The Thessaliad Redux

So ... okay. You know how awhile ago, I was talking about that 'Scent of a Warden' thing - my little side project of perfumes themed on Dragon Age characters? And ... also Mass Effect characters? And a couple of WoD characters now? (I expanded operations 'cos someone wanted a perfume themed on their Corax and I couldn't say no, 'cos ... y'know, Corax and now I've done someone's Son of Ether...)

ANYWAY. Point is that this is still going on. And San Diego Comic Con was just this weekend gone (I think; recently, anyway). There were Mass Effect people there. There were also people I talk to regularly on Tumblr. Some of them were wearing SOAW perfumes. One of them happened to get to talking to Courtenay Taylor, one of the voice actresses from two of the Mass Effect games - does a character named Jack of whom I'm particularly fond - who also does Ada Wong from the Resident Evil games, among others. Apparently, someone who bought the Jack scent showed said scent to Courtenay Taylor and according to Taylor's Twitter feed, she was 'huffing' it. Next thing I heard about it was a couple of days ago, when a friend of mine was one of many to mention who I was to Taylor via Twitter - just she was the only one who knew I was on Twitter to mention me in the post. Because apparently, Taylor had dropped a few Tweets asking how she could get in touch with me for a bottle of this perfume.

So to clarify ... voice actress for character I love in game series I adore likes my perfume. And wants a bottle.

The reason I am still awake and bouncing up and down now is because apparently I am not as good at setting my Twitter text alerts up so they don't wake me up at 1am. This one was from Courtenay Taylor (I Tweeted her myself when I knew she was looking for me). So now I have a Tweet from voice actress about whom I fangirl-squee, telling me that something I did is awesome and that she will be in touch about a bottle of this stuff.

I just ... can't sleep. Too much SQUEE!

I have been quiet. I am fully aware of this. There has not been much to say or I just haven't really wanted to get into it. That and I didn't really want to dump a whooooooooole bunch of "I played Mass Effect 2 and flailed immensely" on my LJ/DW.

...I saved that for Tumblr.

And in fact, most of the flailing I am likely to do concerning ME3 will also be found on Tumblr. I have played it. I do like it. I am a little worried that my graphics card is not handling it overly well. There are moments that made me really happy. There has been only one minor problem: spoilers.

It happened before the game even came out. This is more or less to be expected, but I had safeguards against that! Look, it was really simple; I kept it to Tumblr, wherein a little Greasemonkey app called Tumblr Saviour actually blocked any posts marked with appropriate tags. And most people were actually really good about tagging posts. Text posts, anyway. Screencap posts that gave away recurring characters who would have been a really nice surprise had they actually been a surprise? Reblogs of other people's posts? Their replies to replies they got to their posts? Not everyone checked those. Eventually I had to unfollow those people for a few days until I got the game.

And then there's the other one. I have been liveblogging ME3 (under all appropriate tags, and being very careful that everything I post on the subject - reply, reblog, whatever - has those tags) and I expressed an opinion. This individual did not agree with my opinion. She said so. I conceded the point and expressed my intent to keep an open mind but that I stuck by my opinion. This apparently was the prompt she needed to explain to me the basics of a conversation I might (emphasis might) strike up later on in game, because knowing about the conversation I won't be having until later would surely get me to drop this clearly erroneous opinion. I asked her to please drop it because knowing about the conversation and the kinds of things things that the other character would say therein counted as a spoiler, however vague. The response: "It wasn't a spoiler! I just wanted to let you know what was coming up!"

...Does that strike anyone else as the textbook definition of a spoiler?

I am debating whether to unfollow, block or just confront this person. She seems nice but she is one of those people who goes on the offensive when someone disagrees with her opinions on matters fandom-related. I am side-eyeing her with extreme prejudice right now. But that's not a decision I am going to make right now because I have been up all night. Yes, I took the day off to play ME3. I know myself too well. I wasn't tired until 20 minutes ago.

( Cut for spoilers. )

I need coffee or a nap or something. Actually, I need food in the house.

There are a few reasons why I'm not finished Mass Effect yet.

1) Multiple False Starts
I am NOT GOOD at this game. I admit it freely. It is not like Dragon Age, which I am good at if I play on Casual. I am not good at this. I will never be good at this. Not even on casual. Not without cheats. It took me awhile to find said cheats but I found them and started over from point zero with the Super Armour and a Super Gun. So now that I am playing a bog-standard gunbunny with armour that'll withstand anything and a gun that more or less one-hits anything smaller than the Mako, I will at least be able to play the damn game through. But I only got that after a couple of previously created little buggers and a lot of dicking around with the character creation screen. So ... y'know, the Citadel bullshit takes awhile.

