Solid Snake's Pseudo-Let's Play: Mass Effect

[Mike McC]

Bit of a nitpick, but there are Let's Plays out there without any audience input. Doesn't make them false LP's or Psuedo-LPs.

That being said, I'll do an ABC here as well.

[Yumil]

Id go Colonist, since I prefer the colonists side quest.
Id go Sole Survivor, because I like the added dialog.
Now, for the third choice...its hard to make.
Do you want an easy, but boring game? If so, go Soldier...Honestly its just activate the increased defense skill and mow things down with the AR.
Do you want an easy, but fun game? Vanguard. Lift and Warp really help add some fun. Shotgun isn't the best all round weapon, but its fun to see them flying away from you when you pump them full of lead.
Do you want a harder game? Adept. It'll definitely prepare you for your next game with all the skills, but I prefer to play Adept with an AR addon skill. Yes, basically non of their skills do damage, but you can pretty much control any fight effortlessly as an adapt, just keep your stronger allies with you.

[DFM]

C, C, and B.

C with C gives you a reason to be ruthless and B is pretty awesome because shottys.

[Solid Snake]

Originally Posted by Yumil

Do you want a harder game? Adept. It'll definitely prepare you for your next game with all the skills, but I prefer to play Adept with an AR addon skill. Yes, basically non of their skills do damage, but you can pretty much control any fight effortlessly as an adapt, just keep your stronger allies with you.

Crap, thanks for setting me up for a harder game everybody. =)

Adept and Ruthless won their respective matches in blowouts. I suppose since I technically could keep those two matches open overnight since I can't start the playthrough until tomorrow morning (I've been playing with setting up Irfanview to take the screenshots as well as toying with a new idea for character appearance) but unless an absolute windfall of Soldier votes come through there will be no challenge to Adept's supremacy, and I'm kind of digging the Adept concept anyway, so I'm willing to roll with it. Ruthless is frankly so far ahead of the other choices in its category it's not even worth the debate.

The only semi-questionable matchup right now is Colonist VS Earthbound for the pre-history background. Unfortunately the subjective manner of exactly what and how I define "justification" could lead me to narrowly hand the match one way or the other. So instead I'll just leave voting open in the optimistic hope I'll return tomorrow and see a blowout.

Here's a question for y'all though: Assuming it's between Earthbound-Ruthless-Adept and Colonist-Ruthless-Adept: what actual noticeable changes would I see between these two options? For example, one of you mentioned different sidequests (I didn't know that was possible) -- is one sidequest clearly objectively better than the other? One of you mentioned an Earthbound-Ruthless character receiving a boost to Renegade scores. But wouldn't the Ruthless trait still tilt a Colonist-Ruthless character in the Renegade direction? Would it be easier for me in subsequent playthroughs with this character, to acquire more paragon points faster with a Colonist-Ruthless character than an Earthbound-Ruthless character? On the flip-side, could an Earthbound-Ruthless character achieve maximum Renegade points in a single playthrough?

I ask these questions in hopes that if I have to break a close vote, I make sure to break a tie in the direction I'd actually prefer.

[DFM]

IIRC Earthborn is the "Renegade" origin, and "Ruthless" is the renegade claim to fame.

Therefore Earthborn + Ruthless = 2 Marks toward renegade whereas say Colonist + Ruthless = 1 Mark toward renegade. I haven't played in forever so I'm not even positive if that's close to right.

It's mostly the same sidequests for all the traits/origins, just with different dialog on how they play out based on your history. Most of them do have at least one specific, exclusive sidequest that aren't available for any other background.

I'm not sure how spoiler-ish you want it but the Earthborn sidequest can be finished by shooting the quest giver in the head and the Colonist one takes some mean talky-talky skills. Unless you can also finish it by shooting the quest giver in the head and I was just too nice to pursue that path.

[Yumil]

The trait sidequests are just changed dialog to existing ones. They are quite a nice way to show the reason things are happening in them, as they are generic without the trait.

The origin sidequests are quite different and usually involves meeting someone related to your past. The spacer one is rather boring, but the earth and colonist ones play on some rather interesting topics. Yes, both of them have renegade options, and both of them have nicer options. Actually, the Earthborn one feels much more involved since its not just talking to one person, but I really like the colonists one.

BTW if you renegade the colonist one, I really think you look more evil than if you renegade the earth one>.< However, you'll get more of a bonus towards renegade with Earth and if you are trying to up intimidate, you'll probably want to go with that.

[Solid Snake]

Originally Posted by Yumil

BTW if you renegade the colonist one, I really think you look more evil than if you renegade the earth one>.<

Really? Just about the only two factors that made Colonist seem slightly more appealing to me than Earthbound was A: an actual justification to hate and kill slavers and to have gone renegade (as opposed to just "I grew up in a seedy gang, so it's cool.") And B: the possibility of a decent Paragon bonus to go along with the greater Renegade bonus of "Ruthless" so it'd take less multi-playthroughs to max both Charm and Intimidate skills.
If either or both of those claims aren't true then I might as well just go Earthborn, max my Renegade percentage increases and have fun beating the crap out of folks.

Also, I finally found out how to take screenshots of Mass Effect with Irfanview. The good news is: I should actually be able to seemlessly use this method to actually (occasionally) take snapshots of cutscenes without interrupting those cutscenes. I still don't imagine I'd do this often (I'd prefer watching the cutscenes my first time through without obsessing over screenshot procurement, and I have no idea when the right times to take screenshots are coming up in-game anyway.) But I can do it.

The bad news is: Taking screenshots with Irfanview that are saved to my computer's hard drive is easy. Getting those screenshots saved online so that I can actually resize them and tag them as images that you can see in this topic? That'll be more difficult.

[01d55]

The GIMP is a free program that can resize and reformat images pretty simply.

[Kerensky287]

Originally Posted by Solid Snake

The bad news is: Taking screenshots with Irfanview that are saved to my computer's hard drive is easy. Getting those screenshots saved online so that I can actually resize them and tag them as images that you can see in this topic? That'll be more difficult.

You should probably resize them before putting them online. There are a whole bunch of programs that are perfect for batch-resizing, actually. The one that I use is Advanced Batch Converter (ABC), but if you get the trial only, it puts an annoying stamp in the corner.... whatever. Full version? No stamp. Y'arr.

My friend DID however tell me about another program called Exifer that batch-resizes... but when I looked into it it only works for JPEGs, which didn't help me one bit. Still, you should try it out and see how it is for you. It's free.

I just used Photobucket to upload stuff. There's a new "bulk uploader" that you can use to throw all of your pictures up at once. Plus you can save them in albums to organize them.

Hope this stuff helps!

[Yumil]

Originally Posted by Solid Snake

B: the possibility of a decent Paragon bonus to go along with the greater Renegade bonus of "Ruthless" so it'd take less multi-playthroughs to max both Charm and Intimidate skills.

Honestly, without partaking of the glitch, and mainly just doing the story, you'll only get your free points towards one of the two sides, though you may be able to get paragon high enough to get one more charm point. The Renegade/Paragon bonus doesnt matter as much as if you renegade most of your choices anyway you'll be near max at the end of the game anyway. Really, I only see it needed if you are trying influence a few of the stories outcomes with charm/intimidate and you want your charm/intimidate bonuses ASAP.