What's in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet; William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet Recently, I was suspended for a day for a post I made that used the word "retardation" in connection with how a group of people express their views. Specifically, I stated that System Wars served a useful purpose because it allowed for groups of people whom I alleged had limited intellectual capacity ("morons" was the word I used but apparently was not a punishable word according to the details of the moderation) to discuss amongst themselves without their "banned word" spilling over to disturb the rest of us. I then proceeded to compare the System Wars forum to the garbage disposal in your sink. Quote: "You may as well suggest getting rid of your garbage disposal on your sink. You may not like how it sounds. Sometimes there are some strange odors coming out from it, but damnit, it serves a useful purpose." For this, I was given a one day suspension. I suspect the pertinent passage of Gamespot's Terms of Use is this one: Communications clearly insulting other users, individually or as a group, directly or indirectly, are not allowed. This includes, but is not limited to: name-calling ("You're an idiot", "You moron"); direct insults and orders ("Screw you", "Go kill yourself"); insinuations ("Are you stupid or something?"); or insults towards family ("Your mom..."). Frankly, by the letter of the law it is true that I broke the Terms of Use of this site. The moderators were well within their rights to suspend me. Let me go on record as saying that while I may not like what happened and feel that it was an overreaction, I certainly broke the rules. However, I still feel that the suspension was a silly one. Moderations should take context into account.



Specifically, would Gamespot suspend me if I said something like "Only retards are fans of the Boston Celtics" because I am a Laker fan? I'd be clearly insulting a group of people on the site (Celtics fans) were I to say something like that. However, I have a hard time believing that I'd be suspended for that statement because I clearly am only talking trash to a rival fan base and don't seriously believe that all Celtics fans are retards. (Maybe 85%...) Moreover, I made the post several days previous. Since I made the post in the "Site Enhancements and Feedback" forum (a bit of retardation on my part not being a bit more careful with my wording in a fourm with a limited volume of posts and a large moderator/user ratio) my guess is that the post in question was read by quite a few people, including probably some moderators, prior to anyone actually taking offense and disciplining me. In other words, it doesn't matter if the first three moderators who see the post decide to let it slide. If the fourth one thinks it needs to be deleted and the writer to be punished, well then by golly that's what's going to happen. Getting back on point, if I had said instead: "I couldn't disagree more. Keeping System Wars open gives the *Happy Campers* a place to spew out their *Special Sauce* without disturbing the rest of us." Would I have been suspended for that? The point expressed is the same one in either case. I'm essentially saying that System Wars serves a useful purpose because it forces people who want to rant away about which platform is best to go and flame each other repeatedly in a designated area without everyone else having to get a migraine sorting through the rampant fanboyism. It's a public health restriction similar to limiting smoking to specified areas.

Strip other things away and I'm actually complimenting Gamespot on having the foresight to include an outlet for things that would disrupt and ruin the atmosphere of the rest of the site if System Wars went away. I guess all of my points sum up into: "Sweet Zombie Jesus Gamespot, why are you ticketing me for jaywalking when there's a murder happening across the street?"

To me, it is over-policing like this that are the greatest threat to Gamespot in the future. Online communities generally fall apart because the users who make positive, productive contributions get ticked off and decide to go elsewhere. It doesn't happen in some sort of mass exodus like what some people suggested after the firing of Jeff Gerstman. It happens one user at a time until one day, people look around and go, "Geez, where did the community that I used to enjoy here go? For that matter, why the hell do *I* still hang out here?" Hundreds of things that are, technically, violations of the Gamespot Terms of Use happen every single day. Most of the time they are accidental and aren't really intended to cause harm. Most of them can also be fixed with less draconian measures than a suspension. A couple of weeks back one of my readers accidentally posted a spoiler about Mass Effect in a blog of mine discussing the characters in the game. Technically, this was against the Gamespot Terms of Use. Presumably, if I had reported him he'd possibly have been punished in some way according to this section of the Terms of Use. Plot Spoilers - Posting "spoilers" (critical plot details) about games, movies, time-delayed broadcast events, or other media in the title of a topic or in a message without a clear notice is prohibited. To discuss such information in a topic, users should leave the title of the topic as vague as possible, ensuring that no mention of the actual spoiler itself is included, and include a warning (i.e. "SPOILER") in the topic title. In a message post in a non-marked or otherwise unexpected topic, users should leave several blank lines in a post after a warning before revealing any vital plot information. But obviously it was an accident and no harm was meant. I suggested he be a bit more careful as some people hadn't yet played through the game yet. He apologized and went back in to edit his post and mark it as containing spoilers. Problem solved! Similarly, if whichever Gamespot mod had banned me had contacted me and asked me to modify the offending language, I'd have certainly done so. Problem solved! It is this sort of action that I suggest moderators take for minor offenses in the future. If the person involved clearly doesn't have a history of disruptive behavior and flagrant violations of the terms of use, then why not cut him or her some slack, send them a PM, and ask them to fix the problem themselves? I suspect the answer is that Gamespot users post hundreds, perhaps thousands, of posts each and every day and there just are not enough moderators around to take this approach. An individual moderator probably doesn't have the time to go back and reread the offending post to see if it was corrected as they asked.

