I have a confession to make. I’ve never completed Mass Effect. I do own it, in fact, I have owned the Limited Edition of it since its day of release and did play it, and loved it, a lot until in my infinite wisdom, when my friend Lee bought his Xbox360, offered to lend him “any game you like, any at all”, to which he promptly picked Mass Effect, thus ruining my momentum in playing it. He actually took it and in fairness, played it, completed it, and loved it, for over 3 months, so it is a little hard to be overly annoyed because he did love it and it welcomed him into the wonderful world of Xbox360.

I always intended to go back to it, I even bought the ‘Bringing Down the Sky’ downloadable content as soon as it was released and continued to feature it in my most recommended 360 games lists over the last couple of years. I have decided to go back to it because of Mass Effect 2.
I’m not blind, I knew Mass Effect 2 was coming, hell, my friend Neil left a job at Bizarre Creations, moved to Canada to work for BioWare on Mass Effect 2. It’s not even that I’ve not had enough time to fit it in over the last couple of years, despite other fantastic games such as BioShock, Fallout 3, Gears of War 2, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, etc… It’s just that… well, I don’t know, I’m stupid I guess.

All throughout this period of time, right down to the impending release of its sequel, I’ve had one thought in my head, do I continue from where I am, quite progressed, certainly character developed the way I wanted to be, and possibly forget about all the wonderful nuances  that the game offered when I originally played it, or do I take one huge leap backwards, start from scratch and take it all in?
To give full quality to the continuation of the story line in the second game, released this Friday in the UK, I decided that I really, really should be starting from the beginning because my knowledge of the story can only lend to the quality of story from the second game, so that’s what I’ve done, Commander Shepard circa February 2008 is no more, instead he has been re-built, although not quite better, stronger or faster… yet.

Anyone who has played Trials HD and gotten to the latter stages of the game, the extreme tracks, will know that one track is so much harder than the others, insanely so, that track being Inferno II.

That track has caused more curse-words, temper tantrums and thrown items than any other in the entire game, and quite honestly it got to the point that I was certain I wouldn’t be able to stomach the completion of this game and notch up the ‘Demon on Wheels’ achievement for completing all the tracks.

It’s not often I’ll make a post for the completion of one single achievement, but this one I felt totally deserved its place. It took me well over 1000 attempts (more than likely 2 or 3x more than that).

All I can say is, ‘Wahooooooo!’

I’ve never been overly lucky (at least outside of perfect health) certainly not close to some people I’ve known who seemed to find fortune riding shotgun with them through this journey called life, winning things here and there and up until the age of 16 the only thing I’d won was a free Mars bar, which was on the inside of a Mars bar I’d just eaten, which was ridiculous, because after all, who wants to eat back-to-back Mars bars?

Things however have changed some what in these past 12 months, lady luck has most certainly been on my side in the Twitterverse (a terminology horribly applied to describe the world of Twitter) where I have won quite a few things, some of a nominal value, others of a much better standard. Lets just say, for free, I’ve seen prizes well in excess of £300, which by anyones standard is a bit of a result.

I’ve won an indie game for PC thanks to those fantastic folk over at Resolution-Magazine, to whom I subscribe £2 a month to for the fantastic articles they put in, so a big applause to @lewisdenby and co. over there. I’ve won a t-shirt from @CorporalKitty which I’ve never seen, but did win :p, those are the cheaper returns, both of which are great and all, but only the beginning of a rather successful 2009.
In June I entered a competition by @PS3attitude, a fantastic PS3 based website who created a rather novel easter hunt through their site for clues which ultimately led to a keyword for the prize, those who successfully entered would get the chance to be randomly drawn for some e3 goodies from the 2009 expo. I was one of 2 people lucky enough to win one of these bundles. Among the prizes were 4 shirts (Red Steel II, Assassins Creed II, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and Battlefield 1943), some Battlefield 1943 sunglasses, a flying monkey, some flashing USB lights, a USB reading light, a DS game carry case and many, many more randomly wonderful prizes which you couldn’t put a price on, but the shipping alone was $60 from the US.

Then came the motherload, yesterday this arrived:

Continue reading ‘Yay me!’