He tried to stop you. He knew what was ahead. If only you'd realized what he was trying to do.

He tried to save you from the awful, awful ending. But he failed.

In life he was Marauder Shields. In death, he was Marauder Health.

He is the true hero of Mass Effect. May he rest in peace.

Excerpt from another forum I frequent.

"...A few days ago my roommate who's been playing this p. steadily for weeks did something that we think might have been, if not unique in pvp then at least vanishingly uncommon. For starters he's doing a Faith build which I gather is rare in itself, but it's made a few of his spells quite powerful including Wrath of the Gods, that fat white aoe that the giant knights in Anor Londo do. It's been quite effective by itself during world invasions, but one night we decided he should combine it with the Chameleon spell that turns you into a vase. And the giant dragon helm that breathes fire.

So he invades a world of the guilty, and places himself behind one of the pillars in the hallway leading to the twin bosses in Anor Londo, and turns into a vase. It takes a while, but the guilty player eventually starts fighting the giant knights just to clear them out, since he's not seen my friend and thinks he's safe. Miraculously, he ends up running right past the vase, whereupon my friend immediately explodes out of it with Wrath, hounds the player into a corner in front of the white boss door, hits him a few more times with Wrath, then finishes by breathing fire on him. We erupt in laughter."

Follow-up to my post from yesterday, here's a little video about a bunch of guys in EVE who take on and beat a bunch of other guys who outnumber and outgun them, and on their own turf. How? Through superior tactics, of course.

This video is dramatized, sure, and not all of EVE is like this all the time. But this is an example of how good it is at its best.

Anybody want to play internet spaceships for free for two months?

I'll help get you started.

Haven't done an update in a while.

Last time I talked about internet spaceships, I was in the depths of uncharted wormhole space with my corpmates. The alliance that corp was in has since collapsed in on itself after the guy at the top stopped playing, and the power vacuum that created made the whole structure just come tumbling down. I jumped ship and went back to the guys I used to fly with in The Graudates (TGRAD), and joined up with my old pal Hels, who some of you will know better as BLAHOrblah. There's many a story about the two of us flying spaceships all the way back in 06, but I'll tell those another time.

Anyway, the TGRAD leadership had put out feelers to all the Olde Guarde asking them to come back and teach the new crop of pilots, so we jumped onboard with that. Unfortunately we weren't told the whole story, that Morsus Mihi (the alliance TGRAD was part of) was in its death throes, and TGRAD wasn't anywhere near the bustling PvP corp we remembered.

So now Blah and I have sailed off into the sunset to form our own corporation, something we've both been wanting to do for a long time.



We're calling ourselves Team Fabulously Terrific Wonderment, or T-FTW. Some of you from RPFF may recognize the name.

Yep.

Been an interesting week for SotS2. There's been news coverage of the fact that they're patching it like madmen, but most of the other stories I've read glossed over the reason why it needs such rapid patching. Since not everybody was around when all this stuff was happening, I thought it was important that somebody establish a narrative. I tried to be as fair as I could, balancing my own opinions and emotions about the launch and a very, very strong desire not to give Kerberos a harder time than they're getting already, while also being, y'know, a journalist and not pulling any punches about reporting what actually happened. Said opinions and emotions were half the reason I waited a week to publish - the other half being I wanted to wait and see how things developed.

Anyway, this also marks the first time I've actually reported on something for HG. Achievement unlocked I guess.

Holy shit.

They got this bang-on.

Linkage

Basically, it's a MMOFPS by the same guys who did EVE Online that integrates into the existing EVE Online universe and interacts with the Tranquility server (which as some of you know runs on a single instance shard with a population of about 60,000).

From what I undersand it works like this. Zipp buys Dust and amuses himself with NPC-given missions to amass wealth and train a computer-controlled squad, maybe recruit some other players into his mercenary group, hopping from planet to planet in New Eden and fighting in the ongoing war between the four major powers. At some point, the NPC missions aren't enough for him, so he gets in contact with somebody who plays the spaceship game, me. I supply him with additional funds and equipment, load his squad onto a transport bound for null-security space, and drop him on my planets where he starts shooting at some other guys who've decided they want a piece of my lucrative ice-mining operation.

Here's a video not on that site I linked above, that gives a glimpse into where CCP wants to take this.

Anyway, Dust is in an unusual position as far as spin-off games go, in that by virtue of very design there is no possible way that it can stand on its own. Luckily, it's got one of the largest MMO communities backing it up, but the community is still debating whether PS3 gamers running around shooting their planets is something they want.

From where I sit, there's three ways this could go.

