"I wanna move to Mass Effect!"

"Dear diary..."
Seriously, that's what this blog seems to be turning into and I'm sorry. Originally, this whole thing was really just supposed to be a collection of rants and smartass comments on various games, things that piss me off, the kind of stuff that I assume brought my 20 or 30 regular readers to this website in the first place. Yes, I've been checking the statistics and on a boring blog I get roughly 30 hits, the more popular ones can reach anything from 70 to triple digits. So I'm not exactly internet famous, but I seem to have a small, yet dedicated reader base. Makes me wonder. Who are these people? Are they real people at all or is all this traffic related to the annoying spam bots, who love posting their garbage in my comments section all the damn time? Heh.
Still - seeing as we live in a day and age where people deem it necessary to post Tweets about their breakfast and/or morning shit, my feeling of guilt regarding all those diary-style posts has its limits. And that's the sweet thing about the internet: You can always stop reading this entry right now, go back to watching porn and come back later, when I post another funny one. Whee!

2013 is only a month old and thus far, it has been nothing short of awesome. Job wise, these past few weeks have shown me that I can do some amazing shit, such as creating huuuuge articles based on tiny fact sheets and snippets of information, whilst keeping them fun to read. I didn't know I could do that until I had to. You see, for the most part, my work is pretty simple and straightforward. Somebody tells me to play a game, take some screenshots and write one or two pages about it. The first time they requested two pages rather than just one, I felt absolutely terrified. How the hell do you write a 5000+ characters preview on a game, where all you do is build little huts and raise an army to fight bad guys? I'd sit there for hours and hours, trying to come up with a new paragraph, hoping to figure out what to talk about. I hated those dreaded two-pagers for the entire first year on the job.

The nice thing about experience is that you get more confident with the stuff you do. My writing had begun to improve the moment I was no longer afraid to fuck up. The moment I quit thinking, "Can I really say that? I bet nobody is going to understand that. They're gonna fucking hate this article!" and began to just fucking write, I could actually focus on little puns and jokes, making the whole text more entertaining, making it fun to read. Basically, over the years I went from shitting myself to getting my own little magazine section, where I can write whatever the fuck I want and people give me money for it, because they think I'm funny. Two page previews? Pfft!

Still, there are things about this job, which will always be scary to me. Anything that involves picking up the phone or answering Skype. I'm not afraid of people. I'm not afraid of most things. But I genuinely look up to the people I work with. I grew up playing video games. I've been reading all those gaming magazines since my early childhood. Those guys were the coolest people in the world to me, with the most awesome job. Now I get to work with them. This isn't like a dream come true, it is the actual fucking dream! So, even four years into this job, when "the office" calls, I still sound like a complete idiot on the phone.
And it's the same with PR guys, publishers and just about anything that involves press events. Those guys invite me to their test servers, show me all the cool raids, bosses and other features on their games, whilst talking to me on Skype answering all my questions. I've met some incredibly cool people and community managers that way. They have one of the toughest jobs on earth. You can't possibly pay them enough. Dear publishers: Hug your community managers today. Appreciate them. Show a little love.

Yesyes, they all just wanna sell off their product, they're trying to bribe and coerce me, blah, blah, blah. Thing is, you can tell when they really love their game, when they identify themselves with it, when they're proud of what they're doing. I love that enthusiasm just as much as the special treatment, the early access, the whole VIP thing, just because I'm some guy who wants to write about a game. You gotta love those perks, man.
Anyhow. I've completed my biggest, most challenging articles this year, it feels like a huge achievement and the extra pay doesn't feel half bad, either. After several months of frozen and canned "food", it's nice to enjoy some fresh meat and vegetables. Home-cooked meals. And it's a lot easier to find sleep when you don't have to worry about the rent, unpaid bills and overdrawn bank accounts. Life is good right now and I intend to fully enjoy every minute of it. The next phase of frustration and bullshit is already lurking around the corner and I'll be damned if I don't appreciate the happy days for as long as they last. Our pets look rather happy, as well.

In other news, we're back on Mass Effect, Claire moreso than I. She said she'd live in that universe if she could. Come to think of it, I'm not sure if any other game universe has ever fascinated me so much, if any. As a Sci-Fi setting, I enjoy it even more than anything Star Trek and/or -Wars, though that comparison is probably a tad unfair. Mass Effect gets you emotionally involved, makes you feel as though it told your personal story and that's something a tv show or a movie simply cannot do. Friends and enemies, entire species live or die depending on your actions and decisions, you make love to sexy blue-skinned alien chicks and, ideally, you unite the galaxy against a common enemy. What's not to love?
Seeing as there is no RL quicksave button or a possibility to reload and undo untimely deaths and bad decisions, which doom entire planets, I'm not entirely sure I'd want to be Commander Shepard for real, though.

