Pronounced My-Key-On: by Michael Quach

I finally finished up Mass Effect 2 clocking in at 41 hours and 30 minutes. I have to say, Mass Effect 2 was a big improvement over Mass Effect 1 and I thoroughly enjoyed it more.  The ethical dilemmas had more impact on me and I found myself trying to rationalize what would I do in that situation.

I’ll have to write up my review later on but I have to say, playing through Mass Effect 2 has me starting up a new character on Mass Effect 1 just so that I can play again on #2.

Meet Kaiden, saved part of a colony, learned more about the Collectors. After that, a floodgate of personal missions from the characters pop up. I’ve finished Jacob’s, Jack’s, and that bounty hunter’s missions and now on my way to Illum to get other henchmen and do Miranda’s quest. Picked up Tali and finally got an SMG.

I have my 4 main squad mates. Picked up Jack the convict, and the krogan warlord and now off to battle the collectors. So far, no romance options with the two available females on my crew and my hold is filling up with resources from probing the planets.

I think I’m about 18 hours in so far and just started finding side quests on the planets I’ve explored, I think maybe another 18 hours and I should be done.

Day 1 of my first play through of Mass Effect 2 and I’m still in the same star cluster. I’ve been to Omega station, collected two squademates, investigated a lost colony, and went to the DLC site, Normandy Crash. So far it’s been a pretty fun and engaging game despite some minor gripes I have.

Bioware has improved the shooter part of Mass Effect and the game now include some time sensitive cutscenes that you let interrupt with either Paragon, or Renegade options. The inventory and planet exploration have also been revamped; inventory no longer exists on your character and the only things you can pickup are plot items or decorations that go in your ship. Items you buy from the store are upgrades to your body/squad/weapons and you only get one armor, not including the DLC armors.

The armor you receive is customizable in paint and patterns and will change based on what upgrades you add to it while your henchmen wear the same armor throughout the game and will auto equip the best weapons in your loadout. No need to share weapons or buy multiples of them now as your buddies will get a copy magically and they will never ever run out of ammo clips. Yes, that’s right, ammo clips.

Remember how in the first Mass Effect you had to wait for the heat to dissipate on your weapon if you fire too much in a short time but that was fun because you had unlimited ammo? Not in Mass Effect 2, now everyone carries the state of the art ammo clips that let you immediately flush out the heat with the heatsink ammo clips without having to wait for your gun to cool down. Unfortunately these ammo clips only lasts for so long and are one time use so you must always be on the hunt for more ammo.

Mako exploration of planets has been replaced by a resource scanning/probing minigame. Now you just spend your time holding down a button and scanning a planet grid by grid and slowly turning the planet in order to mine resources that you need to upgrade your weapons, armor, and ship.

In game menus require multiple mouse clicks instead of having to press Spacebar to close the menu and scroll wheel on the mouse is only used for weapon selection. You cannot use your scroll wheel to scroll through the pages of information in menus and instead you must click and hold down on the scroll bar and drag it down.

Oh, and you can’t take your helmet off during cinematics. All that talk about how much facial expressions and the eyes are important in Mass Effect? Hard to see those expressions when you can’t even see your character’s own face. Other NPCs have no problem identifying you though and they don’t seem very surprised to see you considering what happens to you in the first five minutes of the game.

Now onto day 2, I’ll go visit the citadel.

This is only Day 1.

Solutions are on the youtube page of this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIVejv9sHLg

I’ve come across one of the best dungeons I’ve expereienced in a while. A dungeon where it relies on your thinking to solve and where you need to read the lore behind the world to understand. I loved the riddle puzzles as I actually read the lore behind each of the characters and found it a nice break to solve puzzles without having to kill a bunch of monsters.

The bridge itself is another example of a thought puzzle in the game, after figuring out that I needed a combo of two characters to keep the bridge up, a third to move around and open up a new path, and my fourth to walk across, I was amazed. Finally, a thinking puzzle. I took out some pen and paper and began recording which stones I needed to stand on in order to make a path across, testing each stone with a character moving all around. After about 10 minutes, I got my solution and was on my way to the Sacred Urn of Andraste.

So I entered into the Maximum PC podcast contest last week, found here http://www.maximumpc.com/article/no_bs_podcast/no_bs_podcast_121_windows_7_live , on identifying the Windows startup sound they played and explaining which one was your favorite. Below is what I put as my favorite startup sound.

I first encountered Windows 98 in 1999, when we got a new computer and my parents allowed me to buy my first pc video game. That game was the original Rainbow 6 and every day, the Windows 98 startup sound would echo through the house from my speakers as I began my PC gaming career. Windows 98 is my childhood; it was there when I began PC gaming, it was there when I began my foray onto the internet and all its wonders and horrors; and it was there when I finished elementary school. Windows 98 is why I am here today. That startup sound will always remind me of my childhood and I will always hold it dear to my heart.

