Mass Effect 3 - demo

SPOILERS ALERT!!

A demo download is now available via Xbox Live for everyone for the upcoming third and final Mass Effect game. Previously it was only available to a certain select group of testers.

I tried it out last night. As described by other sources, when you start the game you are given the choice between Action (skip the story and just get the missions), Story (fighting is kept to minimal difficulty) or RPG (get both story and fighting). This is a brilliant idea - one thing that really did my head in was replaying ME1 and ME2 and having to sit through storylines that I had already sat through umpteen times, when all I wanted to do was shoot some bad guys!

I picked a male standard John Shephard with biotic powers. The game starts with Shephard grounded on Earth after the events of ME2 downloadable content add on mission Arrival (even if you never bought it, the game assumes you played through the events and wiped out a planet of batarians to slow down the Reaper invasion). Shephard is called into a meeting with the head of Earth Alliance's military council. Along the way he meets the new squad member, James Vega, who looks like some sort of ridiculous steroid junky,

as well as an old face (either Aleiko or Williams, depending on who survived ME1). It's Captain Anderson who accompanies you. According to the Mass Effect wiki, it's during a tie-in novel (Mass Effect Retribution) that Anderson resigns from Citadel politics and returns to Earth military.

Shephard is asked if the force that is attacking Earth colonies is a Reaper invasion fleet. Shephard says yes. At that point, the invasion bypasses all Earth security systems, and Reapers start landing on the planet, along with meteor rocks falling from the skies and hatching all sorts of different Husks to wipe out human resistance. Shephard and Anderson form a squad who have to escape the wrecked HQ and get to the Normandy. The dialogue is pretty silly, the military heads all come across about as intellligent as a sack of potatoes.

The second part of the demo involves Shephard, Liara and Garrus landing on a Salarian base and trying to fight Cerberus forces to reach Mordin. Expect some tough battles, with enemies moving agressively forward rather than hanging around waiting for you to kill them, and several of them carrying defensive metal riot shields that protect them from fire (unlike energy shields or armour which you can just whittle down with appropriate weapons).

You also get to see the new skills system, where instead of following a linear path in increasing them, you have to pick one of two upgrades each time you spend experience points on a Power, allowing you to have a far greater fine tuning on whether you want your powers to increase in recharge efficiency, duration, power or range. Looks AWESOME!!!

There were also weapon customisable upgrades lying around.

All in all, I am very much psyched for this game, cannot wait for its arrival in March 2012.

Mass Effect 2 DLC - Arrival

(Warning - mild spoilers in this article).

If you have an Xbox 360, chances are you have at least heard about Mass Effect. I recently bought the new Downloadable Content (DLC) add on for Mass Effect 2, called Arrival, and thought I would let you know what I thought!

For those unfamiliar with the games, Mass Effect is an action and Roleplaying Game (RPG). Set about 150 years in the future, humans have joined a galactic organisation of aliens called the Citadel. There are 3 alien races who control the ruling Citadel Council, with humans and other aliens as mere members, and a few other races who aren't part of the Citadel at all. The council lives on a space station called the Citadel, which is linked to a network of giant objects in space called Mass Relays. The relays allow travel all over the galaxy. The relays and the Citadel are believed to be leftovers of an extinct advanced alien race.

At the start of Mass Effect, your character, Commander Shepherd has been chosen to become the first human Spectre. Spectres are the creme de la creme of soldiers and secret agents who work directly for the Citadel Council. Your promotion paves the way for humans to become the fourth council race. But then you discover an alien Spectre has gone rogue, allying with evil robots to try and summon an evil race of advanced aliens to destroy the galaxy.

The game is made up of several mandatory main missions and multiple optional side missions that are not part of the main story. Each mission involves your character and two others picked from your squad of 6 aliens and humans. Most missions are to kill all the opponents and reach the target point, but some involve talking to characters, picking dialogue options. Often you can pick nice Paragon or mean Renegade options. The more paragon options you choose, the stronger your moral stance becomes until you are able to talk terrorists into releasing hostages etc. The more renegade options you choose, the more frightening you become so that you can frighten opponents into surrender, for instance.

You can pick what class of character you are, which determines which special abilities you get. The more missions you do, the more experience you get, the stronger your abilities get (and you pick which get stronger to suit your playing style). Soldiers can use all types of weapons and use the strongest armour. Engineers can only use limited weapons and armour, but can use technology to overload enemy shields or sabotage their weapons or hack robots to attack other robots. Biotics can use energy powers to make enemies float helplessly or throw them out of the way or crush their life. You can also mix two classes together to get a mix of abilities.

The storyline is epic. They have put SO much detail in the alien races, their backgrounds, galactic history. What was infuriating was using the Mako tank to drive around planets that had ridiculous mountains that are difficult to drive over. Many of the side missions take place in identical bases or derelict starships. Many opponents (geth husks, thorian creepers, medical experiments) are almost identical in nature. The side missions are tedious, but the main missions are superb in diversity.

There are also some brilliant key decisions to make. At one point, you must try to convince an angry team mate that you are right - or have him killed. At another, you must choose who to save and who to leave to die. At the end, you must make an immense decision on the nature of the Citadel itself.

