Mass Effect 2 - Review

After finishing my play through of Mass Effect 2 this morning, I don't know why I waited so long to pick this one up. I enjoyed the first one, but was worried about certain choices that I made in the first game (namely not being able to do anything about Wrex) and was thinking I could make up for it. Well, I finally decided to say screw it, and start it up.

Mass Effect 2 picks up shortly after the events of Mass Effect, and quickly destroys everything you know, hitting a giant reset button. Doesn't matter how you looked or what class you were in Mass Effect, you get the opportunity to change it all here. It doesn't take long to get your bearings, and does a good job of throwing you right in. The game explains things to you as you play, and even reminds you to do things like use special ammo from time to time.

One of the biggest complaints was the elevators in the first game game, which are now replaced with loading screens. There's several of them, and they're animated and pretty, but I miss the banter that would go on between party members while riding them. Actually, they took out almost all of the party member interaction. Sure, there were a couple cut scenes where people didn't get along, but nothing like the lines and lines of dialog that you could listen to from another Bioware game, Dragon's Age.

The story holds up pretty well, and lets you pick how things will play out. I never felt forced into any situations, or how I wanted to handle something. Combat was fast and interesting, and just as one group was becoming boring to fight, a new group of mercenaries would come crashing in to tear up the galaxy.

Part of me missed having to select certain people to get objectives done during the missions. In Mass Effect, if my hacking skills weren't up to snuff and I didn't have an engineer in my party, well, tough luck. In this one, I was able to hack or decode everything with little challenge. I would have liked to see later abilities that just took out the whole hacking interface because once you've done the two hacking mini games once, you've mastered them and the rest are just a waste of time.

If you try to break down Mass Effect into either a RPG or a FPS, it doesn't really do either side phenomenally well. It's the integrated nature of both genres that make this such a hit. Bioware learned some lessons from their first game, and hopefully they'll learn some more lessons from their second (scanning planets for hours is not fun). All in all, this one gets my recommendation, especially now that you can go out and find it for less than $40. Just try not to play while the wife is napping on the couch. The get cranky when woken up with explosions.

MTG: Archenemy Initial Impressions and Review

My friends and I have been playing Magic for about a year now, and early into the game, we were convinced to pick up a full set of Planechase, a multi player magic variant. Since we were doing a lot of multi-player games at the time, we were looking for something to bring us together and set some ground rules, and just have a new way to play. We loved it. We thought that Wizards did a great job in creating an environment of chaos and fun, our only complaint would be that the games take a great deal of time to get through. So when Wizards announced another multi-player variant called Archenemy, in which one player would "be ready to face off against as many of your friends as your kitchen table can hold. Two? Three? Twenty? Bring 'em on!", our interests were peaked.

So we went to our local store and ordered a full set of Archenemy. I picked them up this past Friday, and we got together Saturday night to play. I opened up the first deck, Bring About the Undead Apocolypse, and we set out to play with a mixture of casual decks. A few turns later, I scooped up my cards after giving all of my opponents double mana for a turn, allowing them to completely massacre me.

After a few more games of this (even swapping out the precon deck for a good white control deck), we came up with two inherent problems with the concept of Archenemy. One is one of the oldest concepts in Magic, in that card advantage wins games, and the second is that many of the Archenemy scheme cards are pretty worthless, and in some cases (as I discovered in my first game) help your opponents more than they would ever help you.

Card advantage in Magic is how people win games. The base concept is that if you use one card to stop two cards of your opponents, you have a one card advantage. We had 5 on 1 matches, a far cry from the quoted "twenty" opponents pitched to us. In a turn, the Archenemy would play a scheme, draw a card, and potentially play a land and cast a spell. The players would all draw a card, and all potentially play a land and cast a spell. The scheme card played would have to have the power to make up a 4 card advantage (in our case) and they just don't have that power. My first card, for example, allowed me to search through my opponents graveyards and pull a creature. That might be fine in late game, but for your first turn, that's a 4 card advantage in your opponents favor. A couple of turns like this, and there's no way that one player can make up such a huge disadvantage.

