Now, back then I had a crappy toon. It was a mish-mash of builds. At first I wanted to be a kung-fu master, so I went with the custom class option. I specialised in un-armoured and un-armed combat. Mid-way through I realised I was getting beat up really hard, so I suddenly switched to Heavy Armour and started using a sword and shield. So my skills levelled up in those. Then even later on, I decided to ditch the heavy armour and weapons, and went with light armour and short blades (knives, shortswords etc).

In the end, my Nerevarrine is just a warrior with a bunch of ill-chosen skills. At the end of the game I remembered him being in a fully glassed armour outfit with a daedric sword and shield (yeah, I know right?).

So now, 17 years later, I’ve come back to revisit Seyda Neen – cuz Bethesda released a free GOTY version, and I realised I also had a GOG GotY version. I installed the GOG version instead cuz it came with more stuff.

Now, 17 years later, I’ve played Oblivion. I’ve played Skyrim. I’ve made mods for Skyrim and Oblivion. I understood how TES games worked “under the hood”.

This time around, I went to Nexus and obtained a few mods which I thought were essential – Unofficial Patches, patches that fixed gameplay issues that Bethesda didn’t fix (“Purist Patch”), and of course, modern HD Textures (with normal maps, or “to make things pop out”). No longer are bricks on the buildings just a painted-on texture… now bricks look like bricks! Well, unless you get closer, and you’ll see that it’s still a flat surface.

The first hours back in Seyda Neen was nostalgic – I remembered Fargoth, I remembered he had a hiding place. I did those quests, and headed off to Balmora. These, I remember. However, I am glad that whatever happened later, I’d forgotten. The game now feels like a “new game” to me cuz I barely remembered even 5% of the quests I had to do to slowly creep towards being the Nerevarrine. At this point my character doesn’t know he’s the Chosen One yet.

And Vivec – maaaan… it was bigger than I remembered. I barely even remembered the Arena. I doubt I had even taken part in fights in the Arena back in 2002, because I do not recall one single bit of the quests and of the Arena!

Solstheim

I also did a quick hop over to Solstheim cuz of a quest I got in Al’drun . The moment I arrived by ship, I had “reverse nostalgia”. Right up ahead was Fort Moonmoth, still intact and with guards patrolling! Now, it’s reverse-nostalgia because I was very intimate and familiar with Solstheim due to making my mod – Severin Manor Guard. So I kinda remembered where the landmarks were – where the Skals would be (had a Skal follower in the Skyrim Dragonborn expansion), where Thirsk Mead Hall would be etc. Thirsk actually looked kinda the same in Morrowind and in Skyrim – the only difference is the inhabitants.

I must say, Bethesda have really fleshed out Solstheim since 2002 – I went to where Raven Rock was supposed to be, and there was only 1 guy there that said this would be the site of a “new colony”. Luckily there were no dragons around (there’s a Word-Of-Power wall up at the northern part of Solstheim in Skyrim), and I ran all over the island trying to see what it looked like 4000 years before Skyrim (or was it 400 years?). I found Stahlrim and was unable to mine it cuz I didn’t have the Ancient Pickaxe (needed in Skyrim to mine it). Haven’t run across anything in Morrowind yet that would allow me to mine Stahlrim.

Back in Morrowind…

So after my quick jaunt into Solstheim (I still have to go back to complete some quests), I’m back in Morrowind, but at the Northern shores trying to uncover more of the map.

I must say, I expect to be caught up in this re-play for about 100 hours or more, simply because I’ve forgotten so much of it and remembering only key important highlights of the game, and also the mods really updated the game to be somewhat decent by today’s standard.

As an example, even for Grand Theft Auto V, I didn’t buy it “at launch”. I still haven’t bought it, and it’s one of those that I am definitely going to get “sometime soon”, but “not at this price”.

However, for Witcher 3, I had very tempting offers. GreenManGaming had an offer that was so good, that I was able to get 30% (3% more than the 27% off offered by GMG) off the launch price. That was kind of the push I needed to get it on “Launch-Day”. So, applying all the coupons and discount codes, I pre-purchased the game.

