Illustrations are gratuitous Asari pinups, as that is a search term that has been used to find this blag. We like giving the Internet what it asks for.
The text is a pretty incoherent response to playing Mass Effect 2 which I composed when it first came out but never put down anywhere.
I'm a girl. I'm a girl gamer. I enjoy shooting things in the head with my space rifle. I enjoy saving the world with a kick-ass hero. I enjoy having an option for that hero to be a woman who gets to do all things that the male hero does. In short, I really like Commander Shepard.
I also like having love stories and personal relationships in games. Maybe that's girly, I don't care. I want the kick-ass, and I want the fluff. I want true role playing. I want my choices to count.
I really (mostly) liked how they did relationships in Mass Effect 1. You weren't forced into a relationship, you could choose whether to flirt (or respond to flirting). You only had three options, sure, and limited queer or alien options, but you get an almost-lesbian relationship with an alien, and that's a big first.
My choice, still, was Kaidan, a human man. I love Kaidan. Yes, I know, but I do. I liked him as a love interest. I found it sad that he was limited to being the possible love interest for the female Shepard only, but I could deal with that. (That's what fan fiction is for, after all;)
The relationship story arc was fulfilling, you had the choice of flirting with him or not, you weren't pushed into a relationship, and you got to have a sex scene! That was something new.
And then we get Mass Effect 2. The gang's all there, in the beginning you get to continue from where you left off, in the game as in the relationship and... yeah, here come the spoilers, but as the third game is out already, I figure you can deal with them.
Then you die, and wake up in what appears to be an alternate universe, but everyone else seems to be in denial about this. My co-bloggers have addressed this issue already, so I'll concentrate on why the game was so unfulfilling emotionally, in the context of the first game. (Not saying anything about the cardboard cutouts that you are offered as love interests in this game, nor about the fan service of Garrus and Tali.) (After all, nothing you said to either one during the first game affects how they behave in the second one at all. Garrus is a crazy vigilante in any case, and Tali is as crazy and genocidal as ever.)
You had (if you had) this deep connection with another person in the previous game, and as much as all of the relationship options spelled out that this might have been just a one-off, I would expect to get *some* reaction from the love interest in the next game.
Kaidan sends you an e-mail. When you meet him, he's the only one who finds it wrong that you're working with your old enemy, the Cerberus, and I was yelling, 'Thank you! I thought I was alone in this! Let me come back to the Alliance with you!' Do I get to do that? No. I get to invite him to join the terrorist organisation with me. "It'll be just like old times." What? I wonder he didn't deck me.
And then he sends you an e-mail saying 'maybe'. Maybe you could continue your relationship at some future date. I survived for weeks on that e-mail.
I never went through a relationship with Ash because I found her attitude problem and xenophobia quite unappealing. But I gather she has a similar reaction. (Why? She would fit right in with these human supremacists.)
What does Liara do? She's had a personality transplant, has given up her career as an archaeologist, and is organising assassinations. ...wait, what? She says, "Hi Shepard, heard you were alive after all, wanna help me choose which of my associates to murder?" The emotional connection, I can feel it.
Mass Effect has never been big on having your companions react to what's going on, but when my Shepard, having just seen her lover in for what for her was a few months, and for him two years and having been rejected by him, goes to talk to Garrus, who was around in the "old times"... what I wanted was a bloody hug, what I got was "Too busy to talk right now, come back later and I'll make a pass at you." Well, technically.
One thing they got right. If you choose to *not* romance any of the very straight love interest options you have, your last night before facing the Big End Fight is spent staring at Kaidan's (or who ever was your first game love interest) photo. Thank you. I felt that. I *felt* that. You managed to give me two moments of real emotional contact with the game. An e-mail and a photo.
Okay, Tali becoming officially part of your crew was touching but was ruined a bit (or a lot) by the fact that you could only achieve that by lying for her, losing important allies for nothing, and going along with her attitudes towards the geth. Doing it was out of character for my Shepard but for once I chose the game mechanic over the role playing (which, admittedly, is usually mostly in my head because the games don't support it) - I wanted her loyalty.
