This is not written well. And is structured as a rant. Just check out this very statement to see how well I form sentences and say writtten well instead of well written! BLAMO.

Wouldn't say I've changed my mind about Mass Effect 3, but I've definitely had my mind clarified and sorted thanks to hearing the folks talk about it in a reasonable manner during the Game Of The Year Podcasts this past week. I know it wasn't as hard hitting when I was playing through it and I know I didn't 'enjoy' it as much but it was/is still Mass Effect and it still is pretty good, and definitely has moments there. Having time between playing it and being able to look back on Mass Effect 3 and 2 (and 1 I guess) it's way more clear how much of an impact Mass Effect 2 had on me during and after playing it, where as with Mass Effect 3 I just kinda had a good Mass Effect experience but ultimately don't feel anything for it. I definitely never re-played ME2 a billion times but you know what, I actually did playthrough it more than once and definitely jumped in a handful of times to start playthroughs that maybe didn't finish but were definitely great fun. The initial playthrough of ME2 was very fulfilling and I feel like the entire game was very tight and had a really specific tone throughout, the music especially was unique and interesting where as with ME3 it's very much closer to the grand generic film score some modern games are getting closer to now. Sounds good but just ends up not being notable in the long run when you go super orchestral instead of taking a more bold statement with your game music, same can be said I guess for films themselves and a reason why film scores get copied within themselves... and why films like inception kinda make every film after sound the same. it sucks and everyone should always make unique things all the time, forever and it should all be the bestest.

Most of my recoil from disliking ME3 was due to everyone spouting their opinion at me and taking the internet hyperbole stance of 'This is the Worst', which ME3 is far from. Games are way more than their mechanics though and it shows so much in the Mass Effect franchise because ME3 is easily the most refined and enjoyable with it's technical game mechanics where the other were sloppy and un-fleshed out, but I don't really play games for good game mechanics they are really just more of the appreciated foundation to something more. I'd prefer all games have solid foundations, especially controls, but I've played more games because of other reasons and had just as much or more fun than ones where the only thing going for it was how tight it's controls were.

I played and fell in gaming love with Risen for a few weeks I think (late 2009), simply because it nailed a tone in gaming that apparently I love and it had a look to it that was that sort of bland look that is closer to real life than most games now which opt for the ultra-real look from some films where things are hyper real, more real than real 100 gallons of blood from a paper cut type jazz. Some sort of really basic survival sim kinda experience where things feel raw and meaty, preferably allow me to chop a fucking log or collect flowers and give me a semi-fleshed out thing to do with that stuff like craft some shitty items that are worthy of how scruffy the materials I've collected are. I wanna make some simple home grown items to slowly do things like make some harty stew from my hard earned ingredients. Something more than a gamebryo engine crafting system that just amounts to pressing Take All on all things in every room then randomly accepting the craft item button on a menu dialog to make items appear in your inventory. Give me a crafting animation and some form of hard earned respect for what I've made and it won't matter if the actual end result is some kinda lame weapon. Risen ends up introducing magic into it, which I hate (I hate magic in games, it always feels lazy?).

Vanity of High Scores.

I download mods for games like Skyrim and Fallout New Vegas that add armors and weapons, all of which are usually tagged with 'immersive' or 'lore-friendly', or are just exceedingly well done (rare for mods)even though I rarely or never actually care about the actual lore in those games, I just don't want to run around with a bullet proof vest in Skyrim, or have a clean skinned bouncing bussom'd anime character that uses weapons from some fucking dumb anime... fuckin'. Through the lens of the Bethesda game modding community everyone is asian(the author names on all these mods don't lie!!!) and everyone is into panties. Clean skin... also.

CLEAN SKIN DOESN'T MAKE SENSE IN SKYRIM!!! OR FALLOUT!!! Also it's really creepy how popular those mods are. along with the nude body mods and how many there are along with how many sub-mods there are that change the textures of the nude body mod textures slightly... WAT.

Though recently saw a mod that cleans up that main Radio HQ building in Fallout 3, the one with the main dude from the radio 2 dog or whatever the fuck. Made me think that I never noticed that in the vanilla game of fallout (both 3 and new vegas) it always looks like everyone discovered and inhabited the buildings within 3 days from when you find them, cause there's garbage everywhere. You'd think one of the first things people would focus on was cleaning up the insanely fucked up building they seem to wanna live in but almost every room looks like a crack den or worse, or at least the lived in areas look just as bad as the abandoned areas in that world. Like everyone just said fuck it and doesn't wanna do shit for hygeine since the bombs destroyed everything, like that's some excuse to not use soap anymore. Build that into the lore then and add some real nasty sicknesses associated with unclean living spaces (pretty sure that's a thing, scurvy type oldy diseases linked to pissing on yourself or living in feces).

Speaking of Fallout games I got this email:

I don't know if I'll ever play through the main quest completely for New Vegas, for whatever reason the House stuff in the story is really not interesting to me. I think it was slightly interesting the first time I got to it when initially playing through the game but I stopped at some point and now I only really have patience for the first chunk of the games stuff. I'd like to eventually finish it because I think I heard decent things about the ending of the game and how it wraps up? I might be crazy and maybe I didn't hear that.

I got dat ENB junk working for New Vegas, I'd had issues before and gave up. Most ENB presets from users are way insane with their over saturation and contrast and sharpness. There is almost zero presets that are subtle. I am using the only one that doesn't make the night time in the game look like daytime, let's say.

Gallery

I don't even have anything to say about not finishing Assassins Creed III. The extra level of less optimized engine code on the PC makes it a bit less appealing to playthrough I guess, considering I really enjoyed how they improved that stuff every time with the last games because they were just optimizing and optimizing the same game engine over and over, made those last games run SO WELL and this one is very poor in comparison.