As I sat on my couch eating a stale danish pastry and drinking a cup of tea, I thought to myself, people tend to compare Mass Effect to Star Wars, at least often enough for me to notice. Why? Why do people compare these seemingly unrelated franchises as if they were brothers?

Star Wars

If I rack my brains I can think of two similarities between the two: Space and memorable characters.

If you think about it, memorable characters appear in various works from all mediums of entertainment, so really, this shouldn't be anything to compare to two over; if it were, we could all be comparing Mass Effect to 24, or Star Wars to A Game of Thrones.

But the setting, and all the tropes that accompany it, is a valid comparison. They are both obviously set in a future where Space travel has become a viable option, and both have extra terrestrial races and space ships and such. But this is pretty much where the comparisons end.

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Now if I was to think about something that actually is comparable to Mass Effect it would absolutely be Star Trek.

Star Trek

(I must make it known, I am definitely not the most knowledgeable when it comes to Star Trek, but I'll do my best.)

From the handful of episodes/films I have watched I can note numerous similarities between these two franchises. Both have Councils who 'rule' over a large multi-species conglomerates and allies; the Citadel Council and the United Federation of Planets respectively.

They both feature fully fleshed out crews, each with their own roles and specialities; not just a man and his dog. This gives a greater feeling of realisation, a stronger backbone if you will. The ships in question also are much more fleshed out, both having galleys, private quarters, stock bays etc.

Star Wars only really has one main enemy: the Sith; whereas both Mass Effect and Star Trek have mutiple: Reapers, Geth, and Collectors; and the Borg, Romulons, and the Dominion. And even here, there can be similarities found between two of these races: the Borg and the Geth. Both are cybernetic races that belong to a collective with one singular mind.

Now, obviously, there are many more similarities than this, but the point of this blog was never to list them all, it was to ask, why do people compare Star Wars and Mass Effect so rampantly when there is a more obvious comparison to made right here? If you have any sort of reason please tell me... Help me understand.

That was corny as hell. But thanks for reading and hopefully responding.

I thought I'd have the misfortune of working through it, but I managed to get the earlier shift so I could do some things before shops closed, and realised I'd be able to watch this, so I took notes and have now written them into coherent sentences, for all you that care.

GOG STUFF

Since it's inception is the Autumn of 2008, GOG.com has grown a substantial amount, with over 1,000,000 unique visitors a month and almost 400 DRM free games. Soon they'll have sold their 6,000,000th game, and when that happens, everyone who has previously purchased a game from them will be able to download Brokensword: Shadow of the Templars for free; for 48 hours after the 6,000,000th purchase. They'll announce when this happens via email and twitter. Also, the person who completes the 6,000,000th transaction, will win the entire back catalogue of games from GOG.com. Yes, all ~400 of them.

As we're coming up to their 2nd anniversary there will be a big sale on their most wanted games. Their most wanted games being the 9 D&D games: Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate 2, Icewind Dale, Icewind Dale 2, Planescape: Torment, Neverwinter Nights, D&D Dragonshard, The Temple of Elemental Evil, and Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone. The big sale gimmick with these is, the more you buy at once the more you get off. Starting at 20% and climbing to 60% off. So if you buy all 9 you get them for 40% of the price; and if you already own, for example, 4 and you want just one more you could get that at 40% off straight away. So if have paid any attention to Dave Snider, you'll know you will want to take advantage of this sale; and if I didn't already own them, I would too.

CD PROJEKT STUFF

I like that they called autumn autumn.

So far they have breached the 1,000,000 sales mark. No actual figure though. Oops I missed a bit, from next Thursday 'til October 6th the game will be $30. And from now on the game is cheaper, $40 £25 €40 and AU$60. It's a shame a game by a Polish dev is the same amount of Dollars as it is Euros, but that's because Atari suck.

Version 2.0

The reason they have created this Version 2.0 is because they want to make the game the best they possibly can. Included in this update are 40 new technical and gameplay enhancements; no word on anything more specific than this though. All 9 of the DLC pack previously released will be included in this version also, even though the included them all in the last patch they made.

Now the three biggest inclusions in this update are:

A new extensive tutorial. In which we are shown all of the games mechanics, with on screen prompts, and tasks created just precisely for, with this tutorial. And it actually has some light story elements to it, with the introduction to the arena (from what I could gather). The reason for this tutorial is the many complaints about how hard the opening chapter is and how poorly people felt the game's mechanics were shown too i.e. not at all.