Still, no other game has ever "stayed" with me for that long, if that makes any sense. I have finished Fallout 3 and forgot about the whole plot ten minutes later. Skyrim? Epic game, dull story. Heck, I still remember most of the Ultimas and Wizardries, but looking back at those, all I feel is a certain sense of fond nostalgia. Mass Effect, on the other hand... man. The music, the characters, it's all still there like I played it five minutes ago. Realistically, it was about a year ago and that's not a very long time, but thinking about the Normandy and her crew feels like thinking about some old friends. Remembering how some of them died along the way still makes me sad. The first time I saw the shocking ending to Mass Effect 2's 'Project Overlord', I was overwhelmed. I didn't think a game could ever rouse such strong emotions. And coming from somebody, who laughed out loud when Aerith got stabbed by Sephiroth, that's probably saying a lot.

Of course, if you've never played the trilogy and you have zero connection to any of these characters, watching the above video will probably do nothing for you.

I don't wanna play the whole trilogy again. I know the story. My version of it. I'm happy with that. Claire wants to replay it over and over again, but I'm just happy knowing she's having so much fun with it. We are, however, still fighting our epic multiplayer battles. Which is surprising, really. Basically, all you get in ME3 multiplayer is a very simple horde mode. You fight waves of enemies, which constantly increase in numbers and strength, until you either die or defeat every last one of them. No death match, capture the flag, cooperative story mode or anything. You just gather three friends, fight side by side and face almost impossible odds, that's all there is to it.

It also has the worst unlocking system I've ever seen in any game of this kind, featuring a ridiculously heavy focus on "micro"payments. You start the game with a bunch of very basic, human characters. There's your soldier, your engineer, an infiltrator (sniper) - you get the idea. They're all good classes and competent at what they do, but they're not very cool. The character roster features the hulking krogans, who can headbutt a ten ton armored Cerberus battle mech into submission, epic fighting robots, which somewhat resemble Ikea desk lamps and a quazillion other incredibly cool toons, yet you're stuck being a boring human. So what do you do? You kill shit, earn credits, spend credits on upgrade packs and get random rewards out of them. Kinda like buying a booster pack for your favourite trading card game.

And you know how those work. You know exactly what you want, but you can't buy it directly, so you're at the mercy of the powers that be. Fucking RNG. You want an epic new shotgun? Enjoy your new sniper rifle! You want to be a Turian Sentinel? Well, you're getting a Salarian engineer and that's that. Sure - by giving you all kinds of random stuff you wouldn't normally play, you end up enjoying combinations of weapons and characters you normally wouldn't dream about using. I always wanted to play a Krogan and just beat the shit out of everything, but the RNG turned me into a kickass Turian sniper. It's a dumb system, which is strangely fun.
Thanks to the completely randomized rewards, I'm now an infiltrator (aka stealth-based - ME! WTF!) sporting a massive machine gun. I top the scoreboards on all difficulty levels, so I guess I'm making it work. Claire is an Asari Valkyrie, which is funny, considering they're her least favourite species in the game and she always wanted to play a Quarian. In fact, she finally unlocked the Quarian she wanted so much last night, but never played it, because she's too damn hooked on her Asari now.

They're not handling unlocks that way in order to make you try and appreciate unlikely combinations of characters and guns, though. They're doing it to make you spend real cash. Because buying those upgrades costs shit tons of credits, getting the stuff you REALLY want can take what feels like an eternity. In fact, there's a fair chance you get the same unwanted stuff multiple times, even though you already have it. It's perfectly possible to "unlock" a character you already have, even when they're at the maximum level and with all customization options fully unlocked. Same with guns - they all come in ten upgrade stages. You didn't like your Black Widow sniper rifle? Enjoy the Black Widow MKII, which you've just spent 99,000 credits on! Of course, this also works the other way 'round. You've finally unlocked that one gun you've always wanted, more than anything else in the game? Well, it's a lousy MKI. Good luck getting it nine more times for ideal stats!
And since the upgrade packs can also be bought with real money, well... you can see where this is going. If you're after one particular item, you can spend well over 100 Euros and still not get it. Thanks, Electronic Arts!

I don't know why exactly it's so addictive, despite all that crap. It probably works a bit like Diablo. Remember Diablo? Grinding away for hours and hours, getting shitloads of really awful loot, but every so often, you'd find a piece of gear, which would provide a small upgrade to your stats. Reward! Feels good! In a way, the upgrade packs on ME3 work like that. You unlock a new armor-piercing mod for your favourite gun and start shooting baddies through cover. You luck out and roll an upgrade, which raises damage on all assault rifles. You get that camo you wanted for your favourite toon. There is no instant gratification, no "I want this weapon and that character maxed out right there and now", but there's constant progress, small baby steps, getting a little stronger one upgrade at a time. Of course there's also a downside to it - you might be the most talented player in the world, but if you don't have the gear, then the higher difficulty settings simply aren't for you. Also a bit like Diablo. But when was that ever about talent?

-Cat