Dungeoncrawling in SPACE!

Just today, Gas Powered Games released their next in line for the Dungeon Siege series. The new thing: they moved it into space, hence the title "Space Siege".

Well, I started expecting more or less the same controls and actions as in Dungeon Siege II. My bad. It's more like a 90% new game than a successor. And 10% RPG at that, if we take DS to be 40%. I wouldn't call it outright TPS, but its quite close to that.

The changes:
First, there is no inventory. Judging from the demo interface, you can pick up maybe a dozen guns in total plus use the same amount of special powers. Other than this, you collect a total of 7 cybernetic replacements for yourself, HP packs, grenades and credit-like "parts" for upgrades. That's it, nothing else. Basically, you go, shoot everything for parts, pick up everything, use that as upgrades, rinse and repeat.
Well, at least you don't have to deal with selling your stuff from the pack mule any more!

Oh, you can also manufacture (read: buy) hp packs and grenades from the parts, not just weapon & self upgrades.

The controls are tricky a bit. You can't move with anything else but the mouse click. Weird.

What remained constant:
The story is the usual "gone-to-explore-other-systems-but-found-angry-powerful-aliens-instead" one. Then again, which *Siege had more of a story? They were all for the easy action, not the intriguing story.

As usual, there is still no save. Not that there would be a use for it in such a game, especially with zero items...

The system requirements are good, that is, runs on full-out on my aging PC.

The amount of enemies seem to be about the same as in the previous installment, numerous, but not many.

Well, the demo setup is ~900MB, and gives off about 10-15 minutes of game play. If you're finished, go back to spore CC!

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Massive storyline

So, Mass Effect. Yes, the one with the oh-my-god-full-sex-scene engineered shocks and all its variations. Quite a good game actually, not perfect, but still there.

The Good
Well, no one can deny that ME is -in more than one way- a milestone.

Graphics is just exquisite. That is, if you have a halfway decent machine and set it to max. What I saw detail in NPC heads of Crysis, I see it everywhere in ME. There were some bugs with older video cards, but mine were eventually resolved with satisfaction.
The last planet was a crowning achievement for this, I have yet to see anything like it.

Sounds and Music is way above average. There is the usual problem of voices being too shunted even with maxed out volume, -sadly quite common bug lately,- but voice actors and music composers did a phenomenal job.

Story was also good, quite enjoyable with the side trips, even with the cliche evil. The characters were original, mostly not closed into their own stereotype, with rich background info. Having a couple of not auto-generated paragraph of info for every planet you can visit is also a big plus. I found myself not one time just reading them for passing time and smiles.

The Bad
There were a number of things I dislike in ME sadly. Most of them come from being a console-first game.

First, the horribly raped inventory system. I think they had to get a fair number of meetings on the topic "what makes an inventory not work" to get something like this. I liked the fact that you can have dozens of items.... but when its full, and you pick up better equipment, you have no other option but destroy the pickup. Why have a full inventory? Because first, you get a truckload of items per encounter, then there is the fact that you can have 8 characters which all level with you... oh, and there is no mass-delete for items, you have to select them all one-by-one, push delete & confirm... a tedious process. Add the fact that in no way can you access the whole of your inventory, only at a shop, and it comes clean why it is even worse.

The next thing comes from the cute designer-shape conversation selector... for all of your conversation options, you can chose between some pair of words, not one whole sentence, god forbid the whole answer! Most of the time the answer even contains the words... other times it is quite FAR from the answer itself. Very annoying, to say the least!

Of course, the "bad guy" path is -yet again- the usual "I have a bad mouth/attitude problem" kind. There is no real evil path, you work for the very same goal against the same guys with the same guys. Heck, I have a feeling sometimes even the answers to the good/evil paths are the same.

Equipment and their usage... there are -as I already pointed out- a truckload of equipment. They all vary in strength, weaknesses, price and availability. There are two problems here: first, unless you explicitly say so, your gang doesn't even have the brains to use a gun they are proficient in. Second, there is no real variation in the guns other than their stats. Armor are more varied, but guns are not so.

The maps were... repetitive, to say the least. There is one map for every "transport ship", one for every "human colony building", one for every "underground mine" and so forth. The only distinguishing feature each have are the randomly placed junk/containers and some locked doors. Other than these, they are all the very same. There are some unique places, like most of the main quest ones, but other than that, no variation whatsoever.

The story is good, but has some interesting jumps and quirks that are not explained... Some info vital are learned seemingly of thin air, plus the fact that a delusional, paranoid, hysterical ("The end is near, robots gonna kill us all!") armed and dangerous, out-of-touch-with-reality individual is not dispatched with haste to the nearest (perhaps military) mental clinic is laughable, if you ask me.

Lastly, they still can't make a head-molding tool that does not produce eerie female heads. Well, at least it's waaay better than that of Oblivion.



