Tournament Blogging, Podcasting Madness

Tons of Missile DamageWith the EVE 5th Alliance Tournament coming up at the end of February, I figured now was a good time to speak on some plans that are being hatched.

First up there’s some goodies Urban and I want to do on the podcast. Nothing is fully set yet so I can’t give any details, but watch this blog for some updates as things progress.

One of the things which ended up being more successful than I’d ever thought it would be was my photoblogging of the last tournament’s finals. The pictures I took are still up on my Flickr site, so knock yourself out with those. This year I hope to do more of the same, photoblogging as much of the tournament matches as I can. This should be especially interesting given the new engine, and it’s my hope the shots I can take will out-do the ones from last year. Plus, I hope that the community enjoys the addition to the tournament coverage that will be available everywhere.

Again, watch this space for more news as the Tournament approaches. 🙂

In other EVE news, we’ve got the inaugural episode 0 of The Drone Bay, a new EVE podcast from Crovan, CrazyKinux, and the new guy whos name I can never remember. The show’s amazing, with an great chemistry between the podcasters. It’s been a blast helping these guys out the last couple of weeks to get started, and I can’t wait to listen to future episodes!

Review: Mass Effect

Mass Effect CoverIt took me long enough, but I finally managed to finish off Mass Effect on the Xbox 360. The start of a proposed series of games, but a self-contained story in and of itself, Mass Effect tells the story of Commander Shepherd as he tries to stop a rogue Spectre named Saren from carrying out his evil plans.

Lets get the bad out of the way right now. This game isn’t perfect, there’s some seriously gimped inventory management and a godawful lot of texture popping happening. Sometimes it’ll switch to a scene with a character and they’ll look like they’re made of clay, then *zing* they’re back to normal. It shows up more often than I’d like, and really shows how technologically stretched thin the 360 is as a platform.

All of that aside, Mass Effect is a brilliant cinematic experience. The presentation is top notch, essentially like a 20 hour long movie where you play the protagonist. Combat is relatively simple and accessible. There’s very little tutorials in this game, but things aren’t too tough to figure out. And once you do, combat will probably get pretty easy for you depending on the role you’ve chosen for your character.

RPGs can get pretty tiresome, what with a lot of dialog reading and such, but with Mass Effect this is made more interesting by the fact that the game’s cast speaks to each other instead of forcing you to read a book. And it’s all done in a very cinematic style, again making it feel more like a big movie rather than a game.

The story is at first glance fairly standard fare for a sci-fi, but there’s enough political and military intrigue to separate it from other games of its kind. There’s a lot of depth, especially with all the interpersonal relationships the characters have with one another.

You can blow through the game in around 15 hours or so, I’m guessing, if you focus on the main thrust of the storyline and don’t steamroll through it. There’s a ton of side quests, which I haven’t finished.

I’m definitely going to give this game another run through, maybe trying a different class and completing more of the side quests themselves. All in all, even with the glitches, I highly recommend this.