May 19 came. Because I am on the “other side of the world”, May 19 for me is May 18th for you. So I was thinking I won’t be able to play anything until May 20th, when it is May 19 for you guys. How wrong I was! On May 18th my time, I received an email from GMG with my activation key. So I went to GOG.com (yeah the guys that do not do DRM on their games!) to activate it. Yes I can play it without Steam. I can just click on “witcher3.exe” and the game runs without any DRM checks

What can I say when I clicked the PLAY button?

In a word – WOW!

I must admit, the world is indeed BEAUTIFUL. And my graphic options weren’t even at max. When at max, even my GPU struggles. At my current comfortable settings, I get 25 to 45 FPS. Also, the driver version of the GPU plays a part. If I installed the latest nvidia driver (352.86) which is optimized for Witcher 3, I get better fps but I lose the ability to record video using the built-in NVENC hardware encoder. I have to fallback to using software encoders which may cause lag. However if I rolled back to the version optimised for GTA 5 (350.12), all my recording problems went away. So yeah I’m now this version so my fps suffers slightly, but I can record!

The world is HUGE. A little like Dragon Age Inquisition, the game only has loading screens between “zones”. Each zone is large, very very large. What Witcher 3 does better than Dragon Age Inquisition, is the horseback combat. I can fight on horseback if I want to. My horse has abilities and stats. It can get frightened.

In Dragon Age Inquisition I would always have to dismount to fight. Not in Witcher 3 – I can lob heads off from horseback! But it still sucks that I need to dismount to loot bodies and gather ingredients. Maybe a patch may come soon to address this?

NPC simulation of life is a little lacking though. It suffers the same problem as Dragon Age Inquisition – the NPCs have no life outside of what is needed to give the quest to the player. Skyrim (and other TES games) are still kings in this area – their NPCs have a life! The world seemed ALIVE there.

The towns and villages that dot the maps usually have various NPCs that mostly do nothing but walk around and say the same exact line over and over again when you run past, but they also sometimes have an NPC that pops a quest up when conditions are right. Also, they have “Notice Boards” that give you sidequests to let you level up your Geralt before you continue the main quest.

The new-and-improved portion of the game is that now the game has a “recommended level” beside the quest. That is just a guide. If it says LEVEL 16 and you’re level 9, feel free to go ahead and try the quest. Who knows, you may actually complete it even despite the advice that you should be level 16 to attempt it.

The one confusing aspect of Witcher 3, though, is the way potions are used. In the past, you create some potions, then you drink them. As you drink them, they get used up. When you have no more potions left, you need to brew more.

In Witcher 3, you get an initial recipe to create a potion. Once created, you have “3/3” or “5/5” of these potions which you can equip to drink them during combat. Once these are used up, you don’t need to brew more – all you need to do is just sleep, even for ONE hour, and all your potions will magically refill. This is the most immersion-breaking thing I have found to date. I would much rather it remained the same like in Witcher 1 and 2 where we need to brew more potions if we wanted them. Worse still is that we’re limited to only 3 or only 5 of them. I can’t make a batch of 20 health potions, for example, and use them as-and-when needed like in previous Witcher games.

Thus far, I am still pretty much engrossed by the game. I’d rate it 4 out of 5 stars.

Related articles

• The Witcher 3 First Impression
• The Witcher 3 gets an amazing CG cinematic launch trailer
• Your Real Guide To The Witcher 3’s Characters

30 years later, the same creator that made “Elite”, gives us “Elite Dangerous“. At the core, it’s still the 1984 game Elite, but updated with modern graphics and multiplayer capability.

By no means does that make Elite Dangerous an “MMO”. It’s more like a single-player game with a multiplayer capability. Much like Neverwinter Nights, or even older games like Baldurs Gate or Icewind Dale – they are primarily Single Player games but with multiplayer modes.

