jimmuhpage

Spring break just so happens to start this Friday. Aw yeah.

Pointless achievement of the day. Level up N7 rank to 120 in a demo. Mixed emotions.

Yeah, the Widow goes with anything. Anything at all. Whenever I try Gold, I go with salarian infiltrator and a Widow. Headshot damage goes through the roof while cloaked. And cloaking before reviving and de/activating objects around the level is extremely useful.

Vanguard has an ability called Nova that, if it works on SP the same way as it does on MP, essentially makes you invulnerable to all enemies except the ones who can assassinate you at close range, and turrets, if there are more than a couple in the area. Essentially, you have to level up your class so that Biotic Charge refills your barriers 100% and Nova only uses up 50% of your barriers. Since Nova only runs on barrier, there's no cooldown for it. Use small weapons and Biotic Charge will have cooled by the time you're done with the second Nova. Biotic Charge, Nova, Nova, repeat. It's how I got my Vanguard class to level 20 in the demo. Lot of fun, except your teammates might complain that you're stealing all their kills. Which is true.

Trying to finish my last proper Shepard in ME2 before the 6th. 2 days ago, no Cerberus Daily News. Today, a message about Khar'Shan, the batarian homeworld, going dark. I wonder if they'll do one every day or just leave that one up.

So, I'm trying to max out my N7 rank, but I'm not enjoying playing as a turian sentinel at all. Instead, I tried using the human sentinel with warp/throw combo. It's not effective enough to warrant trying silver or gold (which Ethan, a couple friends, and I accomplished earlier today ), especially since it means you're putting less points into tech armor, but man is it fun. Maximize the area of effect for biotic explosions and you can easily get a quadruple kill on bronze, with a fireworks show to boot . And my favorite censorship was the first one, Vega's "not supposed to $%#! you either" lol

The Claymore. It hits with a LOT of power, but it has only one shot per reload and takes forever to reload as well as being extremely heavy, maybe even heavier than the Widow. And yes, the Carnifex is indeed among my two favorite weapons right now. I either go with just a Widow or just a Carnifex, if I need more fire rate. The only exception is my human soldier, where I can't not take my Mattock. My sweet'n'sexy Mattock X Hmm, I already don't like the scope on the Tempest, I imagine the Hornet won't be one of my favorites. I remember not liking the Revenant too much in ME2, I guess I'll have to try it out once I unlock it.

Finally. Playing really late last night, I told my buddy, "this is my last game," and then I unlock the asari adept, so I had to play another game, and immediately after that, I unlocked the krogan soldier. I was too tired to play another match, but it finally happened. **single tear** As far as lvl I unlocks I'm missing, I think the Revenant and the Hornet are all that remains. I'm not expecting too much out of those though, anyone really like either of them?

It's wrong that it's day 1 paid DLC, but I doubt it's that meaningful. Also, I don't buy many (new) games at all; I'm not gonna boycott the one game that I am actually planning on buying this year.

Deception was written before the demo came out, but I have a feeling Dietz may have gotten one thing right about the Mass Effect universe... Edit: NSFW

I unlocked the drell Vanguard last night. Now just the 2 coolest ones left: asari adept and krogan soldier...

That's pretty cool. I'm getting the Limited Edition anyways, but it's nice to know they still do unnecessary things for the fans. Also, he tries to cover the online pass code, but then leaves it on the corner, lol. EDIT: And I don't know how to embed youtube videos... Thanks Dean

One thing I liked about the book that came with the Limited Edition was a paragraph in the afterword:

Deception, yeah. This one dude is almost done with a rage comic version of it. The accuracy in them is astoundingly hilarious. http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=462110 The signature on the first post has all the released chapters so far.

The third novel, Retribution, which occurs between ME2 and 3, has Anderson out and about doing Shepard-y things, so he's not completely out of shape. Also, there was Deception... but it never happened, so it doesn't matter....

I love my Mattock far too much to ever use any other rifle. I have Mattock IX and am very happy with it, but when I use a power-heavy character, my Carnifex I satisfies me to no end.

