Shades Of Twilight

As I may have mentioned in earlier posts, lately I have been entertaining myself by creating missions in the Armed Assault Editor and playing them.

In the past I have created a series of missions in Operation Flashpoint, the forerunner of Armed Assault. In fact the missions I did had many “advanced features” which I have all but forgotten how to do. The current editor is very similar to the one in Operation Flashpoint, so most of the basic stuff I don’t have to relearn.

A short clip is show above on my current work-in-progress mission. Usually my missions aren’t “released” to the internet because they are made for my own enjoyment. Besides, there are many missions out there that are much more well done than mine.

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Almost everyone knows by now, that the expansion pack for Mass Effect has been released on 29 July 2008.

Almost everyone, except me. I didn’t know about it till a couple of days back, when I thought I’d just pop by the Mass Effect website and have a look-see. When I saw that the expansion pack was ready for download, I was very excited and couldn’t wait for all 320MBs of it to complete the download so I can install it.

To play the expansion, all you need to do is load a savegame that allows you to access the galactic map, that’s it. That would be any savegame after the Council has granted you Spectre status in the game. Once in the galactic map screen on the Normandy, a new system will show up in the Utopia cluster (the same one where Eden Prime is).

Honestly, I was a little disappointed with this “expansion”. To me, as it is now, this “expansion” is little more than just “a new mission”. Although it was touted to give about 90 minutes more playtime, I completed the mission in about half that time, or at best, 1 hour. Ok granted I may not have taken all possible actions in this mission, but even if I did, I doubt it would take 90 minutes.

The mission is pretty straightforward actually. An asteroid is being driven into a planet, you need to stop it. You fight bad guys (the Batarians), you reach the main facility, and you meet the boss. You need to make a decision, and then you get a choice of reward at the end of the whole mission.

Personally I picked the armour over the other stuff, even though my Charm and Intimidate skills were high enough to get an Omni-Tool as a reward. At level 50+, the armour would be a series 10 Colossus armour, the best in my opinion, in the whole game.

This makes me wish that Mass Effect came with an editor, like in Neverwinter Nights. I could create my own missions! If the editor could be as powerful as the one in Armed Assault, you could even create cutscenes with advanced camera control via scripts.

(Yes in the past couple of days I have been spending time in the Armed Assault Editor making my own missions.)

Well I hope more “downloadable content” would appear soon for Mass Effect, even if they might be short 1 hour extensions of the playtime.

Image via Wikipedia

I am sure many of you out there have played Fallout, and its sequel Fallout 2. I remember having a blast with both of them, and turning up the gore to see exploding heads and me shooting arms and legs off the enemies.

For those who have no clue about the Fallout series, here’s a quick summary.

Fallout takes place in a post-nuclear near-future world. The whole art concept is very retro - 50’s or 60’s type. That’s when the nukes fell and people took refuge in bomb shelters called “Vaults”. Fallout series is an RPG, and in Fallout 1 and 2, the combat was turn-based. Meaning, you choose your actions, spend action points, then the computer will do the same for your enemies. You can take your own sweet time deciding what to do when it’s your turn to shoot.

However in Fallout 3, Bethesda (known for making RPG hits such as Morrowind and Oblivion) decided to make it into an FPS. Well, the best way to describe it is “Oblivion with laser guns”. Don’t take my word for it. Look at the video below:

Yeah my jaw dropped too. I am hoping that my current rig can handle it. However, it’s also not very expensive to get a decent dual-core system nowadays. I have calculated that it would cost about $800 or so to get an above-average gaming rig built from Sim-Lim.

I really can’t wait for Fallout 3 to be released. In fact, I might go as far as to say I look forward to Fallout 3 more than Diablo 3.

For those who are also counting down, here’s a widget that tracks the time to release of Fallout 3 below:

Fallout 3 at IGN

Woohooo!!