Thus, there won’t be the usual MMO staple – players killing other players every place you go for example. The online world is designed to be “drop-in-drop-out”. That means you can easily switch from playing the single-player game to the online mode, and everything will seem transparent to you – the only additions you would notice is just the human players, that’s all. The game world would still be the same. That ton of Gold you saw earlier will still be the same price in that system (unless players have suddenly dumped alot of Gold there and prices become lower due to more supply).

The background economy is working, and it does get affected by Player Actions, but not significantly like in X series universes. I dare say it works even better than most of X’s games, because you can actually see the effect your trade runs (as well as other players’ trade runs) have on the economy right before your eyes.

This is because the game designed, even in Single Player mode, to draw game data from their servers. You can choose NOT to do this too – for example when you’re travelling and it may cost you money to keep an internet connection alive.

Elite is also not X, not Eve, not anything else. It has unique gameplay mechanics not found anywhere else and it is therefore, not a game for everybody. For example – having the “best ship” and the “best weapons” doesn’t make you invincible. It just means it takes more hits to kill you. A skilled player in the default tiny ship with that “peashooter” can, and probably will, kill you before you manage to kill him.

Thus, this game is based very much on SKILL rather than STATS. So don’t think about trying to cheat by grinding offline in solo mode to get the best gear before you go back online. You can do it of course, but it won’t help much against truly skilled pilots. Also, having the best weapons doesn’t do you a bit of good if you can’t shoot too. You yourself MUST have some skills in the first place. It’s not a game about button mashing and spamming your “abilities”. There is also no “builds”, because your skills are not the same as another player’s skills. He might be good at using lasers, but you’re better at using bullets. What works for him won’t work for you. If you copy his “build” (ie his ship loadout), you’d die horrible deaths many times over because you just can’t do the things he can with that gear.

Another example – a skilled player in a trading ship, generally recognised as a ship with so-so armour but lousy weapons, can easily kill pirates who try to plunder him, even if the pirates were in “good” ships.

That said, the game direction is not even PvP in the first place. In general, 99% of the time online, people are actually co-operatiing with other people. They run missions together, share trade tips, or just generally chat about nothing. If you see a big Anaconda (think – warship) lumbering along towards you, don’t panic. 99% of the time it’s just a player coming along to say HELLO!, not to shoot you.

And it’s only a beta.

Can’t wait for it to be a finished product!

First time when I saw this being released on Steam, I thought “Huh? What kind of simulator is this? How could driving a truck be fun?”. I didn’t give it a second look actually.

It wasn’t until a friend kept telling to to try it that I downloaded the demo, and I was hooked almost immediately.

On the surface, it looks boring. On the surface, you can play it casually. Just pop in for a quick delivery between games or TV.

However, once you add mods to it, it becomes awesome! Realistic economy, physics, better looking paintjobs etc… all are there and moddable. In fact, there’s a couple of mods that extend the game by adding new roads and cities to the map! And these modded maps work the same way as vanilla ones – you can buy garages, hire and deploy truck drivers to go on jobs, discover unknown truck dealers and/or job agencies etc.

The base game only has unlocks up to level 30. Meaning, you get every item available for your trucks once you hit level 30. However, there is no “level cap”. Other people have claimed they are level 70, 100 etc in forums. Personally I can only verify that after level 30, I still can continue earning XPs for delivery jobs. However my skills are all maxed out except 1 skill, and in 6 more levels I would max that one out too. So we’ll see what happens at level 36

The demo can be downloaded here

XJ3UKJZYG259

Have you ever wondered why your housecarls, eg Lydia, keeps on wearing her Steel Armour at home, even if you’ve given her better armour when she was following you on your adventures?

Skyrim has the following “Wardrobe features”

1. Skyrim “snapshots” the armour and weapons (ie the gear) that is being worn by the NPC at the point the player says “FOLLOW ME”.
2. If weapons or shields in snapshots are not present after zoning (Fast travel, cell change indoors/outdoors), it helpfully “re-creates” them (ie dup exploit!)
3. If body armour in snapshots (head/arm/chest/legs) are not present after zoning (Fast Travel, cell change indoors/outdoors), Skyrim engine “crashes” out right here, and will not equip better gear even if present in inventory.

