Back for the first time again

So, how was everybody's Christmas/Hanukkah/Chinese New Year/holidays? My best guess was my Kwanzaa was good. But being as how I really don't know what Kwanzaa is or how to celebrate it, I'm taking the optimistic route.

Yeah, my wife ordered from Iraq and Xbox 360 and a handful of games, so I spent a lot of my holiday break drinking beer at night and 'boxing off a hangover. I don't know if anyone else says that in reference to playing an Xbox, 'boxin' off, because I'm kind of new at being an Xbox owner, but they should. I will start a trend of it if necessary. Anyway, I was mad impressed with the Xbox as a whole, it's pretty awesome, and as a result I came to a few realizations:

1. If you say you don't care about graphics, you're either lying to me or to yourself. After all, when's the last time you played a choose your own adventure book? Case closed.

2. Guitar Hero is pretty cool on easy.

3. Having locked content in games is stupid. I ain't paying by the month and I suck at playing the guitar, so I only get 10 songs? Guitar Hero sucks.

4. Mass Effect is awesome.

So I spent a lot of time playing Mass Effect, like 13 hours into it, and it's pretty awesome. I read a lot of haters talking down on this game, but don't listen to them. There are a few legitimate complaints about it, like the controls for the Mako are pretty ass backwards and the planetary exploration is bad and the inventory would be cumbersome on a PC but isn't too bad on a console, and the text is really, really small on anything but a huge TV. If you can get past that you'll actually have to aim to hit things and dodge things like an FPS, it's a lot of fun; at least, as of now it is.

First, there's the dialogue wheel you've no doubt seen in some screen shots where there's some two or three word responses...but that's not what the character actually says, it's just the general idea of what the character says. I think it works really well.

Plus, a lot of things happen where you have to make choices about what to do. I'm not sure at this point to what extent these choices matter because I haven't gotten around to reloading and testing the differences, assuming they would be apparent immediately anyway, but it's fun. Pretty minor spoiler to follow: After a while, this reporter will ask you a few questions and, barring the nonsensical "I'll kill you!" option (why in the world would you threaten to kill a reporter? Classic Bioware "evil"!) you get a few ways of answering the questions, then later you get a transmission telling you how you made everyone look bad (if you're me) or whatever. I don't know if it's like this huge part of the game, but it happens pretty frequently. Also they masked the load screens mostly with other activities, like being decontaminated before you enter your ship or riding in an elevator, and in these scenes sometimes your characters will talk about things or, more importantly, you can hear about what you did on your latest mission over a loudspeaker. I thought that was pretty cool way of integrating the choices you made to make the world more immersive.

Also, there's a ton of sidequests, and some of them are picked up during the load screen elevators when you listen to the news and such. I think that's a pretty efficient use of loading, and riding the the elevator listening to one liners is more interesting than a stupid tip and a little bar filling up!

The companions also seem to have a lot to say and the writing and voice acting are top notch ('course, what did you expect? They hired Keith MF-ing David!) and the combat is fun. I recommend this game.

Well anyway, I just got back to the house today, so I've got a few things to get in order like unpacking and laundry and such, but I'm more or less back in the saddle, folks.