Now then, with the exception of NBA basketball, I don't watch a lot of TV aside from the funny stuff like South Park, Family Guy and Scrubs, but I have to admit that like 90% of the United States I did check out an American Idol episode or two just to see what all the fuss was about. I think that the show is popular mainly for the reason why people watch Britney Spears and Lindsey Lohan. There is something strangely compelling in watching someone with absolutely no self awareness make a spectacle of themselves in front of millions of people. With that in mind, I give you the latest Youtube advertisement in this very strange U.S. Election season. It's Raining McCain!

Lost Odyssey, Microsoft's latest attempt to partner with a Japanese developer to add some JRPG spice to a game lineup often derided as being shooter and sports focused with not much else by critics, represents a major step forward for the platform. While Lost Odyssey is not the first major JRPG to come to the console, as it follows Eternal Sonata and Blue Dragon, it is easily the best to date. While it isn't without its flaws (more on this in a future blog I think) it is certainly a big step forward from its very flawed predecessors. A large part of what makes this game such a significant improvement upon earlier efforts is the great deal of attention paid to the storyline and the characters. While they still do not rise to the level of some of the more impressive WRPG titles in recent years like Mass Effect, they are certainly above average. However, I think what makes the characters above average is not necessarily the characters themselves, but the dialog and relationships between them. With that in mind, I'm going to take some time to go into detail on the character lineup and list my impressions of both their personalities and usefulness in the game. I'm going to do this in two parts. The first part will focus on the four immortal characters in the game while the second will address the five mortal characters. But before I do that, I'd like to add some context by adding some thoughts upon a common theme that I saw pop up time and again throughout the game that were more or less central to the entire experience.



Immortal Characters "You mock my pain!" "Life is pain highness! Anyone who says otherwise is selling something." The Man In Black and Princess Buttercup from The Princess Bride (I've been waiting for months for the chance to work in a Princess Bride quote. It felt good.) The thing that sticks out the most about the immortal characters in the game is what gigantic whiners they are. I suppose fans of JRPG games will stop reading at this point whereas critics of the genre will be cheering, but both sides hold off and let me explain what I mean. All the immortal characters, to greater or lesser degree, focused extensively about how sad their eternal life was, how very lonely, and how awful it was to live forever. Paging Adrian Paul! Paging Adrian Paul! These guys need some instruction on how to live a full and happy life despite being immortal. After 70+ hours of this, I had a burning desire to sign them up for some extensive therapy or get them a motivational speaker or something. The immortals focused on this one thing that was beyond their control, that they were going to live seemingly forever and that everyone else around them would grow old and die, and developed a severe case of tunnel vision. Yes, I can see how this might be sad at times. But really, a life, eternal or otherwise, is only as fulfilling as the amount of effort and time you put in to make it so. You're lonely? Well then go out and make friends. You're sick of constantly fighting in wars? Well, take a decade or so and go be a farmer. While it is true that there is something tragic inherent in knowing you're going to constantly outlive all the people you love, it doesn't mean that you can't still enjoy their friendship and love in return for the decades that a mortal lives. I swear, most goth people are more uplifting and positive thinking than these people. Cowboy up and face your challenges like grown ups instead of angst ridden teenagers people!

Japophiles out there, is this sort of wallowing in tragedy common in Japanese culture?

Rant over. Let's go to the score cards and see how the Immortal characters stack up against one another. Kaim Argonar Kaim is the de-facto leader of the immortals, I guess because he has the best abs or…something. It's never really clear why the other three follow his lead. It could be because he's generally the scariest guy throughout the game, though more likely because war-making seems to be the central reason for his existence. Of the 1000 Years of Dreams flashbacks, I think approximately 73% focus on how sick he is with going from one war to the next. After the first couple of flashbacks of this type, this struck me as really weird. Nobody was forcing Kaim to sign up for another tour of duty time and time again. Hell, the way the game tried to portray him as the ultimate warrior I doubt anyone could force him. Take some responsibility for your life choices Mr. Argonar. If you don't like being constantly in wars, then change that.

