First Impressions Mass Effect

After getting a few hours into playing Bioware's latest title Mass Effect I'd have to say I'm not that impressed. The game delivers on it's promise in creating a new universe that will entice gamers to go into the journey of trying to save the galaxy (I know its cliched but that's the way it is). It has a brought a visual style that is very impressive considering the varying amount of environments. The facial expression engine works well enough but characters tend to suffer from (what I like to call) an evil eye problem (Everything about the characters show expression except their eyes like they're dead). Once the game gets into a nice flow it's actually a lot of fun with a great deal of depth in its story line. The action sequences are were the game starts to shine.

Alright now that you know what is done well, here is what's bad. The majority of the game mechanics seem poorly thought out. For instance the control for vehicle steering and aiming is poorly implemented. (Translation: the controls suck in a way that will make you want to take your life) The game lacks any kind of useful training system leaving players to fend for themselves.Though the game looks pretty good I've been seeing a good amount of frame rate drops and noise in the overall scenery. The in game dialog scenes are placed in some of the most inconvenient places (i.e. just before a major fight). Often forcing the player to have to repeat these fill in the blank scenes over an over again should they die in combat (The auto-save should have been implemented better). The major problem that I'm seeing with Mass Effect is the never ending elevator load screens. However, this maybe my biggest complaint it is also the one flaw that I'm really willing to over look since the game itself is quite massive and the 360 doesn't have an abundance of memory. That being said BioWare's Mass Effect is still a good game but it's not to the caliber of most of BioWare's back catalog (i.e. it is not great).

Zero Punctuation: Clive Barker's Jericho

Now with all the big title games coming out, I haven't heard much about Clive Baker's Jericho but Yahtzee has. However, based on his review he probably wished he didn't.

Zero Punctuation: Zelda Phantom Hourglass

You'd think I'd be getting sick of these rants ... but no, not at all. Enjoy!

Zero Punctuation:Medal of Honor Airborne

Apparently my super busy schedule has put me behind on the latest rants of Yahtzee. So to make up for lost time (at least in my own little mind) here is his review of Medal of Honor Airborne

Social Network Bankruptcy

I've decided to basically declare bankruptcy on all social networks, I've been all networked out and really don't want to whore out my personal info anymore. Now this doesn't mean that I'll stop blogging/twittering/powncing? but if any else really comes along I'll need to just be left out. At first I thought I was just getting over the social network phase and really just waiting for something new, but I'm finding that the constant stream of info about my friends makes them seem either unintersting or stupid/crazy.

This is mostly based on the fact that your friends will do one of the following they will update their networks with tons of information about every little piece of minutia that occurs in their day to day affairs. Which is potentially interesting if your friend is like a super hero but more than likely it's just boring. The other variation of this is the person who doesn't put up every little bit of information about their lives instead they try to put up witty/funny updates that will in some hopes make them .... seem cooler? To be honest very few people can pull this off especially on a some what regular basis, for the most part we can all get in a few good lines but to do consitently over and over again. Well, let's just say that their is a reason why most of us aren't comic writers. Now if your on one of these social networks you'll notice that most people fall into this general cliche (myself included) . Unfortunately the social network platform really only works when the network can entertain itself indefinetly.