other boxes (isnt it amazing how in games there are always chest high walls and boxes to hide behind, ALWAYS). I felt good, I felt sneaky. I pull out my sniper rifle, I peak out around cover I zoom in my rifle and...
Somehow the damn thing is staring at the box I'm behind, dammit! I try again and I see my target, right when I was about to pull the trigger he turns, sees me and 3 guys are on my ass again. To hell with this, Shotgun it is. 
I wont bore you with the sad sad details of my infiltration attempts, except to say that, I can't sneak worth a shit and this game makes it impossible to go in guns blazing, at least at the early point I'm at. after about 3 bullets I'm looking at the reload screen. Also, much like how if I sneakily kill someone in the middle of the wasteland with no one around to see me in New Vegas somehow everyone still knows, I knock a guy out with no one around and unless I HIDE his body somewhere, everyone knows, even though no one saw me or him or heard anything. WTF is up with that?

Now, don't get me wrong. I like the game. I love the rich deep, sexy palette of black and gold. I have no idea wtf is going on in the story, but its enough to pique my interest. Adam is suitably cool and I have a decent selection of guns to play with. But this is definitely a "mood game". Its like sex, not tonight, I have a headache. 
I had the same problem with Assassin's Creed 2. LOVE LOVE LOVE Ezio, love the game and the story...HATE walking at a snails pace in a group of people to avoid having the whole damn city chasing me. After a few hours, I just can't do it..I NEED to switch games and hack and slash or mow down a city with a machine gun.

So, today, I will go back to Mass Effect 2. Once I got past the whole "WTFOMGBBQ!!! indignation of not having an inventory and my Vanguard being decidedly gimped and took it more as 'Gears of War' with a deeper story, I'm having a good time. It helps that I can romance Garrus..I love me some Turians, hehe, I'm such a weird little lech.
After getting my ass handed to me on a black and gold platter repeatedly last night it will be nice to be a badass bitch kicking ass and not bothering to take down names. 

My only current problem with ME2 is a problem I have with most RPGs, and since I play mostly RPGs its a problem I have with most games. I talk to 3 people and suddenly I have 30 missions to do. Now I realize I have no time constraints in which to finish these missions, hell I dont HAVE to do the side missions if I dont feel like it but, you know, its an RPG, the point is to do EVERYTHING, get everything, see everything. So it gets a little overwhelming when I look at my journal and there's a billion things to do, and it seems for every 1 thing I do, that leads to 5 more things to do. But you know, I shouldn't bitch, having lots of good interesting missions to do is better than being bored and roaming the wastelands pointlessly (yes, I have revised my opinion of Fallout New Vegas, but I still reserve the right to bitch about it).





1 comment:

Jim said...

Deus Ex and Mass Effect both sound like fun - I've always preferred RPG over shooters.


you got a point - I can't resists doing every possible mission there is and yes I play every RPG I can find.

if you want to get done in a hurry you can skip some of the side quests but trying to do that makes me feel like I'm skipping something. Even in Oblivion I left the main quest line go for as long as I could