Wolfedood

March Report #2

It’s that time of the month again, the time you look back and see how little progress you made and promise yourself to do better next month.
Fell into a kind of rut somewhere mid March where I didn’t really feel like playing anything until I came back home and…well we’ll cover that below. First the list.

  • MOBIUS FINAL FANTASY
    MOBIUS FINAL FANTASY

    53 hours playtime

    14 of 21 achievements

  • Card Dungeon
    Card Dungeon

    5 hours playtime

    3 of 17 achievements

  • SUPERHOT
    SUPERHOT

    7 hours playtime

    10 of 26 achievements

  • Supreme League of Patriots Issue 1: A Patriot Is Born
    Supreme League of Patriots Issue 1: A Patriot Is Born

    3 hours playtime

    16 of 35 achievements

  • Pregnancy
    Pregnancy

    14 minutes playtime

    no achievements

So this is what I played since my last post(almost).

Mobius and Fire emblem Heroes: Mobage, blah blah blah, kill time. Blah blah.
Card Dungeon: Fun little rogue-lite dungeon crawler. Not particularly hard but it’s an android port and it’s rather obvious. Had some fun with it but I honestly don’t see me going back to it, so many better choices for the exact same thing.
Superhot: This one was actually interesting. It’s short alright but there’s quite some fun to be had in that time. Also it’s quite the jab at how people act like sheep, so much that by the end of the game I don’t wanna recommend it to anyone just cause that verifies I’ve been “sheepified” xD
Supreme League of Patriots Issue 1: A Patriot is Born This was actually painful to play. I neaaaaarly finished it but I just couldn’t take it anymore. It is supposed to be funny but all the humour comes from overplayed stereotypes and completely juvenile puzzles. The characters are LITERALLY walking stereotypes. Also the puzzles often make absolutely no sense. I couldn’t get myself to even finish the first episode and I’ll gladly stay away from it from now on.
Pregnancy: Yes, I was feeling THAT guilty for not having an SG win among these so I cheated a little by adding Pregnancy, a game that literally has 15mins of content in it :P
And as a 15 min game it obviously fails to strike any chord, just fell flat all the way through.

As for the month’s MVP…

  • Mass Effect: Andromeda
    Mass effect: Andromeda

    48 hours playtime

    21 of 55 achievements

Mass Effect: Andromeda

This is where all my time since the 24th that I came back home went :P

It all started with a lot, and I mean A LOT, of frustration. I opened the game, pressed that “Customize Character” button and proceeded to do one of my favourite thing with these games. Make my own hero. Little did I know. No matter what I did I ended up with a monstrosity, and the couple that I liked while I was in the editor, once put into the actual game and seen under all the lights and whatnot looked horendous. So default Broder it is :3

Starting off the game the first thing you realize is the how bad the facial animations are. And they’re BAD! Alpha testing level bad. There’s the crazy eyes, the lack of head movement during conversations, the awkward squints etc etc. So right off the start Andromeda doesn’t give a good impression.

However soon after you realise that all that trainwreck of animations is limited exactly to that. Faces. Movement, combat, crounching, interactions etc all work fine, at least for the most part.

The combat is the same as previous Mass Effects, only mostly improved. It’s more fluid and you have many more options, all within the mechanics we already know. The only “downgrade” to it, is that there’s no option to customize or command your allies anymore besides a “go there” or “target that one” button. However BioWare did a good job with their AI so you rarely need that option, if ever.

Graphic wise when it comes to character models Andromeda fails to impress. For some inexplicable reason they look worse than DA:I even though they use the same engine and most NPCs feel like they were just randomly generated through the horrendous Customization tool the game offers. Even NPCs that have quite the active role in the story like Director Addison(oh gawd, Mrs. Tired Face…) and Reyes Vidal(hunkah hunkah!) look rather generic. And some secondary quest NPCs are outright ridiculous(Rhys for example).

The environments however? Those are majestic! From the lighting striken rocky fields of Habitat 7, the lush blue jungles of Havarl to the vast desert of Elaaden and the snowy wastelands of Voeld everywhere you go is a sight to behold. I’ve found myself stopping and just staring at these places on multiple occasions till I realise one more reason why I hate Origin. There’s no built-in screen capture so no shots to share :(

The above though is one of the things Mass Effect needed the most all these years and personally have been longing for forever. The open-world setup it has. In all previous games, besides the horrendous moons you landed on ME and took the Mako around an empty wasteland(ugh) most places felt like long corridors. Sure, it gave a vague feeling of a planet but still it was very limited. Now almost everywhere you land besides the hubs you are free to go in every direction you want and see what is there. And they’re MASSIVE! Also the Nomad(the vehicle you are given) is quite fun to drive in unlike it’s predecessor. I still haven’t tried to go from one side of a map to the other but even at a flat land I’m sure it’d take minutes to cross at high speeds. In fact I haven’t even hit a map border yet.

And now for the most important part of a BioWare game, the story! As I still haven’t finished it I’m not 100% sure about it(the bad guys motivation has not been revealed yet) but otherwise I’m very pleased with it. It doesn’t start very strong but a few hours in it really starts taking off. Sure, it has some overused tropes like suddenly being the most important person in the galaxy without having even trained for it but you know, videogames :P

It actually feels like an exploration game and is setting up a rather promising galaxy for BioWare to further expand with future installments, I for one want to go back to Andromeda. The characters that join you feel rather one dimensional at first however as you progress the story and their conversations they start actually feeling like people and grow on you. Even generic-boy 23478 Liam actually is a person by the end. Sure, when you compare them to characters like Garrus and Tali they feel they fall short but don’t forget even they didn’t have the same time to grow. I for one think the Andromeda characters are actually more fleshed out now than characters of Mass effect were in the end of the first game.