Beyond that, his reason for losing his memories seems a bit far-fetched. A guy who has seen the amount of death and suffering that he had suddenly couldn't take it anymore when his daughter committed suicide under magical influence? It's semi-plausible since you can argue that this was the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back, but it still seems a bit far fetched to me. On the plus side, he does gradually show some growth during the game, evolving from the brooding, and scowling tough guy into a big old softy. He also has some depth as he's obviously afraid of getting his memories back because he's not sure he wants to know what they will reveal. But as a grandparent, it seems really strange that he has his two pre-teen grandchildren accompany him into combat situations time and time again. I guess there is no such thing as babysitters in the world where Lost Odyssey takes place? Maybe he's just new to this whole parenting thing? After all, he's only a thousand years old. While the game does not mention any previous children for Kaim that I'm aware of, it is hard to see him not having had any at all previously during his thousand year old lifetime. Moving past all this and looking at Kaim from a combat standpoint, he is absolutely essential. Except for storyline purposes, Kaim should never leave your active group. He's the lynchpin of your front-line forces with the most hit points of any character in the game. His combat abilities are, overall, the best of any character in the game. Seth may be faster than him, but nowhere near as heavy a hitter or strong a defender. He doesn't bring much to the table outside of muscles, but he doesn't need to. He serves a role and really, nobody else on the team can serve the same function. Kaim does best if you don't try and turn him into some sort of fighter/magic hybrid. He's intended to be a tank and the skills you equip to him should reflect that. While there is nothing wrong with mapping some white magic to him in case of emergencies, using any sort of attack magic is by and large a waste of time until late in the game when you get access to magics like Reverse and Divide. Final Grade: C- for personality, A+ for usefulness Seth Balmore Seth needs a stylist. That is one heck of an afro she's packing for the entire game. I guess it was intended to make her look "piratey" and an eyepatch was out of the question, but you have to wonder what inspired that look. I watched pretty closely and I couldn't find another person in the entire world that had a similar hairdo. Seth's a bit of a rebel type, so maybe that's the reason? She wanted to be different? Seth shows a greater degree of testicular fortitude than Kaim does in many ways. (Irony intentional) After all, the prospect of being chained inside a dark, lonely cave with no food, no water, and no hope of escape for all eternity would be a pretty darn good design for Hell. Now to me, that is the sort of thing that would be a really good reason for a person to lose their mind. Her other reason for losing her mind is a pretty decent one as well, but seems odd that she lost her mind since she still had her son with her and he definitely needed her at that point. Regardless, I liked Seth. Of the four immortals, she's the only one who showed even traces of a fun-loving spirit and a cheerful nature, no matter what deeper feelings that may have been a cover for. From the time she first joins up with Kaim at the beginning of the game and teases him about how maybe they were lovers at some point in their past to her constant ribbing of Jansen along with the two kids, she adds a much needed light-hearted element to the plot. Add onto that the fact that her breasts actually looked like they might exist in real life and her actions at the end of the game, and you've got a pretty decent character. Combat wise, Seth is, like all the immortals, irreplaceable. She almost always attacks first in a round and packs a pretty darn decent punch. She's not as heavy as Kaim, but makes up for it with her speed. Seth should never leave your front-line except for storyline forced purposes. Overall, she's an above-average character. I employed Seth as a bit of a jack-of-all-trades in addition to being my second fighter type. Skills like Double SP, Double Gold, Double Experience, Double Potion etc. got mapped to her.

Final Grade: B for personality and B+ for usefulness Ming Numara We come at last to the first immortal who actually took advantage of her endless lifetime to accomplish something worthwhile. Ming is the queen of the nation of Numara, and has been queen for pretty much the entirety of her thousand year lifetime. During that time she's actually built her nation into a beautiful place filled with art and culture and devoted by and large to a peaceful existence. Sure, she, like the other immortals, has been lonely at times over the years, but that hasn't stopped her from taking advantage of her immortality to do real good in the world. She is also the only immortal in the game that lost her memories voluntarily. Gongora was attacking her nation with a bunch of super-monsters. In return for her agreement to use her magic to take her own memories away; he spared her nation from destruction. It was a noble, if ultimately shortsighted, sacrifice. But as reasons go for an immortal losing their memories, doing it voluntarily to save thousands of lives is a pretty darn decent one. Then we get to her physical design, and that's where things take a sharp downwards turn. Frankly, I don't have any issues with her choice of wardrobe per se, though others have expressed disapproval for what they see as the latest example of female characters in gaming being turned into a sex symbol. To me, this ignores two things.

First, the climate of her nation seems to be pretty sunny and warm. Second, and vastly more important, the royal crest of her authority is plastered across her chest. By dressing the way she does, she can be instantly identified and verified as the queen. It is like wearing a crown, albeit in an odd location. Ming has not been reduced to a sex symbol in the game because she has obvious power, authority, intelligence and influence. She isn't some damsel in distress that needs to be rescued. Calling her a sex symbol based solely on her bust size and how she dressed is lazy thinking. My objections to Ming's looks stem from something more specific: My god, those blue veins that are so blatantly visible on her breasts are not fun to look over the course of a very long game. There is such a thing as too much realism. Where is Monco in all of this? Why hasn't he condemned this in a Friday Funbag blog? (Probably because he doesn't play JRPGs very often I guess.) Getting to the combat portion, Ming is, like all the immortals, completely indispensable. She and Sarah are the two most powerful magic users in the game. Given that magic in the game is remarkably flexible between attack, healing, and support, these two become an unstoppable team when paired. Ming's also a pretty fast caster and can learn to be faster with the proper skills set. Add onto that the ability she eventually learns from Jansen to Double Cast and the ability to add skills that boost her HP and she becomes just an absolute magic casting tank of a character. Throw on the auto magic recover skill, completely ignore anything that might boost her worthless combat abilities since you'll never use them, and you've got a walking, talking magical nuclear arsenal with ugly boobs. Final Grade: A for personality and A+ for usefulness Sarah Sisulart As a character, Sarah struck me as more than a little dry. She seemed to spend most of the game stuck in Kaim's shadow. It wasn't that she was unimportant, but rather, she seemed to almost be an extension of Kaim. According to the storyline, Sarah was a researcher of some kind into magic energy. She wears glasses and is obviously intended to be a scholar of some type. Sadly, the game never really elaborates on what, if anything, Sarah has learned over her decades or even centuries of study. This is very vexing. I'll get back to this in a minute. Like Kaim, Sarah's memory loss was triggered by the apparent loss of their shared daughter. Only, she took it to an even greater extreme than Kaim did. She went complete bat**** crazy, locked herself in their old mansion, and became some sort of hermit, self-flagellating lunatic. Eventually, with the help of her grandchildren Mack and Cooke singing a lullaby that Sarah's lost daughter used to know, she's restored to her senses if not her memories. Now, this is where Sarah actually brings something to the table for the first time as a character: she actually took the time and effort to keep a diary over her 1000 year old lifetime! Yes, one of the immortals took the time to do something completely pragmatic and reasonable. Bravo Sarah! Bravo! I would have liked to have seen more information in that diary, maybe something readable, or at least a summation from a cutscene on all the things she'd written about and discovered over the years. This isn't up there with the complete ripoff that not being able to read Fall-From-Grace's diary in Planescape: Torment was, but it still felt unfair. At the very least, it would have been nice if she had discovered even a quarter as much as what Gongora's diaries in his secret labs revealed and wrote it into her own journals. It's all well and good for the game developers to call her a scholar and give her a pair of glasses, but it would be nice if she had something to show for the title. After all, Ming was called a queen and actually had a thriving and beautiful nation to show for her efforts. Getting to the subject of combat, Sarah and Ming could be twins. Normally, duplication of abilities in a party is a recipe for disaster in an RPG. Fortunately, this isn't the case in Lost Odyssey. Sarah, like Ming, should come fully loaded with Black, White, Spirit and Composite magic and all the HP boosting/Magic boosting skills like speed casting you can get squeezed in. You pretty much want these two to have identical skills mapped to them. Sarah and Ming actually make an exceptional team. You can switch their roles in combat at will between attack and defense magic. A good strategy that I liked to use for boss battles was having both of them spending the first round getting support magic like All-Barricadus and All-Shieldus setup, and then take advantage of their incredible magic versatility to both keep your party healthy and whittle away at the enemy throughout the rest of the combat.

