Woot!  I was able to complete the Mass Effect Trilogy before going on vacation! :-)

First the Good points about the game. The character I had fun mass effect 2 transferred over into mass effect 3. NICE! I think I started playing as a level 25. I am not sure but I think I decided to pick the infiltrator class again. This was pretty nifty. The story line and the direction was pretty awesome as well. I now realize that the games were designed as a trilogy so this all makes sense how they fit together. The searching fit artifacts mini games were pretty good but I decided to not tackle the entire galactic map. I am not sure that I would have completed the have had I taken this approach.

Some M'eh points: the only m'eh thing about the game we also the mini games. O was used to finding many spots on any given planet that had useful deposits of ore, and only having one thing per planet was a bit boring.

As far as achievements go, I earned 37 out of 68, which ain't bad! I am sure I can get more but I think I need a break from this game to complete some of my pile of shame. For the paramour achievement I decided to stick with Liara, my Mass Effect 1 love interest, but then Miranda showed up and I decided to test fate and romanced her. Somehow Liara found out and was cold towards Shepard afterwards. I guess in video games you can't be a player :-). It was nice however to have that tender moment with Liara just before the end.

As far as the ending goes, since I didn't have full military readiness (I was at 85 or 90%) I did not get the perfect ending. I sacrificed my Shepard in order to save the galaxy. My crew survived, the reapers are dead and the earth is saved. I guess ask things considered this was s good ending. The way Shepard was limping at the end I wasn't sure he was really going to make it (and he did not...at least in my ending).  The game reminded me a lot of Babylon 5, specifically the Vorlon/Shadow conflict and how they directed the evolution younger races/species. It also reminded me of the new Battlestar Galactica in the "technology is bad" aspect, and how technology will overrun your life and cause extinction. The whole premise though seems laughable that an older species would willingly prune species in order to prevent extinction.

All things considered the game was pretty awesome. I am wondering what the next mass effect will hold.

Over the weekend I decided to download and try out Star Wars: The Old Republic, a free to play MMORPG.  I am not a huge Star Wars fan, I neither love it, nor I hate it. I just like it.  So, with Star Trek Online being a little flaky this weekend I decided to download SWOTR and try it out. I was looking forward to it, but I didn't get very far with it. As a matter of fact I didn't even get to character creation! ;-)

The first major issue was the massiveness of the download.  Like Star Trek Online the main installer is pretty small, and then it connects to a patch server to download the real thing.  Well, the real thing for SWOTR was over 10GB! I have 20GB free on my Samsung slate, so I thought it would be OK, so I started downloading.  The download took forever, so I decided to let it do its thing over night and it would be ready for the morning.  Nope! It seems like I ran out of space on my hard drive and the install never completed.  For now, SWOTR is a back-burner project :) If anyone is currently a player leave a comment. I would be interested in your opinions.

I was looking forward to playing on the beta server (Tribble) of Star Trek Online in order to get a preview of the new Legacy of Romulus expansion.  Since I will be on vacation when it lands I was quite excited to see what Cryptic did with the story of the Romulans and how things progress.

Well, after an accepted application to join the beta (didn't seem like it was that big of a wait) I was able to access the test servers. I did have to download a 6GB patch (really??? Jeez) in order to do so, but that didn't bother me as much. My Samsung slate had 20GB free.  So I got to playing, and the experience was sluggish - no surprise, it is a beta server after all!  About an hour into play things got too sluggish and I got kicked out of the server...or rather the server was not responding so the client disconnected. I customized a character, a Romulan Science officer by the name of D'Nel Beret, did some ground missions, and started with a space mission before things went haywire. So far the story looks interesting. Looking forward to play more when I come back from vacation because I honestly don't see myself getting back into Tribble this weekend. The queue was a bit crazy to get into the beta of the game (10-15 minutes).

The bummer is that I can't get into the Holodeck (main server, non-beta) either. Star Trek Online seems to be...well....offline :-/