Mass Effect for PC?

[pro5]

I've changed my mind on Mass Effect 2, it's the worst game in history. 30 hours in and I've hit a game-breaking bug, on a path which affects all my saves.

 

Unless anyone can suggest a fix for the 'blank screen after the LotSB car chase', that's 30 hours of my life wasted. I've tried the car chase multiple times, restarted my PC, updated my graphics card drivers, reinstalled the DLC, turned off motion blue, turned all graphics settings down to minimum, disabled sound and verified the file integrity (through steam). Still fails at the exact same point. Stupid POS.

 

My only other hope is that someone has the game and same DLC setup installed - they could take my save, complete the chase, and then send me my save back? Help anyone? :(

 

Do you have patch 1.02 installed?

 

http://social.bioware.com/page/me2-patches

[igi]

Do you have patch 1.02 installed?

 

Yep.

[igi]

Fixed.

 

Spoke to EA Live Support, turns out I needed to download the Origin client, which downloaded a couple of updates, and voila, it all works!

[Jarno Mikkola]

ahh... never mind...

 

I agree that the Mass Effect games are not really a suitable game for a 7 year old to watch... one can take the non romance talk option and so forth, but there's no options to really avoid all the kind of brutal gun play and violence. Especially if your native language is English, the whole setting is kinda harsh.

[igi]

It's taken 40 hours, but ME2 is finally off the game backlog. W00t.

 

Pros:

I enjoyed it. A lot. I put 40 hours into it!

 

Cons:

The resource gathering mini-game is terrible - next time I'd just cheat the max amount and ignore it.

There were a couple of bugs, mainly floating off the floor, missing characters in cutscenes and the occasional game-breaking issue of cutscenes not firing.

 

 

I wouldn't recommend either ME1 or M2 or children, far too violent, and there are some tough decisions in there that a child may find disturbing. For anyone else though, I'd certainly recommend it.

[Domi]

Thanks, folks! Luckily I will be able to run ME on my laptop, if I decide to take a plunge, so it will complicate the matters to keep the kiddo away, but she might just naturally decide that happy pixies world is better than ME. If not, heck, I started KOTOR 2 in Feb 2010.....

[Kulyok]

I think Mass Effect can be too painful for 7-year olds(Virmire choice, plus Wrex choice - a kid might not be thorough enough to get Paragon points or do Wrex' sidequest, and consequeces will be tragic), plus a girl will be treated to a porn scene(naked boobs, ass, no underwear with Kaidan).

[Domi]

TY. Sounds like the game is actually a step above in maturity from the previous entries. I will keep it locked out on my account with Parental. I am also wondering if I would be better of with SWTOR, try to MP with the kid. Hmm? Wow, so weird.

 

EDIT: I am walking again, albeit slowly, but fingers crossed I will actually play anyway. Missed the stuff of legends (Disciple's only great line: I thought she was the hero. )

[Twani]

SWTOR is probably safe if you keep to the two Jedi's and stay light side, or maybe the light-side smuggler (but the smuggler will still run in to some difficult scenes). The Trooper has to make some very hard and ugly decisions where there's no happy endings (save a friend vs save a whole group of people, all the time while your friend is terrified and begging you to abandon the others to come help her- no saving them both), and all four of the Empire classes will see a gambit of ugly, difficult to explain things (the Agent- while I think by far the best written story- has some parts that freaked me the right out, and my agent gal was mostly light side; that's just an emotional class). Any class dark side, and there will be murder of innocents, general bloodshed, corruption and hatefulness, and generic 'wow I am playing a complete bastard' moments.

 

But Jedi are generally pretty safe and stable light side, and you basically play the messiah who saves everyone and finds solutions to everything. I'd still recommend playing ahead of your daughter, to make sure you know what's coming up so you can explain anything off kilter (even the Jedi Knight has a long arc about a father trying to kill you for the murder of his son- a murder you have to commit), but it's probably mostly safe.

 

Compared to ME, I would probably say it really depends on class and alignment if it's darker then the ME series. ME3 in particular can be really dark at times (mostly if you didn't make certain decisions correctly in ME2), and I'm not sure any class but a dark side Sith Warrior quite approaches that. On the other hand, SWTOR's Empire classes are probably darker over all then a paragon route through ME1/2.

 

Good to hear you're walking. Cheers to that!

[Domi]

Yeah, Sith/Dark side is out of the question. Which is not a big deal for me, I normally play Neutral to Good regardless. I haven't yet seen a game path that made a bad guy path really attractive.

[Kulyok]

Then SWTOR is bound to corrupt you. I've seen three Empire paths and two Jedi ones(Jedi Knight and Trooper - Trooper is irresistable because you get female Shepard's voice), and the story is pretty cool and engaging for Empire. To me, much more so than in the Republic - probably because the writers got more freedom.

 

But, yep, it's pretty PG-13-ish in terms of fade-to-blacks(and Imperial Agent is cool). Jedi Knight is very KOTOR-ish and many, if not most Republic players play him/her - I once played a Heroic quest in a company of four Jedi Knights.

[Twani]

Don't give up on the Sith classes just because they seem evil- you can play them light side! You'll have some difficult decisions and often end up lying desperately to superiors, but my light side Sith Warrior is so much *fun*. I haven't gotten to the end of her story path, though- the only ones I've completed are Agent and Smuggler (...I like that class, apparently), though I'm pretty far with Warrior and Inquisitor, and I've seen a decent amount of all the others- up to 30 or so.

 

(My Inquisitor, on the other hand, is pure Dark Side and takes the 'shock him' option whenever it comes up in conversation. She's sort of amusing, but not very deep. I'm not very good with playing evil characters, either- all my other characters are light side (the smuggler and the Agent only mostly- I played them with light side/dark side indicators off and just role-played what I thought they'd do rather then caring about maxing things out).)

 

Female Imperial Agent has a great voice, too- that's female Hawke from Dragon Age 2, sounding pretty darn badass. Though no one can beat fem!Shep's voice, I always love hearing my Imperial Agent accenting all over the place (she switches from British to American accent if she's undercover or not, which amuses me).

 

I'm not sure if SWTOR is worth giving up ME for, though. It is really addicting- personally, I love the under 50 PVP (...50+ PVP ends up being too much of a gear slog for lazy me) and the space missions, and you almost need to play at least one Republic and one Empire character to see the whole world... which makes for good replay value. But ME is really good. Hm. Buy them all? (I kid, I kid. Maybe.)

[Domi]

It looks like there is a monthly fee for SWTOR. Duh! Not something I can do, unfortunately, with my time for playing being unpredictable. I'll probably go with ME Trilogy, buy the story-important downloadable content, and exercise parental control.

[Twani]

SWTOR has a monthly fee option, but also a free to play option. You get basically the full single player game free to play: you just miss group things, raids, and some special items, I think.

 

This is the chart of what you get with FtP versus subscription: http://www.swtor.com/free/features

 

SWtOR is good in that you can basically play your full 1-50 character. The big issues are you don't get real access to tells unless someone friends you first (I think), so communicating is *hard*, you only get a limited amount of character slots and a limited amount of races (not that the races mean a darn thing in this game), you have no bank, and you have limited access to pvp, space missions, flashpoints (group events), and even less access to the raids. Oh, and most annoyingly: you have to revive back at a nearby med center, rather then reviving in the field.

 

But you can still play through the planets, and could easily group up with your daughter and play the 1 to 50 planet and class storylines with her.

[lynx]

I wouldn't recommend either ME1 or M2 or children, far too violent, and there are some tough decisions in there that a child may find disturbing. For anyone else though, I'd certainly recommend it.

Haha, what a typo!