2) The Mako
I am good at the Mako. Comparatively, anyway. But that 'comparatively' is more to do with being able to get from point A to point B without ending up upside down. Still, it's a little drawn-out, all this having to speed around on that hunk of crap, which takes turns like a giant tortoise and has a bad habit of drifting one way or the other. Why anyone thought this fucker was fun is beyond me. (Oh, and its targetting system is total crap. CRAAAAAAAAAP.)

3) Surveying
At least with decrypting stuff, you can say, "Fuck it I am using Omnigel". You can't do that with minerals. So after you've finally managed to charge the Mako up whatever fucking mountain you need to climb to find a mineral (or a salarian mummy, or whatever the hell), you have to do this ... I can't even call it a 'puzzle', exactly, though that's the best term. Fifteen seconds to try to get your cursor to the centre of a circle with moving and static barriers, with the directional keys being your only method of moving the f'ing thing. It's a bitch and it generally takes me about four tries to actually get the damn mineral. Why anyone thought that was fun is equally beyond me. It's slow and pointless beyond apparently badly needed XP. Gyeh.

4) Random Assignments
Spectres answer to no one and work the mission for the good of the galaxy. So why the fuck do I have the Alliance fleet sending me to do random shit all the time? Don't even get me started on "Rear Admiral Up-Himself Shitting All Over The Normandy And Her Crew From A Great Height" and "Randomly Getting Accosted By Journalists". Though I guess it's at least realistic...

Not that I'm not having fun, but ... I get the impression that a lot of these quests are going to end up just ... not being completed because I honest-to-gods cannot be arsed with them. I hope ME2 moves a little faster.

And on that note, bed.

Yes, I am still whittering about Mass Effect. Sorry. At least there's some actual social commentary involved.

So last night I manned up and did the one thing that anyone who's played Mass Effect knows to dread: I drove the Mako. For those of you who don't play, picture this: you have a six-wheeled ATV whose suspension has to survive getting dropped from a moving spaceship, at least according to the cutscene. (Why the hell didn't they just actually land?) Anyway, end result is a monstrosity that handles like a bumper car and has pogo sticks for suspension. Guess how much fun this generally is to drive.

As it turns out, I'm not horrible at it. It takes a delicate touch on the A and D keys and I'm still not entirely sanguine about going backwards, but aside from an unfortunate 'I ran over a space monkey' incident on Hercules (I think it was Hercules, anyway), I actually did pretty well, considering how terrified I was.

The rest of it? Noooooot so hot. I'm finding that playing an Adept is complicated beyond reason and I'm not entirely sure how to use any of the special bits and bobs you get for the techies or the biotics beyond Barrier. I'm pondering starting over again, this time with Soldier (plain old gun-bunny) or Infiltrator (gun-bunny with tech). The problem is that even on Casual, the fights happen too fast in areas that are too poorly-lit and I end up flailing. A lot. This decision was made during a particularly unpleasant set of firefights with renegade biotics on a cargo vessel and geth in an abandoned mine respectively. I'm better at shooting things. I should really stick with shooting things. I could be a sniper. That'd be fun.

(Also, madzilla has flagged up the Super Armour and Super Gun mods. Yeeeeeees, I'll be having those...)

On a related note, ME3 spoilers are going up and while I don't entirely understand them, I am getting ideas about them from stuff I've read while looking for ways to not die horribly every time I enter combat. There is one thing that I do understand, though, and this is not so much a spoiler as a thing that should have been fairly obvious from how EA/Bioware has been dealing with the whole 'FemShep marketing' thing to date: ME3 is apparently suffering from a near-terminal case of Dudebro Syndrome.

Dudebro Syndrome: Where a piece of entertainment media conforms so strongly to the sexist tropes on offer, up to and including, "We can't be sexist! Our girls kick ass! Fine, in ludicrous poses and unrealistic outfits so that they can conform to our fantasies, but we gave you girls who fight, what more do you want?" that it honestly feels unwelcoming for women. It's basically the "NO GIRLS ALLOWED" sign on the treehouse that is modern entertainment media.

They haven't made any secret of it, either. In the bits and pieces I've seen, the blurbs about character redesign have emphasised an increase strength and experience for the men ... and an increase in sexiness for the women. And let's face it; it didn't start with Ashley; it started with FemShep. When they made the decision to market ME1 and ME2 exclusively with a male Shepard, they didn't bother anyone about what he looked like - he looked rugged and manly because some demographic said that's what they wanted. They based him on the default male Shepard you get in game. Then, after three games (I am counting DA2 in this because of the Bioware connection), they finally decided to say, "We're going to do some trailers and marketing with a female Shepard!" Which got us all celebrating ... except instead of just giving us the default female Shepard, they made a beauty contest on Facebook to let us decide what FemShep would look like.