Final Grade: C for personality, A+ for usefulness That's it for part 1. I'll throw up a part 2 in a couple of days that will tackle the five different mortal characters.

Gamespot finally released their review of Condemned 2: Bloodshot today and the basic gist of it is, "If you don't mind gallons of blood, guts and gore and enjoy being scared until you wet your pants, then this is the game for you." I will almost certainly be getting this game, since it is a sequel to perhaps the best "launch title" game of the past fifteen years. For those of you who haven't played the first game, Condemned: Criminal Origins, I would advise you that to this point you've missed out on a game that is more intense and scary than F.E.A.R. ever was. The first game was a visceral thrill ride of emotions and I cannot wait to grab up the second game, lock myself in a dark room late at night after I've chased my wife out of the house so I won't be bothered, and give myself sleeping difficulties for a couple of weeks. You may be asking at this point, "what makes these games so much scarier than a creepy game like F.E.A.R.?"



First and foremost it is the the distance and atmosphere of combat. In a game like F.E.A.R, which was primarily a shooter title that just happened to have an excellent atmosphere, when combat actually began it usually was at gunshot range if you were playing the game well. If enemies managed to get close to you it was generally an indication that you'd messed up in some significant way. Contrast that to Condemned, where guns were extremely rare and you were fighting enemies with trashcan lids, wooden boards with nails, locker doors, sticks, fire axes, sledgehammers, chunks of concrete or whatever else is handy that you can grab up and swing about. When you actually hear and feel the sickening thud of impact every time you either hit someone else or get hit, it creates for a much more intense experience than when you see someone that you just headshot drop to the ground thirty feet away. Next there is the look and feel of the enemies involved. Much of F.E.A.R.'s spookiness was based upon things that happen before or after combat began. It was in the anticipation of combat. When you're actually in a firefight on the other hand, the game isn't that scary most of the time, because most (though not all) of the enemies look, feel and act fully human. Combine that with the fact that most of us have played many, many shooter titles and actual combat wasn't scary because it was familiar. Contrasting that experience with the ones in Condemned highlighted the difference between the two. In Condemned, the enemies looked...off.



The makers of the game made the perfect compromise in how they designed the characters by making them look human to some extent, but twisted enough to make them horrible parodies of humans. They were not so ugly and twisted that you could write them off as zombies and kill away, secure in the knowledge that it is just a game and these things aren't real. Rather, they were just human enough to be recognizable as such. That, combined with the up-close nature of the combat, made you feel twisted and a bit corrupted yourself by killing these things that may or may not be human underneath.



Beyond simply the combat, Condemned set the atmosphere beautifully. Any great horror writer will tell you that setting the mood is key to making something scary. It is the unknown that scares most people, the sense that, at any moment, something could leap out of nowhere and kill you. Once something is exposed to the light of day and we can meet it head-on, it just doesn't frighten us anymore. It is part of the reason that a dark room is more scary than a light room: we can't see danger coming. Both F.E.A.R. and Condemned did this well, adding the right touches to sound, shadow and mood that, when you combined them with what was going on in the paranormal storylines, always kept the pulse of the players racing. Another thing that both games did well was the isolation factor. Humans are social creatures. There is a reason why in prison it is considered to be a greater punishment to lock somebody up alone in the dark for a week than it is to lock someone up in the dark with a big "lifer" named "Bubba". We don't do well when we don't have other humans around us. Our minds start to play tricks on us. We get scared and jittery, because we depend on the safety in numbers that is a genetic legacy from our tribal days.



