Mostly Mass Effect and Stuff in Our Galaxy

[damselfish]

Perhaps one of the most amazing things about Mass Effect is realizing how many celestial objects are actually in the Milky Way. I feel pretty knowledgeable, I know a lot about space, but I never had any idea some of those things were in the Milky Way-- like the Horsehead Nebula.

When you learn about celestial objects you learn about things like "galaxies" and "nebulae" in such a way that, at least for me, lead one to believe that they're separate things. A galaxy is a spinny collection of stars and activity. A nebula is a floaty blob of gas.

Realizing that nebulae are bits of floaty gas inside galaxies turned my entire conception of space upside down. And I grew up on this sort of space-related edutainment. If you look for information on the Horsehead Nebula, it'll tell you that it's in Orion, but it doesn't say that Orion is in the Milky Way. This would make logical sense since we can see it with the naked eye, but again, that's not how we're taught about space-- especially since you can also see a band of the Milky Way, so clearly the things not in that band aren't in the Milky Way, right?

In fact, the only way to connect the two is to google "where is the horsehead nebula in the milky way" and you finally get places explaining where it is in the galaxy. This would sound dumb, because of course most of these things are in the Milky Way! Do you realize how far everything else is from the galaxy? Well, yeah, except I heard about Andromeda (our galactic neighbor!) in the same breath as various nebulae, so I put them in similar categories.

Then I realized that, before Mass Effect, I'd never seen a map of the Milky Way. It never occurred to me to look for one. I know that we don't know what 80% of the stuff in space is, but I don't even know where the stuff we do know is. Talk about your gaps in the education.

Also on the Mass Effect subject (behind the times~): ffffffff ME2 is an exponential jump in difficulty compared to ME1. ME1 was a fun walk in the park, and my primary source of death was driving the Mako off things it should not be driven off of, and not realizing I had a timer. I'm an adept again in ME2, and holy balls it is a hard game on casual mode. Okay, I'm not dying a lot so I guess it's not hard as in "you're dead, again, scrub," but hard as in I spend too much time healing and babysitting my NPCs and the camera is less-than-optimal, making it not only hard to see things, but giving me some pretty gnarly motion sickness at times. Also the gross arterial "you're hurt!" image makes me want to vom even more, and I used to dissect hearts at the hospital so I am not a weenie on the gore front.

I am also not sold on the new battle system. Enemies are harder to hit, you spend more time reloading, and they're smarter (which, okay, whatever, ME1 gave me some bad habits re: having tea time behind cover and letting my health regen). I find it frustrating that I can get an enemy down to half, and they heal up all the way in the time it takes me to reload. My skills don't reload fast enough for them to be all that worthwhile for killing things because you auto-reload your gun once you run out of ammo instead of the old overheating system that let you burn up your gun and then waste things with skills, creating a seamless killing experience. I find that the older I get, the less patience I have for frustrating battle systems: I want to blow things up and move on to the next plot-point, but sometimes battle is enjoyable. I liked ME1's battle system. It was soothing. This is a lot of "aaaaargh stop coming up the stairs gaaaah stop taking cover where did that come from why are there more of you why are you healing my finger hurts from all this shooting I am annoyed but also kind of bored."

It takes me forever and a day to jump over things because Shep wants to crouch first and I have yet to figure out the magical w+space combo that will make her vault on approaching an obstacle. I still can't figure out sprint, and I keep hitting space when I want a menu. I'm playing on casual! I am only here to romance blue space ladies and swagger with my alien buddies and listen to Oz and Six bicker!

Also why you gotta be switching up my buttons, Bioware. You know I am a creature of habit like most nerds.