Last night, a buddy of mine unlocked both krogan soldier and asari adept. Jealous does not begin to describe my state of mind last night. One thing I noticed about the lack of rolls in turians and krogan is that while turians storm slower than humans, krogan have ridiculous health and shields AND run faster than even drell. EDIT: Oh, and while turians can at least roll from cover to cover, krogan can't.

The only part I didn't like about the Sentinel was the lack of crowd control. If I have teammates backing me up, I can take anything down. Scoped Carnifex headshots are fantastic for taking out Guardians (and everything else). Not being able to roll as a turian still bums me out though.

See, I only upgraded the default classes with recruit packs. Granted, I've yet to unlock any class at all with Veteran packs, but I'd assume other races would be uncommon or rare. The Bioware forums have a couple threads about this (most people dislike the system, but some feel it forces you to vary your game, with the word "force" being used in a good light...), and quite a few of them said they unlocked other races with veteran packs. I just wanna play as an alien, at this point, I don't even care which one...

Yup, open to everyone If you wanna play on xbox right now, I'd love to play with someone willing to communicate and COOPerate...

I don't know if we should have different threads for different platforms, but I'm down for playing the demo's multi on Xbox right now. Just add my gt.

The ads have always been there, but in my opinion, they've gotten less intrusive in this last update. In the original blades, they were small clickable banners in the marketplace tab if I recall correctly. I also seem to remember an option to disable them, turning them into blank, useless buttons. At one point, I think it stopped working; you could set ads to disabled, but they would appear anyway. At least, that's what I think happened to me (in recent times, I've learned I have a terrible memory ). NXE made the ads bigger and added muted videos that played audio when highlighted and took up a selection spot that was often in the way, requiring one extra "right" or "left" input than otherwise required. The exception was if you knew what you wanted wasn't in your current "page," in which case you could skip to the next one with the bumpers. These ads were present in multiple channels: Spotlight, Games, Video, Music and maybe another one or two. There were usually two ads per channel. I also remember some people criticizing that when setting "boot to dashboard" while online, the console started on the spotlight channel instead of My Xbox channel, requiring an extra push of the thumbstick to go to the generally most visited channel. Some people specifically said they wanted it to start on the play disc button, but then wouldn't you rather just set "boot to disc?" With this new update, the home tab condenses the spotlight channel to the "giant box" in the center and starts with the "disc tray/play game" button highlighted. The giant spotlight box is emulated in almost every tab, except optimized to show content relevant to that tab, e.g. new albums in music tab, new movie in video tab, etc. Ads are present in 2 places that I've seen so far (haven't really checked every nook): in the bottom right corner of almost every tab, including game marketplace tabs, and the rightmost panels of the first page in a Bing search. I have yet to see an ad in any of the giant boxes. There really is no reason to highlight any of the ads that I've seen. If you want to see what's to the right of any ad, the right bumper will send you to the next page. If you like manually scrolling though every item, you can still hit RB to skip the last panel with the ads. I don't want to get into the argument of whether there should be ads in a paid service. Obviously, it'd be nicer if they weren't there. I just don't see why people picked now to make an even bigger deal out of it than last time. The ads are much less intrusive this time around. Sure, they take up space that could have been used to display more information, but they don't bother me in the least. In fact, I actually checked out the Chuck Norris WoW ad. I mean, it had Chuck Norris in it. How could I not? It was terrible, and I stopped watching it before it was even over, but watching it was a choice I made, not forced upon me so I could get to what I actually wanted. And that's more than I can say about watching live cable tv. P.S.: Just did a quick check before hitting post, and there is a correction I'd like to make. The music tab's advertisement is not in the bottom right corner. It is actually closer to the left side. While it does make it a bit more intrusive, it's still clearly labeled as an ad and does not require any extra inputs to reach what you may desire.

If I remember correctly, before this update, quick launch had 2 tabs: recent, and latest downloads. Now, the relabeled quickplay has a third tab: "All." It lists all your games in a list alphabetically. I don't currently have any demos of non-arcade games on my hard drive, but if you hit Y, all your trial games disappear from the list. And since quickplay is available from the Guide, you don't even need to quit any game, video, etc. to check it out. Just FYI.