Ghostface318's forum posts
If we end up in Cambridge, I may be equally upset.....
A place like Jillian's, near Fenway park, has a lot of options for private space, but they'll make you buy a food package, and I bet it costs. That Fenway area might be a good bet for you guys, as many places are a bit larger and used to hosting private functions.
My girlfriend just bought us 3 day passes as an early Birthday present. Looking forward to it, but I don't know how much will hold her attention. Any Boston drinking is good drinking though, so. ..
Question- is this a console shooter behavior, or does this stuff persist in what I had been led to believe were calmer multiplayer venues, say WOW or Starcraft?
Miranda's getting antsy, so we should roll on her loyalty mission, which involves keeping her sister away from her dad - apparently Miranda's family is southern or something. She's needed on Ilium, and we will have bigger fish to fry there soon anyway, so here we go.
Miranda ran away from he old man, who genetically altered and trained her as some perfect human, I guess for espionage or fighting, or some such dark enterprise. He apparently wanted more than one model, so he had another kid popped out. Miranda took Oriana with her when she ran, and placed her with a normal family on Ilium. She has stayed out of Oriana's life and tried to keep her isolated from any trace of her origin, but it now looks like Miranda and Oriana's father is on to them, and Oriana's family needs to be relocated. The only link between Miranda, Oriana's new life and her father, is a man named Niket, who Miranda trusts totally, and will no way be the source of information that makes everything go bad. This kind of thing hasn't happened at every turn here. Ever.
Our party drops in to the transport area, right on top of a bunch or mercs hired to take Oriana back. Some great bad pontificating by the second-in-commando is interrupted by our pistol, and our party opens up on the mercs before they can fire on us, and thus begins another roll of a mission with Shepard, Miranda and Thane.
Insanity difficulty or no, our party is just too powerful for most enemies here. We just hit guy over guy with two doses of Warp and then Reave, and then follow up with our new favorite toy, Squad Cryo Ammo. I had totally been sleeping on this power-up through all my plays of this game, thinking that it wasn't very effective in comparison to Incendiary's ability to burn up armor. I was wrong, so wrong. Using Cryo ammo, along with the Barrier and Shield-stripping biotics we're throwing out there, serves to keep any melee focused enemies or mechs up off us. Enemies that are aggressive, like the LOKI's featured here, or the Husks, have caused me issues throughout this playthrough, since they come so quick and are carrying armor on top of their health. This new tactic puts and end to this problem in many cases.
The toughest piece of this mission was the endgame, after a confrontation between Miranda and Niket, who shockingly betrayed her to her father, and is subsequently killed by the merc leader. When the battle commences, I didn't have a good sense of the shape of the field, and chose to move forward into cover, bringing my team with me, focusing on enemies on our right, including the mercenary leader, an Asari.
I made this much harder on myself by not realizing I had plowed down the middle lane of three possible in the room. When Miranda got picked off by fire coming from somewhere I thought wasn't in play that I realized that a whole other crew of dudes was now behind me and moving freely to either end of the lane I was in. Whoops.
I'm just lucky, tricky and badass enough to survive, stubbornly not using medigel, and Thane and I hunker down, switch fire to closer enemies, and keep moving to the far end of the lane in front of us, then continued around, cleaned up the rocket-launcher lady and the Asasri leader in front of us, and then looped all the way around to catch up with the guys who had been coming from where we first started. A fun little exercise in murderous aggression.
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Miranda says hi to her sister, and is now warming up to our cause. Her loyalty unlocks slam, which is a nice power, and will be something she tends to use when I'm not ordering her to constantly use Warp on Armor or Barriers. Through the rest of the game, all of a sudden, some enemy will get launched out from behind cover, causing me to pan toward them as a threat, and then get blasted to the ground. In our next long mission, she did this several times, sending people pinwheeling into the ether. Awesome.
Really enjoying the playthrough. I'd be shrieking more.
A quick search of the forum didn't help. There doesn't seem to be a ruling here, so we have a bunch of empty or duplicate pages. If I'm rehashing old business, I'm sorry.
It would seem that athletes are people appearing in games, like actors, so the character pages should be combined into the people pages.
Shaq O'neal may be a tough exception, because he's a fictionalized verson of himself in Shaq-Fu (unless the events of the game really happened).
