Misc notes:

* It's amazing how I'm pretty much playing the game in the same order. I wasn't even able to successfully make a different looking character. I'm not sure what that means. I'll probably try it again later as a Renegade, though -- hopefully that'll help me mix it up some.
* I had vowed to not to do the side-quest planet missions; this is a vow I did not keep. Now that I'm almost up to where I was, though, I'm remembering *why* I made the vow. I'd thought it was because I found the travel & quest log system irritating. These turns out to be minor inconveniences. What wears on you is yet another planet where you have to listen to your buggy go "wrrrrrrr" while you try to get over this really large mountain that your FREAKING SPACESHIP could have dropped you on THE OTHER SIDE OF.
* And then, once you get over the mountain, you get to either see the Cave Dungeon, the Installation Dungeon, or the Spaceship Dungeon. Seriously, guys -- 5-6 more stock dungeons for your side quests wouldn't have killed you.

On the plus side, the PC combat is more fun than the XBox combat, if for no other reason then you can hotkey abilities and not be pausing all the time. Also, the load times are way better, and I'm not in constant fear that the XBox will decide to stop reading my disc and effectively lose my progress.

I need to remember to make a sniper/tech class next time though.

I'm definitely digging it as much the second time through, though -- I think I might actually finish it this time.

This is from a few years ago, but it's been getting reblogged a lot recently: Let's Tell a Story Together (A History of Interactive Fiction). It's an engaging read, and includes some recommendations of modern IF works to check out. I bought the Infocom Masterpieces collection back in the day, though -- it may be time to bust that out again and enjoy some old friends.

Also reblogged from a few different sources: Milliways: Infocom's Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. This guy has a copy of Infocom's shared drive from 1989, and does some archeology on it to find out some of what happened to HH2. And then -- a bunch of Infocommies descend in the comments section to reminisce and correct. It's fascinating. The comments have the usual amount of Internet e-thuggery, but they're still worth skimming over for the Infocomments.

Finally, an interesting read on the process of delivering a hotfix for an MMO.

I'll probably be replacing the 360 soon (one of my brothers is moving to Austin, and we have plans to found a Rock Band, if you know what I mean), but my jumping back into Mass Effect will almost certainly be dependent on the PC version being released. Still, I can comment on what more of the game I played between my last post, and the disappearance of my save game. (Oddly enough, that's what I was most upset about -- they stole my save game!)

Bioware has this structure to their games. There's

* the initial story hub area, which you must complete before you can unlock the "freeform" part
* the "freeform" part, which typically consists of three less-well fleshed out sections than the part that initially sucked you in
* a bizarre final sequence that you can identify because they've taken away your ship.

I am always a sucker for the first part. It's where they do their best work.

In Mass Effect, they tried to spice up the relatively thin pickings in the freeform part by adding some collection games. Being full of OCD, this initially satisfied me. Then I got irritated by the lack of in-game interface for keeping track of the collection games. I was keeping a pen & paper list of which systems I'd explored so far, and it was driving me nuts. When I revisit the game, I will probably skip most of the optional stuff, and just dig through the story.

That being said, I was still digging on the combat, the writing, and the visual look of the universe at the point I stopped playing. I just stopped enjoying the filler where I drive my ATV around the restricted subset of the planet to find the macguffins.

Marty also mentions the whole good vs evil problem. I didn't mess with the "bad" choices much in the game, but I guess I had more of an impression that -- like in Jade Empire -- that evil wasn't evil so much, as a philosophy of, let's say, personally-oriented goals. The good/evil stuff is just a way to hang unique snowflakes on the infinite hallway, however. The story isn't fundamentally going to change. Sure, the final cutscene may vary (see Bioshock), but it's a narrative trick to give you the feeling of agency in a story that cannot possibly be customized for you.