Diablo III Screenshots

Mass Effect 3 - Part 5 *SPOILERS*

SPOILERS AHEAD for the ending of Mass Effect 3!

Still reading?

So aside from suffering further rounds of "homage" and Easter Eggs -- "The first shuttle is away!" Yay! -- the ending, at least the ending I experienced, concluded with Shepherd saving the galaxy by blowing everything and anything to hell. The Ghost Child in Shepherd's Max Payne-like nightmares that turned out to be "The Catalyst" tells Shepherd flatly that all robotic life will be wiped out if she puts a few well-placed shots into a crazily exposed conduit. And because Shepherd has a bit of robot about her, it means her destruction as well.

That's what Shepherd came to do. Put an end to the Reapers. And in the process mimic some scenes from LOST.

It came as a bit of a surprise that the destruction of the Reapers and all the mass effect relays basically destroyed the galaxy. (This is something I predicated in a previous blog.) It was a bit of a, "Wait, what?" reaction on my part. In my head I imagined all the Reaper tech just shutting down and collapsing in a heap all over the galaxy. Cue the inter-species celebrations, ticker tape parade, and medal ceremony. Nope. Earth's surface is essentially "glassed" and Joker just maybe got the Normandy far enough away from the explosion to fight another day.

The ending wasn't enough to make me want to send BioWare cupcakes or file an FTC complaint or just go crazy with a "That's not how it should have ended! Those leftist feminist ruin everything!" diatribe. If anything, the ending kind of made me sad that I predicted the end of the game -- the close out of a trilogy -- only a couple hours into the third chapter. I wanted a surprise, a real smack to the face, from BioWare. Something that would have been unexpected (along the lines of Jade Empire characters saving the day). It makes sense from a trilogy standpoint to end things so definitively but it did kind of undermine the entirety of the struggle in the trilogy: trying to save organic life in the galaxy. After all that, the Reapers won!

Granted, my ending was one of (supposedly) 7 different endings, some where everyone survives and Earth isn't vaporized. But I'm not sure I want to dive back in again after witnessing the end of the galaxy, particularly because it means scavenging space for War Assets, which isn't actually that fun.

When the game "ends" it re-launches Shepherd into the last part of the game where she's about to assault the Illusive Man's hideout. But I think I'm done at this point. I already destroyed the galaxy once, why do I need to do it again?

The Main Problem with Skyrim

Here's the moment I became an

F12 addict.

So far my biggest problem with Skyrim is that I'm constantly hitting F12 to take screenshots. Every vista, every detail, every place I've been, I keep thinking to myself, "Oh man, that looks so cool!"

I've been very careful about staying on the main story path so far because of the problems I ran into with Mass Effect 2. That game would present these seemingly innocuous choices that might (or maybe they didn't) have repercussions down the line. For Skyrim, I've stayed on the straight and narrow and the only exploration I've really done is the distance I have to travel from story point to story point with a decision early on to always try to take the "good" path during NPC interactions (when they didn't try to kill me first).

After the story is done I might go back and do some more exploring. After all, there might be other vistas and caves that are just begging for a half dozen taps of F12.

There are spots like this all over Skyrim. Places you just want to string up

your hammock and drift into unconsciousness.

Just how many moons are there to see in Skyrim? Maybe the ultimate in-game 

moon is the crazy one from The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (N64).

The spider is only on fire because I'm using some kind of flame spell on it.

(I'm not good with knowing the specifics of what things are called -- the
spider is on fire, that's the important thing.)

From Blizzard, With Love

So, some sections of the Internet are crying today about the latest news from Blizzard: Diablo III will be available on consoles. I was pretty sure the company had announced this ages ago so I'm not sure what the big deal is. I'm sure that for a few days there will be some very vocal whining and complaining from some segments of the gaming public, but these guys need to spend their time on more fruitful pursuits, like say, horticulture or cleaning up a river.

Dollars to donuts, the same people flipping out about this recent announcement were the same individuals that went a little off the deep end when it came to the art style. I remember when Blizzard showed off Diablo III for the first time and the voices called the art direction terrible, the grittiness had been replaced by a Care Bear sensibility, and so on.

I'm not sure how small your world has to be to care about stuff like this. More players getting a chance at a Diablo game?

That's good news.

Not just for Blizzard, a company that needs to have its gold-plated silverware re-finished, but for those gamers that have to listen to "old timers" beat the drum about how awesome those old Diablo games were. Finally, they'll be able to experience the "killing and shopping" of an RPG series that is still labelled as one of the best ever even though the last game was released more than a decade ago!

ADDITIONAL: Blizzard has actually denied confirmation of a console version. I'd still say it's likely to appear though.