Deus Ex: Human Revolution I got this game and a bunch of other games a short while ago and I felt this really deserved a review.
This game is what Crysis 2 would have been if it was an RPG. It has stealth mechanics, cloaks, weapon upgrades, Aug-upgrades and several other nice little features that make you feel like a bad-ass.
Unlike Crysis 2 however, this game seemed to make it its soul purpose to make me as annoyed and pissed of as I possibly could be.
It has the stick to chest-high wall mechanics like in Mass Effect 2/3 and I don't mind that as such unless you have to press a specific button to detach yourself which this game didn't have either, so that was all OK. The biggest problem I'd say would be is that any good idea the developers originally had seems to have been screwed over by making the game seem balanced. In fact, throughout the whole game you encounter the developers obsession with making the main characters powers balanced. All but one upgrade seemed to have a hint of "overpowered" to it, everything else was... not useless... just somewhat unnecessary.

Bossfights were a pain, most people who have played the game know that. They, however, weren't the thing I hated most about this game, my biggest frustration lies with the weapons. Unlike aug-upgrades, weapon-upgrades are necessary. For example, I'm not a guy to use assault rifles much in a stealth game but when I do I expect them to work. My assault rifle in this game however wasn't much use when I needed it and unfortunately I spent all my upgrades on my hyper-stealth-magic-silenced pistol for which finding ammo was like looking for a piece of hay in a Russian needle factory.

Story wise it's actually pretty good, not very original in some aspects but good nonetheless. You play as a guy called Adam Jensen who is an augmented cyber robotic cop-dude who for some reason needs to save the world. Yes this is one of those games that feels it needs to answer every question in the universe starting with the simplest of trick questions, what is the meaning of life? Are you still human when you're Darth Vader? Is there room for improvement in a "perfect" society? That sort of stuff.

You do get to do a lot of interesting missions in interesting places and at first the game reminded me a bit of Mass Effect 2. The similarities ended fairly quickly though after I progressed and found out more about who I was up against. In the fear of slightly spoiling something about the story, the real baddies are an old secret society running the world, I thought it was a nice touch but they stay fairly anonymous apart from some smaller pawns that fill the traditional role of "let's taunt the man who cannot comprehend our greatness"-people.

Here is a screenshot that sums up the their best argument in this game perfectly:

It doesn't get much more complicated than that (until the end of the game).
Overall I do like this game, even though the game annoyed me a lot in the beginning I grew to like Adam Jensen as a character not to mention dragging unconscious guards into a ventilation shaft is a huge amount of fun. Call me a collector or perfectionist but I never felt quite satisfied until my vent held at least five guards.

So I rate this game 7/10 with a very generous seven just because I cannot say it is a bad game or even an average game. It is in all its over balanced, not-always-so-fun kind of way still a very good game.

On a different subject, I submitted my Magic Swords to the challenge. There have been some nice entries, now let's see who wins.

Description:
Lorea was originally created as a ceremonial sword for the desert lord Koshja Ma'an of the third century Torah-nomads in southern Novea. It became his personal preference in battle so he ordered the creation of another sword, Vorea. Both swords were in the Ma'an family for over two hundred years before disappearing in the desert with the fall of the Novean empire.

I haven't got any projects going on right now as such but I still have a small to-do-list and I think it's about time I get back to modeling.

That's it for this blog, have a nice day!
Mikom Ya

A while back I started a Magical Swords challenge on the United 3D Artists forum. Haven't worked much yet on my entry but here is a Work In Progress image of my swords:

Also, still no new from BioWare on the Mass Effect 3 ending. They're slowly starting to talk more and more but nothing solid about whether there will be a follow-up on the disappointing ending we got or if we will just have to be satisfied with what we have got.

Also also, I recently discovered a great Source mod called Hidden: Source. It's a multiplayer first person horror modification of Half-Life 2. Team ISIS hunts the Hidden, an invisible test subject who escaped from a secret lab someplace. The ISIS squad has some simple weapons, FN2000 with scope being my personal favorite (Battlestar Galactica FTW) and also some nice attachments (flashlight, lasers, etc). The Hidden however, who is completely on his own by the way, has only a knife and some grenades. He is however invisible, this makes the game really fun to play because as the Hidden scaring the crap out of people with your creepy voice *I see you... hissss* always makes you giggle. Trying to spot the Hidden as a soldier always requires some skill but you feel like a real badass when you do get him.
So yeah, I recommend this mod to everyone who likes action/horror games.

Still have to try out the new release of No More Room in Hell but with Mass Effect 3 and everything I haven't had a proper chance to do so yet.