To explain further, that was the operating system where I truly began exploring other games available to me. Before then, I was just another kid who sat at home all day watching tv, but now, with my 56k modem and AOL, I began learning about things like other internet speeds, lag, and courtesy (back then where I played, there was no flaming, people were actually nice and helped each other out). It was like a sort of awakening for me. Windows 98 was the platform when I started making friends who didn’t care how I looked, just that I was a nice guy who played games with them. That’s all they needed in order to start a friendship and become a community. It was because of these friends that I made I was gradually introduced to other kinds of PC games such as real time strategy in Age of Empires, Role Playing Games in NeverWinter Nights, and text games called Multi User Dungeons (MUD). I would even say that because of Windows 98 and its introduction of video games, that I began geeking out and learning about technology and made me the “computer guy” in my family.

Without Windows 98, I might not have become a PC gamer, I might not have begun my education into learning the latest tech, I might not even have all these e-friends that I now have and the communities I belong to which has lasted longer than real life groups and friends. So to Microsoft, Thank you for Windows 98 and beginning my career of pc gaming.

P.S. I also won Cities XL, woot!

A recent search on Facebook shows that there are over 7,000 people with Quach somewhere in their name. Looking through the various Quach groups on facebook, I’ve come to find out that I’m not alone in wondering just where do I fit in.

All the Quachs I’ve met in San Francisco have similar backgrounds, born in San Francisco, parents are from Vietnam. The differences among the group is the language they speak. I’ve met some who speak a dialect of Chinese called, TeoChew and Vietnamese, while others grew up with only Vietnamese as their primary language. All the relatives in my family  can speak both languages fluently but can only read and write in Vietnamese.

When I asked my mom if we were Chinese or Vietnamese, she would always tell me to tell everyone else we’re Vietnamese. The only problem was that I never learned Vietnamese from my parents or even learned much of TeoChew from them. Things get awkward when I meet other Quachs and they begin to speak to me in either Vietnamese or TeoChew and all I can reply is that I never learned the language.

I never even knew how to spell out the name of the language I grew up learning until a few years ago when I found the Facebook group called, “Quach is better than your Last Name” and found out that TeoChew is the official name. My family pronounces it “Chew Chao” which is also known as Chaozhou, located in Eastern China.

Image from the Facebook group 郭 family (Guo, Kwak, Kwok, Quach, Kaku, 곽)

For the family name of Quach, it turns out it has different spelling and pronunciation depending on the country but maintains the same character of 郭. In Mandarian, the character is Guo, Cantonese it is Kwok, and Vietnamese is Quach. In my family, we pronounce all the letters in the name. It sounds almost like “crouch” (a nickname some kids would give me in school) as the “ch” in the name are not silent. Another version I’ve heard makes Quach sound like “Kwok” which I guess is the more mainstream version as every teacher I’ve ran into pronounces my name as “Kwok.”

I’ve figure that if anyone asks where my family is from, I’ll just tell them I’m Vietnamese that speaks a dialect of Chinese. I have relatives in California, Texas, New York, Germany, and the rest in Vietnam, but none that I know of from China as all the family my parents have grew up in Vietnam. My ancestors probably did come from China but seeing as how most of my relatives live in Vietnam all their lives, I say it’s safe to say I must have some Vietnamese blood in me.

Never knew that Demigod could be such a hostile game. Me, Nayrhyno, and a random get a 3 vs 3 going on. The random claims it’s too laggy for him and quits in the first 5 minutes so Nay and I were left with just the AI. Apparently, two other players on the enemy team were new to the game and didn’t know what to do. Their teammate, Casper, raged hard on them in the public chat. I don’t know what he said in their team chat but I no doubt he was quite acidic.

I guess the Unclean Beast player just got pissed at being yelled at all the time and just spent the game running into us to die. He even killed himself with ooze and no health regen to keep him alive.

Another fail on their part as they don’t notice the uncapped celerity flag.

Games like this just makes me crack up.

This is what makes Demigod fun. In his all pubber game I joined, my team of 2 Sednas and 1 Erebus were pushed back to our Citadel by their Erebus, Torchbearer and Queen of Thorns. For the majority of the time, we could not put a dent into them and they would always chase us away from the flags.

Eventually, we got pushed back, both our portals capped with locks, most of our towers dead, minotaurs, archers, priests, angels, and catapults coming out from all sides and not one of us with any Area of Effect damage attacks. All seemed lost but the enemy Demigods fell victim one by one at the front steps of our citadel as we ganged up on each one. Our citadel constantly bombarded but we were able to hold off the waves long enough that each time the health went down to 10,000, we were able to push back to get some warscore.

Eventually while the enemy were all respawning, we pushed all the way to their portals and our giants took care of the rest. The biggest folly I see in the enemy’s gameplay was that they never upgraded their towers or creeps so it was relatively easy to push back and hold off the creeps while our creeps had two levels of upgrades in armor and damage. Most of the time, games of Demigod just starts steamrolling so comebacks or stalls are very rare, but when it happens, boy is it fun.