A New Home for Themed Challenges and Halls of Fame

Following the unexpected shut-down of the Bioware Social Network Forums, the Themed Challenges Group (previously mentioned in my N7 Day posts about Solo and Duo Themed Challenges) was forced to move to a different location (since, obviously, we refused to just lie down and bleed out).

Themed Challenges and Halls of Fame now constitute a dedicated site, Prestacious’ Challenges, hosted by the founder and leader of the group, a fabulous guy and a good friend, Prestacious. Along with the various challenge series, the new site also hosts the Gold Solo Speedruns Hall of Fame, and the Platinum Solos Hall of Fame (which is since recently under the management of yours truly).

The bulk of the Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer community has moved to BSN Unofficial Forums, so submissions for the Halls of Fame are mostly done there, in the Themed Challenges and Hall of Fame thread and the Platinum Solos Hall of Fame thread. However, submissions are also welcome on the Forum associated with Prestacious’ Challenges site.

Come visit us, get challenged and inspired, and get ready for the journey to Andromeda!

Amazing Space Art

By cosmicspark for the game Particle Fleet: Emergence.

Modding Skyrim to Perfection

I’m a great fan of The Elder Scrolls games. Morrowind was the first role playing game I ever played, the first game I ever modded, and for a long time, my undisputed favorite across all genres and flavors. Then came Oblivion, which was the first game to keep me obsessed for a thousand hours and the first game (or any form of entertainment) that had me write fanfiction. It’s no exaggeration to say that these games changed my life, and I don’t mean just my “gaming life”.

So it shouldn’t be difficult to imagine that I had great expectations from Skyrim. It was to be larger, prettier and better than its predecessors in just about every way imaginable – and mostly it didn’t fail to deliver. Yet, even though I got it immediately upon release and tried playing it twice, I couldn’t get into it, and I never finished it.

It is only now, with more than a hundred mods installed, that I’m finally able to enjoy Skyrim the way I always hoped to.

Continue reading Modding Skyrim to Perfection

The Music of Dragon Age: Inquisition

I got this game in preoder, but haven’t finished it yet; I started and quit the single player campaign twice (for reasons that are out of scope of this post), and mostly just played the multiplayer. But I feel compelled to speak about something I studied in detail nevertheless: its music. What follows is a somewhat extensive, but by no means exhaustive review; the entire soundtrack (without DLC) has some 40 tracks, all of them excellent to varying degrees, but these are the ones I come back to over and over again:

Eleanor Roosevelt

It’s your life — but only if you make it so. The standards by which you live must be your own standards, your own values, your own convictions in regard to what is right and wrong, what is true and false, what is important and what is trivial. When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else or a community or a pressure group, you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.

Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer: Themed Solo Challenges

Part 3 of Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer Revisited

I explained the mechanics of Themed Challenges in the previous post. Solos are in principle no different from duos — only they’re much harder to do.

In a way, I started playing this game solo. With the SP campaign finished twice, once immediately upon release and once again when the Extended Cut appeared, I was naturally curious about the MP, but at the same time I was horribly afraid to go online and play with random people. (Have I mentioned this was the first online game I’ve ever played?) So for the longest time I struggled on my own, on Bronze, playing the vanilla Human Soldier on Firebase White vs Cerberus and Geth, as they could be held for entire waves from a single defensive position. Well, entire waves 1 and 2. I’d die as soon as the objective on wave 3 made me move around. It was extremely frustrating and didn’t get me anywhere, since not many credits can be earned in incomplete games. But still I kept trying!

Continue reading Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer: Themed Solo Challenges