What VIDEO GAME(s) have you been playing?

It does look bad ass

Black Barney wrote: So happy to hear you say that. ME2 is clearly the better game, but ME1 evoked a ton of emotion from me. I've said it several times but I'll never get tired of conveying the sense of total awe and wonder the first time you explore the Citadel. SO BIG, so much awesome stuff. I couldn't believe it.

Walking around the Citadel felt like being in a dead shopping mall. Huge, lots of empty space, and what's there is disappointing. When the big debate about blah blah aliens or whatever is going on it was like I was standing in the food court watching someone argue with a security guard about shoplifting from Everything's $1.

ME2 was slightly better, but I'm just not the kind of guy who plays videogames to try and fuck the characters. I'm not going to talk to CGI people for 30 minutes in the hopes of finding the dialogue path that lets me fuck them. And doing so to unlock their bonus mission lost its appeal when every one of them was "I need to go check on my dad" or "I'm a dad and need to go check on my kid". I don't know how you write 16 side quests and never notice they're all dad oriented. The gameplay was mediocre and the plot was just absolute standard Oh No An Ancient Powerful Cosmic Race Is Returning junk. Never played ME3, don't care about ME:A.

^^^^

I could not agree more. And that truck driving shit was AWFUL in ME2. AWFUL.

I tried ME2 and it didn't do anything for me. I wanted to be the gruff, strictly business leader the galaxy needed. But I got to the elevator farm there and just wandered around kind of lost and didn't go back.

I've been playing BLOODBORNE, which is pretty cool. I don't like the whole "drop 5,000 points worth of shit when we surprise you with some hidden guy" thing though. Very much a From Software title on that front. I am using a saw thing. And I bought a hat and what not. And the game is me handling little mobs when I have to, peeling dudes when I can, and losing to the third or fourth fat guy I have to fight when I mistakenly miss a hit.

I'm currently playing ME2 again, on PC this time, because I started playing ME3 fresh and quickly got annoyed with the shut-out on story options and war assets for not having an ME2 save (I completed ME2 on the 360 originally). I'm not aiming at romancing any characters, because ME was never good at that, and side quests are side quests generally involving some McGuffin or other, but that's side-quests for you.

The terrible driving was the Mako in the first ME I thought. ME2 was that kind of chill rumble probe thing.

The usual Bioware/ME problems for me are:
Save before opening any door, because you might suddenly cut-scene to a different planet and miss half the level you're on.
Dialogue Option Bait & Switch, where choosing to "disagree" means insulting someone's whole family and threatening to shoot their face for +5 Renegade points. Hard to not be a door-mat in the game if you're not working on Asshole Powers.

Andromeda supposed to be awful anyway so I'm going to skip it

It's been a little while, so I might not remember this correctly, but did Renegade/Paragon ever close off any options for you in ME/ME2? I didn't think they did - it was just a matter of being a nice guy or asshole.

ME was never about cool story/plot. It's more like a moment-to-moment game and people.

ME1 probably have the best opening in which nothing happens. I mean, you're just looking out of the window and walking to the cockpit. But the dialogue, song, graphics, etc... just perfect. It pains me to hear MEA has less than stellar start.

RobertB wrote: It's been a little while, so I might not remember this correctly, but did Renegade/Paragon ever close off any options for you in ME/ME2? I didn't think they did - it was just a matter of being a nice guy or asshole.

They unlock dialogue options (blue and red responses) based on what level they're at.

Apparently they've just gone full Cinemax in ME:A.

I enjoyed them when I played them but today I can not imagine looking at a CGI face with spacey sounds in the background, the character waiting for me to choose a cheese-ass pickup line. Or controlling those stupd vehicles. Or trying to convince myself that good writing means having a good choice with bad consequences or a bad choice with good consequences. WOOOOOWEEEOOOOO moral gray area- this is harder than "who wore it best"!

ME (and Bioware in general) are tremendously overrated. They come up with good plots, good characters and sometimes take some chances but then the gameplay is lame and the characters are about as sophisticated as what you might find in a preteen novel but with more overt sexuality.

And I didn't really have a problem with the end of 3, I thought it was about on par with the rest of the games. I thought it was funny how people whined about having to pick one of three colored paths...when by that point in the series they have been spending 60,70, 100 hours doing EXACTLY that with the dialogue choices. I thought it was almost clever that Bioware boiled it down to that three part, color coded choice...it almost satirized the notion that players made any kind of "moral" choice.