Mass Alex: Mass Effect - Part 11

The children, and eggs, the Rachni Queen talked about is a reference to a side quest you have yet to complete on Noveria. I suggest completing it next time.

Sure, but I bet the engineers/scientists who built the plasma vents for the decon chamber just passed the specs on to the programmer who coded the VI, and that person wasn't super conversant with SI conventions. Since Noveria lets people operate with zero oversight, no one did any checks to make sure the whole facility and VI were complying with ISO standards.

Activate

This was a great episode! Alex and Vinny were both in good moods and just riffing on everything as they went, it reminded me a lot of MST, which is always when GB videos are at their best.

ACTIVATE.

Is it just me or does it seem like weight of the Rachni being brought back from extinction never really hits Alex? Ever since the first one he comes across I feel like he just sees them as just another alien enemy. It could also just have been the way I reacted when I first played. For me it was much more of a "holy shit how did this get here" kind of feeling.

I honestly didn't know you could actually miss this part of the game. During all my playthroughs I would go to the hot labs to set off the neutron purge and on the way back up the soldiers turned on me because Benezia said to kill me.

@gooddoggy: Ha!

Same! This entire section on Noveria is really weird. It's like the designers wanted to give you a bunch of different choices as to how you got to Benezia (which is cool) but for some reason made no effort to point those options out to you, so you end up just stumbling into one of them accidentally.

@smurf_in_a_blender: I was pretty indifferent to it too. "Oh, huh. that's neat. Time to keep shooting y'all but spare the queen I guess. She seems nice." Outside of the queen, all they are are just another alien enemy to kill.

Alex is terrible at navigating in this game. I do the same thing however; backtracking because I think I've missed something and getting lost. A minimap would have gone a long way in this first game.

I think a lot of it, also, is that mass effect itself never really puts any weight into the rachni or their existence until 2 and 3? Like, if i remember right, the rachni wars are mentioned in 1 on a handful of occasions in offhand comments and the queen's own infodump is. kinda all you get. for that game

"With forced cheer" *my life*

@alex If you want to reduce the number of items you have so you aren't near the item limit, you need to go through your upgrades and get rid of everything low level whether that be selling them or breaking them down. You get so many of those and they don't immediately surface them and they are a substantial percentage of your items. In order to get to them to break them down, you have to try to attach them then break them down.

Holy crap, Benezia went down quickly. I remember her being pretty challenging. What difficulty is this on?

Yeah same here, she'd litterally kill me in 2 shots when I played it.

Activate

Hot labs in your area want to hook up with you tonight.

@nevergameover said:

Alex probably gained some boost from doing a bunch of side stuff early on. He is on normal and I don't remember it being a particularly hard game on that difficulty, maybe he was just especially decked out to melt Benezia at the time.

This Benezia sequence is part of the game I think of first when I think of this game.

I don't think this is something you fully appreciate until 2 and 3. In retrospect I don't think 1 does a great job of contextualizing the Rachni's story.

Once you've played through the parts of ME 1 we haven't seen yet and then 2 and 3 you really get a feel for the scope of the story. At this point what Alex has seen is so Saren focused a lot of the other stuff with the Krogans, Rachni, etc feels like interesting world building material, but not nearly as important as it becomes once the full scale of the conflict is revealed.

Why sell stuff? It's not like he's running out of money. He's not even looking at what he's getting out of crates.

Just a heads up, if you go back to the citadel make sure to find Conran Vernor again. He’s Citadel:The Fan and he’s great. That quest is defenitely worth finishing. (It’s easy to miss out on)

Activate

I could be remembering wrong, but I feel like I got that activate bug at the same time as Alex did in my first playthrough of the game.

lol

This refused to show up on the Roku GB playlist. :(

Novaria is a cakewalk as long as you do it last. My main memory of this part of the game is going straight to Novaria after leaving the Citadel at the start of the game without doing any side stuff. The Benezia fight seemed pretty much impossible. I tried it dozens of times. So I packed up then walked and drove all the way back to the Normandy to do other stuff first.

Oddly enough, the exact same thing happened to me when I met my wife's mother.

Just watched through all of the videos in like 2 days. So brings me back. Forgot how good the music is too.

Wow, Alex did WAY better in that Benezia fight than I did my first playthrough. Good for him.

If you bring Wrex, it feels like the conversation is VERY different. He really starts to drill down on "This wasn't just a war we fought, it was WHY the genophage happened ultimately" sort of stuff that really lets you know the Rachni War wasn't just a blip in history.

Too bad ME3 completely drops the ball with all that awesome buildup. And I say that as someone who defends ME3.

Benezia is a great character, it's a shame she got killed off so quickly. I think releasing the Rachni Queen makes sense for Paragon Shep Shep. Activate!

My dirty secret is that I rerun these episodes every night to sleep to. Between the mass effect galaxy map music and their sweet sultry tones, It puts me out like a light.

Now I'm a kinda bummed because of how little they end up doing with the rachni going forward.

I know I'm months behind but I keep being bummed out by Alex not going through his squad's equipment and upgrading them.

@davidshade: and I think that point where you realize how big things are in the series is when you talk to the red hologram. You know what I mean. It's like the game's scope opens up 50 times, and it sends a chill down your spine.