Death seems to pay much closer attention to us when nobody else is around and when we're in a dark and scary place than it would if we had five other team members toting shotguns in that dark and scary place with us. In both F.E.A.R. and Condemned, you pretty much on your own for the majority of the game. Last but definitely not least is the concept of rising tension. This is another thing that the games have in common. The key to good drama, and when you strip away everything else that's a pretty good definition of the horror genre, is to start small and build. In F.E.A.R., you slowly get further and further away from any known support. You get deeper and deeper into the heart of evil. It is the same in Condemned. Not only do you get into darker and scarier places, you're getting closer and closer to a serial killer and the enemies are looking gradually less and less recognizable as human. In both games, frantic action is broken up by prolonged periods of quiet and anticipation where you're left to wonder what direction the next attack will come from and what form it will take. I haven't yet decided if I will get Condemned for the 360 or the PS3. Gamespot didn't mention any major technical differences between the two games, but I may read a couple of other reviews to make sure. However, if it is anything like the first game, and it sure looks like it is, then I think it may be one of the best "sleeper" titles of the year.

The characters in Mass Effect are excellent and I didn't truly appreciate just how good they are until I played through the game as a renegade and found how difficult it was for me to be genuinely rude, mean, or, in the case of the alien characters, racist towards them. It was quite difficult because of how real they seemed to me. When I was mean to them, it was like being mean for no good reason to real people who just happened to be watching my back in intergalactic combat. In other words, it just didn't seem right. That having been said, not all of the characters in the game were created equal. Some of them are just plain better than others. When I say "better", I am speaking of entirely subjective criteria more or less based on a number of vague, touchy feely sort of factors that all tend to boil down to "how much did I like the character?" So because of that, I'm going to rate the characters on two different scales: 1. How useful are they? I'll try and be fairly objective here. 2. How good is their personality? This translates into how much do I like them. So, in alphabetical order, here are my ratings of each of the characters in Mass Effect. This will contain some character spoilers, but no spoilers of the actual storyline. Kaiden Alenko Kaiden is a sentinal cla.ss character, which essentially means he's a cross between a full biotic and full engineer. Apparently, when you breed Liara and Tali together you get a male human. All told though, he's pretty darn useful to have around on missions if you play a combat oriented character like a soldier or even a vanguard. With him serving two roles, it allows you to fill your other companion slot with a real heavy hitter like Ashley or Wrex. With that having been said, bringing along a team of Wrex and Garrus accomplishes the same thing without losing as much combat oomph since Kaiden can't learn any weapon well. As for personality, frankly, I liked Kaiden a lot in the abstract but found him annoying to hang around. In other words, he's a really nice guy but a bit of a Magoo type. Remember "Jerry" from the Liar Liar movie? He was the guy who was plowing Jim Carey's ex-wife during most of the movie? That's what I'm talking about. He's super nice, but so goody two-shoes that at times he makes your stomach turn with his syrupy sweet nature. In other words, the guy really could use a flaw or two to make him a bit more three dimensional, round him out, and make him all-around less annoying. On the other hand, if you get deep enough in the conversation trees with Kaiden, particularly if you play a female, you find out exactly why he's the way he is. He's got a good reason. It is interesting that Kaiden had first hand bad experiences with aliens, the Turian biotic teacher that effectively tortured him and the other students to get them to learn, and came out still a romantic and an optimist and Ashley was generations removed from aliens doing anything wrong to her and turned out to be a bitter racist. (More on this later.) I wonder if the developers of the game deliberately set out to make these two characters stereotypes of Democrats and Republicans? Kaiden is the main love-interest for your female characters. Final Grade: C- for usefulness, B- for personality Tali'Zorah nar Rayya Tali is your pet Quarian. I say it that way on purpose because at times she does strike me as a young, overeager puppy: cute, but perhaps a bit too bouncy and energetic. Overall though, she's quite likeable. She really doesn't have much in the way of good reasons to be kindly disposed towards the rest of the galaxy. After all, her people haven't exactly been treated nicely since they inadvertently created the Geth in the first place.

Despite that, very early on when you first get her added to your party she makes it clear that part of her upbringing teaches her the importance of the individual sacrificing for the good of the community. It's a nice sentiment and it makes me want to lock her and the human ambassador in a room together until she rubs off on him a bit. She's a bit blind with regards to the Geth though. In fact, all of the characters in the game are. It's taken as an article of faith - something beyond even being discussed - that all synthetic lifeforms want nothing more than to obliterate organics from the face of the galaxy.

One wonders if the Geth would have turned out more kindly disposed towards organics if their "parents", the Quarians, hadn't tried to drown them in the bathwater during their formulative years. Tali's opinion that the mistake her people made was in creating the Geth in the first place, not in trying to wipe them out after they turned sentient, was astonishing in the way it glossed over whole volumes of moralistic debate and discussion. Tali is underrated in combat. Her ability to wield shotguns makes her a fairly decent offensive character. Add onto that her skill in electronics giving her very good scores in shields, and the fact that most of the enemies in the game are synthetics and therefore vulnerable to her engineering talents, and she can become a real asset in combat situations. As an added bonus, with decryption and electronics together you'll be able to open any loot chest you come across in the entire game and Tali can repair your Mako beautifully. If you're playing a soldier cla.ss character, you could do a lot worse than constructing a team with Wrex and Tali. Tali should be a romance option for male characters and isn't. It's one of the few knocks against her. Final Grade: A- for usefulness, B for personality Liara T'soni This character just has to be intended to be taken tongue-in-cheek, because when you step back and look at everything about her as a whole she winds up being pretty ridiculous. Liara's a beautiful blue-skinned space babe who happens to be over 100 years old and still a virgin.