Dark Mode. This is the game's new difficulty setting, with it sitting just below insane mode -- in that you can reload if you die. Also added in this mode are new armour sets and swords sets, three of each to be precise; so that's 3 silver swords, 3 steel swords, and a set of light, medium, and heavy armour respectively. These items will likely be the best in the game, and will help players against the increased difficulty, and I know we'll all be happy for that. This mode also comes with three new miniquests, as they call them, but there was no detail on these other than that they are new. The last thing to be said on this mode, is that the dark items, yeah they're cursed. Until you have the complete set, your health will drain every time you draw you sword; and whilst you have your sword drawn, the screen will go... darker. From what I could tell it seems like a bit of a gimmick, one close to the stupid jam smears of CoD, but maybe it'll be more refined when it's not being shown on a poor 360p stream. A big point for this mode: the first person to complete this mode will win a prize. (Bolded due to importance for skimmers)

Arena Mode. You can probably guess most of the details about this, and you're right, it's an arena mode: a mode where you fight off hordes of enemies, that are thrown at you in waves. The aim though, is to keep going, for as long as you can, until you die, and when you do die your score will be calculated and you can upload it to the official leadboards on their website, and -- shudder -- Facebook. Each round, the quicker you defeat the wave, the more points you will acquire; and you will be able to choose from three prizes each round. The audience will act dynamically to your actions: play poorly and take too long, they'll boo you and throw their shoes at you; play well though, and they'll cheer you and keep their shoes on. One thing unique to this mode, is the werewolf, a new adversary created specifically for this mode No real details were included though, but he has his own cage. Lastly, you can hire Mercenaries to help you with the fights, they come in various play styles I believe, with at least standard swordsman and sorceress (probably the only two styles, but there might be more).

All of these things will be added, for free, in a patch we can all download come the 29th of September (1 week from this post).

The Xbox 360 version

As we all know by now, they have also been coding away to create a Xbox 360 version of the game, due out Winter 2012 (Q1). Now this section of the conference was mostly just them narrating footage of the gameplay -- in which I found out that Geralt is a bad ass, and Iorveth is a really, really bad elf) which was actual 360 gameplay, but there were a few details. For example, this version will come with a 4 minute CG introduction at the beginning of the game, directed by none other than Tomasz Baginski. Yeah I dunno who he is either, but they assured me this was a good thing, and that he also did the intro and outro for the first game. There will be also be some other features to come with the Xbox version, but they didn't announce any past this. And for all of us who already bought the game on PC I am pretty sure we'll be getting them too, I know for a fact we'll get the intro.

Those are the facts anyway, now for the opinions: the game looked beautiful, obviously nowhere near as beautiful as the PC version, understandably, but still pretty beautiful -- it will probably take the title of the best looking 360 game for sure. They said that they managed to retain a lot of the graphical features from the PC version, including SSAO and dynamic shadows and lighting; but I must say the lighting didn't look nearly as good and didn't wow me at all like it did with the PC version, but the vegetation looks as alive as it does now, and the characters still look pretty detailed. One issue I did have though was the audio, and it may well have been because of the stream although it wasn't present when they showed footage from the PC version. It sounded echoey, and a bit like they'd recorded it in their bathroom (which led me to think it was the stream), but then we all know the sound will have to be heavily compressed, to fit on the 360's meagre 9GB DVDs, so I guess this is kind of a non-issue. And lastly, they showed us a cover art: Geralt in the middle of some scenery, but not scenerey at the same time. I'm not entirely sure how to describe it properly, but I can say I didn't really care for it, at least not compared to the cover art it already has.

Thank you for reading this, and if haven't already go buy the damn game, you won't regret it.

Just leave this here.

Please read: The following is based on the approximated sales figures stated on Wikipedia. It is not any sort of pro-xbox/wii/ps3 rant. It is just a few things people seem to ignore, and a few things I can make from the numbers. I'd search for year by year figures but I am lazy and this is meant to be brief.

Sales Figures

As well all know, the Nintendo Wii has sold the most units of the current console generation, followed by Microsoft's Xbox 360 and then the Sony Playstation 3, this is not what I have written this about, as this is knowledge we all accept.

As we can see; the Wii is the clear leader, with the 360 and PS3 falling far behind.

But if we look at various averages it shows a slightly different picture.

And there you are the average sales, based on the approximate total sales of mid-2011. Obviously they mean very little, but some of you may find this interesting, some of you may not; such is life.

And one last quick fact, since it's release there has been a Wii sold every 2 seconds. That is a little bit scary right?