After finishing Mass Effect 2 I told people that the only thing that would make me want to buy Mass Effect 3 was if it gave me an option of getting back with Kaidan, and/or allowing the queer options.
Since it's boxing day, we'd best start with a picture of a boxer.
Her name is Fatima Adib, and like Batroc the Leaper and me, her martial art of choice is savate, in which she won the 2008 European Championship in her weight class. I ran into a picture of her while image searching "savate", so that's all I know. Isn't she cute?
**
And now, Minecraft. I complained earlier about the endermen in Beta 1.8, who would pick up blocks, including bedrock. While I was strongly tempted by the idea of putting out all the lights in my pit and seeing if the endermen would really dig a hole through the bedrock, I decided the smart thing to do is run away before endermen break all my stuff. So that's what I did.
I'm heading west, toward the sunset and away from Epic Island. As I'm going to be staying on the move, this will be a very visual post.
There's my first tower on the right, and the new tower on the left, flanking the rising sun. After spending most of the day walking west, I found a nice little cubbyhole with a small coal deposit in it, and decided to spend my first night there:
Here's what it looks like from the outside.
Turns out good old Mount Impossible, which I first visited ages ago, is just around the corner:
Here's the view to the west of Mount Impossible.
As I was looking at that lovely pine forest, I couldn't help noticing that there was rather a sheer drop below me...
That's where I took the previous screenshot from. Now, I'm no programmer, but it occurs to me that I might have encountered the edge where the terrain generated under the old system ends.
I'm not complaining; I think it's cool.
There was even a bit of a cave in the previous chunk, which opened onto the water but wasn't flooded by it:
Making an excellent location for an underwater base!
We move on, into the desert:
Since the desert looks kinda boring, I decided to walk through the woods next to it. That turned out to be more hazardous than I expected:
Here's another innovation: shears. As something of an animal rights person, I heartily endorse the new Minecraft, where you no longer get wool by punching sheep.
Eventually the forest gives way to a rolling plain, where I built a house. But what's that in the distance?
Shopping for presents? There's a lot of great second-hand and discount XBox 360 games out there, including ones I've played over the last year or so and have sort of meant to review on this blog but never got around to doing, so here they are. Pictures provided by the cast of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, or as I still maintain it should be known as, Dune 2 2 2 3.
Blood Bowl: Playing Cyanide's Blood Bowl is the most fun I've ever had with such a hideously badly made game. It's ugly, the interface is clunky, there are bugs galore and the overall quality is just appalling. While PC users got the "Legendary Edition" featuring all the teams from LRB5 except Chaos Dwarves (?!!), XBox players have to make do with only eight teams, but can download Dark Elves for Microsoft points. The AI, of course, is mind-bogglingly stupid, and you can't compensate for that by playing online as apparently that just doesn't work.
Even though the game is basically rubbish, and in places insultingly badly made, it's still damn good fun. There's some kind of real-time mode that I've never tried, because the basic game simply is Blood Bowl, and it delivers. Somehow the game is enjoyable enough that despite all its flaws, I like playing it. I'd say it's definitely worth picking up on the cheap.
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3: Around here, you can get this for something like 10e or less. Do, because although the single player campaigns are fairly short, they're great fun. For the ridiculously low price this is retailing for, it's great value for money.
F1 2010: Be clever and pick up the previous edition for cheap instead of dishing out an obscene 70e or whatever new games are being sold for these days. This is an awesome game. There are realism and difficulty settings that let you customize the driving experience, and you get to work on the car set-ups just enough to keep an F1 fan happy. When you turn everything up to as high a level of realism as you can handle, driving even a half-length Grand Prix is an awesome experience. I highly recommend it. The game makes you feel like you're driving an F1 car, and really, that's all you need.
Batman: Arkham Asylum: Now that Batman: Arkham City is out, do yourself a favor and pick up its excellent predecessor. The best superhero game by miles since that one decent Spider-Man game for the old XBox.
Space Marine: I may do a proper review of this yet, but for now, I'll just say that it apparently did poorly, like all GW games tend to, and is available on the cheap. It's definitely worth getting at a reduced price: if Gears of War was fun, it would be Space Marine. I'm thoroughly enjoying it.