That's it for this blog, have a nice day!
Mikom Ya

WOAHH, SPOILER ALERT!! Actually no, not a spoiler alert but just a general alert. (with some spoilers)

I know no other way of saying this but MASS EFFECT 3 WILL KILL YOUR LOVE FOR THE MASS EFFECT GAMES. Actually, no, that's not true either (not entirely anyway). Mass Effect 3 however is a very sad example of how a great series has been somewhat ruined for everyone who has played it all the way through to the end of ME3.

Let's start at the beginning, Mass Effect 3 started out a bit simple but the action and all the great features from Mass Effect 1 and 2 quickly returned. Even though most missions weren't as unique and individual as the missions in Mass Effect 2, they were very action packed and entertaining in that way only a Mass Effect game can get you involved with what you're doing.
It even got better, the more you play the game the less you feel you have to worry about choosing the wrong conversation options with your squad mates. You're just friends, randomly chillin out, talking and thinking of the old days. You feel more connected to your teammates than every before.
The only down-part of that is that the conversation-system where you can choose different responses seems rather useless now, or rather so I thought until I accidentally killed an important squad-mate and even an entire race by just choosing the wrong option (ooops).

Anyway, the game builds up the tension rather well and even though the threat of a reaper invasion seems less... threatening when you're chilling out in the Citadel bar, you still get reminded of it on every mission you're on.

Oddly enough, AND THIS SORT OF IS A SPOILER, you spend more time fighting Cerberus than the Reapers during the game. And even though they promise you 20 hours of constant gameplay, the game still feels rather short.

Oh, and now we come to the ending... ...yeah. I should say spoiler alert here as well but if you've played Mass Effect and seen the trailers for the 3rd game you'll probably be able to figure out what the ending(s) are like when I say there not a happy ending in this game. Sure, you save the galaxy either way, but that's not a huge surprise, fans would have torn BioWare apart if they had made another game where Shepard doesn't defeat the Reapers in some way, the bad part is that BioWare really seemed to make to want a point about not being able to make a sequel.
Yeah I get it BioWare, this was meant to be a trilogy, you don't need to shove it in my face when I get to the ending of the last game...

And it's not as much the fact that -:WARNING MAJOR SPOILER:- Shepard dies in the end that bothered me much as the fact it was the end of the whole bloody game. You don't get to see how your squadmates get on with their lives after the end, you don't get to see what happened to the fleet, or Earth or anything else for that matter.

The ending was also very confusing, there was a character there that you meet only at the very end of the game and that doesn't really explain itself very much why it's there or what its purpose is.

The largest mistake BioWare made probably happened at their very first meeting when setting up the base story for Mass Effect 3. That is the Reaper invasion of Earth in very beginning of the game. You see, being a hobby writer myself, that would have been an idea that I would have thought of as well, smiled when imagining the reaction and expressions on peoples faces when they first found out but then I would have quickly dismissed the idea as being something that just would not work.
BioWare truly made the best of this idea but in the end (as you notice when playing the end) nothing good could ever have come from this idea.
Basically, here are the flaws that makes the idea not work: One, you can't give Shepard as much freedom to explore and to take his time for sidemissions because there is a timer on how long it will take before the Reapers kill everyone on Earth and let's face it, that doesn't make any sense. So they had to remove that and by doing so they also removed one of Mass Effects greatest features. And two, as mentioned before: then ending. By using this idea as a base for the whole game the ending was unavoidable. Basically, Bioware just dug their own graves by sticking to that exiting but ultimately flawed idea of a Reaper invasion.

SO... overall, was it a bad game? No, I enjoyed it very much and it really is all you would expect Mass Effect 3 to be. However, the ending(s) ruin the Mass Effect experience for anyone who wants to play the series all over again.
If I were on Noveria in Mass Effect 1 now I would definitely be thinking about Shepard's end in ME3.
If I were doing the assault on the Collector Base in ME2, I still would be thinking of the end of Mass Effect 3.
Not only has this game given Bioware a game of nearly 0% re-playability, it also gave them thousands of angry fans and a game that due to all the bad publicity it will be receiving will not sell as good as any other Mass Effect game. *Sarcasm mode engaged* Well done BioWare!

Worst of all though, the fate of the Mass Effect series will from now on always be remembered as a game-series that focused heavily on story and eventually let everyone down because of its story, as a result we probably wont be seeing more proper story focused games for probably another decade or so...

..and that's really sad.

There has also been a lot of discussion on the internet about the "From Ashes" DLC/extra mission that already was under production before the game was released. I pre-ordered the Mass Effect 3 N/ Collectors edition so I got the mission for free. BioWare claimed it was a mission of no importance to the overall story and this is partly true, however, if this Protean character (the one in the From Ashes DLC) wasn't in the game, I would definitely notice it.
No, he is not hugely important to the story but as with the Shadow Broker DLC for Mass Effect 2, it is a hugely important character for Shepard and if not more important, also a great importance to Liara.
Oh, and though he also is the most serious character in Mass Effect 3, he also manages to have some of the funniest lines in the whole game.
When talking about the Salarians in his time, his remark "They used to eat flies" kept a smile on my face for hours after I stopped rolling in the floor with laughter.