When I said brief, clearly I meant brief. I can't really think of much I want to add to this, nor can I bothered to think, I'm going to go and play TF2.

If any of you have any requests as to figures I should include then awesome.

Games sold per system to date.

Ok I found something else I can add. The average games sold compared to how consoles have been sold. (People don't seem to realise, this is new purchases, it does NOT include used)

Again; make of this what you will. I find it interesting. I hope you do too.

Alex.

Yes another blog, partially, about L.A Noire. I know it is hardly the most uncommon of things around these boards, but it's not like any of you read these things so who care, right?

My thoughts on L.A. Noire

So yes, in my last blog I noted how it my copy hadn't arrived, even after 5 days of shipping time. It still didn't arrive for a further two days after this. So I was playing the game a full week/4 days after everybody else.

I don't really like it. It is a bad game. A bad game with some brilliant ideas that I hope will be taken that much further in the next game, or at least in games in the same vein; but a bad game nonetheless. The driving is not as good as a 2011 game should be, we all expect it to be a bit 'boaty' considering the setting but Mafia 2 seemed to do it much better and in the same time setting, and it feels lifted straight out of a game 10 years ago; the textures, not the graphics as a whole, just the textures are lazily drawn, pretty low resolution, and most of the time, anything lacking importance will be part of the texture below e.g. paintings, newspapers, tramlines, manholes, windows, keyholes etc and it make the game look very flat; the mo-cap that isn't facial is pretty poor, the characters kind of flop about when they die, and instead of recording a sprinting animation they just speed Cole up; the gun combat is terrible, the damage done doesn't change depending where you hit them -- except for the head -- so you can't incapacitate targets with a gun, only kill, which as a detective is something you don't want to be doing; and the 'brawling' consists of mashing X and occasionally Square 'til it tells you to press Circle. Now most of these are clearly filler content between clue hunting and interrogating, but still it is really obvious it is filler, which is wrong.

Then there is the interrogation sequences: these consist of you asking a suspect a series of questions, usually 3 or 4, and then gauging by the way they answer whether or not they are telling the truth. This usually boils down to did their animation stop or are they still moving their face. Simple as that. If they stare blankly at you then are telling the truth, and if they are looking around or smirking or avoiding your gaze etc, then they are lying. Now if they are lying you have two options, you press doubt if you don't have evidence and you click lie and choose the evidence if you do. Now it isn't always obvious which piece of evidence you need, as a few times I have clicked lie chose the evidence I would expect to be correct and have it be wrong. I have also had occasions where the perp has just looked at me and blinked like a normal person would so I have chosen truth and it turned out they were lying, which is a load of crap.

Obviously, these sections could be brilliant, but they are massively flawed. A lot of questions have answers that will be repeated in later questions and you'll act like you didn't know. And I know this is so if you miss it once you have another chance, but they could have at least removed them if you already know the answer, or maybe tailor it so they answer differently as they know you already know the answer. E.G. "Yeah that bar I told you about" or something similar.

Lastly we have the clues: they operate in a user friendly manner; when the music chimes and the controller vibrates press X, and when the music stops you have found all of them. It's all kinds of simple, but it isn't boring at all, it is actually kinda cool being able to manipulate loads of different clues and possible clues to check for evidence and such, because the detail put into the important ones is pretty high.

I felt initially it was pointless to talk about the facial animation because it is so damn good and this is kind of an obvious point to talk about, but whatever, y'all be moaning so here it is. I really like the facial animation, even if it is a bit creepy seeing Greg Grunberg telling me he wasn't a killer. The tech used to recreate it is mighty impressive, and Team Bondi should be darned proud of it, I know I am. I really hope they license it out to other, more capable, studios but I really doubt Rockstar would let them, which sucks.

Now this game could have been brilliant, but as it is, it much too shallow. I kinda feel like I am offending both Detectives and Adventure games by calling it a Detective Adventure game like so many others have but hey. If the dialog had been more dynamic and I was given more freedom to choose the way I ask my questions then it would have made the game much, much better. And if the whole thing didn't look like a Playstation 2 game it would have helped me ignore the bad driving and bad gunplay. But alas, too many glaring faults makes this game pretty un-enjoyable, for the most part.

I don't think I'm much more than half way through, so I will try and sit it out 'til the end but I won't be surprised if I don't.

Ok, I am now onto the Vice missions. I really enjoyed the setting and atmosphere of the end of the last homicide case, but it was ruined by being forced to blow some dude's brains out.

