Reach and Flexibility

I finally finished my female-Shepard ME1 run, and I’m well into ME2 now. It’s much, much better. The renegade decisions are easier to deal with. You can get a “good-guy” outcome but still earn renegade points for it, like when you intimidate someone in order to scare them out of harm’s way. You get the badass quotient without any of the guilt. It doesn’t make sense, in real-world terms, but it’s airtight in its video game logic.

I haven’t decided which romance my female Shep will pursue. It’s down to Jack or Garrus. Garrus because he’s one of my two favorite characters; Jack because she’s more complex than she appears and it would fit my renegade aesthetic to hook up with the murderous sociopath.

I’m playing as a Sentinel, which is an interesting class. Way more challenging than my beloved Infiltrator (although I’m also playing on Veteran, which makes everything harder regardless of class).

BioWare has announced Dragon Age 2, which seems strange to me, given the timelines involved. ME1 came out in 2007; ME2 in 2010. Meanwhile, Dragon Age came out in 2009, and its expansion came out in early 2010, right after ME2. By my reckoning, Mass Effect 3 should be out well before Dragon Age 2, but BioWare seems to be pushing the latter franchise more heavily. I want to get into it before the next installment comes out.

Lots of big game releases in the next few months. This month saw two big titles drop on XBLA: “Shank” and “DeathSpank”. The former of these is an old-school platformer with great Penny Arcade-style character design. The second is a weird coop multiplayer Diablo clone with hilarious dialogue that seems more amusing than the game itself (the demo was lackluster, in my opinion). EA 2010 was a big deal, with Nintendo’s DSI, the stupid Microsoft Kinect crap, and PlayStation Move all going on at once. Fable 3 drops in October, and despite myself I’m looking forward to it.

It’s probably telling that I spend more time ranting about video games than talking about pretty much anything else. I’m not sure what it means, but it means something.