*drumroll please*
Congratulations, Blake! Please fill out the Contact Form with your address and I’ll get it out in the mail!
Thanks everyone, for playing!
A Strategy Guide for your Strategy Guides
*drumroll please*
Congratulations, Blake! Please fill out the Contact Form with your address and I’ll get it out in the mail!
Thanks everyone, for playing!
…Darksiders.
Honestly, I was surprised at the number of votes for Darksiders, because I’ve heard so little praise for the game. It was a Zelda rip-off, the hack-and-slash gets boring (that complaint never made sense to me…it’s hack-and-slash for God’s sake), the story isn’t that great, yadda yadda yadda. But hey, it’s a game I’ve always meant to finish, and since putting up this poll, my Twitter feed has been ablaze with praise for Darksiders.
Good thing I own it for the Xbox 36o, because I’m not turning on my PS3 anytime soon. So if God of War and Enslaved had won, they would have had to wait. And they wouldn’t have waited for Darksiders, as I still have that Mass Effect addiction thing going on.
Speaking of which, that is what I played this weekend, because I didn’t check the poll results until Saturday night. I’m on my second set of recruits, and I’m burning through loyalty missions. The only side missions I’m going to complete are Lair of the Shadow Broker and Arrival. This time around playing, if I fail any loyalty missions, I fail them. No repeats. Since I’m also not going to mine planets, if I don’t upgrade my ship fully, ah well. A Renegade seems like he would rather get the job done and get it quickly instead of horsing around through space. That and, I don’t want to.
But I fully expect to honor my poll results and shelve my second playthrough of Mass Effect 2 for now. It’s been well over a year since I’ve played Darksiders, so I believe my best bet would be to start over. I don’t think I’ve even made it to the first boss yet. Or maybe I have. Who knows. It’s been that long and I’ve played numerous games since then. I can’t remember what distracted me from playing Darksiders in the first place; it could have been either Bayonetta, or Final Fantasy XIII, or both. Guess it doesn’t really matter as I’ll be restarting it from the beginning.
So what will I be playing during the week? I have Portal 2 and LEGO Star Wars III for the Xbox and the DS (they’re actually two different games!) slated on the agenda. One game to stress me the hell out and the other(s) to make me laugh. Why do I do this to myself?
FOR SCIENCE!
I lovingly stole this post’s title from one of the many Twitter jokes I happened to catch yesterday (I’m sure I missed hundreds of others) regarding the latest boom in the gaming world: the hacked PlayStation Network. I’m sure most of you know exactly what is going on, but in case you don’t, head on over to the PlayStation Blog for a quick read. We’ll wait for you to get back.
While I am very angry that this happened, not to mention very put out that I need to cancel my credit card and change all of my passwords that are the same as my PSN password, I don’t lay all the blame on Sony for this.
I agree that Sony did not handle this very well. They should have alerted all users immediately once they knew there was an intrusion. Their latest blog post explains that they didn’t warn anybody until they had official confirmation of what was accessed from their investigation. I do understand their reasoning behind this a little bit, but when it comes to the amount of personal information Sony has on all of its users, this still is not acceptable. Everyone should have been warned as soon as they knew they were hacked.
Now do I think this warrants our legislature’s involvement? NO. I’d rather our Congress spend time working on real problems they’re supposed to be working on; you know, the things that they can’t get done because they won’t stop bickering like children.
The rest of blame I toss directly at the jacktards who are hackers and pirates. A lot of people are blaming Sony for having an insecure network. The way I see it, Sony is being punished for trying to give something nice to its users. For starters, they allowed their network to be more open, and allowed for installation of Linux. Once people started exploiting that and took advantage of Sony’s open policy, Sony has been trying to plug up the holes ever since. Granted, they’ve been plugging up the holes with silly putty, but you know, it’s hard to fund plugging up all these holes when the service is free. One of the biggest reasons why Microsoft has such a secure network is the fact that they charge those yearly fees for Gold Accounts, which easily supports their army of security geeks. In this situation, you get what you pay for.
I also strongly believe that this wouldn’t have happened if the hackers known as Anonymous hadn’t gotten their panties in a twist over the GeoHot ordeal. While they claim they had nothing to do with this current hack, who’s to say that their intrusion on the network didn’t leave a hole for these hackers to break into? For that matter, since Anonymous is a group of hackers, how do they know that one of them didn’t do this?