Here are examples:
Kevin Garnett (person)
Kevin Garnett (Character)
Paul Pierce (Person)
Paul Pierce (Character)
Dwayne Wade has 2 character pages, and no person page
Dwayne Wade #1
Dwayne Wade #2
If this is legit, I don't mind tracking others down.
- Nick
12. The best way to end any conversation with a chatty person is always to shoot them or kick them out a window.
No matter how many times we try to send his calls to voicemail, or ask Jacob to tell him that we aren't here, we have to talk to The Illusive Man. When I realized that conversating with him would immediately send us on the next mission, I reloaded and tried to keep going somewhere else, but the game forces your hand. Fine.
The Man tells us that there's a Collector Ship disabled in space, and we have a chance to get there and collect some info before anyone else gets there. Sounds kinda unwise, seeing as what happened last time I encountered a Collector ship in space, but this is what we do, so we walk into a likely horribly dangerous situation. Shepard's insurance company probably has no idea what do with him, he has to have a hell of a deductible.
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The Collector ship is an almost total duplicate of the crashed-Geth ship base from the Overlord DLC, in set-up and tone. The whole thing is totally dark and empty as we roll in, and our squadmates, Miranda and Thane, investigate creepy stuff with us all the way through, as we look for the main computer. Tension mounts as there are no enemies, and just as in the Overlord scenario, you just know things are going to go real, real bad on your way out. I happened to recall, unfortunately, that this running battle will be quite a bit longer, and has some significantly rougher spots in it. I can't wait.
Along the way, we find evidence that the Collectors are enslaved and extensively modified Protheans, and that the Reapers are definitely using them as agents. We also find out that in a low atmosphere environment, that Thane puts on a totally terrifying black facemask with red eyes, which served to surprise me twice during the mission into thinking I was being jumped by husks or abominations. It's a nice thing that friendly-fire isn't on, or Thane would have died a lot quicker than from his medical condition.
Sh*t really jumps off when we hit the switch on the computer, or whatever EDI needs access to - a couple of floating platforms fly up to the one we are standing on, and they are full of collectors, and a couple of Scions.
I've read thread on the boards here, lamenting that this part of the game is broken and impossible, and that Bioware should be firebombed, etc. The issues most have are familiar to those who have been following some of my difficulties in this playthrough (those problems which haven't be caused by my being stupid and lousy): The damage dealt by enemies being so ruthless that when the Scions use their shockwave, it knocks Shepard out of cover, and the recovery takes long enough that you're a dead man, or that the Squad AI gets itself pinned between the Collectors and the Scions, or takes terrible cover, and quickly get themselves killed.
I sympathize, but had no such issues. I cruised through this, getting myself in good cover, right in the deepest part of the "V" of the half-wall cover on my platform, and ordering my squadmates to positions on my right, away from the heaviest of the action. From here, we went heavy after the collectors, with Warp, Reave, and incendiary ammo, picking off the regular guys as quickly as possible, and letting Harbinger just yell at us, and throw black-hole makers into the wall in front of us.
The Scions, either since we didn't move forward, or didn't attack them, just wander back and forth a bit, and the shockwaves don't hit myself or my allies at full strength, not knocking us significantly out of cover during the heat of the main firefight, now murdering my squaddies. Maybe I got lucky, and glitched through, but I'll take it.
The rest of the mission rolls on pretty well, with a lot of slow, cover-base encounters, which go well, although every once and a while Miranda or Thane get picked off, and I have to kill the rest of the enemies along with my other teammate, or by myself, since I suspect I'll need the medi-gels soon enough. There are only a few hiccups, in which I get killed, and those are really in the spots where Husks/Abominations show up - we still don't have the technique for dealing with rushing melee enemies well - in one hallway at the very end of the level, Miranda and Thane got curb-stomped to death by Husks before we really knew what was up. A qhole bunch just flowed up at us, and they were dead real quick, while I retreated, throwing Reave and Cryo-ammo out as much as possible. I will extoll the value of the cryo-ammo shortly, but I began to really appreciate it here.
The other big battle, which comes maybe halfway out of the ship, is an encounter in a large room with a few Husks, a few Collectors, and another Praetorian. I hated, hated, hated, this part on my Normal difficulty run, and have been dreading it on this run. I either get overwhelmed trying to deal with the Husks and get thrashed by the Praetorian, or I can't deal enough damage to the Praetorian, and it gets a clear lane at me to laser-beam me to death. It didn't go well the first few times through here, either, especially with the Husks, who I am excited to not see for a good while after this.
