Mass Alex: Mass Effect 2 - Part 09

Shep Shep! Always the favourite part of my week. :)

You should talk to Fai-Dan.

Lord of the Flies in Space.

Whoa I didn't know they got Zaeed to guest on this episode!

Good length of episode this week

Jacob's loyalty mission seems like Mass Effect 1.5. It's like it's the earliest mission they made that made it into the final game. Completely flat path and classic Bioware "space crazy" NPCs.

Great job on getting an episode out in 24 hours, looking forward to it

It's seems that the downloads are borked?

You're my only real Shep, Shep Shep.

Zaeed - British accent - bit of Souf London innit.
Miranda - Australian accent

tiny tip from seeing the first minute of the episode:

the engineers' "dialogue" are all incidental since you finished their little sidequest, along with the rest of the normandy's crew. they're not going to say anything new when you actively talk to them. if you're actually interested in hearing what they have to say after story missions, just hang out next to them and let their dialogue play out.

alex interrupted what they had to say about jack by initiating the dialogue wheel, and i'm not sure there's a way to get them to repeat what they were going to say.

Alex did not pick up on something that Mordin said. I'm excited to get to that loyalty mission.

I always leave that guy to get torn apart on the planet, even when I'm being a paragon. Some dudes just gotta be dismembered by the people he victimized. I'm Commander Shepard and this is my favorite moral on the Citadel

that poor eezo :(

I still can't get over how Bioware was able to make Miranda look so hideous. The actual actor Yvonne Strahovski is a smokeshow so how did they screw it up so badly.

@ht101: He'll enjoy the surprise when it happens.

The Revenge of the Box

Miranda and Jacob definitely have the least interesting loyalty missions. I freaking love Mordin's and I can't wait for Alex to get to Tuchanka, ha ha. TUCHANKA. That is fun to say.

One very important thing!

Do not do Miranda and jacks loyalty mission too close together. Once you do but there will be a speech check which requires a lot of paragon points to pass. So make sure your bar is almost full before doing that. If you fail the check you can lose someone’s loyalty even if you finished their missions successfully.

@anthony: It doesn’t help that Alex put in her that awful alternate outfit. Her normal get up looks much better.

Flashbang Grenade: probably one of the worse loyalty powers Shep can have. They will be spending some extra eezo in the future I imagine. Thankfully, you get more resources that you can spend, specially with all the dlc content.

I Don't Remember That, The Vinny Caravella/Mass Effect Story

I forgot how cringe some of the characters were, especially Jack.

@asakusa_a18: definitely feels like some peak edgelord 2000's stuff and I can't tell if the writers were serious about it or not.

Also, I have a dream that one day they will learn to read the details/description box for upgrades and items :|

Funny that the biggest Ezo spike they've hit was right on the distress signal on Aeia and they didn't even notice/just wanted to get back to probing.

Love the series!

@fireburger or how Vinny said, there's not going to be any ezo here and they immediately pass over an ezo spot (albeit small) on the desert planet

take off those hideous visor outfits

Sunglasses in the form of a single curved rectangle that stretches across your nose must be the worst retro futuristic design.

I don't usually get frustrated when watching someone else play but it bugs me to no end how Alex keeps interrupting the downstairs engineers incidental dialogue, and that he didn't check the journal for the new dossiers.

SPACE MADNESS

I appreciate how never reading anything cost them 5000 eezo

Did anyone else notice Alex was very hurried / inattentive / careless this episode? He missed more and made more mistakes in this episode than he did in the entire series.

Weekly wish (on top of enjoying them) that these were a) more regular or b) longer as it always feel like they end just as they're getting into a stride

@anthony: I think it might entirely be age. At the time I think Miranda was considered a very good approximation of yvonne, but eight or nine years later and... it becomes more noticeable...

Reason #73 why I love the Alex and Vinny pairing so much: Referencing Lord of the Flies, Heat and The Aristocrats within a quarter of an hour.

@alex : London, not Australia. Think this guy with less menace.

Zaeed's gotta be inspired by Leslie Grantham. I'll believe that until the grave, Ange.

I think I killed that father guy every time I played this game. Eventually I stopped doing this mission because Jacob sucks.

The weird massive eyebrow outfit doesn't help.

Vinny if you're reading this, for the love of god, stop letting Alex spend his resources like a drunken sailor. His "I plan to buy everything so I'm going to reflexively spend on every single upgrade" approach is going to keep biting him in the ass going forward. Save up for some stuff every once in a while.

Alex, I don't know if you're reading these, but ship upgrades are the Number 1 most important thing to spend resources on in the game. Always prioritize those if you can.

another classsic!

I'm only halfway through the episode, but just fyi getting Jack and Miranda's loyalty asap is for the best.

Jacobs loyalty mission is so weak, there's zero confrontation between him and his father, and the fact that he doesn't deny his acts or more forcefully defend himself is odd. The whole ending scene is incredibly anticlimactic, Richard is seeing his only son after 10 years and acts like he barely knows him.

On the Advanced Training thing: Shep Shep gains access to a new power for every squadmate who has finished their loyalty mission. The inferno grenade corresponds to Zaeed and the Flashbang corresponds to Kasumi in this episodes case. Every squadmate allows Shep to get a different power (though you can only equip one at a time as seen through this episode). Alex seems comfortable enough with the powers that he has and isn't struggling much, so unless something looks suuuper cool, it's probably not worth the Eezo.

I don't think I've ever seen this particular random anomaly mission. Wierd that Zaeed doesn't have anything to say about it considering these guys seemed to be responding directly to Vido (the guy Zaeed wanted to kill in his loyalty mission).

Very excited for the coming loyalty/recruitment missions.

mission to recruit Tali is dope as hell

I hate Turians.

Please switch Jack’s outfit back to the original. I don’t like not being able to see her eyes when talking to her. It’s weird.

@asakusa_a18 said:

Yeah, my memories of enjoying Mass Effect 1/2 were right along with Vinny's - loved 1, *really* loved 2. But watching this play out makes me realise I forgot how much I missed my original crew once I got into 2. Never played Zaeed - don't seem to have missed much, Jack always made my eyes roll, and the thief is boring. Jacob's really dull too. Grunt and Mordin save it, and I enjoyed Miranda though they've not done much with her so far.

I feel like there's less of an cohesive overarching threat than I remember - just a nebulous "uh oh, Collectors" - makes it feel like a load of grinding space business, less achieving a galactically important goal. But maybe it's still early, I can't remember that either :p

@tdous: Mass Effect has always had a weird relationship with the "overarching threat" thing. It likes to make the stakes as high as possible "Reapers coming to wipe out all organic life!", but then it undercuts itself by having you go and do a bunch of stuff which really probably could wait. The time pressure is almost always not real.

No spoilers, but this gets especially bad in ME3.

I think most players just overlook it and roll with it.

I wouldn't read to much into Zaeed (or Kasumi) from this play through, for reasons unknown Alex seems to skip all conversations that don't come through the dialogue wheel. Hell he won't even listen to Ken and Gabby do their thing.

My experience of Zaeed was that he was actually pretty funny and he's got some crazy stories to tell if you'll give him a chance.

When it became clear that they only skim the text on the upgrades, I knew Alex would waste element zero on the same power upgrade at least once. On the plus side, at least it wasn't the respec one which would have wasted more time (and potentially leave them perplexed when they enter a mission with no powers).

That geometry bug is so bad, getting stuck on benches, cover and in my experience a specific corridor on Illium. You're so affixed to the ground in the way they built this game that it doesn't allow for any workarounds besides hoping you find the magic spot to fall off.

Shepards most dangerous adversary.