When a player enters a cell with an NPC in it, Skyrim engine does these:

1. Loads NPC graphic
2. Dresses NPC in “default outfit”.
3. Does Skyrim have a snapshot (rule 1 above)? If yes, try to dress in snapshot gear.
4. If you entered/exit a building together with this NPC, and this NPC is a currently follower, then Skyrim will equip the best gear available in inventory, but will still go through step 2 and 3 first.
5. If  the default outfit AND snapshot body gear NO LONGER EXIST IN INVENTORY in step 2 and 3 above, and the NPC is currently NOT FOLLOWING YOU, crash! Error! Stop right here! Even if this NPC has a set of armour in inventory, they will NOT be equipped if these are not part of the snapshot set.
6. Snapshot weapons and shields that no longer exists are helpfully re-created (hence, duped), even if the NPC is currently an active follower.

Best way to demonstrate points (1) to (3) – If you own Hjerim and have Calder, give him better gear, dismiss and recruit him to snapshot him in better gear. Dismiss him, and leave Hjerim (not an active follower). Go back in. Chances are, you can see Calder in his default Steel Armour walking around, then right before your eyes, he “changes” into your better gear.

Point (4) is demonstrated everytime you tell a follower, eg Lydia, to “follow me” when she’s in default outfit (Steel Armour,) and you’ve already given her better armour. Once you step outside the house, amazingly she did a Wonder Woman change and is now fully dressed for adventuring, in the gear you’ve already given her! Further, if Lydia is NOT an active follower, she’ll be wearing her STEEL ARMOUR at home (default and/or snapshot) even if you have given her Daedric. Just try to recall… when you say FOLLOW ME to Lydia, was she wearing STEEL or Daedric?

To demonstrate point  (5), when you have Lydia as follower, use console or a mod to REMOVE Lydia’s Steel Armour. That’s her default outfit. Give her better gear if you want to, then dismiss her, and do NOT recruit her again (not an active follower, invalid snapshot of non-existing Steel Armour, no new snapshots of any current armour). Leave the zone/cell, and come back. See her run around naked at home.

To demonstrate point (6), with Lydia as a follower, give her a better sword and a better shield. Dismiss her. Recruit her (Snapshot!). Take back the sword and shield you’ve given her. Now, go travel a bit. After 1 or 2 cell changes (fast travel, or indoors/outdoors change), check her inventory. You will see the same sword and shield THAT YOU HAVE ALREADY TAKEN BACK, present in her inventory (and may even be equipped).

So what significance is this bug?

Understanding this bug allows you to do something interesting – allows you to equip your spouse and/or followers with 2 sets of outfits. One for use when they’re following you (point 4), and one for use when they’re NOT following you (point 3).

Or, if you like seeing your housecarls using the best gear possible, then update their snapshot when they’re wearing the best gear, and next time you come home you will continue to see them wearing it instead of the Steel Armour.

Also it may help you work around some modded custom companions that “feature” some sort of wardrobe functions. The mod author(s) may or may not be aware of this Skyrim bug and might not have written scripts to take care of this, and thus their modded NPC companion may run around naked when the right conditions present themselves.

Related articles

• The Elder Scrolls Online: is it just Skyrim with co-op, or much more?
• Question of the Day: Who is Skyrim’s Best Companion?

It has been quite some time since I last played Grand Theft Auto IV, and my interest in it was re-sparked recently by a similar game – Sleeping Dogs.

However, for some strange reason, it refused to start. The Social Club login screen would come up, and then…. nothing. No error messages, no beeps. It just seemed like it’s not even launching at all.