After 5 or so tries, I took a break, then got back at it, and pulled off a narrow victory on my third try. I would impart a strategy if I had one, but, I didn't really put one together: I used my squadmates to help with the Husks and Collectors, while I rained down some fire on the Praetorian from the ramp that leads down to the room, drawing it toward me - and then, when the regular enemies were gone, I just ran and ran and hid and tried to throw some little bit of fire toward it as often as possible. It took a long damn time as my teammates whittled it down, and I basically looked for anything to put between me and this horrible death-engine. As with the Scions before, I will take lucky if I can get it.
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We barley escape the awakening Collector ship, and after being appropriately pissed at the Illusive man for sending us into another obvious trap, we are back to being able to do our own thing. Boy do I have plans. I have some more business on Illium, a couple favors to try to please a couple of my favorite ladies, and then a wild ride after a dark force in the galaxy. Fun stuff ahead.
- Nick
Oh, god, we never should have come here. It's all bad.
Ok, I'm exaggerating. Overlord is a damn good piece of side story, with some rough combat, and my first exposure to the Hammerhead, which, while it has it's Mako moments of frustrating vehicle-ness, is neat to mess with.
We show up at this facility to find everyone dead except for the head researcher, Archer, who speaks to us over an intercom, telling us that they were experimenting with the Geth, who are, to recap these machine intelligences that became self aware and almost destroyed their creators. Well, they decided, here, to try to link these intelligences, to another computer, and were really surprised when it all went wrong. Even worse, they somehow linked up Archer's brother David, to the whole thing, and now he's gone nuts, as well, and is trying to upload himself off world, and into the inter-ether, where he may lead to all machines turning into murderous monsters. I'm almost sure we don't want that, so we should probably step in here.
The first part of the mission is a combat run to bust up the facilities satellite array, which the evil AI is trying to use to get out. It's not rough getting there, or actually blowing up the dish when we get up top on it (Leading to an awesome little cinematic where we run off an exploding, crumbling array). In the middle, however, once we get inside the sattelite dish structure, there is a large, circular area in which a whole bunch of geth, among them the rawdog Geth Hunters and Destroyers, who suck, and a surprise Geth Prime, who I forgot was coming, and murdered me right away the first time, and then helped kill me a couple more times. I got beaten up pretty bad in this area, but with some successful retreating, I eventually got through,
Archer then comes out and explains to us more of what's going on, and outlines to us that we'll have to go through a bunch of steps to try to put a stop to this whole thing, and that we'll have to use the Hammerhead to get there. Great. The Hammerhead stuff isn't great fun, but it's workable. We have to go through a bunch of popping in and out of hiding against enemy turrets, but it all works out. We have two intermediate bases to go to, a fiery lava base, and a crashed geth ship, to unlock parts of the big lock on the main base, and then that main base, where the crazy AI/David is.
I'm not going to go over much of the rest of the Hammerhead stuff, except for the stuff outside of the base in the crashed geth ship, which is kind of fun, since the AI has enabled a shield and a huge goddamned cannon to try to kill you. That was fun, especially when you think you are out of range of the cannon, and it goes off. It's always fun to erupt into a fiery ball, but it isn't good for one's long-term prospects.
The combat in all the bases remains fairly standard, with some mechs and bunches of reanimated geth. Some hiccups (deaths of my entire party), but nothing to serious, as we stick with our careful, cover/use abilities/retreat style of play. Where this DLC package excels, all the way up to the final encounter, and then after (I will speak about the final battle in a second) is with the atmosphere. At everyplace terminal you interact with, over most loudspeakers and in many windows, you see the sickly green eyes of the rogue AI and are often blasted with creepy, angry sound from it as you enter new rooms. It's kind of scary, even on a second playthrough of this whole scenario - the blasts of audio, which come out as either a howl of pain or an angry warning, and the representation of the AI's eyes watching you, appear at just irregular enough intervals to stay fresh and unnerving throughout, and there are terrific little touches, like with every security camera being under the control of the AI, and following your movements.
