Bioware's famous series is a very polarizing experience for me. Its like where dreams are met with a sub-part execution, but its a weird way where neither hits you in the way you would expect it. On the bad side the dialogue choices feel somewhat forced and arbitrary, you can never tell what your character will actually say, there's a lot of slow text based moments to take in, and the world just isn't very natural (you either walk around with your gun out constantly, or you just bump into stuff mashing the action button only able to manipulate loose contextual stuff). On the other hand the world is very creative, the scale is powerful, the game is loaded with an entire textbook worth of information and lore, and its got both a mixture of high sci-fi role playing and unique shooter combat. Idealy I should feel like a little kid on christmas being so wrapped up and taken in by such a virtual world, but the reality is I get bored of all the tedious down time or annoyed at something not going as it appeared it would, and start to remember how much a better simpler game was. I guess the game is vastly ambitious, but made more by writers than coders and they can't input the right things into motion. Things just don't feel very natural, and rather than a functional world that does as its promised, it feels like a lot of great ideas spread on a fragile and robotic canvas giving the illusion that gaming can't handle their vision (although it can, every trait here has been done better somewhere else). However if there's one challenge I'd love to overcome with my dumb ADD-ing effect in gaming, it would probably be to beat a Bioware game and complete it by playing it from start to end without skipping a day of play. In other words: play it like I'm supposed to and not have it fade to dust. I'm sure its good enough worth completing, its left a major impact on gaming, and it still has some awesome stuff within it. So its worth beating if I can just put on my rubber boots and deal with the messy parts to find the treasured moments.
So I'm off omega for good, visited the citadel, got Garus and Mordi on board, and I've got kasumi (one of my favorite levels and characters) in as well. I'm currently finishing the Project overlord mission. The problem now is how much longer will it take, and how much bad pacing or talking do I need to cover? Don't confuse that for me saying all talking is bad, but its always on thin ice. Its sometimes good, and its sometimes a chore to go all over the place only to run into dialogue trees. I also wish I could figure out more on how loyalty works, but as it is now I'm at least not pissing anyone off. However I'm a bit frustrated with how I can go so far as to flirt with ME2's equivalent of a secretary, yet I cannot even have a basic dialogue tree for the legendary theif that was at one point sold as DLC. Why!? Bioware can't even follow their own damn structure it would seem.
I don't know if I have much more to say. I still really get bugged by the robotic feeling of the world, but things are still fun enough. I guess what it really comes down to is that many still view gaming pretty shallowly, and as long as you have a great novelty, decent controls, AAA presentation, then people can overlook the lacking mechanics or delivery. So its just a matter of trying to forget that I'm on a very linear corridor path, can't touch anything but the strangely placed panels on every planet, and that I have to take the talking with a grain of salt. That's what I did wrong originally to make me turn off and put up the game. Once the novelty of all the sci-fi stuff wore off I got pissed off by the inconsistent voice acting, and got bored of the uninteractive worlds, but now I'm trying to return and focus on the narrative adventure rather than the interactive adventure. This isn't Skyrim, that much is clear. However it does have some really good writers and they want to show you some really amazing sci-fi stuff they come up with, and give you just enough freedom to trick you into thinking this is more of you writing your own destiny rather than them. Under that sort of view, I can commend Bioware, and say that this game is probably worth continuing through.
edit
Well nevermind then. I was going from my dad's place over to my mom's and in addition to facing crashes earlier that day, I now cannot get the game to install like it should on the PS3 over there. Fuck this, between my normal PS3 over at my dad's place nearly failing completely and only surviving if it could wipe all my saves, and now the one over at my mom's just plain wont install a game right and even shuts itself off in the middle of the process, I stand by what I've said in the past that consoles don't need to be this complicated and its just absurd that we can't rely on them anymore to do the one simple thing we buy and ask of them for: gaming. And don't give me this "it needs to install" crap, the Wii U is doing perfectly fine without that nonsense and runs more demanding games than the PS3. I can only hope the PS4 continues to go smoothly despite installing the whole damn disc onto its system. This is ridiculous. I'm finishing up a Doom 3 article I started on and I guess its appropriate that I just play that instead, since the people that put that together had the brains not to make it go through crappy installation nonsense and I can actually count on that.
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