Using trusty Google, I tried to find a solution. However, all the links that came up are old links, and some of them contain, shall we say, questionable solutions to bypass Social Club checks for authenticity. However, NONE of the solutions addressed my problem – that the game did not launch and died quietly without giving any error messages.

Thinking I may have a corrupted install, I uninstalled and deleted everything (oh no, there goes all my mods!), rebooted, and restarted Steam to re-download and re-install. Luckily the savegames are located in a different place and hence all my saves aren’t lost.

1 hour later, Steam had finished downloading GTA 4 and the Episodes From Liberty City DLCs. Yes I have a fast internet connection and Steam was downloading it at full speed.

So, I tried to start GTA4 again.

Guess what? SAME PROBLEM!

So obviously it wasn’t a corrupted install. There must be something changed in my PC that GTA4 relied on, but is currently either missing or in a different place (if it still exists).

I thought about it for a while, until I remembered the launch sequence the last time I played GTA4 … Social Club then Games For Windows Live. I know that Microsoft had changed their “Games For Windows Live” client pretty recently, and it’s now named “Games For Windows Marketplace“. I think I even remembered that it was Batman Arkham City that installed this.

So, as a desperate measure, I started Games For Windows Marketplace  manually, logged in, and minimized it. Then I tried launching GTA4.

SUCCESS!

So, moral of the story – GTA4 needed Games For Windows Live, but somehow it’s not loading up during the game startup. Now, remembering to manually run Games For Windows Marketplace everytime I wanted to play a game is going to be very tedious, so I just went to www.xboxlive.com and downloaded the Games For Windows Marketplace client to reinstall again. The reinstall went super-quick – I wasn’t even sure whether anything was installed. I tried to launch GTA4 again as usual (without GFWM running) and viola~! It works now!

Well, guess I’ll have to start re-installing all my mods again

Related articles

• This GTA IV Mod Lets You Go Back to the Future to Escape the Cops
• 5 Ways Sleeping Dogs Improves On Grand Theft Auto [Sleeping Dogs]
• Final version of GTA IV realism mod makes it look better than GTA V, also reveals drunk airline pilots
• Holy Crap, Grand Theft Auto V Looks Gorgeous [Grand Theft Auto]

For the longest time, FRAPS was the only one with the features I wanted.

However, the only drawback is the huge filesizes of the raw captures. Granted, they are only minimally compressed (may not even be compressed at all), and hence you cannot fault the quality of the capture. However, to capture a gaming session of any length of time more than say 5 minutes, will entail huge chunks of harddisk space being taken up for the raw capture.

Not anymore.

Now, it’s not “recently” that I have discovered Bandicam. In fact, I have used it on and off for about 8 months or so. When I first started using it, I realised its potential to rival, or even replace, FRAPS. However, at the time, it was just not “good enough”. The only thing it had going for it was the small filesizes of the video captures.

Fast forward to present-day, about 8 months later. The devs at Bandicam has added and improved it so much that now, I have finally replaced FRAPS with Bandicam as my primary gaming video capture software.

As a very stark contrasting example, take a look at the video below:

It was captured with FRAPS and Bandicam, but this video I’m showing is the one captured with Bandicam. I used default Bandicam settings for “youtube” preset, changing only the capture resolution to 1080p (default is 720p). First of all, to my eye at least, the capture quality is no different to FRAPS, even at 1920 x 1080. The difference is the resulting captured filesizes – FRAPS 3.7GB vs Bandicam 400MB. Keep in mind that I capture at full screen, full HD – 1920 x 1080, hence the filesizes would be huge. Unlike FRAPS, Bandicam uses compression in their captures. Even so, the hit on CPU resources isn’t big. Framerates are about the same as using FRAPS, so it seems that the Bandicam devs have solved the problem of compressing videos on-the-fly while capturing, which was the main argument the devs at FRAPS always had about not including compression in their capture files.

The other thing that prompted me to change to Bandicam was convenience – I could embed a logo or a “watermark” into the video during capture.

By default, Bandicam captures at 80% quality, similar to JPG compression quality for photos. If it’s good enough for JPGs it’s good enough for videos, it seems.