All in all, Mass Effect is quite good game to pass a few (20-30 for main quest, about 10-30 for all others... oh, 3*, if you want to play all difficulty levels) hours, but has its problems as well. That said, the goods outweigh the problems, even if some of them are annoying as hell.

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The Belated Tablet Review

So I promised to write a full review about my then-new tablet... months passed and I got quite some learning experience from it in both ways.

Noise: virtually none. The tablet has no built-in fans whatsoever for cooling. Only some grills for hot air. Because of this, the only sound you can actually hear is that of the HDD. The downside is that thus the unit gets quite hot, but not dangerously so. Still, wear some cloth between your leg and the tablet, or it will be uncomfortable. More on that later.

Speed: It's slow! At least compared to the 1.7GHz (both are Dothan core Intel Centrino), this 1.1 ULV CPU seems sluggish many times. Don't expect top performance. It can't play 720p xvid videos nearly fast enough, some programs are quite show, but thankfully not all. The digitizer is quite fast, able to put up with my fast scribbling and all... plus, it does not truncate fast gestures, like a simple touch screen would, (unlike on my PDA,) only smooth them out.

Buttons: actually a bit of both. The placing is quite bad, whereas the buttons themselves - apart from the moody directional buttons - are responsive enough. I've yet to accidentally push one, what is good, but while it's in portrait mode, they are in possibly the most uncomfortable place to reach. The same applies to the stylus dock. It's in the worst possible place! If the tablet is in you lap, you can't take it out without picking and lifting the tablet itself up first, (or sliding it nearly off your lap,) since it's at the bottom right corner of it.

Battery: I did conduct some standard usage tests, and it would seen that it can go for about 2.5-3 hours with a charge under usage. Nothing to write home about, a bit less than the newest ones, but still enough. By the way, the battery has a nifty plus: it you press a button on it, it'll display the charge on a row of LEDs, even if it isn't in the tablet.

Temperature: One of the more problematic aspects of being fully passive-cooled. The main chassis feels metallic in one way: it hers hotter and hotter everywhere gradually, to the point of being uncomfortable to the touch, but still bearable. The inner temperatures are - surprisingly - quite within the safe ranges.

Digitizer: fast, very effective, but can be a bit problematic if you only used touchscreen so far. With a touchscreen, the cursor is where you actually touch the screen, regardless of the angle or position of the stylus. Whereas here, its not fully so. Luckily, digitizers detect the stylus from quite a distance, all but eliminating the accidental mis-clicks.

Why vista? I'm aware of the multitudes of reasons against using Vista, but for a tablet, Vista is actually way better than the "Tablet XP 2005". The major changes that are of importance include a much better handwriting recognizer that can finally be personalised to your own writing style, this being the biggest and most important for all who don't want to learn to write in a manner that the old recognizer wishes but in their own style. This in itself should be sufficient reason for the change, at least it was for me.

Extras: First, the fingerprint reader and the stereo mics ... that both are inoperable under Vista. The dynamic brightness control does work, but some may be surprised by it. Usually it's unresponsive and slow, even when the idea is quite good. The buttons required a Vista update from MS, but after that and the other drivers, everything worked like a charm.

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Two Rainbows in the Sky

As I did play with the first installment of the series I was curious to the fixes and the storyline this would likely include in this. Especially because the first game was quite full of bugs and didn't quite close that story to my satisfaction.

Well, they fixed the bugs that lead to numerous crashes, but made it up with including a truckload of scripting bugs and some annoying audio bugs. Then they included the worst yet: unlockables. The real problem with their concept is that - unlike in any serious game - most of them requires the player to play it at least 5 times in varying styles - possibly more - just to get enough XP to unlock them!

The unlock system has other flaws as well. You can't see the stats of the weapons you loot from enemies. Ok, did I mention that the enemies use the best stat weapons early on, at the worst in the very end? Of course, in the hands of the enemy, they seem to be scaled damage wise compared to your own... An other kept feature is that you mates are still too dumb to help, that is, to use their damn revive potion on you. At least they jump in front of you less often. BTW, on an not-so-entirely-unrelated note, they can tale five D Eagle bullets to the head from point-blank range. Hey, they deserved them!

Again, we have checkpoints and periodic automatic save points. In other words, we still have a console conversion FPS, with all the annoying locks and unlocks.

Oh, I almost forgot to include the "best of Script bugs": on quite may occasions, I had enemy-generating script lock up, that resulted the with unending stream of cannon fodder. On other instances, the damned teammate didn't notice that I did give his room and kept asking for more. Even after I went out of the room. As a plus, the audio error: Fist, voices tend to be way too quiet, even next to you. Then, you can hear gunshots or more precisely, some sort of muffled explosions over places you're really not supposed to do (like, 2 rooms full of mufflers away). Last, while glass cracks with a great and big sound, enemies that are in front of them, less than 5 meters away will refuse to notice it.

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