Gaming Goals 2011 - Week Two

It's been a pretty good week in terms of productivity on my Xbox gaming goals. Since my last update, I've completed Limbo and Mass Effect 2 (the latter was just finished about 15 minutes ago.). I racked up 87% of the achievement points for ME2, and 90% for Limbo, which goes a long way towards bringing up my overall gamerscore to a 35% average.

My gamerscore currently stands at 72,755.

I'll have a review coming for Mass Effect 2, but there were some choices made by the developers that were kind of awkward for players who played the first game. They don't affect the review, because they were story choices and didn't affect the gameplay, as they could have easily replaced entire cast from first game and not had any problem. But the lack of interaction between the returning crew members was unfortunate. That's not to say there wasn't any... Garrus and Tali had a hilarious conversation, reminiscing about the elevators from the first game, as I wandered around the (totally redesigned and much much smaller) citadel level. I went out of my way to bring the two of them on missions together, but there just wasn't much acknowledgement of each other.

And what was with Liara's character? A shy, withdrawn archaeologist has suddenly become a intimidating badass (for the most part) information broker? I just didn't buy that at all. They should have written something into the first one that could have evolved into this, but as it is...

And finally, this is a problem I have with most squad-based RPGs. It does not make sense for most missions to only go in a group of 3. Sure, there are a couple of stealthy, infiltration type of missions and the smaller the group the better. But when an assault team is needed, the bigger the better. And only being able to fit 3 people in the transport isn't an excuse, because at one part of the story, all of your characters are loaded into the shuttlecraft, so they'll conveniently be away when the ship comes under attack.
The final mission does a good job of explaining the need to split up into squads to accomplish different task, always leaving you with a group of three... which they didn't bother explaining why you couldn't have a bigger group since a couple new crew members were added via DLC.
I would love it if Mass Effect 3, and other games for that matter, would come up with a good solution to the group-of-three ridiculousness. Maybe a bigger squad, and during points in a mission you'll get separated from part of your team, leaving you with randomly assigned squad members. I like randomness, makes replays more fun and interesting.

DC Universe Online releases tomorrow, and if the snow doesn't stop the UPS guy, I hope to have the game by the evening hours. Next week, I'll report on how well this new game captures my attention, and how much my Xbox gets ignored because of it.