So, hi. Both because Boss is singing its praises in guild chat and because of voice actor nerdery (and Jessie Monster prodding me over Twitter), I looted the first Mass Effect and slapped it on Blastoise. I was going to hold off until I finished at least the capture part of my .hack//REPLAY youtube project but… you know what they say about curiosity. I’m a few hours into it as of this posting.

Yes, this is another instance of Yoshi being stupidly late to the party. Are we surprised? Hell no!

Anyway… I like it. It’s not something I’d have ordinarily picked up sight-unseen (in fact, I vaguely recall there being a bit of drama about the DRM when it came out, which might have turned me off at first), but this is one of those games where you stick your finger in and something happens and you’re all “I am intrigued by your ideas and wish to subscribe to your magazine.” It makes me think of… a smattering of things, really: a bit of Metal Gear, Star Trek, Metroid and dare I say it, *PlanetSide.* I am particularly amused by how directing the flow of conversation is handled; it’s very… subtle and natural. I dunno.

And, ya know what? Despite all the promo videos and such that pimp out dude!Shepard, everything I’ve seen so far ingame suggests that the story was meant to play out with lady!Shepard. :P While I’m not one of those hardcore feminist gamers, I will admit it’s kind of awesome to play a female protagonist who looks like she could be over-30. (Seriously, look at most games that let you customize your avatar… I am extremely hard-pressed to find one that lets you make anything close to “middle-aged woman,” yet you can still make an old guy.) I think my only complaint about the character editor was the lack of anything resembling long hair, though given that you’re often in full body armor, it wouldn’t have been practical on a graphics level anyway.

Oh yeah, VA nerdery. No shortage of that here. Play as lady!Shepard and… oh hi, Jennifer Hale (as in, Sheena and Samus to name a couple). :D! And, of course, Liara = Ali Hillis (sup, Lightning!*). There are some others in here, but those two are the first to spring to mind. :D

* You want to see something really trippy and meta-y, especially if you like FF4/13 and read voice actor Twitter in character? Watch her tweet at Mr. Liam and Mr. Yuri. One of these days I’m going to crack and draw Lightning flirting with Kain and Cecil over beer and it will be AWESOME. XD

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Semi-related: Blastoise’s rebuild is happening in November, if he can hold together that long. For one thing, his first incarnation was “born” in early November. I built Yggdrasil in November, too (2 years ago)… and last year, I got Dinah the MacBook the week of Thanksgiving. So, may as well do the rebuild then, ya know? :P Of course, I imagine the holiday sales for parts will likely be starting up, too, so that helps in the “keep things under $700 if possible, with $1000 as a hard limit” department.

“Blue Dragon Palm?” More like EXTREMITY FIST.
Celina’s FE Bromide has her cosplaying as Lunar 2′s Jean (in the Blue Dragon martial artist gear)… except I decided to recolor the upper robe. Now I’m having flashbacks of the few episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender that I actually watched at brendala‘s house waaaay back when. Oh well.

On the internets, I like to, you know, at least make some attempt to remember the spelling/grammar/mechanics that got drilled into my head in grade school, but I’m generally forgiving of others. That said, I have… well, they go farther than “pet peeve” territory, and right into “No, you stop that, you stop that right now.”

The first is the use of LOL as punctuation.
Do this and with few exceptions you’re likely to go on my “this dood is a dim-witted stupidface, don’t take him seriously” list. Seriously, are you stupid enough to find everything funny? You are no Beavis and Butthead.

The other has been cropping up more and more, typically in, uh… let’s just say where you would expect to find displays of feminist/political outrage though I’m sure this form of nonsense can appear anywhere:

“I can’t”
“I can’t even”
“I just cannot with this nonsense”

…
WHERE’S THE VERB? You stop there without the verb. You can’t… what?
I know in a way this omission of the verb may suggest a sort of speechlessness/brain BSOD but for some reason it still pushes my grammatical hot button. Stop that! I’d rather you not say anything and stick an angry face (or, hell, even one of those fugly trollfaces) instead of this crap.

That is all. *bow*

Boo. My secondary drive is now officially a 1 TB brick of poop sitting inside of Blastoise. The entire drive is down– not just select folders, ALL of it!
Again, nothing of hardcore mission-critical value was lost (basically, nothing that can’t be copied back from Yggdrasil or Ayarane Project), but for some reason Windows likes to stash some of its baggage on the secondary drive. That explains why Blastoise has been freaking out over his Windows Activation status, doh…

Yeah, this is totally moving up Blastoise’s rebuild.

- Bad PS2/3 component cable is bad. Shame on you, Sony– you put this thing in one of those awful, pain in the ass to open cases, and the audio part of it doesn’t even work. And because I had to practically tear apart the box to open it, good luck on getting a return/exchange. I’m convinced half the price goes into all the packaging!

- PS3 is… really weird about A/V inputs. You would think it would auto-detect based on what cable is plugged in, but you have to do it manually. It likes its HDMI too much and like hell am I going to go through the trouble of switching back and forth between capture box and HDMI, so it’s out. PS2 w/ component is the way to go for now on this side

- I’m assuming the Wii isn’t going to give me much, if any trouble since it DOES auto-detect. Good Nintendo, you actually do something right for once. :P

- PSP component out cable (along with replacement PS2 component cable) on order.

- I had thought Blastoise could play without lag… but I jumped the shark there. He can go lag-free… for a few minutes, and then it’s just as bad as everywhere else. There’s pretty much no way around it, I’ll have to do a passthrough. Good thing this got sorted out early on in my playthrough or else it would have been rather icky.

Looks like my next Amazon box is going to be a bit cable-happy. In addition to the replacement and PSP cables, also looting an RCA Y-adapter for mother, and a mini-DisplayPort to HDMI (this goes on Dinah).