Mass Effect 2 modified the game by streamlining the abilities, and emphasising different types of protection (shields, armour, barriers, regeneration) that required different powers to overcome. The combat style is different, with improved squad orders, and now you have to pick up and use limited amounts of ammunition (whereas in Mass Effect 1, you had unlimited ammo but weapons shut down if you fired them without a break). The side missions are now unique and different. There are several great downloadable content add-ons.

The story picks up two years after the first game. Your character is recruited by a morally dubious organisation to carry on the fight against the evil aliens from ME1. Now you have to recruit and gain the loyalty of the best of the best to make a team capable of fighting a new foe in their home turf, a virtual suicide mission.

The newest add-on to the game is called Arrival. You can do it in the middle of the game or after the final mission. Admiral Hackett calls you to tell you a human operative has found a Reaper artifact that proves the Reapers are on their way. You have to go rescue the operative, and help her with her mission to stop the imminent arrival of the Reaper invasion.

What's irritating about this mission is that it is a solo mission, so you cannot bring along any of your squad. What I love about ME2 is using combinations of my and my squad's abilities to take down the enemy. This game mostly requires you to fight everyone yourself. The first mission requires that you sneak through the enemy base undetected. There are several varren that you can kill, but take care to not shoot ANYONE else until you find the operative - then you get a new Xbox achievement! From there you have to fight your way out, this time with the operative to help you.

After that, you get to her base, where she has an audacious plan in motion. Unfortunately, you discover things are not going to plan. You then have to take on an entire army by yourself (there's even an achievement for wiping them out). You then have to fight through the base, taking on groups of soldiers at each point. You have one big decision to make, which as usual has a paragon or renegade option, but to be frank, felt rather flat.

I have to say this game was nowhere near as enjoyable or immense as previous DLC for ME2. The first DLC gave you a mercenary, zaeed, and a decent loyalty mission. The second gave you an expert thief, Kasumi, with a wonderful mission requiring a James Bond style infiltration and then a great fight to escape through an army of foes with just you and Kasumi. The third was a great reunion with Liara, and a wonderful mix of locations and two great end bosses (the rogue agent and the Shadow Broker).

Arrival gives you a sneaking mission (kinda dull), fighting off troops to protect the operative (not bad), then taking on the base on your own (ok, but like I said, I really missed directing my squad). There's nothing epic or imaginative about the locations. The moral dilemma was not particularly gripping either for some reason. The operative character just looked weird and flip flopped from dedication to psychosis a little too quickly.

I already knew this DLC had poor reviews but was desperate for more ME2 before ME3 turns up at the end of 2011. I have to warn others though that this really is not worth forking out for.

I've been working

That's my excuse for no updates recently. But the stats say people are still visiting occasionally, so I oughta at least say hi!

I took some time off at Christmas to write up. The only problem is, that I got very little writing done. Partly this was because of writers block. Ask anyone who has done their PhD. It's insanely difficult to get started on your thesis. It just looms over you, like an unborn monolith.

Of course, realising I hadn't as yet finished playing Mass Effect on the XBox 360 had nothing to do with it. This is the first game, not the recent sequel. I actually purchased it over a year ago, but got bored fairly quickly. I decided I ought to give it another shot, especially since I'm too poor to buy any new games at the moment. Once I got into it, I actually really enjoyed it. You control a character named Shepherd (first name, gender and appearance can be chosen at will; there are also quite a few options in picking his/her past history which influences how other characters relate to you). It's a scifi RPG, where you basically play a soldier who has been chosen to represent humanity at a very high level in galactic politics. It's your job to figure out why a highly decorated alien supersoldier has gone AWOL. As you progress through the game, you can pick up allies. Each mission lets you take two such allies along, allowing you to pick which sorts of skills you want to complement your own. You can either follow lots of side plots, or carry through the main mission, which follows a standard plot of uncovering the history of an ancient alien race, wiped out by an even more powerful and ancient alien race. It's still v gripping and exciting. I did find driving the MAKO allterrain vehicle incredibly annoying, and all the bases and derelict ship interiors look identical. The romance subplots were amusing.

Still, I am now finally in the groove of writing my thesis. Of course, I promised my supervisor I would hand in the first three chapters by today - I've only handed in one, half finished the second, not even started the third. Eek!

I'm still working in the lab, so here's a treat for you. This is an important figure from my future thesis. I'm interested in investigating a certain protein, which we shall call X. In order to see how X works, it's useful to know what other proteins X plays with. To do that, I am using antibodies that recognise X, in a reaction called an Immunoprecipitation. Basically, you take cells grown in cell culture labs, break them up to release all their proteins, and then incubate them with your antibody which is stuck to tiny little beads. You then remove the cell proteins and keep the beads. Hopefully the antibody on the beads has grabbed your protein out, along with all other proteins that interact with Protein X. You then spread them out on an acrylamide gel, and use silver to make them visible.

The pic shows in the right hand lane a very dark band representing my protein, and lots of lighter bands, representing potential proteins that work with my protein X.