If that isn't enough fetishes wrapped up into one single sentence, she's a doctor and the shy, unassuming school-girl who doesn't know she's really a super-hottie type and she just happens to be attracted to both genders. My guess is that some engineer/character designer/sci-fi nerd at Bioware was working late one night, figured out how to bypass the company's porn filters, and then spent the rest of the night splicing together various porn fantasies into a single character. He probably also got a huge bonus for his character concept, and he should too! The media frenzy around the misunderstood idea that Liara is a lesbian with whom game players can have fully simulated, active nookie with probably sold an extra 200,000 copies of the game. Overall I think Kaiden summarized Liara pretty well when Shepard asks about her. He says something to the effect of, "she's kind of sweet I guess, if you like the bookish sort. I prefer someone a little more adventurous." Overall, Liara doesn't really have that much personality when you look beneath the surface. She's got some parent issues and is a nice person, but beyond the fetishes she's pretty dull as a character. Sadly, she's also pretty worthless in combat. She can't use any weapon very well and her biotics in general are not very useful at some of the higher difficulties because most of the enemies where you would need biotics to fight start getting immunities and resistances. Add in the fact that the AI of the Mass Effect NPCs combat behavior isn't very intelligent you're left with two choices: leave the gameplay setting for NPCs using their powers on their own set to "off" and spend an annoying amount of time micromanaging their powers so they're used intelligently, or set it to active and watch as they waste their heavy hitting powers like Singularity on the first "scout" enemy instead of reserving it for the main group. Final Grade: D for usefulness, C for personality...but bonus points for being sexy and filled with fetishes. Garrus Vakarian Garrus is a former C-Sec officer that joins you out of a desire to see what his life would have been like if he had become a Spectre instead of bowing to his father's wishes and joining the police. In many ways, Garrus can serve as your conscience. Since he values your opinions so highly, he's perhaps the only character in the game whose development you can actually influence strongly if you consistently follow the same path in your answers. Since it is pretty obvious he's following your lead, I personally found it very difficult to give the "renegade" answers when talking with him. I felt guilty because every time I gave him a renegade answer it seemed like I was molding him into a psychopath. This is exactly the sort of feeling that Mass Effect characters should generate. If you're a developer, you want the player to feel like the characters he or she is interacting with are real people who will be influenced by your choices. Add onto that the fact that Garrus is really cool looking and you've got a solid character. But how useful is he? Well, Garrus is a bit like Tali on steroids. He's better in a straight-out firefight, due to his ability to wield sniper and assault rifles, wear medium armor, and gain the benefit of extra shields with electronics, but isn't quite as versatile as he sacrifices some extra engineer abilities to get these benefits.

Overall, Tali is more useful in the beginning stages of the game when all the assault rifles are pathetically weak and inaccurate and shotguns are the way to go, and Garrus becomes a great choice in the mid to late parts of the game when the superior medium armors and assault rifles start popping up. Final Grade: A for usefulness and B+ for personality Ashley Williams It's a good thing that Ashley is an absolute monster in combat because she's a catty, jealous, racist, annoying little ***** outside of it. Anytime someone has to use a phrase that begins with "it's not racism, at least not really" to describe their feelings, then chances are that what they are saying is, in fact, racist. Ashley has her reasons for hating and/or distrusting aliens. Her grandfather was the only human officer to ever surrender to an alien fleet and her family has been blacklisted ever since. I suppose this is intended to make her views tolerable and/or understandable, but it conveniently overlooks the fact that ever since her grandfather's days, it is human officers in the Alliance Military who have blacklisted her family. When the Turians attacked during First Contact war, it was a mistake, but it sure wasn't intended to harm Ashley's grandfather personally. On the other hand, all the military officers who have blacklisted her family since have been attacking her family specifically. Therefore, her anger at aliens seems a bit misdirected since the people who have actually been making her family suffer over the previous two generations have all been human. Overall, Ashley is like a bad parody of a right-wing Republican here in the United States. She's paranoid, ultra-militaristic, blames aliens for all her problems while stringently denying that she's racist, super-religious, and spitefully jealous towards other females.