I think that's about it. If you want more game reviews, read Arcadian Rhythms.
Okay. I'm going to write about Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, but before I do, there's something I have to get off my chest first. Namely, Jenny McCarthy. She got the role of Allied superagent Tanya in C&C:RA3, thus stealing Kari Wührer's job.
This is a little hard for me, because Jenny McCarthy has a place in my heart. She's the first woman whose pictures I remember searching for on the Internet. It wasn't called googling then, because Google didn't exist yet. One particular picture from one of her Playboy shoots, which I can't post here but features her in a bath, is actually the first piece of pornography I ever remember seeing. So in my books, she's really hot.
So I was troubled, to say the least, to learn that she'd taken up the cause of Andrew Wakefield. As near as I can tell, Wakefield is a fraud, who was struck off the UK medical register for dishonest and irresponsible conduct. To make a long story short, he fabricated research results to prove that a vaccine was causing autism in children, planning to make millions from related patents he held. Unfortunately for him, the hoax was blown.
Unfortunately for the rest of the world, he's managed to attract a rabid, cult-like following. Finnish readers can avail themselves of an excellent text on the topic, and English readers can consult the New York Times, who give us this soundbite:
Andrew Wakefield has become one of the most reviled doctors of his generation, blamed directly and indirectly, depending on the accuser, for irresponsibly starting a panic with tragic repercussions: vaccination rates so low that childhood diseases once all but eradicated here — whooping cough and measles, among them — have re-emerged, endangering young lives.
Wakefield has almost single-handedly revived the anti-vaccination movement. He and other anti-vaccination propagandists have managed to cause several moral panics against vaccinations, all of which have led to significant health problems. It's ironic that these anti-vaccination campaigns are providing us with some of the clearest evidence of the efficacy of vaccines. Similar concerns were raised earlier this year over Michele Bachmann's moronic comments on the HPV vaccine.
Despite this, Wakefield has created an anti-vaccination cult. Here's the New York Times again:
“To our community, Andrew Wakefield is Nelson Mandela and Jesus Christ rolled up into one,” says J. B. Handley, co-founder of Generation Rescue, a group that disputes vaccine safety. “He’s a symbol of how all of us feel.”
Since losing his medical license, Wakefield has depended on his followers for financing and for the emotional scaffolding that allows him to believe himself a truth-teller when the majority of his peers consider him a menace to medicine. The fact that his fans have stood by him through his denunciation may seem surprising, but they may find it easier to ignore his critics than to reject their faith in him. After all, his is a rare voice of certainty in the face of a disease that is, at its core, mysterious.
My impression of Wakefield is that he's a ruthless profiteer exploiting the distress of parents who have autistic children. I use the word "cult" advisedly, because from where I'm standing, Wakefield is behaving like a classic cult leader. It's interesting to note that the journalist who led the way in exposing him as a fraud disagrees.
You could read Deer’s collected body of research on Wakefield and come away with the conviction that Wakefield was an underhanded profiteer who exploited parents and abused their disabled children with invasive tests for the sole purpose of capitalizing on parents’ fears about the M.M.R. vaccine. (He applied, for example, for a patent for a diagnostic kit that could test for measles virus in the intestines.) But Deer does not think Wakefield was solely motivated by profit. He compares him to the kind of religious leader who is a true believer but relies on the occasional use of smoke and mirrors to goose the faith of his followers. “He believed it was true,” Deer says of Wakefield’s theory of M.M.R., but he was also willing to stretch the truth to get more financing for more research. Deer theorizes that Wakefield’s maneuverings were all rationalized by his conviction that he was right: “He would prove it next time.”
Crusading academic or medical cult supremo, what's unquestionable is that Wakefield's stand on autism isn't currently supported by science. He's taken the conspiracy theory route, claiming that his detractors slander him, falsify research results and even lie about non-vaccinated children's deaths to discredit him because they're in the pay of a giant conspiracy by the medical industry. As Cracked.com has noted, pharmaceutical companies are one of the most popular "evil corporation" strawmen out there today. Even if that weren't the case, believing Wakefield's conspiracy theory requires the same leap of faith that all of this "the truth is being suppressed" nonsense demands: taking the word of one discredited researcher and his personal following over just about everyone else who's ever studied the topic. Sorry, Mr. Wakefield.
