Hi All,

I’ve been exceptionally quiet over the past week or so due to Christmas happening.  I’ve got a whole load of posts lined up that I want to do and my Taste of Cinema article that I haven’t even started yet, plus some things I want to do to THE book and an extra story I want to write, set in that world, that I can publish and give away for free in line with the advice I got when I was sniffing around the Kindle Direct Publishing website.

Then this happened!

My wife, the wonderful Mrs A, went and bought me an Xbox One for Christmas.  To say I never saw that coming is a complete understatement. She also got me Mass Effect: Andromeda. I didn’t think I’d get a chance to have a go at this for quite some time. It’s been out for ages and I’d lost most of my interest due to the really poor reviews I’d seen since its release. By the time I’d unwrapped the packaging, however, I was so keen to dip back into that world.  Mass Effect is one of my favourite science fiction franchises of all time. If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you’ll know that I rate the Universe that the good people at Bioware created above illustrious competition like Star Wars and Star Trek in terms of its depth . I loved that story so much and got so much value out of all three games in the original trilogy that I just couldn’t wait to dive back in when I was given the chance.  It may not live up to the great heights achieved in the previous trilogy but, after about an hour of gameplay, it already feels great to be back. I’m going to keep a little diary going of my experiences as I go through the game. These are just some initial observations:

• The graphics are gorgeous and the controls seem to have changed very little, although I’m a little unsure still how to access the power/weapons wheel.
• I can’t remember what character type I went for. I think I went for technician. I preferred that option in my previous experiences in terms of gameplay.  A bit more thinking and less heavy weaponry.
• Combat hasn’t changed much from ME3 and it was quite easy to get headshots (maybe that was just because these new unknown aliens have big heads)
• Speaking of these new aliens, I hope I’ve done the right thing.  The first time I encountered one I got all excited and blew its head off. I hope that doesn’t come back to haunt me later on. Strangely, they’ve all been pretty hostile since then.
• I like the big jumps you can do, although I have overestimated the range a couple of times and ended up falling, falling!!
• Took me a while to figure out what the ammo dumps were.
• My wife is really fantastic. This is a great present!!
• I want to have a look at the multiplayer options and see if they’re as good as ME3. I’m not usually a multiplayer fan but I spent SOOO much time on ME3 multiplayer that it really increased the value for money of the game. I was still playing it earlier this year; that’s about five years after I bought the thing.

Anyway, it’s late and I didn’t want to write too much.  I’ll be posting more as I progress; hopefully with some screenshots.

Keelah se’lai,

Richard