That's a small example of the worthlessness of the scheme cards. Often we'd find ourselves hoping for some major boon to let us just live for another turn, and instead we would draw something that lets us discard a card from their hand. That doesn't do anything about the horde swarming down on me. That doesn't do enough by itself to hurt my opponents. It's the right kind of idea, trying to fight card advantage, but its not enough of an impact, and its too random to be reliable.

So with these very glaring problems, and two of our top decks unable to even come close to winning, we started working on house rules to make these things work. Here's what we've come up with so far, stuff that worked, and didn't work, so hopefully we can make this as great of a format as Planechase is.

1. The Archenemy gets 20 life per opponent. With 5 opponents, that would give the Archenemy 100 life. We quickly proved this to merely extend the game by about 1 turn. By itself, it's not enough.

2. The Archenemy draws a hand of scheme cards. We tried to figure out hand size on this, starting with one card for each opponent, but that was way too strong, limiting it down to three cards was better, but it was still pretty powerful. We're trying to help the Archenemy have a chance, not handing him the keys to a steamroller.

3. The Archenemy draws two cards and chooses one to play. We didn't get to spend a whole lot of time testing this one out, but it seemed to be much better. Most of the time one of the cards would be useful at least.

4. Combine the best cards into a real scheme deck. Many of the cards are useless, but there's some real gems in each of the sets. If we could pick the best of them, then the random nature of the cards might be easier to deal with.

So, should you run out to the store and pick your play group up a full set? Welll... probably not. Some of the underlying concepts that the game tries to make are on the right track, but there's too much wrong with the schemes and the precon decks to make it worthwhile. Hopefully somebody comes up with a way to play these decks that keeps game balance and promotes fun, because Wizards dropped the ball on this one.

Lego Batman - The Review

I know it's been awhile since my last review, but it's been a slow time for gaming in general. Alan Wake hit and somewhat disappointed people, and then Red Dead Redemption hit and somewhat disappointed people, and that's about it. I'm currently on a back catalog (like and 30 year old gamer should be), and thus the reason for the latest game I've finished up:


Lego has enjoyed a huge success with their Lego Star Wars set, and have expanded out in other games as well, Lego Rock Band, Lego Indiana Jones, and an upcoming Lego Harry Potter all ring to mind. I'd only ever played the Lego Star Wars games, but when I saw a friend getting ready to pawn it, I wanted to take it for a quick spin. While not as clean as Star Wars was from a memory stand point, Batman was entertaining enough to keep me going, but probably should have stopped before it all ran thin.

The game starts you off with control over Batman and Robin, and that's it. As you progress through the levels, they get new costumes, but in the end, they liked coming back to the same two, a suit where Batman can blow things up, and a suit where Robin can walk up certain walls. There's only so much variety that can come of the two. Two more interesting suits that hardly see the light of day, a flame suit for Batman, and a diving suit for Robin, really don't get used to their full potential, at least in the Story Mode.

Speaking of which, Story Mode and Free Play are both back per usual, with 3 levels for the Heroes, and 3 levels for the villains. While the villains have far more interesting level design, as they're tailored to each of the 2 man groups that will play in it, they all lack the explosive endings that (most) of the Batman levels had. Hero boss fights consist of Batman fighting the villains, whereas on the villain side, you will sometimes get a police vehicle to fight against as a boss. In fact, if you play through the Hero side then the Villain side as I did, the last thing you do in the game is assemble a contraption to stand on, then stand on it, and the game ends. It would have been nice to give a nod to the villains and let them duke it out with Batman at the end to get a different ending.

A few complaints that I had about the game would be that the control was too loose for what is effectively a platformer. They made this game more vertical, which means that some jumps are a bit hard to make, and if you're off by a bit, it doesn't always give you much room to recover in. Secondly, the music to the game was taken straight from Tim Burton's Batman movie in the 90's, and while I very much enjoyed that, too much of it repeats between the levels, making me not like it so much anymore. Lastly, the level selection screens (Batcave and Arkham) are terribly done, hard to get between areas, and made me not want to finish the villain side. I always had to start as Batman, work my way through the cave, and then select villains, and then move to their level selection screen. Annoying.

My recommendation on this one is going to be a pass unless you have younger batman lovers in the house. I could very much see a Parent / child thing here and think both people would have some fun. Slogging through it alone as I did, there's better ways to spend your time.