The foreword to Wakefield's book Callous Disregard was written by Jenny McCarthy, who's been very active in promoting Wakefield's views in the US.
McCarthy claims that her son had autism, but was cured by chelation therapy, a medical procedure that removes heavy metals from the body. Hockey fans might remember a goalie called Steve Passmore, who had chelation therapy to overcome severe heavy metal poisoning he had from drinking contaminated well water as a kid.
It's been claimed that mercury poisoning can trigger autism, although the scientific consensus is that this is untrue. Some experts have speculated that McCarthy's child may well have had Landau-Kleffner syndrome, a rare childhood consition often misdiagnosed as autism. Certainly McCarthy's claim that chelation therapy cured her son of autism flies in the face of medical science. In fact, chelation therapy is actually dangerous if used on patients who don't have heavy metal poisoning; it can cause hypocalcaemia; one 5-year-old autistic boy was killed by chelation therapy through hypocalcemia.
Despite the scientific evidence, McCarthy continues to promote the link between autism and vaccines. Her activities earned her James Randi's Pigasus Award for "the performer who fools the greatest number of people with the least effort in that twelve-month period". Earlier this year, Salon.com called her "a menace", and given that her continuing anti-vaccination campaigning is clearly having a detrimental effect on public health, it's hard to disagree.
McCarthy is unfazed. As recently as this past January, she defended her stance in a column for the Huffington Post, in which she claimed the decisive debunking of Wakefield's work was "one dubious reporter's allegations", and appealed to her authority as a mother. In her worldview, her conviction that her knowledge as a mother, and the determination of innumerable parents of autistic children to find someone to blame for their child's condition, trumps medical research. That's a truly monstrous idea.
**
So you see my problem. I think she's gorgeous, and I remember seeing her smoking hot Playboy pictorial at an impressionable age, but she really is a menace to children's health care. I don't imagine that what I post in this blog makes the least bit of difference to how the world works, but as a point of personal ethics, I'd feel it would be wrong of me to post pictures of her online without saying something about her misguided, downright dangerous personal crusade against science. She's wrong, and should realize that what she's doing is hurting and even killing children by persuading their parents to leave them unvaccinated.
She's still hot. I just wish she'd actually think about the children, and maybe a little about science. Then I could enjoy pictures like this one with a clear conscience.
To begin, a disclaimer to avoid misunderstanding. I have no knowledge or opinions of the Mass Effect 2 designers' and developers' actual political views, so I'm not talking about them. What I intend to show is that Mass Effect 2 tells a story that shares many characteristics with the way white supremacist movements see themselves, and co-opts the player into sharing that narrative. Contains spoilers.
Despite being a big fan of the first Mass Effect, I really didn't like its sequel. I found ME2 incredibly disappointing in many ways, and I share many of the views put forward in this article. While the gameplay in itself was a big letdown, what made the game actively distasteful for me was the way it not only trampled all over continuity from ME, but it does this to make you participate in a white supremacist story.
In Mass Effect, the player encounters a rogue Alliance black project called Cerberus, which aims to create super-soldiers. During the course of the game, it becomes obvious that they've gone totally insane, fighting Alliance personnel, including the player character, and perpetrating all kinds of atrocities. They're basically Unit 731, only worse. In fact, if your character has the Sole Survivor background option, it turns out that the people responsible for the death of your former unit, who spent years torturing the only other survivor, are in fact Cerberus. Because the first game is quite immersive, I have to admit that by the end I figured my character had a fairly negative opinion of Cerberus, to say the least.
Having said that, it was a bit of a shock for me when the Cerberus we meet in Mass Effect 2 seems to have nothing to do with Cerberus from the previous game. In the second game, Shepard dies and is resurrected by Cerberus to work for them. The Cerberus operatives you meet enthusiastically explain to you that you've got it all wrong: Cerberus isn't a bad organization at all! They're an independent human supremacist group, bankrolled by a reclusive millionaire, and not some horrible terrorist organization that murdered your entire unit!
