Hey, wait, this isn't Space Vegas, or even Space Fortune City! This is a gross, brown garbage dump of a place. someone must have gotten lost, or Joker didn't get the memo.  
 
Ok, we're on Korlus to recruit a Krogan Doctor, which seems like an oxymoron. He's apparently being either held captive, or in league with some Blue Sun mercenaries, who we seem to run into everywhere so far, so they should either be running out of people, or be well aware that we tend to murder tons of them whenever they run up against us. We've killed Blue Suns all over Omega, on the Purgatory prison ship, in Donovan Hock's house and now here. You would think they would fear us by now. 
 
This mission doesn't have much of note in it. We kind of just roll along, Miranda, Mordin and Shepard. Picking guys off long distance with biotics and pistols, using cover cleverly, and taking it nice a slow. A couple hairy moments when you begin to encounter a long string of crazed Krogans on narrow ledge-pathways that offer chances for fire from all sorts of angles and directions, but sending Miranda out as a distraction/sacrifice to draw their fire worked well, then I just sat in a nice piece of cover and wailed away with an Assault Rifle and Reave, and used Mordin to incinerate their armor. 
 
As I stated when I started the running blog here, part of the reason to do the playthrough on Insanity was for the stupid achievements, as long  as i was gonna play the DLC anyway, and wanted a nice full, clear save for the next installment in the series. Just to update, I was missing very few of the base game achievements when I started, other than the Insanity difficulty-based one. I had left the Incinerate, Warp and Overload achievements, based on using those abilities. With the gameplay on this difficulty (not to mention my newfound caution) dictating extensive use of biotic and tech abilities, these have begun to rack up. I hit the Overload achievement during the Kasumi mission, and the Incinerate one here. Starting to see more barrier-ed enemies, so I guess I will be using warp more in the future. I wanted to get that little book-keeping type stuff out of the way. There, done. 
 
Yup, really not many issues throughout, as you access the Blue Suns research facility, where they are having Okeer breed krogans for some army, yet he seems to be doing his own thing. Then you run into Okeer, and he's made some perfect Krogan, genophage be damned, yadda-yadda-yadda, and then you have to take out the Blue Suns commander (at least this groups; seems like we've killed quite a few Blue Sun commanders so far). She ends up taking out Mordin and Miranda with a few well-placed missile strikes as they stand out in the open, but that's just a distraction, and she goes down pretty easy, especially once her guardian heavy mech has been scrapped. 
 
But the good Reptile Dr. has been gassed to death, and we've inherited his clone-super-soldier offspring.  Overall, a very surgical mission. The best, survival-wise for this run so far. Huzzah! Iced coffee for everyone!
  
- 

This is weird, since I was just remarking to Garrus the other day about how much I wanted a Krogan in a tube, and now, I've got one. Life is funny like that sometimes. They tell us that we get to decide whether or not to keep him, but his mom probably won't take him back now that we've petted him and he smells like us. I think I'll name him Bubbles. . . or Grunt, if that's what he wants to be called. Fine. 
 
-  
 
Now we have a little cutscene win which our buddy the Illusive Man tells us that the Collectors are at it again at a colony called Horizon, and that we can high-tail it there to try to stop them. Sure, an enemy that we don't yet know how to stop, I'd love to rush headlong to where they're at. 
  
Horizon also begins on a good note, combat-wise, as my same running crew continues to do well against the shielded and barrier-ed Collectors, we even do okay the first few time Harbinger, the Collector leader/Reaper consciousness, drops into one of the Collectors to say hi and try to murder us. 
 
Then it quickly goes bad. Pretty much from the 1/3 point of this mission, we're back to slogging slowly, battle to battle, dying for every small mistake, of which I make many.

some happy accidents occur though. After dying a bunch of times while getting rushed by husks and collectors (Armored Husks, really? Really? Crap.) We hid out from Harbinger and friends inside the bay where you talk to a mechanic who seems to have locked himself away to avoid getting frozen, and they kind of bugged out instead of coming to get at Shepard. The husks came through the door, but the collectors would just hang out, mostly in cover, near the to of the stairs and doorway, which let Ol' Shep get at them.  Then had to run out, take out the last two or so bee-men and our team came back to consciousness, asking if they missed anything. 
 
The mission ends in a long standoff with the collectors, Harbinger and f-ing Husks in a rectangular courtyard where you are arming some cannons to try to oust the Collectors from the colony. On entering the area, I caught sight of a Scion, a bulbous, roughneck super-husk, mostly in cover across the yard. by sending Miranda over there and using my pistol to hit while it was mostly behind cover, I was able erase it before it realized I was there. This tactic seemed to work each time. The second one, and the husks, that took some luck, some repeated running and hiding, and a bunch of repetition. 
 
