Interlude: Mass Effect

A little over three weeks, two playthroughs of Mass Effect, one playthrough of Mass Effect 2, a fat scholarship, and a college transfer application later, the future looks bright - also, I've provided you my brief reviews of the Mass Effect saga so far (rather late for most prospective players, I admit).

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Mass Effect 1 starts off slowly. You play as Captain Shepard (first name and gender are flexible), assigned to a top-secret vessel in the Alliance Navy, and are quickly launched into a galaxy-spanning tale of backstabbing, giant robotic monstrosities, sacrifice, redemption, and lots of sci-fi cliches. Humans are notably low in the political food chain of the galaxy, but you have the pleasure of being the first human assigned to the Spectres (basically, Jedi Knight/secret agent hybrids of a sort) to perform duly impressive missions for the Galactic Council. This being a Bioware title, much of your time is absorbed by sitting around chatting with your fully voiced teammates, most of whom are extraterrestrials.

The game's strong points are superb acting (although one major character's voice will be uncannily familiar if you've played Bioware's earlier title Knights of the Old Republic), ridiculously deep backstory, and very meaningful story decisions (more on this later).

Weak points include miserably repetitive and floaty vehicle-based surface exploration of planets, which is far duller than you might think - none of the planets have vegetation or actual terrain formations beyond different height elevations of the same two or three textures of ground. Regular squad combat is better, although still a bit shaky, due to nearly all weapons being slightly better versions of the same sniper rifle-assault rifle-shotgun-pistol set. Extensive inventory management is a must, but you won't see particularly dramatic results from your fiddling.

Rating: 8/10
Superb, genuinely emotional story (with blue alien romance!), slightly hampered by funky combat. Still worth playing, particularly for reasons you'll see below.

Mass Effect 2's story kicks in a couple of years after the events of Mass Effect 1, and your character has quite literally come back from the dead. Your lovely team is disbanded, and you've been resurrected by people you didn't particularly like in the first game. Combat in ME2 is even more like a cover-based shooter (augmented by visually impressive biotic and tech powers) than ME1's gunfights, and most inventory management is gone along with the obnoxious vehicle sections. The story is better than ever, though, due in no small part to the fact that you can (and definitely should) import your Mass Effect 1 character in their entirety into the game. Besides preserving their appearance (and attitude), virtually every sidequest and plot choice influence the events of Mass Effect 2, some more dramatically than others. The capacity for alien romance is a bit ludicrous in some ways, but character development is absolutely wonderful to experience, especially since most missions are focused on acquiring or helping a teammate. The suicide mission endgame is nerve-wracking, as any member of your crew (even your romantic partner or a friend from the first game) can easily meet their demise in the final hour of gameplay. There's no guarantee that even you will make it out alive, even if you do complete the mission successfully, so the tension is quite genuine.

Rating: 9.5/10
Glorious. Easily the best examples of meaningful role-playing I've seen, supported by fun gunfights and a vicious set of powers to experiment with. Bioware is at its finest with this title.

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More importantly (for you lovely readers) I'm back into Minecraft, and our multiplayer server is about to be reincarnated, which will mean more features from yours truly!

Next: More Minecraft, I hope.

Minecrafting: Fresh Start

As mentioned in the previous post, I'm starting a new world to take advantage of new resources in the game, as well as the seed feature. This way, anyone who's interested in a particular feature of the world can make their own with the same seed and check it out for themselves (as much as the world allows for).
In the interest of actually getting more done, with this world I'm going to focus less on the blow-by-blow account of the entire adventure, and more on overall progress. Exceptions to this will probably be crazy things that happen spontaneously, and cave exploration. Sound good?

So, without further ado -

Seed: Sandbox Empires

(Fun fact: Using the seed "Castles in the Sand" dropped me in a desert biome surrounded by ocean. Irony? I think so.)

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Day 1:
My initial reaction was "Mountains! Trees! Caves! Woohoo!" Further exploration confirms this - this world, conveniently enough, features some really awesome mountains, overhangs, and occasional flying bits of dirt.

Not far from the spawn point, I spot a large swath of bare, exposed rock. I mine some coal for good measure, and file this spot away as a future building site.

Night 1: I chisel into a mountainside and dig away a large patch of rock. I make some new tools and a sword, and even pull up some iron ore.

Day 2: I explore some more, and find some really sweet natural bridge formations. I collect a bunch more wood, as well as a couple of mushrooms and leather from hapless cows. I have a fatal encounter involving a creeper and a large cliff, but recover all of my stuff.

Night 2: Another random cliff face, and another night of chiseling stone and occasional ore out of the ground. I dig into a tiny cave system inhabited by a single zombie, who quickly meets his demise.

Day 3: I decide on the bare stone patch as the site of my future base. It's close to my spawn, open, and mostly level. For once, I'm not building on a mountain, so I decide to make this a more symmetrical structure than my previous castles, and a bigger one to boot. I mark out the corners of what I plan to be the main keep and wall, and it's a 39-meter square.

Unfortunately, night falls before I can get into much of the construction. I have plans to keep myself occupied, though . . .

Night 4: I know very well from previous experience just how much stone a giant castle takes, so if I ever want to get that thing started, I'd better get cracking harvesting some raw materials.
Serenaded by the moans of the zombies outside my dirt hovel, I begin carving myself a staircase deep into the cuboid bowels of the earth.

(Side note: Where else would I ever get to write a sentence quite like that one?)

Some distance in, I pop out into the inevitable cave. It doesn't look large at first, but crawling behind a gravel mound confirms my suspicions - there's actually a much larger lower level not immediately obvious when you enter. A few minutes of skeleton-smashing fun later, I realize that my time on a slightly laggy multiplayer server has turned me into a hardened caving verteran - nothing I encounter in the depths comes close to touching me, as I happily bounce through the tunnel system. While this cave isn't particularly remarkable overall, I do find a couple of cool sights, including an almost perfectly circular room . . .

. . . an impressive underground river . . .

. . . and a lavafall!

The one scare I do get in this cavern actually happens while I'm carefully climbing around said lavafall. About halfway up the slope, a zombie plummets from a darkened ledge onto the ground in front of me. I hastily backpedal, hoping for him to meet a quick end in the magma flow. Unfortunately, he only barely catches himself on fire, so I have to scoot quickly backwards for a few tense seconds before he drops.

At the bottom of the cave I manage to dig up a hefty supply of iron, and even a couple of gold deposits. Sweet!
I poke around a lava lake in the hopes of spotting some diamonds, but that's too much to hope for at this point.

I enjoy the view for a few minutes, then trudge back to the surface.

Day . . . 5? 6?: I've lost track of time while deep in the earth, but now I have a base of resources to work with. The daylight hours are spent working on the castle foundations, along with a few seconds building a bed to speed my nights along.

I go through several days fairly quickly with the aid of my handy new bed, and soon run out of cobblestone. Still, I have finished a substantial portion of my epic fortress foundations.

So . . . now what? More caving? More castle-building? Something else?

Hmmmmm.

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Next: I make a decision!