All in all it’s a rather enjoyable game despite all it’s shortcomings and it’s certainly a very solid base for another epic trilogy. And it really has a Mass Effect vibe(the game, not the franchise). Just hope that the other installments are more polished than this upon release. It’s a real shame for an actually decent-to-good game to be buried into oblivion because of exaggerated critics of mostly visual shortcomings.


So that’s it for this month. I’ll see you all mid-April again,hopefully with more stuff than this! Cheerio~

escollo

Does ‘Pregnancy’ include fertilization? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Wolfedood

Nope, you play the weird voice in the head of a 14year old pregnant rape victim ._.

escollo

Darn, I should read more about subject before making such jokes, sorry.

cbones - LINUX

I thought Supreme League of Patriots was going to be funny too and was disappointed.
It’s nice that Mass Effect: Andromeda is enjoyable for you … you have logged a lot of time in just about a week!

Wolfedood

Well who needs sleep when you have stars to travel and aliens to bang? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
But in all seriousness this was the indisputable No.1 is my wishlist for over 4 years now so it’s great to finally have my paws on it. After all these years you just wanna consume it :P

Trent

Interesting what you say about Supreme League of Patriots. Issue 3 is in my Attack Plan because it was an SG win. I was thinking I’d skip chapters 1-2 and just play the one that I won. Based on your mini-review, that sounds like a good idea. :)

Wolfedood

Yeah, I was very disappointed with what this game turned out to be. I thought it’d have some good laughs but unfortunately the only laughable thing about it is how bad it is. The main character is literally a fat, stupid af American “patriot” who can’t tell his right from his left and your always by your side snarky, morbid, sarcastic Englishman roommate(who literally goes everywhere with a bag with the UK flag on…). Stories should be directly connected so I don’t know how Issue 3 will be without the prequels but having seen what I have I say go for it just because it’s a win, otherwise I’d just advise to stay far away from it :3

Veckpreb

Good to read that Mass Effect is still a fun game despite all of the negatives. Hopefully the devs will learn from the shortcomings of Andromeda.
I’ll probably still wait for a massive deal before i bite.

Wolfedood

That’s the one good thing out of all this, BioWare Montreal that was (mistakenly) entrusted with it will either sink or swim. Unfortunately the other divisions of BioWare were working on other projects so they gave this to Montreal, which has next to no experience developing full games, let alone of this magnitude, and their inexperience showed a bit much. If EA hadn’t pushed for this date and they had another 6 months or so to polish it this whole circus could have been avoided.
If you’re gonna wait then I suggest you wait quite long, preferably until after all the DLCs are released. Origin is notorious for them rarely going on discounts, and even when they do it’s very little so wait for a GOTY/Complete edition if you’re not in a hurry to play it.

ninglor03

I run (or drove to be more precise) into end of map on Eos, so it does exist :D
Have much more fun with ME:A!
Curios though: How did you add the game? Can you like add Origin games as well? o.o

Wolfedood

If you can add it to a list I haven’t found how to do so, maybe if you add it as a non steam game into your steam client?
As far as posts like these are concerned you just copy paste the code for the normal boxes and manually switch the info around. Gonna put the code below, just add a < before every line except 4th.

ul class=”games”>
li class=”game game-thumbnail game-unfinished” data-item=”ewby2g4”>
div class=”title”>
Mass Effect: Andromeda
/div>
a href=”https://www.origin.com/irl/en-us/store/mass-effect/mass-effect-andromeda/standard-edition” target=”_blank”>
img alt=”Mass effect: Andromeda” src=”http://www.nisute.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/mass-effect-andromeda-1140x500.jpg” />
/a>
div class=”caption”>
p>48 hours playtime</p>
p>21 of 55 achievements</p>
/div>
/li>
/ul>

ninglor03

Ah, I see. Thank you for chairing, might use it :)
Guess it depends on my update for Monday - which probably would just be about ME:A since I haven’t played anything else this week. That’ll make a pretty boring update :D

Wolfedood

Depends. Does it involve alien banging? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

ninglor03

Apart from Peebee? ;) :D

Wolfedood

Well anyone, banging is banging, it discriminates against noone :P
Oh and btw forgot to say this earlier but maybe you haven’t hit the map border on Eos. Don’t know where you are in the story but not all of Eos is accessible at first. At some point in the story you’ll be notified the air on Eos has cleared and the boundaries will have been lifted from where they were. It gets much bigger then.
I’m curious to see if that happens on other planets too, I’ve activated all vaults besides Havarl but so far only Eos has gotten expanded. Although to be honest I’m afraid to think of Elaaden and Voeld expanded. Those are already so massive!

ninglor03

Nooooo, I wasn’t! But it was “just fun” :D

I know. I actually returned and found the end that way. It’s some kind of shining and the moment you cross it you are told to return to your mission. Something like that anyway :)
Yeah, Voeld expanding…. scary thought :D
But I guess it would get… wetter maybe?
Still haven’t seen Elaaden. BUT I guess I’m just about to unlock it :]