This is to say nothing about the entire run through the base that is a crashed geth ship. You know - you don't suspect, you KNOW- that the whole structure is full of inactive geth, and it is going to scream to life at some point as you roam through, and having the whole thing build and build, with no enemies anywhere as you walk in, leading you to the switch you need to hit. Both times I played this DLC, I just sat there for a minute before hitting the switch, trying to rest and regroup, knowing that it was gonna get real, real, bad, and that I needed to steel myself for the fight about to jump off. This is great, because it puts you exactly in the mindset of Shepard and crew - they have to pretty much be feeling the same thing - it's a smooth piece of design which could otherwise seem corny (Edit: We will see this design again in a significant story mission a little later, but I hadn't replayed it at this point, so I had forgot it, and it makes this trick a little redundant, but still fun. Sue me).
In the final base, you battle down to where the AI core is, to try to shut it down. At the core level, you enter a side-room to access something, I think the on/off switch to the AI, and then the whole thing goes a little stupid, as far as I'm concerned. I will break it down.
Shepard hits this switch, then has some sort of spell, where he is either shocked by or infected by the AI or something. This is in no way described. But what happens is as follows - the entire environment gets kind of orangey and Tron-like in the computer-grid form, and Shepard zombie-walks out of the room and the door shuts behind him, locking out the rest of the party, who hasn't efficiently reacted to the zapping of Shepard, any weirdness in the immediacy afterward, or his spastic walk out of the room. Thanks guys, way to be on the ball when I need you. Remind me to feed your asses to the Reapers, dicks.
Shepard is now on his own and although he sees some very evocative and well done animations which flesh out the story of Dr. Archer's autistic math-savant brother David and his ability to communicate with the geth, and how this led to his integration into the Overlord project, this whole part sucks. It sucks because Shepard is confronted with some Geth, which he can handle, but there are a couple of close-quarters encounters here, which really are hard on us in the difficulty and with our abilities, and then, right before the final fight, we get to summon an elevator which brings with it a Geth Destroyer and his two rocket-wielding buddies. There's one pillar to put between you and these guys in the room in which they come up, and the Destroyer comes right for you, nullifying that hiding spot. I got murdered a good couple times here, until I started experimenting with retreating back down the hall from whence I came, until the Geth came at me one at a time. It's a little cheap, but it worked.
Now we're at the AI core, which has been causing all this trouble. I said earlier that I would continue to be honest, so here it is - I played this final battle 20+ times, over multiple sittings, and there were more than a couple of moments where I considered totally giving up on the whole thing, that there was no way for me to beat this thing. I thought it was too hard, not totally well-explained on what part of the battle was important, and that I just didn't have the combo of skill and character abilities to pull it out.
I'm not kidding. I considered just outright giving up on this whole stupid thing, and two other times, I pulled up the Load screen, considering just carrying on with the playthrough, and never telling anyone what happened on this little side-trip, that it never happened at all. No one would have known, except me, and I've been living with the knowledge that I'm not a particularly good or truthful person for almost three decades so no big deal, there.
But I persevered. Either out of some heretofore unknown sense of integrity, or for you, dear reader, or just because I'm a glutton for punishment, I pushed on, trying again and again. Finally, by bashing on the battle until I hit checkpointed parts of it, I was able to succeed, shooting the odd energy pulses from the AI that will allow itself to upload itself to the Normandy and then the universe, and then hammering on the shields and armor of the core itself until the end. All the while, I am barely holding out, shucking-and-jiving to avoid these Geth that the AI can now summon in, because were are in the Matrix or some crazy thing, which is never, ever addressed, before or after this. Really weirdly bad the more you think about it, in an otherwise well-plotted side story.
The mission ends with the AI defeated, and the horrible reveal that not only did they connect David to the AI, they made him a part of it, string him up with tubres runnning in and out of him, and his eyes held open by probes. This reinforces our decision to take David forever away from his brother, Dr. Archer, despite his protestations that he has realized his horrible, horrible mistakes. We arrange for David to be put up at the Grissom Institute, named for CSI character and quirky investigator Gil Grissom, which is a place where people with special abilities and needs can be well looked after. We tell Dr. Archer that if he ever goes near his brother, we will put a bullet in his head.
A really interesting story, with it's own ups and downs, quality-wise, but good enough, although the whole thing was really soured for me by the totally bizarre last section and rough boss-battle. The more I think about it, the stupider the whole thing seems, but I'm a bit bitter, reliving the whole experience on bashing my head on it. Let's move on.
We took care of that situation, which didn't advance our cause at all, in the grand scheme, and now we have an urgent message from the Illusive Man. We'll see what he wants next time.
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