You then fire up the cannons, and while they warm up, you have to hold of a whole other host of collectors and some husks. This checkpointed, thankfully, so it wasn't quite as bad as it could have been, but it still took a few tries, until I had a general idea of where I could position myself and my team to try to survive. If you aren't close by, the Collectors/Harbinger will try to pick you off from behind cover and won't come after you, allowing me to pick them off one by one, mostly by using reave. A few waves of this were survivable once the techno-zombie husks stopped showing up. 
 
Then, just as things are wrapping up, A big beetle-looking monster with human faces in it's mouth area drops in and begins firing blue death lasers at us. This little nightmare is called a Praetorian, it it murdered me right quick the first time I encountered it. Things went better the second time, as I just ran from the damn thing, and tried to hide behind whatever cover I could find. This went much better, but I couldn't run forever, and eventually the damn thing caught me. So, next time I loaded it up, I went right back to running, and tried to let my crew kill the damn thing as it chased me on laps of the area and in rings around pieces of cover I could use to hide until it glided around them, exposing me. 
 
Yay! This worked. The damn thing took forever to die, constantly re-powering it's shields with a ground-pound type attack, but Mordin and Miranda, who the Praetorian ignored, were able to finally whittle it down as I bum-rushed around like Shaggy and Scooby. Not the most butch of tactics, but it worked, and when someone asks how I beat that part, I'll tell them that is was easy, and I just stood toe-to-toe with the enemy. No one has to know, right, this can stay private. 
 
So I saved some of the colonists, and even so, one of my former crew members from the first game, the whiny snob, Ashley Williams comes up and tries to crush my buzz because I'm hanging with pro-human Cerberus, and didn't save everyone (What, some colonists is better than none! Where's my medal?"). I told her to pound sand and got back on my way. I have more people to recruit, things to buy, and trust to earn. Plus, I have to walk my Krogan. I left him on the ship for hours while I went out, and frankly, if I don't let him out in the yard - well, it's just gross. 
 
Next time: A little Lord of the Flies action, shopping, and some revengance (yup,  I know it's not a word). 
 
- Nick

Hey, wait, this isn't Space Vegas, or even Space Fortune City! This is a gross, brown garbage dump of a place. someone must have gotten lost, or Joker didn't get the memo.  
 
Ok, we're on Korlus to recruit a Krogan Doctor, which seems like an oxymoron. He's apparently being either held captive, or in league with some Blue Sun mercenaries, who we seem to run into everywhere so far, so they should either be running out of people, or be well aware that we tend to murder tons of them whenever they run up against us. We've killed Blue Suns all over Omega, on the Purgatory prison ship, in Donovan Hock's house and now here. You would think they would fear us by now. 
 
This mission doesn't have much of note in it. We kind of just roll along, Miranda, Mordin and Shepard. Picking guys off long distance with biotics and pistols, using cover cleverly, and taking it nice a slow. A couple hairy moments when you begin to encounter a long string of crazed Krogans on narrow ledge-pathways that offer chances for fire from all sorts of angles and directions, but sending Miranda out as a distraction/sacrifice to draw their fire worked well, then I just sat in a nice piece of cover and wailed away with an Assault Rifle and Reave, and used Mordin to incinerate their armor. 
 
As I stated when I started the running blog here, part of the reason to do the playthrough on Insanity was for the stupid achievements, as long  as i was gonna play the DLC anyway, and wanted a nice full, clear save for the next installment in the series. Just to update, I was missing very few of the base game achievements when I started, other than the Insanity difficulty-based one. I had left the Incinerate, Warp and Overload achievements, based on using those abilities. With the gameplay on this difficulty (not to mention my newfound caution) dictating extensive use of biotic and tech abilities, these have begun to rack up. I hit the Overload achievement during the Kasumi mission, and the Incinerate one here. Starting to see more barrier-ed enemies, so I guess I will be using warp more in the future. I wanted to get that little book-keeping type stuff out of the way. There, done. 
 
Yup, really not many issues throughout, as you access the Blue Suns research facility, where they are having Okeer breed krogans for some army, yet he seems to be doing his own thing. Then you run into Okeer, and he's made some perfect Krogan, genophage be damned, yadda-yadda-yadda, and then you have to take out the Blue Suns commander (at least this groups; seems like we've killed quite a few Blue Sun commanders so far). She ends up taking out Mordin and Miranda with a few well-placed missile strikes as they stand out in the open, but that's just a distraction, and she goes down pretty easy, especially once her guardian heavy mech has been scrapped. 
 
But the good Reptile Dr. has been gassed to death, and we've inherited his clone-super-soldier offspring.  Overall, a very surgical mission. The best, survival-wise for this run so far. Huzzah! Iced coffee for everyone!
  
- 

This is weird, since I was just remarking to Garrus the other day about how much I wanted a Krogan in a tube, and now, I've got one. Life is funny like that sometimes. They tell us that we get to decide whether or not to keep him, but his mom probably won't take him back now that we've petted him and he smells like us. I think I'll name him Bubbles. . . or Grunt, if that's what he wants to be called. Fine. 
 
-  
 
Now we have a little cutscene win which our buddy the Illusive Man tells us that the Collectors are at it again at a colony called Horizon, and that we can high-tail it there to try to stop them. Sure, an enemy that we don't yet know how to stop, I'd love to rush headlong to where they're at. 
  
Horizon also begins on a good note, combat-wise, as my same running crew continues to do well against the shielded and barrier-ed Collectors, we even do okay the first few time Harbinger, the Collector leader/Reaper consciousness, drops into one of the Collectors to say hi and try to murder us. 
 
Then it quickly goes bad. Pretty much from the 1/3 point of this mission, we're back to slogging slowly, battle to battle, dying for every small mistake, of which I make many.

some happy accidents occur though. After dying a bunch of times while getting rushed by husks and collectors (Armored Husks, really? Really? Crap.) We hid out from Harbinger and friends inside the bay where you talk to a mechanic who seems to have locked himself away to avoid getting frozen, and they kind of bugged out instead of coming to get at Shepard. The husks came through the door, but the collectors would just hang out, mostly in cover, near the to of the stairs and doorway, which let Ol' Shep get at them.  Then had to run out, take out the last two or so bee-men and our team came back to consciousness, asking if they missed anything. 
 
The mission ends in a long standoff with the collectors, Harbinger and f-ing Husks in a rectangular courtyard where you are arming some cannons to try to oust the Collectors from the colony. On entering the area, I caught sight of a Scion, a bulbous, roughneck super-husk, mostly in cover across the yard. by sending Miranda over there and using my pistol to hit while it was mostly behind cover, I was able erase it before it realized I was there. This tactic seemed to work each time. The second one, and the husks, that took some luck, some repeated running and hiding, and a bunch of repetition. 
 
You then fire up the cannons, and while they warm up, you have to hold of a whole other host of collectors and some husks. This checkpointed, thankfully, so it wasn't quite as bad as it could have been, but it still took a few tries, until I had a general idea of where I could position myself and my team to try to survive. If you aren't close by, the Collectors/Harbinger will try to pick you off from behind cover and won't come after you, allowing me to pick them off one by one, mostly by using reave. A few waves of this were survivable once the techno-zombie husks stopped showing up. 
 
Then, just as things are wrapping up, A big beetle-looking monster with human faces in it's mouth area drops in and begins firing blue death lasers at us. This little nightmare is called a Praetorian, it it murdered me right quick the first time I encountered it. Things went better the second time, as I just ran from the damn thing, and tried to hide behind whatever cover I could find. This went much better, but I couldn't run forever, and eventually the damn thing caught me. So, next time I loaded it up, I went right back to running, and tried to let my crew kill the damn thing as it chased me on laps of the area and in rings around pieces of cover I could use to hide until it glided around them, exposing me. 
 
Yay! This worked. The damn thing took forever to die, constantly re-powering it's shields with a ground-pound type attack, but Mordin and Miranda, who the Praetorian ignored, were able to finally whittle it down as I bum-rushed around like Shaggy and Scooby. Not the most butch of tactics, but it worked, and when someone asks how I beat that part, I'll tell them that is was easy, and I just stood toe-to-toe with the enemy. No one has to know, right, this can stay private. 
 
So I saved some of the colonists, and even so, one of my former crew members from the first game, the whiny snob, Ashley Williams comes up and tries to crush my buzz because I'm hanging with pro-human Cerberus, and didn't save everyone (What, some colonists is better than none! Where's my medal?"). I told her to pound sand and got back on my way. I have more people to recruit, things to buy, and trust to earn. Plus, I have to walk my Krogan. I left him on the ship for hours while I went out, and frankly, if I don't let him out in the yard - well, it's just gross. 
 
Next time: A little Lord of the Flies action, shopping, and some revengance (yup,  I know it's not a word). 
 
- Nick

I'm 12 and what is this?