Check out Bandicam at http://www.bandicam.com

Related articles

• Fraps 3.5.6 Fixes Audio Sync Issue on Windows 7

Now that the entire trilogy has been released, I have no doubt many of us must have completed at least 1 playthrough of the latest installment and gotten to the ending.

In fact I did a complete playthrough – I started a new character in ME1, continued the story in ME2, and finished it in ME3. It feels a little different because this character doesn’t have a break of 2 years in between games – I knew exactly what happened in ME1 when I imported him into ME2, and ME3. To me it’s like watching a trilogy movie all in one go.

What I can say is, after playing through again with a new Commander Shepard, I have a few thoughts.

Mass Effect:

The most RPG-feel of all the 3 games. You literally can go ANYWHERE, land on most of the planets. This is akin to traditional RPGs where you can enter any town and just walk around. In ME2 it became that you have to scan every planet to find “resources” to build your improvements for your weapons/armour/ship. Not the same thing to me.

You have a multitude of WEAPONS and ARMOUR to select. You can mod your armour and weapons to give different bonuses or effects!

This is sadly missing in ME2, but it made a comeback (somewhat) in ME3. In ME2, if I remember right, I only had a choice of THREE (3) assault rifles – Avenger, Vindicator, and Revenant (if I picked that up in the Collecter ship) as an example. I only had a choice of TWO (2) pistols – Predator and Carniflex. You get the idea. ME2 seemed to be more of an adventure story narrative than an RPG.

By the way, I had completely forgotten that we don’t need to “reload” our weapons in ME1 – I kept hitting “R” key between shots and kept throwing grenades out… doh!

Mass Effect 2:

Best story-telling in my opinion. The game starts off very dramatically with Normandy under attack, and the heart-tugging scene where Joker refuses to abandon ship and Shepard dies. Throughout the game when his friends realise he’s been brought back, you can actually see the conflict within them, to either be loyal to their friend or to be suspicious of who Commander Shepard is “working for”.

Plus, all the DLCs that Bioware has put out over the years for ME2 has made it, im my opinion, the best game in the series by far.

However, in ME2, the RPG-feel was lost. As mentioned above, I had very limited choice of weapons and armour. The differences in performance/protection of the weapons and armour aren’t even apparent to me, or not much anyway. No matter which class of Shepard I play, all the fights play out almost the same way – a lot of shooting plus a little biotics here and there.

This game is also where weapons went back to the “limited ammunition” style of needing you to reload. Of course, in the future, we don’t need bullets – we need heatsinks! Each time you use up a heatsink (a thermal clip), you eject it and pop a new one in to continue firing.

Mass Effect 3:

Sucky ending aside (personally, I didn’t think the ending sucked. Puzzling, maybe, but not “sucked”), ME3 tried to bring back some RPG elements. Now I get my choices of weapons back, and the differences in accuracy/damage is rather apparent. Using a Paladin pistol (the 190,000 credit white one) kills a mob faster than a Predator. The Valkyrie takes down a mob faster than the Avenger. Accuracy also plays a part here, because most times I aim for the head, but I don’t use scopes. Hence, I can say my favourite assault rifles would be the Valkyrie and the Mattlock followed very closely by the Vindicator.

Armour choices have been expanded, and I think ME3 finally managed a nice blend of action/RPG elements into the game. They even put in the “encumbrance” limit that is present in other RPG games. Only that in ME3, if you had carried your full complement of weapons as you did in ME1 and ME2, your biotic/tech powers would recharge oh-so-slowly. Actually I don’t see why being weighed down with weapons should slow your power recharging. In fact I don’t see why they should implement this game mechanic at all since in the previous 2 games, you had always carried all your weapons with you – pistol, shotgun, submachine gun, sniper rifle plus assault rifle. In ME2, you even get one HEAVY WEAPON to add to that list. And you did fine!