However, that having been said, Ashley is, as previously mentioned, an absolute beast in combat. She's a straight soldier cla.ss complete with the ability to wear heavy armor, wield any weapon, use immunity, regenerate health quickly, and shield boost. If you play a cla.ss like Engineer she's virtually essential to have in a firefight, particularly if you're playing at higher difficulties. However she is utterly useless in any non-combat situation and not very flexible in combat. She's best used by people who would prefer to stop and micromanage their team as rarely as possible. Final Grade: A- for usefulness and F for personality Urdnot Wrex Imagine me as a big black guy with a gap between my front teeth, wearing sunglasses indoors, in goth garb mumbling "At last!" in a hissing sort of tone as Keanu Reeves is brought into the room and you've got a good idea of what my reaction to Wrex is. Wrex is the best character in the game. He is the one we've all been waiting for. He is...Keanu Reeves. (Or at least he is Neo from a combat standpoint. He's way cooler personality wise.) To begin with, he rates as a solid 9.0 on the bada.ss-o-meter. (Author's Note: In video game history only one character, Kratos, has ever reached a perfect 10 rating on the bada.ss scale.) He's scary as hell and has the unique cla.ss of "Krogan Battlemaster" which essentially means you get almost the best of both the Soldier and Biotic cla.sses. He has access to Immunity and Barrier, which, along with shield boost, heavy armor and his superb regenerative capabilities (by virtue of his Battlemaster and Fitness abilities) combine to make him all but unkillable once you get him powered up. Throw on that he totes an Assault Rifle and shotguns around and he's useful in every stage of the game, beginning to end. All that and some biotic capabilities! The only way he could be better in combat is if he had access to the vastly superior singularity ability instead of stasis, but that's just nitpicking.

As for personality, Wrex is surprisingly deep once you start getting to know him. He's off the "gruff, mean guy with an inner heart of gold" archetype which I've always been fond of. His conversations are fun to explore and he has the best one-liners of any character in the game when you're our on missions. (I can't remember the last time I was in a game where one of my party companions threatened to eat a person who was being uncooperative with me to help persuade the person to do as I wanted.) Final Grade: A+ for usefulness and A+ for personality And that's everyone. Obviously these are really only opinions based on my interpretations and how I have played the game. I'd love to hear from others on their opinion.

I recently had the chance to play, and finish, the "Bringing Down the Sky" downloadable content for Mass Effect. As I completed the module, one thought stuck out above all the others in my head: "This is what I expected all of the Mass Effect side quests to be like!" Don't get me wrong, I didn't expect them all to be as important as this one. (You are involved in preventing a terrorist driven asteroid from hitting a populated colony planet, killing millions in the process and making the entire world uninhabitable for centuries.) However, I did expect all the other quests to have a similar level of depth to this one. Those of you who have played Mass Effect are aware of what I'm talking about. The side quests in Mass Effect were a huge disappointment. They were about a mile wide and about a foot deep. Most of them were no more involved than "go to this planet and exterminate the bad guys", which is extremely shallow for a Bioware title. Comparing the side quests to a game like Knights of the Old Republic showed how far short of meeting expectations the ones in Mass Effect came. Everyone would have been better off if Mass Effect featured half as many side quests with twice as much depth to them. However, "Bringing Down the Sky" was everything that I might have hoped for and more. As I said previously, your job is to prevent a asteroid populated by terrorists from hitting a populated human colony. That's all well and good. But what makes this particular download a lot of fun are the details that were fully fleshed out. 1. Who are the folks trying to crash this asteroid into the planet? 2. Why are they doing it? 3. What is their grudge? 4. Why were the engineers/scientists trying to bring the asteroid back to the planet in the first place before it was hijacked? 5. Will your decisions as a Spectre help define who you are and also have far reaching implications for the galaxy? (Yes.) Beyond that, while there is a great deal of combat, it is the small touches that add context and meaning to the combat. This mission begins with you intercepting an anonymous distress call from the surface of the asteroid. Apparently, someone has evaded capture from the terrorists and is trying to call for help. You land on the asteroid and, throughout most of the mission, this person stays in touch and guides your actions. There are even side quests within this side quests that you can undertake. You have conversations at several points along the way and, at the end, you face several very meaningful decisions that will have a massive impact on how the scenario ends and whether you come away with paragon or renegade points. Completing the mission earns you an extra 50 achievement points, but beyond that, it will make you want to redo it. It is a testimony to the richness of this particular side quest that after completing it one way you'll immediately want to see the "other" ending to the mission. Is this download worth a full $5 all on its own? For some, the answer will be "no". After all, it really doesn't impact the main quest of Mass Effect at all. Also, $5 for one side quest seems a bit steep. However, for me I felt that I got my money's worth. After all, that's about as much as a downloadable movie rental off of Xbox Live and, unlike the movie rental, I can now play this mission again and again every time I play Mass Effect. That having been said, I can't quite get past the fact that the PC version of this extra content will likely be free to download at some point.

The United States intelligence agencies are inserting spies into World of Warcraft to catch terrorists. Sample text from article: Be careful who you frag. Having eliminated all terrorism in the real world, the U.S. intelligence community is working to develop software that will detect violent extremists infiltrating World of Warcraft and other massive multiplayer games, according to a data-mining report from the Director of National Intelligence. I've never had a more difficult time deciding on a title for a particular blog topic. I toyed with all sorts of possibilities. "U.S. Intelligence: Now with extra stupid!" "U.S. Intelligence: Feel the irony!" "U.S. Intelligence: Got Stupid?" Feel free to create your own. It's hard to think of another bit of news that equals this one for being both as alarming as all hell, and infinitely hilarious at the same time. This is where my tax dollars are going? (Scary...and funny.) These are the people who are keeping me safe from the threat of global terrorism? (REALLY scary.) These are the folks that so many movies like the Bourne Identity are based off of? (Freaking hilarious!)

