A carefully worded opinion. I've been informed by my lawyers that anyone who disagrees must choke on green jellybeans. :evil:

Well with the drop of Mass Effect yesterday came the biggest hit to my gaming ego yet. To curb the pain and suffering, I grabbed up FFXII to get my epic RPG fix - and I'm having some fun with it, I'm definitely a fan of the reworked combat system, as I'm not a fan of the random encounters, part of the reason I'm having such a hard time working my way through FFX and DQ8. They annoy me. I may do some impressions over the holiday... even though it's last gen, and probably not worth the bother given the next gen goodness flowing like water around here.

Alas, the game I have drooled over for the last year is now available, and through some cruel twisted joke, or perhaps the wrath of an angry god, I do not have the means to play it. This is a first for me in my gaming life. I'm used to seeing a game, grabbing it and playing it. There is no middle man.... Just me, my wallet, my new game and my console...oh and my TV... and some sparkly electricity... and a controller... you get the idea. This sucks.

On that note, I guess I'll go ahead and make a running jab of my own, an 'homage to GG', if you will...I will not be breaking down any reviews point by point, as I just don't have the patience, and frankly, I'm off for the rest of the week after today, and to be honest I've more or less checked out already. I'll try not to get myself modded, or my post deleted although it seems almost an inevitability nowadays. So here we go...

.......:shock:

This is like manning up to take one of those really disgusting shots... like a 4 horsemen or a mind eraser... or some really cheap tequila...(which, by the way, you shouldn't do - Patron or better, fellas - a bit of wisdom from me to you. That rhymes! SCORE!!:D) ...although I do like the mind erasers... you know it's gonna hurt, you're going to regret it in the morning, and you're definitely going to need a chaser - but the buzz is totally worth it. Also you look really awesome, and the girls think you're hot, and they come and make out with you and touch you... places.

Or they punch you in the face. Let's face it... sometimes... you're GMode... and no, I will never let you live it down.

Okay, okay, I'll stop stalling... let's do this. (BWAHAHAHAHA... strippers)

*AHEM* ...moving right along : *snicker* :D

As I've only followed Mass Effect in its development, and know only what this, and several other gaming sites say about it, both before and after its release. I have to say I'm a bit confused has to how GS arrived at an 8.5... Leading up to it, everything is peachy; it's a possible GOTY title, and "oooh, so shiny!" (I'm paraphrasing, duh) Then the review hits, and it gets what essentially is a B-. Now, I've never agreed with the change of how the scoring is done. I think that it's better to have the increments of .1 instead of .5, because this only causes rounding up or down, and you get a score that is too high or too low in the end.

Halo 3 got a 9.5 - I don't agree with that score, Mass Effect got an 8.5 - I definitely don't agree with that score. I'll be the first to tell you I've played neither. Going only by what my peers have said, I'd say those scores are completely reversed.... Before I get into that though, I should say that I feel that the games by themselves merit both lower and higher scores respectively. Halo 3, throughout even GS' own review says essentially that it's [Halo 2 with a couple of new toys and spruced up graphics] (behold, paraphrasing), nothing new. So why would a game with no predecessor, that has nothing to fall back on, save it's own, arguably justified hype, with no built in fan base, that ends up scoring so high with everyone, AND coming from a renown developer ranked as highly if not higher than Bungie, score a full point less? It is even pointed out that some of the environments would not be out of place in the oh-so-beloved Halo 3. Nearly every peer review disagrees with this score... and for me, who pays much closer attention to those than official reviews from any magazine, site, or other professional medium - that says a lot. A few are posting a second altered review since their first ones have been getting deleted.

So here I am, disagreeing with the mighty wizard behind the curtain. Out loud, in a blog, in front of everybody.

*closes eyes and awaits Altair and his stabby wrist thing* :cry: