Mass Alex: Mass Effect - Part 11

Time for more Shep Shep Adventures!

Life is like a hurricane...

about time

Only 1 hour and 13 minutes this week? I'm a little disappointed, but at least there is a lot of exposition in this one.

Watch out for the bleeps, the sweeps, and the creeps.

The intro gets me literally every time.

Activate.

ACTIVATE

Activate.

Activate!

PS. Don't leave it too late to do your companion quests ie. Wrex's family armour & Garrus's organ doctor case.

Activate

You still have the Hot Labs left to do if you want to keep your promise to the queen before you leave the planet. One little thing is that you did have the option to do the Hot Labs at the start of the episode, which would have revealed that the security guy was on Benezia's payroll and sent you down there hoping you'd be killed.

Too bad about hitting that item limit. If only there was a merchant you could've sold stuff to.

Looking forward to seeing Alex tackle Virmire. Of course, if he's choosing to follow up on some side-quests and galaxy exploration first, I'd be down for more of that too. Chill times in moon buggies.

They should really sell a lot more of their items! There's really no better way to get money in the game because you just don't get a lot of credits through missions otherwise.

There's no use in hoarding weapons really - most characters generally don't need more than 1 weapon specialization (Garrus, Wrex, Tali, and Ashley can be exceptions).

With armor, all characters (with Garrus as an exception) will never need Medium Armor if you upgrade all-able-characters to Heavy Armor, so you only need to keep that and Light Armor around.

Same goes with sellilng armor/weapon mods - if you ask me, the only armor mods worth keeping are ones that give Shield recovery/hardening, and health regeneration, so anything else can be sold. For weapons, you really only need stability, heat reduction, damage bonus, and incendiary rounds (which is misleading in that it applies an accuracy debuff on the enemy, and does not give YOU the accuracy decrease).

Please go to the weapon sales man on the Normandy and sell all the crappy level items from the inventory, my OCD can't take it hahaha

Great episode! Can't wait to see the next one

This intro STILL gets me.

Counselor Troi has certainly changed a lot. Some might say she's been ACTIVATED

That Benezia fight took me like 6 attempts my first time, and having to sit through that unskippable cut scene after each failure was the most frustrating thing in the history of time. I'm legit upset Alex just blew through that fight without trouble and did have that experience. Literally the worst part of the franchise pre 3's ending. If felt notable that almost every game I played after made sure to set the save point AFTER the long ass villain speechifying.

And after all of that I still didn't instantly recognize the line of dialog that pops up in 2.

My favourite show right now

The VI at 12:09 says "5000 degree Kelvin plasma." Kelvin are the units, not degrees! I think we can all agree this is the true moment where this series started to go downhill.

Asari Matriarchs sure dress weirdly.

Activ-I AM ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL.

@vinny@alex Before you guys leave Noveria, remember you still have to deal with the Rachni Queen's kids in the Hot Labs. I can't remember if the game forces you to do that or not, so figure someone should probably remind you just in case.

Apart from that, this series continues to own. Thanks guys!

Pretty sure Liara and Garrus are sitting on like 20 skillpoints at this point.

There's something about "repair the ship/station/base" quests that is really satisfying, to me.

I am almost positive he has party members set to auto-level.

rip goth mom

God the inventory in this game is a fucking bummer.

ready to Activate, commander

Activate

I don't know why that Benezia fight especially gets so damn buggy, I remember playing it for the first time on the 360 short time after it released and it glitched to hard my Shepard stretched out like gum across half the stage as I was unable to move. I think the enclosed spaces have trouble with the physics of Asari biotic attacks or something.

Alexy Quest is perfect.

Dr. Zev Cohen's speech style is giving me strong KotOR vibes. I'm pretty sure he's got the same actor as the really racist guy on Taris.

activate

Activate?

Whenever in doubt as to where you're supposed to go, check your journal. It almost always explicitly says where to go for any given task.

At 49:11, right after Vinny said to check the journal, it said the maintenance area was near the science team quarters and quarantine lab. It looks like you both read half of that sentence, up to the word maintenance, and then bailed out of the menu… immediately followed by Vinny asking "but where is it?" and you saying "that's a good question." >_<

Highlight of the week right here! Please don't take huge breaks in between games, I feed off/have the same excitement as Vinny for Alex to see these through!

Please stop talking over dialogue to crack bad jokes.

I sure hope he doesn't wait too much longer to do his Loyalty Missions. That could be bad...

@bloody_skirmish: That kinda goes against the reason Giant Bomb exists.

Yo is Matricarch Benezia a Jimi Hendrix fan?! Hell yeah.

I'm glad Alex got to see that weird shepard movement bug in the benezia fight, I get that almost every time I get to that section.

I like the way Alex plays this game. He's actually roleplaying and not just mashing top option/bottom option. He's a basically nice Shep, but with a badass streak.

i kind of wish that instead of shepard being like "oh hehe i wont poke into your company secrets :-)" they could instead just say "oh yeah im gonna totally tell the council that youre engineering bioweapons but its not like you can do anything about it lol im a spectre". fuck those guys

Sell your old shit. Read your journal when you don't know what to do or where to go. Don't talk over dialogue. Please.

Much obliged.

Benezia can indoctrinate me any day.

@schurik: Me neither! About halfway through the video I thought Diana Troy was in Mass Effect lol

@Alex the voice actor for the British doctor Zev is actually Howling Mad Murdock.

And he also did Navigator Pressly.