Star Trek Online has really hit it’s stride recently with their weekly episodes, so I’m very much looking forward to the third episode of the Deferi-Breen arc on Saturday.

Lord of the Rings Online free-to-play (or free-to-try as I like to think of it) launch starts on Friday, the 10th, but I’ll be in headstart on the 8th, which is for current subscribers and F2P beta players. While, I’m looking forward to getting into the new zone, I’m still ambivalent about the store and LUA changes. Still, the sooner the changes launch, the sooner we’ll see how it impacts the Landroval server community.

My Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions preorder is in the mail. Of all of the super heroes in the Marvel and DC universes, Spider-Man has always been my favorite, and I’m really hoping that this game will be more like Spider-Man 2 and not Web of Shadows.

I finally finished all of the available Mass Effect 2 DLC last week, just in time to pickup and play the Lair of the Shadow Broker which should release today. Like I mentioned last week, my excitement level tripled when I saw the trailer for the new content, it looks epic.

As if all of the gaming stuff wasn’t enough, I got an email from Amazon promising that my Kindle should arrive this week. I’m looking forward to spending some time with it and see if this whole ebook thing is for me or not.

Of course the burning question now is: what will happen with my Sheppard’s romances? He was with Liara in the first game, but now he’s with Tali.

I spent an hour with the demo and did not have fun. It may have just been a bad demo, the game may actually be just as great as the first one, but I’m not planning to order it until I see what some other gamer-friends think of it.

The demo really felt like they gave you a beginning of the game character and dropped you into the middle of the game.

• Transformers: War for Cybertron is on it’s way from Amazon and should be here by Thursday.
• There’s the freshly downloaded Crackdown 2 demo on my Eilte’s hard-drive begging to be played.
• Mass Effect 2 has three DLC’s piled up that I’ve barely touched.
• Red Dead Redemption has some new and free CO-OP maps.

There’s lots to do on the Xbox 360.

Then again, poor Cimmerian Brynulf has been trapped in Tortage for weeks longer than he should have been, and he’s only one quest away from escaping.

Bullet points provided courtesy of Anjin, Inc.

I finished on Sunday evening, the in-game stats read that I’ve complete 96% of the game and spent 5+ days playing. The percentage seems about right given the number of unlocks and side-quests I’ve done, but the time played can’t be right. Raptr has me clocked in at 44 hours, which seems more accurate to me. Just as a comparison to Rockstar’s last game, I played GTA 4 for about 3 hours.

First let me cover the controls. Riding a horse felt pretty good to me and I enjoyed the way galloping worked after a short learning curve, it became something of a rhythm game for me. The shooting controls are pretty easy using the normal/default settings, and the included dead eye mode (think bullet time or slo-motion) made it much easier for someone without much skill at shooters to get through some of the more difficult sections. Two other big features were the mid-mission checkpoints and the ability to skip a checkpoint. I died and/or failed quite a bit in a few missions and there was usually always a checkpoint not too far back so that I never got overly frustrated. The skip checkpoint feature I don’t actually know much about, I saw the button come up a couple of times when I was having to retry often but I never used it some I’m not sure how far ahead it let you skip or how often you could use it.

This is a gorgeous game. The character and horse animations are all dead on. The world is breath taking, feels wide open, and really made me feel a part of the wild west setting. Coming out of a saloon into the bright sun, riding over a hill to be treated to the vista of an orange and red sunrise, and the glory of a thunderstorm out on the high plains. The sound in the game is just as good as the visuals too, especially the rain and thunder for the thunderstorms. This is one of the first Xbox games I’ve played where I found myself wishing I could make screen and video captures while I was playing.

Of course there are some problems with the game, mostly glitches which you can check out by searching for: donkey woman, cougar man, and bird people. Personally, the only glitches I had were a couple of places where there was some clipping issues and nothing that interfered with game-play or advancing the story.

Despite how beautiful the game was, the story was the part that really got me through the game.

You play as a reformed outlaw named John Marston whose wife and son were being held hostage by an unspecified government agency in order to force me to hunt down members of my former gang. After the opening movie, you’re dumped in the town of Armadillo and sent out to find the first of your old friends.

I’m going to stop there with the overview, everything I’ve said so far is in the first few minutes of the game but the plot gets good quickly and I don’t want to ruin anyone’s enjoyment. Instead, I’ll just say that unlike the GTA series, Marston is a more likeable character. Of course you have choices to make in the game and you can go more to the desperado side than the hero side if you want, but it’s nice to have more of a choice about how you want your character to act. That said, there are some instances where you’re forced to do some unsavory things, but it always made sense to me when contrasted against the story of a reformed man trying to do whatever he could to get his family back.