What makes the game truly shocking, and totally killed the series for me, was that your character is forced to go along with this. Yes, that's right: my character, who's an Alliance military officer and has seen first hand what Cerberus does, who indeed was mainly known before the events of the first game as the only survivor of a Cerberus atrocity, is now gladly putting on a Cerberus uniform.
It gets worse when you're introduced to your new ship, which is exactly like the old ship. There are even some of your old crew members on board, but they all seem to have entered some strange parallel universe, having renounced their former loyalties, if not even their personalities, and gladly joined a paramilitary human supremacist organization. If this smacks rather strongly of rewriting history in general and Holocaust denial in particular, that's because the game does. What's worse is that this isn't just a couple of characters talking. It's not like this is their version of what Cerberus is; instead, this seems to be the common view of everyone you encounter on Cerberus. Back in Mass Effect, Cerberus and its atrocities were headline news; now it seems collective amnesia has set in, to such an extent that the in-game documentation now gives a whole new view of Cerberus. You're also effectively prevented from seriously questioning it; such topics as the Sole Survivor background being pretty much taboo.
The absolute nadir of the game comes when you encounter a former squadmate from ME, who asks you how you can possibly be working with a disgusting terrorist organization like Cerberus. This isn't even lampshading, it's much worse: your character is being called out on the game's retconning. What are you supposed to say? My answer: because the game forced me to. I can't even begin to imagine what my character would say, because I'd pretty much lost all immersion in the world by then.
The jarring continuity problems are so bad that the most sensible explanation for ME2 would seem to be that your character wakes up in a parallel universe. I've been struggling to find a good analogy to how the rebranding and whitewash of Cerberus felt for me. It's rather like if one were to write a story about an Israeli commando who wakes up from a coma to find that his unit has defected en masse to Hamas, and explain to him that Hamas isn't a terrorist organization at all but a pacifist charity. Or a British left-wing pacifist deciding that maybe the SS isn't so bad after all and joining it when he's told that the Holocaust was really just a lie. And Josef Mengele, who would have fit right in at Cerberus, was a good Samaritan.
**
If it was just that Mass Effect 2 is really bad at continuity, I could just chalk it up to the generally juvenile and subpar quality of the writing, which produces memorable scenes like this one:
The "ass" in "Mass Effect" seen in the picture is one of the new characters, whose only real game functions are to explain away your previous notions of Cerberus and, well, that. Speaking of characters, most of the recurring characters are also more like parodies of themselves, from Tali and Garrus both actively ridiculing the previous game and delivering frankly embarrassing fan service, to the totally ludicrous transformation of Liara that reminds me very strongly of the Mad parody of Steven Soderbergh's Traffic. Liara's reinvention as a gangster and "information broker", and Garrus's new personality as a sort of lame Turian Punisher, are not only ridiculous but again, offensive to the previous game. Remember the whole side plot with Garrus, where you investigate an unsolved case from his C-Sec days? Where you can guide him in either the "paragon" or "renegade" direction? Turns out you needn't have bothered, because he's going to go and become the Turian Punisher either way.
One of the new NPCs you recruit is Jack, a powerful biotic who was the victim of cruel Cerberus experiments and, unsurprisingly, hates them. You get the same old propaganda line from Cerberus and their on-board cheerleader: the great leader didn't know about it and so on. That may be an attempt at narrative ambiguity; either you believe them or you don't. But the problem with that is that you're not allowed to act on it in any way.
By the way, biotics have been completely nerfed, so you don't actually need her for anything. She only has special cutscene powers.
More jarring universe-breaking follows when you meet the ship's AI. That's right; in the first installment of the series, everyone completely freaked out when AIs were even mentioned, and now here they are, happily living on a ship with a built-in AI. The only person who even notices is Tali, and even she can just be talked out of it. Then again, you can talk her into happily co-operating with a Geth, too.
But the problem isn't just poor continuity: what's being done with Cerberus is morally distasteful as well. In Mass Effect, Cerberus was an organization dedicated to human supremacy and the creation of a "super-man" in order to defeat the aliens and conquer the galaxy for man's living space. Sound familiar? It should, because Cerberus seems to be rather directly based on the SS.