Conclusion

Mass Effect 2 is, in my opinion, the best game in the series, even without all the DLCs to expand the story. In fact I am re-playing ME2 right now, by importing my Shepards again from my previous playthrough of ME2.

Related articles

• BioWare: Mass Effect 3 brings back a lot of what was missing in ME2 (inquisitr.com)
• Mass Effect 2 Review Second Look (epicagames.com)
• 10 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Mass Effect (io9.com)

Garrus, left; Commander Shepard, center (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By now, many fans of the Mass Effect series would have already completed at least 1 playthrough of the latest installment – Mass Effect 3.

Strangely, I have had friends and colleagues, some of whom are either non-gamers, or casual gamers (read: Facebook games players) come up to me and ask “What is Mass Effect?”

I have thought about it, and came to this conclusion:

Mass Effect is the story of one soldier. That’s it. When you come right down it, despite the Reapers and geth and everything else, it is the story of Commander Shepard. The enemies are the meat of the story. The entire story is told through the eyes of Commander Shepard. Like a typical epic movie, it starts off with Commander Shepard being evaluated for entry into the Spectre ranks of the Citadel. Then he discovers ancient artifacts that warn of an imminent invasion of a machine race, the Reapers. The next 2 games detail his exploits in trying to get the authorities to believe that an ancient race of machines is coming to wipe them out, but no one believed him. In the end, he had to work with a shady company (Cerberus) to gather info to fight the Reapers, and eventually (in its current incarnation), give his/her life to save the entire galaxy after uniting all the races under one banner.

Many parts of this story contain controversial topics which may or may not relate to current global situation. For example, in the Mass Effect world, same-sex relationships is not frowned on. Anyone and everyone is free to pursue a same-sex relationship (including Commander Shepard). On the other hand, you have the Genophage – an engineered disease which the Salarians developed, and delivered by the Turians, to the race of Krogans, to limit their population. Only a few out of a thousand births produce a living Krogan. The rest are stillborn. That means less than 0.01% of births produce a living baby. Atrocious? yes. Why was it developed? Because in the eyes of the government, Krogans reproduce too quickly and their numbers would overwhelm every other race in the galaxy if left unchecked. Thus the genophage was decided to be introduced, “for the good of the galaxy”.

Yet in the face of this injustice, the Krogans still fight for survival. They are akin to the Klingons of Star Trek – feared warriors that fight for honour and glory, and fighting is their way of life. Only the strong survive, and that is due in no small part to the genophage. Every Krogan looks out for only himself, and the chance to get a female pregnant. Depending on how you played ME3, the genophage may or may not be ended with Shepard’s help.

However, some topics seem to have been “left behind” in later games. For example, biotics appeared to be a frowned upon in ME1, but no mention of this social stigma is mentioned in ME2 and ME3. Biotics are like the “magic” of Mass Effect world. Humans exposed to Element Zero (or eezo) while in the womb may or may not have mutated to be able to manipulate mass effect fields, hence giving them powers like mages in fantasy lore. Humans (and it appears) and Asari needed implants to help control this ability. This topic was prevalent in ME1 and a number of missions were in the game to assist or destroy biotics. As I said, this is strangely missing in ME2 and ME3. By the later games, it seemed that everyone had “accepted” Biotics into normal society and they are treated as equals, or “no different” than other people.

In fact, by ME3, it may even appear that people come to revere biotics – There is a scene where Liara T’soni comes up to the Captain’s quarters on the Normandy and tells Shepard that she is making a time capsule which contains everything they knew about the galaxy, and wanted Shepard’s input on his/her own entry in the time capsule. If you select the option to tell Liara that it’s her call, Liara will mention that Shepard is a “powerful biotic” that helped to free the galaxy.

In the Mass Effect world, humans are the second-class citizens of the galaxy. This is in stark contrast to many sci-fi stories where humans are either the founders (Star Trek is a good example) of are very important to the galaxy.  Humans are the youngest race to achieve space-flight, being only a few hundred years. Other races like the volus, elcor and so on, have been spacefaring for thousands of years. Many of the other races have already had space flight when humans could barely speak and form communities. In this world, humans are often derided, frowned upon and shunned. In ME1 you can sometimes hear aliens telling humans that they should never have left their own system.

