I’m kind of half and half on my response here as I don’t completely agree with Greg on the “overrated” status of the games he mentions, but with the exception of KOTOR, I ain’t exactly in love with ’em either, just for different reasons.<\/p>\n

Now, when it comes to Knights of the Old Republic<\/strong>, I must respectfully ask Greg where he gets his drugs as this is, hands down one of the best Star Wars games ever made.\u00a0 Sure the battles sometimes got wonky, but I have three words that makes any problems with the combat magically melt away: dual wielded lightsabers.\u00a0 Yes, that’s right.\u00a0 Long blade in the one hand, short in the off and away you went.\u00a0 Not only could you dual wield lightsabers but you could customize your sabers based on the crystals you put in them to make your blades even more effective.\u00a0 My on hand was a normal sized purple blade that buffed my light force power and had increased deflections as well as increased damage.\u00a0 Off hand was a shorter yellow blade that did extra damage to droids and increased my defense.\u00a0 I was a bad motherfucker.\u00a0 Droids, soldiers, Sith, it didn’t matter.\u00a0 I’d cut ’em or deflect a bold in their\u00a0 face.\u00a0 In the end they all died.\u00a0 This was the first game to show you just how powerful the Jedi of old were supposed to be.\u00a0 None of this “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for” bullshit and meditating for ten seconds to life a rock three feet off of the ground.\u00a0 These were badass Jedi warriors who kicked ass and took names.\u00a0 The awesome story twist was just gravy.\u00a0 The only complaint I had about the game was that the final battle was way too tedious if you undertook it with a character that focused mostly on healing and defensive Force powers and way too easy if you went full on Dark Side.\u00a0 Oh well, guess it pays to be evil.<\/p>\n

Now I found BioShock<\/strong> to be a hell of a lot more immersive than you do, but I played it on the 360 and it ran smooth as silk which helped a great deal.\u00a0 What I fell in love with about BioShock was Rapture.\u00a0 The setting was, simply put, amazing.\u00a0 The fact that they could flesh out this world so well using the audio logs made it even more endearing.\u00a0 Unfortunately they fell short with the moral choices which didn’t really amount to much at all other than a choice between two equally unsatisfying endings.\u00a0 I also found the boss batle surprisingly pedestrian for a game that had been doing some pretty innovative things up until that point.\u00a0 So while I don’t think Greg is completley off the mark for not loving BioShock, I think it’s better than he does and I also thought it was better than Half-Life 2, even if Robert Guillaume wasn’t in it.<\/p>\n

Finally we have Mass Effect<\/strong>.\u00a0 This was a game that I would have loved a lot more had I not gone for the full thousand points.\u00a0 If you just do one run through the game the combat can be annoying at times, but you can get over it.\u00a0 By the third time however every time your squadmates spend ten minutes unloading into a wall, or worse, into their squadmate’s back you want to punch someone.\u00a0 Plenty of games can stand the test of time and be enjoyable no matter how many times you go back to them however this game ain’t one of them.\u00a0 The MAKO sucks even more when you have to drive it again, the texture pop is even shittier by the twelfth time you run down the same hallway in the Citadel and the long, tedious elevator rides make you want to gouge your eyes out.\u00a0 Now, that being said, every time I’ve finished this game I have started a new game right up because the last hour is just that thrilling and this is even when I started my third run and knew exactly what was in store for me.\u00a0 Something about that final trek up the side of the Citadel as a space battle rages around you to taking on Saren with your buffed up squad gets me all a flutter and makes me want to jump right back in.\u00a0 It’s a shame that the DLC they dropped since the game’s initial release ranged from so-so for Bring Down the Sky to “can I please kick you in the nuts for wasting my time and money?” for Pinnacle Station because instead of getting me excited for ME2, it just made me mad that I had to spend the money on it so that I could keep my perfect score in the game.\u00a0 Sure that’s just as much my OCD as anything else, but I’d like to know what genius decided that the best idea for DLC was to take the worst part of the game (the combat) and build DLC entirely around it.\u00a0 What’s next, the Oblivion Conversation Generator?\u00a0 Oh, you say you’ve seen a mudcrab?\u00a0 Thrilling stuff.<\/p>\n

So yeah, I think Greg is way off base on KOTOR,<\/strong> slightly off base on BioShock<\/strong> and on target with Mass Effect<\/strong> just for different reasons.\u00a0 All in all it’s not exactly the fires of an epic internet flame war, but it’s a start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m kind of half and half on my response here as I don’t completely agree with Greg on the “overrated” status of the games he mentions, but with the exception of KOTOR, I ain’t exactly in love with ’em either, just for different reasons. Now, when it comes to Knights of the Old Republic, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-list","category-rant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2040"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2040\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2041,"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2040\/revisions\/2041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}