1) Ground warfare relies so heavily on Dust players that EVE players can't get anything done planetside unless they either own a copy of Dust, or know people that do, or can afford to pay them. Anti-orbit cannons regularly snipe passing ships and annoy the crap out of EVE players. EVE regresses to two years ago when you couldn't do anything with planets. Dust is initially a hit, but flops as EVE players abandon their operations and there's no "end-game" content for Dust players to work.

2) Between orbital bombardment from dreadnaught fleets and the massive buying power of high-end capsuleers, ground warfare becomes impossible for Dust players unless they know the big movers and shakers in the EVE universe. Frustrated with this seemingly insurmountable obstacle, Dust flops and EVE continues on its merry way.

3) CCP manages a delicate balancing act between the spaceship game and the mercenary game so that each interacts and relies on the other, without making things unfair for any one side.

Personally, I'm hoping for #3 but expecting #2.

Mechwarrior: Living Legends
Suskie's Crysis 2 review reminded me that I had this installed. Living Legends is a Crysis mod, still in beta, that converts the game into, well, a Mechwarrior game. It's a delightful romp with Timberwolves and Vultures and other classic mechs, perfectly to scale stomping around firing lasers and missiles at each other, or if you aren't that big on battlemechs you can pilot conventional tanks and aircraft and go toe to toe with the big kids. Or, grab a personal plasma cannon and hop around in your battle armor shooting mechs in the knees and planting C4 on their backs.

Still more EVE
Two weeks in our wormhole, and we're rolling in ISK. Which is to say, we've recouped our costs and have a brand-new, fully armed and equipped fleet of wormhole ships. Next item on the list: a Nyx-class supercarrier.

Solium Infernum
After stumbling upon Rock Paper Shotgun's LP thing I was fascinated with this game and decided to give it a go. It's magnificent; RPS's description of it as a "political wargame" is perfect; the intricacies and nuances of the Infernal bureaucracy is just as much an adversary as any of the other players.

I was going to do one of these last week, but computer shenanigans meant I spent a lot of it getting everything working again.

Moar EVE:
My corpmates and I stumbled across something quite exciting; a wormhole linking to a particularly lucrative and hard-to-find star system. Of the several thousand "wormhole systems" introduced in EVE's Apocrypha expansion about a year ago, there are fewer than a hundred classified as a "class 6", the richest and most profitable - and also deadliest kind. Making money in a wormhole system usually means loading out a fleet of combat ships and slugging it out with the Sleepers, extremely advanced autonomous drones left behind by the first humans to colonize New Eden millenia ago. When Sleepers go up, picking through the twisted carcasses of their wreckage yields a variety of useful salvage and materials which are used to build really cool shit. There's a high demand for Sleeper artifacts - partly because the high-tech ships and modules you can make out of them are really really cool, and partly because Sleepers are a bitch to kill.

Anyway, we spent the weekend doing that and made a big pile of spaceship dollars. That's going towards buying a fleet of better ships so we can make even more spaceship dollars.

Alien Swarm:
Revisiting this after a while of forgetting about it. Good for some quick lolz, and the Tesla cannon is fun.

Civilization 5:
Ever wonder what would have happened if the Roman Empire survived into the 20th century and became a nuclear power?

I have.

EVE:
Yep, the internet spaceship game. Back in action with a new video card, I hung out on the test server with some alliance pals trying a new setup for a Dominix battleship. It may have been the shitty fits other people were using, but the space shoe sucked everything dry with a battery of six energy neutralizers and a good time was had by all.

Dragon Age 2:
I wasn't sure if I wanted to be a rogue or a mage, so I started a new game twice and am alternating between, to get a sense of which style I like better. I think I'm leaning more towards mage (rather the opposite of the last game), possibly because Rock Armor looks badass and Tempest is just too much fun, but I'm not very far in - still raising money for the Deep Roads expedition. Oh, and I accidentally started hitting on Anders. We'll see how that ends up.

Star Ruler:
Picked this up again for the first time since Blah and I did that interview and review tag-team. It's grown up rather nicely, and there's a vibrant modding community with some really cool shit. The mod I'm playing with now, Expanded Universe, adds a couple of strike craft hulls, completely redoes the shield mechanics, and adds stargates!

You all make me jealous. Seriously. That's how good this week's submissions were.

I know, I know, it's crass, but I swear it's hilarious. And that I came across it accidentally (I was trying to come up with synonym aliases, ie Michael Stone to Mickey Bricks).

Here's the link. As the paragraph at the bottom warns, some might make no sense at all (such as "Badgering Cheetah"), while others will be hilarious(such as "Rippin' the one-eyed postal worker out of his denim cell").

Do share any gems you come across.