RDR has a lot in common with the Mass Effect and Fable series. They’re semi-sandbox games but you have to progress the main story missions in order to open up more parts of the map. For side missions you have random missions, stranger missions, bounties, hideouts, and social club challenges. Random missions occur sporadically, normally someone will come running up to you and ask you to stop a thief who’s stolen their horse or robbed their store. Occasionally you’ll happen across others like an ambush, a man being chased by wolves or coyotes, a hanging, etc. Stranger missions are fixed side missions, and I can’t say whether or not these are really optional since I did them all, the tend to appear as you complete the main story missions. Overall there is a lot of stuff you can do in the game and that’s not even touching on the multi-player aspect (which I haven’t played much of so I can’t talk much about).

Without risking any spoilers, I did want to mention that the pacing towards the very end of the game is a bit odd. Let me just say that the game is not over until you see the credits roll.

My Age of Conan retry was going very well up until Wednesday, that’s when UPS delivered my copy of Red Dead Redemption. I’d been waiting to post my thoughts until I’d escaped from Tortage, but, as a summary, my ranger Brynulf has reached level 19 and is near the end of his destiny quest.

My Xbox hasn’t gotten much use since I finished Mass Effect 2, but Red Dead Redemption has had me hooked the last few nights. This game was completely not on my radar. Scott from Pumping Irony asked my via Raptr a few days ago if I was getting it, so I took a look. Hmmm, a Rock Star open world shooter like GTA 4? Probably not something I’ll enjoy, I played the last GTA game for less than a day. I decided to check out a couple of game play videos anyway, and based on what I saw, I ordered it. So far, no regrets. Well except for a lack of sleep.

Besides RDR, I’ve had some real life stuff distracting me from writing. On Wednesday, my dad had his 62 birthday, and my sister also had her second child, both on the same day. Getting your third grandson, that’s a nice birthday present. Yesterday was my fourth wedding anniversary, and tonight we have a babysitter and dinner plans.

So, that’s that. I do have several drafts waiting for attention, so week should be a busy one.

• Cryptic is releasing Revelation, which adds Vibora Bay to Champions Online.
• Turbine is releasing the Spring Festival for Lord of the Rings Online.
• Bioware is releasing the Firewalker DLC for Mass Effect 2.

This is a non-spoiler post. Please keep the comments spoiler free as well.

I finished Mass Effect 2, and it was even better than the first one!

I’m a reader. I love books. When I’m reading a good story, I find it hard to put down. There’s always a point in the last third of a book where the plot kicks into high gear and starts the downhill rush towards the denouement. I have to be careful about when I get to that point in a book because once I get there I absolutely have to finish it before I can do anything else.

Mass Effect 1 and 2 affect me the same way. I actually started the last mission in ME2 much too late at night and finally had to tear myself away around 2 am but before I actually finished the game. So all day the following day at work, I was counting the hours until I could get back on and finish.

I enjoyed Mass Effect 2 as much as I had hoped to and much more than I expected to. I blame my hesitance to start the game on my lowered expectations and on the crappy marketing leading up to release. All of the talk about a darker tone, and  the awful preview videos with Jack, had me concerned that they were taking Mass Effect more towards a Dragon Age style which I didn’t enjoy much.

Turns out my fears were totally baseless, I enjoyed all of the new characters, including Jack (which I was really surprised about). I was just as (or more actually) emotionally involved in the story. The Mass Effect games are part of a very small group of games (like KOTOR, oddly enough) where my emotional investment in the characters is just as deep as it is when I read a novel. I think it is a combination of “good enough” facial and body animation combined with excellent voice work, good writing, and just enough choice allowed in the dialogue trees. Having fully voiced dialogue for both my character and for non-player characters keeps the immersion level high. Limiting the character customization so that non-player reactions to my character’s appearance is appropriate (don’t refer to me as a boy if I look like I’m 60 years old). With immersion maintained at such a high and consistent level, it is much easier for me to develop a bond with my digital teammates.

So if you are into Science-Fiction, space opera, adventure stories, I highly recommend playing both Mass Effect games. You don’t have to play the first to enjoy the second, but it is a better experience having played both.

I am reminded of the following quote:

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former. – Albert Einstein

Ubisoft has decided that they do not want to learn from the experiences of EA and 2K Games.

PC Gamer has an article about how Ubisoft is requiring an internet connection for Assassins Creed 2 for the PC. That’s not just for registering the game initially, or launching the game, but for the entire time the game is running. So your router goes down, or your 2 year old son unplugs your modem? You get kicked out of your game. When your connection comes back up you’re at the last checkpoint you reached. Hopefully there are a lot of checkpoints in the game.

There’s a follow up at PC Gamer where Ubisoft tries to address their concerns, but the only thing I got from it is that they don’t have a firm grasp on reality.

What it boils down to is that they are trying to combat piracy. They are trying to sell this system as a value add, by saying that you don’t have to have the disc to play, that you can install as many times as you want, and that your save games will be stored on a server. What they don’t seem to understand, though, is that when I buy a single player game, I don’t want to have to worry about launch day player floods of the authentication server. I understand, and expect, that as part of the MMO experience, but I don’t want that in my single player experience. Ubisoft doesn’t even believe that it is unhackable. So, once again, people of rip off the company will be able to play however they want and paying customers get to deal with the hassle.