In ME2, this tone seemed to carry on, but less obvious. Mainly because the second game had you working with a pro-human shady corporation to advance human interest against the impending invasion of the Reapers. In ME3, when the Reapers attacked, humans had to beg the Council for help (and get turned down) before Shepard embarked on a quest to unite the galaxy against the Reapers.

In fact, Turians have the largest military fleet in the galaxy, and Asari commandos are the best and most feared special forces available. Krogans are the shock troops of the galaxy and well… humans are lumped together with other “lesser races” where we have nothing much to speak about.

So, what is Mass Effect? It is a story of a single soldier that can make a difference, and opening our eyes to a world where humans are not the dominant species, and aliens bicker like humans.

Related articles

• First Person: I Shouldn’t Have Feared The Reapers(escapistmagazine.com)

  ---

• The Best of Mass Effect: Its Greatest Moments(bnbgaming.com)

  ---

• Obligatory Mass Effect 3 Ending Post(mrrecursion.wordpress.com)

  ---

I have always been a sci-fi fan, what with me being a Trekkie and all. I know SWTOR was released, but I’m not as much of a Star Wars fan as I am a Star Trek fan. Star Trek Online has released a new expansion-cum-makeover called “Season 5 – Call to Arms” where the skilltrees have been revamped and crafting practically overhauled. Mission progression from Ensign to Vice Admiral has been streamlined. All these are done to prepare for the Free-To-Play launch on 17 Jan 2012.

But, this post is not about those. This post about a new little game I discovered on Steam. It’s called SOL:Exodus. It’s made by a small independent company, hence it is labelled an “Indie game”. Indie games doesn’t necessarily mean “sucky games”.

As I mentioned before, I have always been a sci-fi and space combat fan. X3 is an open-ended game where I will NEVER be “finished with it”, hence my savegames are still there waiting to be reloaded and continued. However, Sol Exodus is a linear game, much like Wing Commander (anyone still remember that?) series or the Freespace series.

In the game you are a combat pilot, and the missions are linear – you finish one, the story brings you to the next encounter immediately. There is no trading, exploring, flying around aimlessly like you can do with open-ended games like X3 or Freelancer. Controls are pretty much intuitive for the most part. However I did have to get used to not having a “strafe” mode… in its place, there is a “slide” mode where you disengage all your X and Y axis and rotate to face a direction while going in another. This allows you to, for example, fly AWAY from enemies, while looking back and firing on them, all the while flying AWAY from them.

The graphics are pretty, and they use the Unreal 3 engine (usually used for FPS games like the Tom Clancy Splinter Cell series). Hence you can be sure of some pretty eye candy. However most of the time your attention will be on trying to stay alive and killing the bad guys, the “Children Of Dawn”.

Voice acting in the game is decent, and doesn’t sound stiff. Pretty good for an indie game actually. The in-game computer persona that is part of your ship is called “Cassi”. I would even go as far as to say, if you have played Mass Effect 2 before, she sounds a little like EDI there.

Anyway let me just show you a video clip of the actual gameplay. No it’s not a video capture from me – I found this on Youtube.

It just got released today actually, 25 Jan 2012. Well in US it is 25 Jan 2012, but over here it’s 26 Jan 2012.

It’s only US$9.99 on Steam, and it is worth it! I haven’t had such a mindless blast-everything-that-moves space combat game since Freespace 2. Hmm I may even reinstall Freespace 2 again one of these days and re-play the whole game… I kinda miss it..

Related articles

• Space Combat Sim SOL: Exodus Launches on Steam January 25 [Video] (kotaku.com)
• SOL: Exodus Launching Fighters This Wednesday (escapistmagazine.com)
• Further Spacebiff: SOL: Exodus (rockpapershotgun.com)