So in Mass Effect 2, you're revived by the SS, and two cheerful SS officers explain to you that you've got it all wrong! They have nothing against the Jews or Slavs as such, it's just that they're concerned with maintaining Germany's racial purity and standing in the world community. Of course, some individual SS members or member organizations, even, may have undertaken some suspicious activities in the past, but those have probably been misrepresented and anyway, they can't keep track of everyone. (The really atrocious examples are simply ignored, and you're not allowed to ask.) What matters is that their leader is a great man with a great vision for the future of our race. Surely you'll put on this SS uniform and follow his orders!
**
So right at the start of the game, you're forced to go along with rewriting history in a manner that rather too strongly resembles Holocaust denial. It then starts getting worse. Soon enough, you're initiated into the main plot of the game. Evil aliens are abducting thousands of people, and the Alliance government doesn't care. Therefore, it's up to the heroic racist militia of Cerberus to stop the evil aliens and save humanity. You see? It turns out the racists were the good guys! The government is corrupt, and its entanglement in a sinister one-galaxy government means it doesn't care what happens to ordinary folks. Luckily, the racist militia does care, and by defying the government, they save lives from the alien threat.
This is a narrative that could have been cooked up for a video game by a Midwestern racist militia or a European neo-fascist group. The main character is a brave government agent fighting on the side of good. He's resurrected by a racist group he's previously fought against, but finds out that after his death, the government has stopped caring about the people. Some of his former colleagues are now members of the racist group, and talk about their alienation with the goverment and its cover-ups of their heroic deeds and the coming alien menace. Only the enlightened elite that make up this militia group understand that the government's destructive policies of multiculturalism are leading to the destruction of the human race, but for saying this they're branded as racists. So the main character realizes that the racists are, after all, really the good guys, and the corrupt government is evil. He gladly joins a racial supremacist organization and battles the evil aliens.
In sum, Mass Effect 2 is the most disgustingly racist game I've ever played in my life.
Oh, sure, there are aliens on your team. That's not historically inappropriate; there were all sorts of nationalities in the Waffen-SS, too. The plot of the game still is that the government doesn't care if thousands of people are dying, because it's more interested in covering up alien attacks for some senseless nefarious reason, and people need armed anti-government racists to protect them from foreigners. I'm surprised they don't make you plant a truck bomb at an Alliance office building.
From what I've heard, in ME3 Cerberus will once again be your enemy. I wonder how they're going to pull that off. Retcon the retcon? Unless ME2 is rewritten out of existence (it was all a dream!), the fact will still remain that while the Alliance (federal government) stood by and did nothing, Cerberus (white supremacist militia) saved thousands of people from the aliens. Never mind that this whole notion of the Alliance being so corrupt and evil that they don't care about people any more comes out of nowhere.
I'd like to take this opportunity to suggest some more plot points for Mass Effect 3, in line with the new creative direction taken by ME2:
- the Alliance bans firearms and sends squads of aliens to collect them from human patriots - main character discovers the "Protocols of the Elders of the Volus", proving the Volus are secretly allies of the Reapers - the Council races join forces to create a New Galactic Order, a socialist one-galaxy government - the New Galactic Order brands all humans with a barcode and bans the non-coded from buying and selling - main character finds out that an ultra-secret cult, the Space Masons, secretly controls the Alliance
There's a lot of mileage to be covered here. The game could be called Mass Effect 3: The Shepard Diaries.
**
Mass Effect 2 was an insultingly bad game. If you were a fan of the first Mass Effect, ME2 went out of its way to slap you in the face. Instead of a dynamic, ambitious CRPG, we get a second-rate Gears of War clone that occasionally masquerades as a racist adventure game. Oh, and don't forget the planet-scanning mini-game, which was almost as much fun as stabbing yourself with a rusty knife.
The game also manages to be disgustingly sexist. As part of your crew, you have a sort of SS yeoman, who, of course, is a cute girl. If you get talking with her, it's possible for your character to develop a kind of romantic sub-plot with her. The consummation? A kiss? A sex scene? No.
You get to use her as a cabin ornament.
It's literally sickening. And, of course, there are no more same-sex romance options, because in the Space SS, that's just wrong.
