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
  

  53 hours playtime

  14 of 21 achievements

• Card Dungeon
  

  5 hours playtime

  3 of 17 achievements

• SUPERHOT
  

  7 hours playtime

  10 of 26 achievements

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

  3 hours playtime

  16 of 35 achievements

• 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
  

  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~