Shades of Twilight

Everyone who reads this blog knows my configurations. It’s an old, single-core, Pentium 4 PC, 3.0Ghz Hyper Threading. It was cutting edge at the time I bought it. Five years later, it’s still kind of okay for playing games. I’m glad it’s not “minimum spec” yet, but naturally I’m not satisfied with the performance I’m getting on modern games.

The one piece of good news with Mass Effect is, I don’t need the disk to be in the drive when I play this. I don’t need to look for NOCD cracks for this game. Publishers of games should follow this trend. While putting the disk into the drive to play isn’t a big deal, it just makes it so much easier not to get the prompt to insert disk when you forget to do so.

Mass Effect is playable on my configuration. If I can live through Assassin’s Creed, I can put up with the portions of Mass Effect when it does slow down. Most of the time, I get slowdowns during firefights, and sometimes, while walking or running around inside the Citadel.
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After a night of unexciting drinks at the local pub yesterday, I thought I could sleep-in today. Guess I was wrong. I got woken up today around 1pm by a friend who needed help with some computer stuff. She had trouble with a wireless keyboard and had been over my place to test it out and confirm that the unit she had bought was indeed faulty. She wanted my help at Sim Lim Square, the local computer mall. I had also wanted to go there anyway so it wasn’t a problem.

So we met and proceeded to get her stuff resolved. In the meantime, I popped by my favourite game store to see if Mass Effect was available (and not sold out). I was in luck, and they had a few copies of it left. Naturally I grabbed one.

I looked at the system requirements before I bought it though, and was half-relieved that my aging 5 year old gaming rig could still play it. It wasn’t “minimum spec” yet, although I suspect that might change in 2009 if I still decide not to upgrade to a newer machine. I also was hoping it would not run as badly as Assassin’s Creed did (It didn’t, much to my relief).

When I got home later, MUCH later, I excitedly installed the game. I wasn’t disappointed. I also had deliberately not kept up with news on Mass Effect or much of its storyline, like someone who doesn’t want to read spoilers on a good movie before watching it. Thus I only knew the basic premise of the game – it’s a science fiction RPG with some elements of squad-based shooters. Continue reading →