If I was to give it a rating it would probably be a 6/10. Great ideas that definitely deserve praise, but they are poorly executed, and the filler content is quite obviously filler content.

Dirt 3

Now this is a bloody good game.

I have always enjoyed Rally games, ever since the first Colin McRae game back for the Playstation. This on is no exception, even if it does fail to bear the Colin Mcrae name.

Unfortunately I don't have as much to write about this: the rallying itself feels a lot better than Dirt 2, which I found felt pretty arcade-y, the wide range of cars and the re-inclusion of the WRC license are all things that make me happy.

There are only two things I'd change about the game: firstly I would bring back proper rallies, not just one off events, but multi-staged rally events where you have to take care of your car in between, much like in real rallying; and secondly I would burn that friggin' American commentator at the stake, WHY DOES HE SPEAK TO ME LIKE THIS WAS DUDE WHERE'S MY CAR? Oh a third thing actually, I would include actual rally drivers like Mikko Hirvonen, Sebatien Loeb, and Petter and Henning Solberg; not people like Dave Mirra and Travis Pastrana. Ken Block is ok because he actually does drive in the WRC now.

But I am having buckets and buckets of fun with this game, so much so I attempted to organise a race night for last Thursday, but that failed because you all suck. Yes, that is why.

Anyway I feel myself not wanting to type any more. So scores.

As a Rally game dirt 3 gets a 9/10.

As a regular video game it gets an 8/10, if only for the fact that as a Rally game, there are only two of the main areas you can excel in, graphics and gameplay.

If you read this: thank you, this seems to be becoming a somewhat regular occurrence, so do read next time.

Alex.

Why is this not deletable?

Holy shit let me delete this please.

Let me delete this one too.

'Twas I who asked, not sure why, although it may have been due to the chat in the free live show the other week.

Any way even though I think they misunderstood the question, or at least didn't want to humour the idea, it was nice to get an explanation.

BUT... I meant something more like this...

Or maybe, to give the idea more of an Escher feel...

And here they are, I kind of feel something equivalent to post-wank guilt for upping these to the site, but hey, I downloaded GIMP when I installed Ubuntu the other day so I thought I would use it.

Now I have joined the legion of creepy GB Users who have paid creepy homage to the Staff. <3 you Dave.

As you all are probably aware, if not by the constant barrage of advertising or the fact that you may actually have yourself a life partner, Valentine's day is just around the corner.  

Just before I get into this, I would like to make it clear that I am not of these opinions because I am sad and lonely, I have had the same standing whether I have had myself a lady at the time or not.  

Firstly, and probably mostly obvious by now, the media have ransacked this commemoration, much like most, and it is largely about how much money you spend on one another, or at least that is how it is portrayed so people spend, spend, spend. This can be seen in such advertisements you find absolutely everywhere you look; in newspapers you'll find advertisements encouraging you to spend hefty amounts of money on things on no real meaning, for instance, on my way home through town this afternoon I saw one praising a mobile phone as a 'perfect present for your valentine'. Now call me old fashioned, but why on Earth would a mobile phone hold any real meaning like a valentine's day gift should do. And if it isn't meaningless expenditure like such, it is tacky heart shaped chocolates, or pink fluffy slippers, or other novelties that have no real meaning, yet are shrouded in falsified gestures of love and caring. Whatever happened to people taking some time and thinking about it? 
 
Secondly, it seems to have become all about the females in relationships. Now i'm not going to get into any 'well Women like lovey dovey crap and Men don't' points as that is not what I am saying. What I am saying though, is why can't a Man care? If the day is meant to be about showing love to one another why does there have to be a focus on one side? Now this may be down to the people I am around at this time of the year, but just being in shops surrounded by people shopping gives off the same feeling. 
 
My main point though, is why does the act of showing your partner how much you love him or her have to be consigned to one particular day? Why can't it be every day? Well, not every day as that would then become the normal and kind of expected, but I expect you understand my point. Acts of such kindness and love should be far more sporadic and not happen on specific days, especially not the same specific days as everyone else. 
 
Now, I think I have burnt myself out with all this writing, hence why each paragraph became increasingly shorter. I hope it is coherent, as I am pretty bad at writing out my thoughts for others to understand. 
 
OH, and also, just as sort of an escape clause, I am not saying this is true of every body, this is just what I have noticed in the people around me and in many different forms of media, as I know full well someone is likely to take something out of context and blow it out of proportion as this, after all, is the internet.  
 
Thank you if you read this, and I don't blame you if you don't get to the end.