Yeah, I used to hate the RPG genre because of crappy stories and acting, but Mass Effect changed that and completely turned me around. Now I know I will again have to stay away from the genre until there is another Mass Effect-like game out there and well... it sure isn't Skyrim, which, by the way, I now think will be the main direction RPG games will take. Just a focus on countless of simple quests and literally no story whatsoever...

2012 is a sad year for gaming, and for me, definitely the end of me calling myself a real gamer.


END NOTE (No Spoilers):
It may seem that when I was writing this piece I was depressed and sad... sad maybe, but depressed or angry, no. I've always been the most critical of gamers and I truly believe more than 99% of all games made, even today are just flawed and poorly made. Writing is always an issue, acting is another. Then there is the Hollywood complex 80% of all games tend to stick to.

No, I'm not depressed, I'm just a gamer before his time...

A scene I made in Bryce 7. The model was imported from trueSpace.

I love the way Bryce can handle such a high poly count. I copied this model which is quite high-poly for the two figures in the background and it didn't lag one bit. tS would have gone bananas with 3 of those.

Alright, so I got Skyrim last week and now that I've had a chance to try out Skyrim properly I think I should write a little review.
Personally, as with most fantasy RPGs I don't like it very much. But that's just a personal opinion. The itself game is quite well made, there are tons of quests just waiting to be done, sometimes they even come to you. So overall it is a great game, so I guess that for some people the hype is actually quite true.

Good things about Skyrim are the beautiful open world you can explore, easy modding and mod support. Fairly good graphics (there is a mod that makes the graphics look a lot better). You can indeed choose what kind of person you want to be, evil, good, mysterious, a hero, a thief, it's all up to you and I like that.

Bad things about Skyrim are in my opinion the somewhat linear and repetitive quests. You need to play it a lot to get a higher level(and this is when it becomes the most fun). It, like with all other RPGs that I've ever played (except Mass Effect 2 and 3), has a crappy inventory system. Also the voice-actors all tend to speak with a North-American accent, which doesn't suit the game at all, the acting also seem dull and simple in most cases. Oh, and some actors sound like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I'm not sure if I would have bought this game for the money I payed for it if I had known it would be like this. Still, it is a very good game and all people who like potions, crafting and a general game fantasy style world would love this game.
I on the other hand didn't start enjoying it fully until I started modding it with the Creation Kit kindly supplied by Bethesda for all to use. Creating an overpowered sword and hacking all the poor guards to bits was a great way for me to relieve the stress built up after playing this game without mods.
It also allowed me to customize my character a bit more.

And here are some screens for your viewing pleasure:

Hope I didn't include any spoilers in the screenshots. Note that the way the game is set up means that each person has a different experience. The order in which you do the quests is decided by you and since there are so many of them you'll never play them in exactly the same order as before, most will probably go unplayed.
I had the misfortune of completing the main story quest first, fulfilling my destiny as the Dragonborn, so as you can imagine no other quest after that seemed quite necessary and this made my personal experience very dull one after I had completed the quest of the Dragonborn.

So I continued playing for a bit but then I discovered the magic of the Creation Kit, it's a mod tool supplied by Bethesda who made Elder Scrolls series.

Now I had the power to change anything in the game and I put it to good use right away creating my "Insane Deadric" sword, a sword so powerful it can kill pretty much anything with just a couple of swings. Same with my "Insane Flames" fire spell, it all gave me that edge a proper badass hero would have without having to spend the rest of my life playing this game.
Funny thing is that shortly after my "upgrading" the enemies in the game started adapting to my newfound power and I couldn't help but notice a connection, I see what you did there Bethesda. *Insert wink wink nudge nudge smiley-face here*
So yeah, "cheating", if you can call it that, might not have been the best idea but it did give the game the realism it needed and this also a better balance meaning only the really powerful enemies can withstand my giant burst of flames and any other enemy will burn nearly instantly after having been set on fire ...AS THEY SHOULD!
Call it whatever you like but saying that fantasy games should stick to a certain code of realism is NOT overrated in my opinion.

Now I'm just waiting for Mass Effect 3 to come out, a game that doesn't need to rely on shoving random quest missions in your face in order to have a good story. Yeah... I sure missed the brilliant storytelling from the Mass Effect games, it really gives RPG genre its undeserved good name.

So, next review: Mass Effect 3 - the Reapers kill commander Shepard and take over Earth! ...probably...

That's it for this blog, have a nice day!
Mikom Ya