🚀 go-pugleaf

>What Have You Been Playing... IN NOVEMBER 2016?

Mass Effect 2
    It's hard to shake a comfort-food image looking back at Mass Effect 2. 
Or reminisce like a Galaxy Quest actor about your time onboard:  "hay 
remember the stag party in the bar on Illium?  Those guys were a hoot!  And 
the seen-it-all world-weary bartender, har!"

And like an actor slipping back into a well-worn role, it felt natural 
resuming a routine of completing a small mission, checking mail, researching 
tech upgrades, then making the rounds and chatting up each of my crew, maybe 
sauntering back to the map to skip around to a few planets and drop some 
probes.

If I had one complaint it would be this sense of routine, and with the loss 
of my beloved Mako in the wreck of the Normandy, planet-scanning in 
particular became a vestigial, mindless task:  I still liked reading the 
detailed planet descriptions while imagining what the surface was like under 
the clouds, but the Mako and surface exploration really needs to return in 
ME3.  Recent ME3 trailers imply that 'fighting for resources' is emphasized: 
Good, but --

Combat itself I'll admit to paying little attention to -- playing on easy --  
other than heeding hints about expected enemy types and their 
strengths/weaknesses & checking weapon loadout.  Most of my time was enjoyed 
going through conversation trees surrounding loyalty missions, and hearing 
the crew's stories.  This is where ME2 really shined, learning the gameworld 
culture through reading and character interaction.  And choosing who to 
pursue romantically, of course (as femshep I went for Thane; Samara asked 
repeatedly not to be pursued, had to respect that)

Building this gameworld, fleshing out these characters, and doing all this 
writing takes much investment in talent and effort, and I could easily see 
Mass Effect 4 doing a mediocre job of it, in favor of console-friendly 
combat or mini-game, as occurred with Fallout 4.

As far as practical matters go, it never occurred to me to use Nexusmods. 
Rather I installed MEIUTM manually, with a tiny batchfile fix to make it and 
TEXMOD work with the Origin client (A modern installation howto using 
ME3Explorer & NMM I'll leave to others).  The only persistent crashes I 
saw -- namely when returning from the Shadow Broker base to the Normandy2 --  
were fixed with the following tip:

"The fix, is to rename the original 'MassEffect2.exe' to 
'MassEffect2Launcher.exe' and rename the original 'MEGame.exe' to 
'MassEffect2.exe'
THEN you create a shortcut to the new MassEffect2.exe, and add 
the -nomoviestartup parameter to the target line. Run as Administrator, and 
voila - no loading movies and I was able to complete the Kasumi DLC mission 
just fine."

To those playing ME2 for the first time, be sure to do all the 'loyaly 
missions' for each crew member, and purchase all the story-related DLC, in 
particular The Shadow Broker:  Hearing Ali Hillis' hypnotic voice-over of 
Liara once again, is not to be missed :)

rms