Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Hope you're a fan of games from 2009

It's not often that I comment on my research without giving away trade secrets, so to speak, so... yeah, it's going to be Mass Effect 2 here for a week or so. Sorry. (Although I'm always open to other topics if anyone wants to suggest any...)

Anyway, today's findings:

1)

This is my favorite scene in the entire game. The set-up is a simple fetch quest, of the sort that populate your basic RPG by the thousands. Doctor Chakwas, one of the two crew members in the game who are carried over from the first ship, lost the bottle of brandy she was saving for a special occasion when the first Normandy was... blown up. So you, Commander Shepherd, volunteered to pick up a bottle if you come across one. And if you do... then you get this scene. I think you get a Med-gel upgrade and a few experience points for it, but it's the story that really gets me. It's Chakwas' moment in the spotlight--she was a very peripheral character in ME 1, and she's not really a big character in Mass Effect 2 either. But for one scene, this character, and her connection to you, really shines.

2) In order to collect minerals, you need to do this mineral thing where you approach a planet, and as it rotates, you hit the left trigger to search a small section of the planet. The catch is that while you have the trigger pressed, the rotation stops, and the speed of search box decreases greatly--so greatly, in fact, that it's not even worth doing until you get access to the mining upgrade in the third mission or so. And it's still slow, because you have to wait for the planet's rotation. Only--you don't. Today, I discovered that pushing the left analog while the trigger ISN'T pressed speeds the rotation of the planet (or the fascimile scan of the planet. Whatever) This is at least the third time I've played through this 40+ hour game. And I'm just figuring out how to do this NOW. Sigh.

Later Days.

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