Let me explain something to Ubisoft. I haven’t played Bioshock. I didn’t buy it for PC because of all of the problems 2k had with their server-based DRM scheme. There were plenty of other games for me to play at the time, so why purchase something that is going to cause me frustration. I also didn’t buy it for Xbox 360, since I didn’t want to encourage bad behavior. Not a big deal, right? That’s just one sale. Well not exactly. I’m not buying Bioshock 2 either. Not because of any DRM of 2k boycott, but because I never played the first one, and I feel I would be missing out on the full experience by not having played the first game.

This whole debacle is very timely. I didn’t play Assassin’s Creed 1 because of some of the reviews it got about repetitiveness, and I was deep into several other games at the time. Generally this means that the window of opportunity for me to get into a franchise is closed. Assassin’s Creed 2 has been getting such good reviews, though that I thought about picking up both games for my 360. I was actually in Best Buy this last weekend and had both games in my hand. I didn’t end of buying them, but only because I decided I should check with friends and see if I really needed to play the first game or I would be better off watching some Youtube cut-scenes. Boy am I glad I didn’t buy those games now. So Ubisoft has cost themselves two sales from me, and likely any additional sales on the franchise since I’ll be so far behind on the story.

As rants go, this one is pretty weak, but I’m not really pissed off so much as exasperated. You would think that gaming companies would look at case studies of what the music industry went through already, or at least what other gaming companies have already tried and failed at.

It reminds me of a corporate reorganization at a former job. We had a full IT department meeting, where the CIO outlined a reorganization we were going to do. Instead of grouping staff by technical skills (team of Java devs, team of Oracle admin, and so on) we were instead going to be grouped by business area/process. This meant that a team in charge of a specific business area would have one or more developers (of different skills sets like Java and Progress), a DBA, a tester, etc. The funny thing about the meeting was the CIO introduced the idea by saying it had been tried at other companies and never worked, but we were going to give it a shot anyway. I left wondering what the heck he was thinking.

So good luck to Ubisoft, trying to do nearly the same thing that EA, 2k, and others have already tried. I’m sure that you won’t have a multitude of issues every time a new game releases and thousands of players try to authenticate against your servers at the same time. I can’t imagine that you’ll have a horde of  angry customers calling support wanting to know why they can’t play their offline, single player game because your DRM servers are down for maintenance. I’m sure no one will mind in a couple of years when you decide to decommission the servers for old games, or really care if you decide to patch out the DRM at that time.

If you want to read some more about this, there’s some more good information and opinion over at both Rock, Paper, Shotgun! and Ars Technica.

Personally, I’m not committing myself to a boycott of the company or anything. I’m not going to start rage posting on forums or signing a petition. I’m just not going to buy the game and then move on with my life. I suppose I may be tempted at some point to buy an Ubisoft game despite the DRM, but right now I can’t think of a game that I’m looking forward to enough that I’d be willing to deal with that kind of DRM. Assassin’s Creed certainly isn’t interesting enough for me to bother. I have so many more convenient ways to spend my entertainment time.

I absolutely loved Mass Effect 1. Not only was it one of the main reasons why I bought an Xbox 360, but it is on a fairly short list of games that I’ve finished.

With Mass Effect 2 coming out at the same time as Star Trek Online, I decided to hold off on buying the game for a couple of weeks. I knew I would be able to play both at once, and I wanted to get enough time in the headstart and get to Commander rank and qualify to captain an Akira class.

Also, I was a bit hesitant about whether or not the sequel would live up to my expectations. Quite a bit of the recent marketing for the game was hinting at a fairly dark tone. After trying to play Dragon Age: Origins and failing to get hooked, I wasn’t sure that I would enjoy a darker look at the Mass Effect universe.

After Bryn’s promotion to Commander earlier this week, I decided it was time to pickup Mass Effect 2. Plus, I didn’t want to wait too much longer to pickup and play it, because I have a feeling that it is going to be hard to avoid spoilers soon on the various blogs and podcasts, not to mention twitter.

So around 11:30 or so I unwrapped the box and popped the disc into my Elite.

I finally tore myself away from the game and staggered to bed around 5 am. At some point during the play session, I started looking at the clock on my phone and calculating how much sleep I really had to have.

All my concerns about the darker tone and disappointed expectations were forgotten in the first 60 seconds.

That’s all I’m going to say about the game right now, except you’re really missing out if you don’t finish ME1 first. I don’t think that I would be having the same emotional response to ME2, had I not already “lived” through the prior events in Sheppard’s life. I know a few people who are struggling a bit to get through it, but in my opinion the payoff is well worth it.

Then again, games are supposed to be fun. So if you didn’t like ME1, I can completely understand why you wouldn’t want to grind through it before starting ME2.