Devs, please.

And of course, we still haven't seen so much as a single bit of promo material featuring the female Shepard whose looks were so important that it merited such goings-on on Facebook. They keep saying it's coming 'soon'. Um ... yeah, but ... so's the f'ing game! I know it feels like forever away for those who are waiting for preorders etc, but March is not that far away, guys! The demo's coming out in a couple of weeks and we still haven't seen a single shred of promotional material featuring a female Shepard at all! There is a fan-made trailer featuring a female Shepard and it is the most brilliant thing ever; I'll link to it when I'm not at an outdated work computer.

So ... everything to do with the male characters is "100% more rugged and gritty and strong and experienced!" Everything to do with women is "100% sexier!" I'm not sure why they're going to such great lengths to alienate the female fans by ... well, there's no other way to put it but 'pandering to the Stereotypical Straight White Male Gamer', but I have a theory: The response they got to Dragon Age 2, which was more inclusive than most games of its type in terms of sexuality and gender roles, was relatively underwhelming and, since that underwhelming response couldn't possibly be because they rushed out the game in a year and thus put out an unbalanced, handwavey rush job instead of the brilliant game we know they can make, they decided that it was because they were being too inclusive. ME3 is to Bioware/EA what a Ferarri is to a middle-aged man: OVERCOMPENSATION. Or it's to make up for giving those poor souls, male or female, who aren't all that good at gaming the 'story' and 'RPG' modes on top of the 'action' modes, lest people think they've somehow unmanned themselves by not making it universally impossible to complete unless you're a frag god or you cheat like hell.

Look, y'all know I love Bioware's ability to tell a decent story. I yell at the screen when I play these things that I don't do for very much else, and that's a good thing. However, this whole thing where Mass Effect is Bioware's "hardcore gamer" game (where "hardcore gamer" seems to universally mean "the Stereotypical Straight White Male") whereas Dragon Age is their 'fluffy fantasy property' that can afford to feel inclusive to people who aren't the Stereotypical Straight White Male. It's like someone out there thinks we're still in primary school and has made the typical gender divides of "Fearless Space Marines are for boys, castles and magic are also for boys but girls can have those too, I guess". And I'm tired of it.

Also, I swear the first person who explains to me in comments about how "I get where you're coming from, but they are protecting their demographic..." is not going to be on my happy list for awhile. I've heard that argument before and I hate it too. The idea that appealing to one demographic has to involve belittling and alienating another is repugnant. If you're honestly telling me that the 'core demographic' would refuse to buy the game if the females therein weren't shaped and dressed like the wet dream of a thirteen-year-old Star Trek fan with a low-key D/s fetish, then it is my feeling that the 'core demographic' is too shallow and narrow-minded to appreciate what they're being given in the first place. They have produced great games with great stories, have Bioware, and they should be let to stand on their own merits without having to so blatantly pander to a target demographic that's only the majority because of crap like this in the first place.

Okay, rant over. Sorry. Well, actually, no I'm not, but...

So somehow - and I'm not sure how I managed this, considering the timeline involved - I mastered the keyboard controls for Mass Effect. Seriously; I came home, thought that I would give the keyboard another shot rather than try to change the settings on my Xpadder profile for the 360 controller again, and I started right from the beginning of the Eden Prime mission as sort of a warm-up act. Surprisingly, I did really well, and got through it with a minimum of fuss, beyond the problem with Eden Prime blowing up with me on it. Yeah, Saren's a dick. And I eventually had to Google the location of the explosive charges because I couldn't find the last one. Now I'm in the Citadel, poking at things in a typical 'doing random shit for money' sort of way and trying to track down Garrus.

I also have a pre-game story in my head for my Earthborn street-rat-made-good war hero Shep. Because I'm like that.

I will probably at some point have a bit of a rant about how shit the wonderful world of the internet seems to be going at the moment - for instance, Google tracking its users universally across all its services and sharing data on user activity on all of them, which really is just turning the damn thing into Facebook and reducing the whole right to privacy thing given the hurdles they put on using a pseudonym on Google services. (Incidentally, I am now looking for another RSS feed reader, as that and searches are the only thing I use Google for now anyway.) But right now I am not in the mood. Partly this is because the coffee has not kicked in yet, I am fed up with the typing and on the whole, I want the weekend to be now, please.