There are no story spoilers below, but I totally understand if you’re on complete blackout and want to skip. (I was, and did, and still do.) I finished the first three Mass Effect games and finally started Andromeda. First, if you’re like me and were way behind on the series, there is no connection between the original trilogy and Andromeda. Much to my chagrin, there is no need to play the first three or know anything about the previous story.

Continuing with Mass Effect week here on the ol’ blog… I’m starting this draft on March 22, but again I probably won’t publish it until after I finish Mass Effect 3. There are story spoilers below if you haven’t finished the game. Mass Effect 2 is a much, much larger and longer game than Mass Effect 1. I’m well over 20 hours into the game, and I don’t even think I’ve gotten to the halfway point yet.

Continuing with Mass Effect week… I’m writing this Mass Effect 2 “review” on Tuesday, March 28th. I finished ME2 on Saturday. It took 31 hours, according to ManicTime, which is actually a lot less than I expected. I thought ME2 was huge compared to the first one and would take at least twice as long, but apparently it only felt bigger. There were definitely more cut scenes to watch in ME2.

Mass Effect week continues… I don’t know how far into Mass Effect 3 I’ve gotten at this writing (March 29th), but I’ve just gotten the Quarrians on board the Normandy. Percentage-wise, I have no idea where that is in the game. I’m just guessing it’s the half-way point. I have some initial impressions which I’ll write down, and as usual, I’ll follow it up with another post when I finish the game.

Whoops. Forgot to publish this dramatic conclusion to Mass Effect week. I finished Mass Effect 3 on Friday night, March 31st, completing my play through of the original trilogy. I spent a total of 42 hours playing it, but I restarted it twice so you can probably throw 6 or 7 hours away. (And if you’re keeping tracking of days and hours played, yes I played these games a ton in March.

Possibly some spoilers below if you haven’t reached Kadara. So this game has pretty much taken over my life, as I figured it would. Honestly I think this is why I put off playing Mass Effect 3 for so long. These Bioware games are really hazardous to your health. :) The first three games took over my life, too, but I played them more quickly than I might have at the time they came out.

I saw that the makers of Persona 5 made the odd choice of limiting streaming of their game. (I use the word “streaming” here to include Twitch and YouTube Let’s Play videos.) Liore and Eri also weighed in on this with contrasting viewpoints. I’d never heard of Persona 5 before this, and never heard of or played Persona 1 through 4, either. (I think it’s a console game from The East.

I strive for timeliness here at the ol’ blog, so here is what I played in March. You might possibly detect a theme. Besides the nearly 100% lack of MMORPGs. Mass Effect 3 - 42 hours 7 Days To Die - 39 hours Mass Effect 2 - 31 hours Mass Effect 1 - 23 hours Mass Effect Andromeda - 2 hours Factorio - 2 hours Shroud of the Avatar - 1 hour Revelation Online - 1 hour Just for the record, I also spent 39 hours in Movie Studio Platinum.

Here’s a grammar thing I learned, regarding the word “punt.” I’m American, so the word “punt” has always meant exactly one thing: Punting a football, as in kicking the ball to the other team. (American football, that is.) Occasionally I also see “punting” used metaphorically, as in something like, “I’m going to punt on making that decision.” In that sense, it means you’re going to put off making the decision, or give it to someone else to make.

A while back there was an article in The Atlantic with the rather controversial title Video Games Are Better Without Stories. I didn’t even know about the article-who looks for gaming articles in The Atlantic?-until I started to see tweets about it filter through my feeds, and I got the distinct impression that it was polarizing the gaming community (again). On one side, there are people saying, “Of course games are better with story what a dumb article.

I did not see Rogue One in the theater. I regretted that decision for a day or two, then felt good about it. I decided that it was “fan fiction”-a term I don’t use in a particularly positive sense. (Sorry superfans.) I waited until it came to FIOS VOD. Then I forgot about it. Then I remembered it. I went into the movie with very low expectations. I wasn’t expecting “real” Star Wars.

This post is going to be a brain dump of my thoughts about the Mass Effect Andromeda story at what I’m guessing is around the halfway point. Spoilers, obviously, if you haven’t gotten to and completed Kadara in the Priority missions. I’ll wait until I finish the game before posting this, in case anyone feels compelled to jump into the comments and explain how everything turns out. Yes, that means I’ve finished the game as I’m posting this.

I declared myself finished with Mass Effect Andromeda on Saturday, April 29. I finished the Priority missions and basically everything else except the sillier busy work under the Tasks section. ManicTime shows that I played for 99 hours. I reached level 59 in the end, and the save page showed I completed 92% of the game. Before I get into this I need to reiterate that I enjoyed most of those 99 hours and would never write this much about something I didn’t like overall.