Although it does make me worry to play Black and White again. (At one point in that game I had trained my pet monster to take poops on defeated foes. I'm not quite sure how high that would rise on the "violent extremist" scale but it can't possibly rate in my favor when determining how normal my gaming behavior is.) In other news, this is a great sign for fans of Mass Effect who were worried that the sequel would be ruined by EA's acquisition of Bioware. It isn't enough to totally erase all my doubts about the future of this franchise, but at least they are paying attention to one of the very few weak spots in the Mass Effect gaming experience.

Dear god, let this end up as being "not bogus". I think I would pass up an unpenalized opportunity from ChiliDragon to go out and nail a couple other women if it meant that I'd get a Max Payne 3 that came out. Max Payne 2 remains, in my humble, humble, not-so-humble, opinion, the very best shooter title to ever be released. (Author's Note: When I say "very best" I mean "game that was most innovative and most ahead of its time" ever in the history of the shooter genre.) Dear god...Max Payne 3. MAX PAYNE 3!!

Well, Mass Effect has a new download available on Xbox Live for a content package entitled "Bring Down the Sky". I'm a little dubious on whether or not I will download it. I mean, don't get me wrong. I still love Mass Effect and pretty much everything Bioware creates, but I was pretty lukewarm on many of the side quests that were included in Mass Effect. They definitely felt a bit like shooting galleries. Has anyone downloaded and played this yet? Is it worth the 400 points to purchase? Edit: Also, consider me as a person who gets a little cranky whenever I go to buy something on Xbox Live. Microsoft could easily have had things cost something simple...like, y'know, dollars, pounds, euros or whatever other funky 3rd world currency they chose. In other words, they could have listed the price tag of the cra.p they have for sale out on the Marketplace in a currency that each user would understand based on the region they chose when they setup their account. This whole business where they convert your actual real world currency into points is nothing more than a cheesy way to get people to buy more stuff because they have no idea how much what they're buying actually costs. For the life of me, I knew the answer to this at one time, but how much is 400 Microsoft points in some sort of real world currency?

Recently, a well respected writer friend of mine has put up a couple of blogs on the topic of EA's proposed takeover of Take Two, the owner of the very popular Grand Theft Auto franchise. Monco's opinion, condensed and summarized, is that EA kills good game developers whenever they gobble them up. In all fairness, he has a host of examples to choose from. Many great studios have gone under, eventually, after being absorbed by EA. In fact, I'm not even certain that I disagree with him that an EA acquisition of a company is the beginning of the end for many developers. Like just about everyone else, I was adamantly against their acquisition of my favorite gaming company, Bioware, late last year. However, upon deeper reflection, my contrarian nature got the better of me as it does at times and I started looking at the situation from a couple of different angles. First, I examined the companies that EA was acquiring. Many of them were in financial distress when they were taken over. In other words, an alternative interpretation of EA acquiring these companies is that it kept them alive when, through financial mismanagement, they might have gone under if they hadn't been purchased. Everyone who is my age or older remembers the ill-fated end of the great game maker Black Isle of Fallout and Fallout 2 fame. Black Isle made some of the greatest games around when I was younger but eventually went bankrupt and last year had to sell the rights to Fallout 3 to Bethesda. I wonder if Fallout 3 would ever have been made at all had Bethesda not tendered the offer to purchase those rights. Do we, as gamers, protest too much when companies are bought out by huge behemoth's like EA? In general, the reason that we protest is that we feel that the games made post-acquisition are not worthy follow-ons to the games made pre-acquisition. Maybe this is true and maybe it isn't, but, continuing my role as devil's advocate, how much of this fault can be laid at the feet of EA? Most great franchises eventually stick around for one or two games too long and this tendency isn't limited to video games. Everyone loved "The Matrix". We cringed a bit with "The Matrix: Reloaded" and by the time "The Matrix: Revolutions" was done we were ready to tear our eyeballs out of our sockets (not to mention our ears with the horrible dialog) to get the series to stop. Why is this relevant? All three movies were made by same pair of brothers. The magic that was there in the first movie just ran out of steam. It was probably the same to a certain extent with the companies that EA acquired. Part of the problem may well have been EA's ownership/management sty.le but part of it may also been that the shelf life of the series in question had just ran out over time. In the U.S., and probably around the entire world, there is a natural tendency to root for "the little guy". We don't like huge, bloated monopolies like EA because we think that they will, inevitably, crush originality, innovation and freshness. We think of them as soulless androids that don't represent the little guy, whereas we idealize the smaller companies and ascribe all sorts of wonderful virtues to them based on rather flimsy evidence such as a couple of good games. But something to keep in mind, while EA has indeed churned out some true stinkers, it has also been behind some really good games in recent years. If we are going to rip on them when they are connected to a game that ends up being mediocre or worse, don't they deserve some credit when they are behind some of the really excellent titles? While I will be the first to decry excessive consolidation of companies in the video game industry and one company gaining too much control and power, I'm also going to point out that such a practice is hardly unique to the video game industry itself. EA isn't some nefarious Dr. Evil style tyrant bent on world domination. They are acting exactly how successful companies act. When they see opportunities to acquire very popular - and therefore very marketable - intellectual property, they try and do so in the best interests of their shareholders. If they didn't do it, another company would. After all, it wasn't so long ago that Microsoft was the evil empire of the corporate world. Now they are celebrated for breaking up the Sony monopoly of the industry that the PS2 enjoyed last generation. If Microsoft ends up eventually being successful enough to attain a dominant market share, will we then automatically hate them again just because they are very large?