We could speculate all day on who the culprit is, but the fact is, I doubt this would have happened if hackers weren’t pissed off at Sony for defending their product. Even with Microsoft’s security army, if a team of hackers was just as mad at them, this could have happened to them. If people cared about the Wii at all, Nintendo could have been hacked as well.
This is another instance of people not being able to handle having nice things. Sony tried to be nice by offering a free service with customizable options, but some people can’t handle that and had to crap on it for everyone else. So thanks to all of you hackers who feel entitled to being able to break into other people’s things, you’ve pissed off millions of people and made a martyr out of a company that doesn’t deserve all of the blame.
I really hope that there is a special circle of Hell just for plagiarists, hackers, and pirates. If there isn’t, I hope karma pays them a visit.
I try to make weekends the time I play games just for me and not for reviewing, whether it’s for the game or for the strategy guide. I know I’ve discussed my stack of shame at length before, and this is the first year that I’m really making a sizable dent in it. My biggest two to complete this year were Mass Effect and its sequel, and I’ve checked both of those off my list with a bit of force. I recently finished my second playthrough of the first game (something that I’ve never done before), and I’m working my way through all of the ME2 DLC. I really want to play ME2 again with my Renegade Shepard, but my stack of shame is out in the open in the living room, staring at me and making me feel guilty. I technically have plenty of time before needing to play ME2 again, and really, I know I’ll play ME3 with my Paragon character first, so I really do have plenty of time.
The question remains though, if I put off Renegading ME2, what game do I tackle next from my list? None of them really jump out of me (which may be really foretelling), so I’m reaching out to the blogosphere, twitterverse, and facebookia for votes.
Please note that the list in my poll is not complete for several reasons:
So please help me decide! Or encourage me to keep riding the Mass Effect train! (And while you’re at it, hope that my Portal 2 guide arrives soon so I can start with that and stop avoiding spoilers.)
I finished Mass Effect 2 last week, and it was the first time I have ever voluntarily replayed a final boss fight in order to get the ending I wanted. I was super mad that I lost Mordin at the very end of the game, and I had to scour the Internet looking for tips on how to keep everyone alive. Thanks to IGN, I did.
Due to the huge release list that is about to come out, I can’t justify buying all of the DLC right now. At the same time, I don’t want to stop playing. I already knew that I wanted to play through both games again as a Renegade, so this weekend I tackled the first Mass Effect again.
This may not seem like such a big deal, especially since I know so many people who have played both games more than once, but this is huge for me. I have not replayed a game since Super Mario Bros. 3, The Legend of Zelda, Tetris, Dr. Mario, and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? What do these games have in common? They’re all from the 80s and early, early 90s. Not to mention, I have a huge stack of games (and guides!) I need to get through. I don’t have time to replay games these days. I honestly meant to replay inFamous (and I still might), but I never got around to it.
But for some reason, I have to replay Mass Effect and I have to replay them NOW. My only explanation for it is that I’m hopelessly addicted to the series.
This time, I’m playing as a guy, as a Vanguard, and I’m very Renegade. Sometimes it hurts me to make this new Shepard so mean, but it’s been very interesting to see how the jerk choices have changed how things went. It’s even more interesting to see that no matter what I choose, the Council still hates me. For example, as a Paragon, I let the Rachni Queen go. The Council chastised me for making a huge mistake and risking another horrific war across the galaxy. As a Renegade, I killed her. The Council scolded me for genocide. So really, Shepard can’t win.
To help me burn through the game more quickly, I’m minimalizing on the side missions and I’m playing on Casual. That makes the game ungodly easy. I rarely take cover at all, because the AI isn’t as powerful and they aren’t as smart. Their snipers don’t even hide! After two days of gameplay, I’m already at the Virmire sequence, and I’ve only died once, but that was because I flipped my Mako into lava. I wanted to see if I really could flip it over, and yeah, when there’s lava involved, you can.
I’m not in any huge rush to finish them; the only thing I definitely want done before Mass Effect 3 is to have all of the DLC done. I am forcing myself to take a step back this week so I can finish The 3rd Birthday, Lego Star Wars III, and maybe start on a new game, like Portal 2 or one of the many games in my stack of shame.