I feel like I should write something about Ashes of Creation’s successful Kickstarter campaign, although to be honest I don’t have much to say about this game yet. Wilhelm’s post on it is actually a great summary of my thoughts, and I should probably just link there and call it a day. I’m not on the hype train by a long shot. Not that I see anything particularly wrong with the game, it’s just way, way too early to even think about commenting on it.

After Two Episodes I have seen a number of people on Twitter talking positively about the new Netflix show 13 Reasons Why, so I watched the first two episodes last night. I expected it to be a touching drama about a teen suicide, but it appears to be more of a tense psychological thriller, somewhat in the vein of I Know What You Did Last Summer (except that we, the audience, don’t know).

This one should be pretty simple. Mass Effect Andromeda - 97 hours … and that’s literally it.

This post sat in my Drafts folder for nearly two months waiting for me to add that picture… I’m hearing reports (from my super secret source known as “the Internet”) of a game called Rend revealed at PAX East 2017. Rend is a self-described “hybrid survival game” from FrostKeep Studios, a studio I’ve never heard of, but which supposedly has a good pedigree. It’s largely being reported as a “survival sandbox” game like ARK or Conan Exiles, but MassivelyOP also compared it to Crowfall and Camelot Unchained.

Here’s a timely post written about six months ago, which sat in my Drafts folder lacking not only a picture, but also some links. I started playing the Battlefield 1 single-player campaign on a Friday evening, and finished it the next day, on Saturday night. There were six missions. I recorded 12 videos, averaging about 35 minutes each, for a grand total of about 7 hours of gameplay. Let’s be extremely generous and say I cut out an hour of video, so let’s round it up to 8 hours.

This is another in my recent series of posts that I’m calling, “What in God’s name can I possibly find to schedule for publishing today.” I saw some folks on Twitter talking about the Farseer books by Robin Hobb, and since I’ve been looking for new stuff to consume, I bought the first book on Kindle, Assassin’s Apprentice. I almost used an Audible credit on it, but I have some complex rules about whether to get books in text format or audiobook format, and this one came up as text format.

Here’s an oldie from Drafts… and I didn’t even have to find pictures for it! Here are some screen shots that didn’t fit anywhere else. I quested for quite a while in Hellswamp without being accosted by anyone. Reds and greens wandered around doing their own thing for hours even while the zone was in conflict. Me and the puppy questing out in Hellswamp, not getting ganked. Apparently if you harpoon the bottom of the ocean you can make your Clipper fly into the air.

Continuing my pseudo-regular new series on television shows and movies I’ve watched recently, because … well, it’s something to write about. These are not “reviews” per se, but merely thoughts and observations. You can assume, though, that if I’m writing a post about a thing, it’s notable to me in some way, either especially good, or especially bad, or otherwise relevant somehow. Today I’d like to talk about a little show called The Shannara Chronicles.

I don’t know how many people know this, but I used to play a lot of Quake CTF with Crayola Clan in the 1990s. Back then, “eSports” were community-run tournaments with no stakes and no prizes and barely any organization. We played mostly NetQuake, QuakeWorld, and Quake 2. We played a little bit of Quake 3 Arena but I personally never liked it and by then gaming started to get commercial with sponsors and cash prizes and it was more work than fun and it was all too stressful to deal with.

I needed to use up some Audible credits, so I picked up an audiobook called Off To Be The Wizard by Scott Meyer. I found it by looking up the works performed by Luke Daniels, one of my favorite audiobook readers, ever since I discovered him from listening to the Iron Druid Chronicles by Kevin Hearne. (If you like the Harry Dresden books, you might also like IDC. It’s the same sort of thing, but with an Irish wolfhound.

A tweet caught my attention Friday and I thought about responding, but it was a topic that would fill a lot more than a couple tweets and I was looking for something to write about anyway. The gist: Why do people keep making that icky grimdark stuff? Nobody likes that crap! My first thought was a somewhat defensive, “Well, I like it.” Then my followup thought was a more pragmatic, capitalistic, “People probably keep making grimdark because other people keep buying it.

I complain a lot about a lack of gaming news (to myself, at least) but I completely overlooked the recent announcement of a new MMORPG called Wild West Online (WWO) from new studio 612 Games. It will be set in … wait for it … the Wild West. Taking a cue from Wilhelm here and screen-capturing their web site. :) Initially I understood it would be a PvP game. But before you groan and click away, there seems to have been some miscommunication and MassivelyOP’s interview indicates PvE players will get their own play area as well.