In this hyper-sexist environment, what was merely poorly executed in the first game becomes actively troubling: every alien race is made up of a single gender. The only exception is the quarians, who seem to come in male and female; in neither of the games do we encounter a single krogan, salarian or turian female. On the wiki, we can have some reasons: the salarian "females are cloistered on their worlds out of tradition and respect". The krogan: "Female krogan rarely leave their home worlds, focusing on breeding in an attempt to keep krogan numbers from declining too quickly. The few remaining fertile females who can carry young to term are treated as prizes of war, to be seized, bartered or fought over." And even though there's no "fluff" justification for never meeting a turian female, we just...don't.
In the first game, the stated reason for never seeing a turian female was, as per the wiki, insufficient time and resources. I can believe that, and I'm certainly not saying that every permutation of alien race and gender needs to be represented in every sci-fi game. Still, for every major alien species we meet, the females are cloistered on their homeworlds or kept as chattel, or are just inexplicably absent. The quarians are the only exception, and when it comes to the more exotic aliens, gender isn't even mentioned but the assumption seems to be that everyone is male. The more unusual alien species are confined to brief walk-on roles, so they're not very relevant. Notable among them are, of course, the volus, a mysterious race of merchant profiteers with prominent noses whose race is denied membership in the galactic council because it's inferior.
And then there are the asari. Even though the asari have only one gender, the in-game Codex describes them as an "all-female" race, surely a mindless statement. The Orion slave girls of Mass Effect, the asari look and act like blue-skinned human women. They're promiscuous bisexuals who, despite looking very human, are inexplicably sexually desired by all of the major races of the Mass Effect universe. The asari can be found throughout the galaxy as strippers and prostitutes, and the game makes sure to bring some loose blue women your way for flirtation and more regularly.
So each major race maps nicely onto a gender. The turians, krogans and salarians are all men, and the asari are all women. The former provide NPC soldiers and scientists, while the asari get by on their biotic powers. As a point of note, while ME1 included a female soldier, in Mass Effect 2 your squad members divide neatly along gender lines. The men are soldiers or scientists, or at best semi-biotics, while the women are biotics, plus a thief added in the downloadable content. In other words, in ME2 women need special powers to be useful team members, while men can just pack a gun and come along.
Yes, it's a man's life in the Mass Effect galaxy.
So, if you've always wanted to be a space nazi, heroically rescuing the overwhelmingly white and heterosexual human race from evil space foreigners, this is the game for you. It made me want to vomit.
Earlier, I explained about my lighthouse problem: to build a lighthouse with a lasting fire, I'm going to need some netherrack, which is only found in the Nether. Or, in other words, hell. So that's where I'm going.
If I'm going to build a portal to hell, I'm not just going to stick it in my basement or something. I can do better than that!
If you could see anything in this picture, you would see my underwater tower:
Using the map, I picked a spot along my subway track that was at about the deepest point of the expanse of ocean east of Epic Island, and started digging up. Building an underwater tower from the bottom up presented some interesting engineering challenges, which I was able to overcome.
I then built a glass-lined tunnel out to a flat spot on the seabed, where I erected my dome:
In my books, that's a suitably dramatic place for a portal to hell. Here's what it looks like from the surface, with Epic Island in the background:
Building the damn thing is a bother in itself as well, as it needs to be made of obsidian. Naturally occurring obsidian is rare and hard to mine, so the easiest way to procure some is by using lava. After hauling bucketfuls of lava over, the portal is finished:
All you need to do is set it on fire, and voilá:
Just walk right on in.
**
The Nether is scary. It's almost pitch dark and there are creepy moaning noises. My immediate purpose in coming here is easy to achieve: pretty much all of the ground is netherrack. But now that I'm here, I feel obliged to explore. This is where I've landed:
The glowing blocks are glowstone, which is the best artificial light source in the game: it gives off more light than torches, and also works underwater. Since I'm here, I gotta get me some of that. Only, here's the problem:
It's all above a giant lava lake. Sure, you can get to it, but it's nerve-wracking:
After I pocketed some glowstone and netherrack, it's time to make my way back to the portal...
...and get the Nether out of here. And finally, a lighthouse:
