SPOILERS AHEAD

So I finished Mass Effect 2 recently, and I’ve already begun thinking about Mass Effect 3. Here is a collection of my thoughts.

Playable Characters

Liara T’Soni

I was somewhat surprised (and perhaps a little disappointed) that so few characters returned from Mass Effect 1 in Mass Effect 2 in a playable form. Let’s break it down: There were 5 playable characters in Mass Effect 2: Wrex, Tali, T’Soni, Kaidan, Ashley, and Garrus. Of these characters, only three of these were sure to have survived, and two returned in Mass Effect 2 as playable characters. The remaining character is T’Soni, and I would be surprised if she wasn’t a playable character in ME3.

Mass Effect 2 Characters

With the suicide mission at the end of ME2, Any team member has the possibility of dying. As a result, I doubt anyone can return as playable in ME3. The only team member who has the possibility of returning is Legion, as he could simply return as a different physical Geth.

Captain Anderson

This is perhaps just wishful thinking on my part, because Captain Anderson was a total badass, I’d like to see him playable in Mass Effect 3. I don’t have anything really good to base this on, he’s just a good soldier.

Characters From the Novels

The novels have a rich collection of characters to grab from, one that I think would be particularly cool is Gillian Grayson, a preteen autistic biotic. Of course, the novels are written by the lead designer of the games, so a crossover wouldn’t be too far fetched.

The rachni

I think the decision to destroy or save the Rachni in the middle of Mass Effect 1 was probably the biggest decision you needed to make in the Mass Effect series so far. Sure, there was payback in Mass Effect 2 depending on your decision, but the crossover was relatively minor from Mass Effect 1. I think the Rachni (could) be a key force in taking on the Reapers in ME3, and you would be rewarded for your decision in ME1 in ME3 for this (especially considering the default decision is to destroy the Rachni in ME2, it would be a good indicator that you played all three games).

Cerberus

I really don’t trust the Illusive Man and Cerberus’s intentions, I think he might be under the control of one of the Reapers, and isn’t actually on our side.

Destroying the reapers

Obviously destroying the reapers (and more than one this time) would be different from the rest of the games, but I don’t know how they would do it. They would either have to make some sort of destroying reaper sub-game, or destroying each reaper would be a different varied mission, or something. It would probably involve rallying all of the races around the ME universe though, and uniting them in an attack against the Reapers (including the Rachni if they’re alive as mentioned above).

Anyways, those are my predictions for ME3. I’m really looking forward to it.

This is the video of me proposing to Callyn on New Year’s Eve. I know this is a little late. It went over very well, except for the goofy look on my face. Time to start planning for a 2010 wedding!

So I watched the Spike Video Game Awards on Sunday and I must say after being really disappointed with last year’s award with Samuel L Jackson I think this year the awards were really good. The awards seemed to be structured differently, as most of the show was about premiering new games than actually presenting awards (which was kind of fun) Jack Black was a very good host and of course, because he’s the main star of Brutal Legend, it got a really good promotion. Here he introduces my favorite game designer Tim Schafer to the crowd, as well as the Brutal Legend trailer:

So what happened this week was Brutal Legend finally got a publisher (EA) after being canned by it’s previous one (Activision), so it’s set to go out in Fall 2009. Another thing that I found was interesting is Jack Black was involved in the creative process of Brutal Legend and co-produces/designs the game with Tim! That means that it will probably have a very distinct Tenacious D feel to it.

Not gonna lie, I’m pretty stoked.

So the American Presidential Election was this week and one thing I noticed is that the social news sites (digg, reddit) are American-focused and it’s hard to note much Canadian content on-line. So I rounded up the stuff I knew about:

Blogs:

• Michael Geist: A Canadian DRM activist. Talks about copyright news in Canada. I interviewed him for a paper I did on DRM last year.
• Amber Macarthur: Tech personality based in Canada. Haven’t watched her show CommandN yet, but she used to co-host Call For Help with Leo Laporte.
• Callyn and Mike: The best blog in Canada. Obviously.

TV Shows:

It’s pretty frustrating that Hulu doesn’t stream their stuff on-line to Canadian users, but the Canadian TV channels have some stuff setup.

• Rick Mercer Report: Great satire, guy formerly of 22 minutes, the most popular Canadian commentator next to Don Cherry.
• The Hour with George Strombolopolous: This is probably one of my favorite news shows now, this guy’s a great journalist and they always get interesting people on the show.
• JPod: A short-lived comedy about a bunch of people working at a game development company. Geeks owe it to themselves to watch this, whether they’re Canadian or not.
• The Comedy Network/CTV: Just some miscellaneous TV channels and their shows. Wow, CTV’s site really needs a redesign.

Stores:

Yah, a lot of digital distribution stores aren’t around in Canada, and the iTunes music store is really behind the curve. Here’s some canadian digital distribution/online order stores:

• Amazon.ca: This is probably a given.
• ZeStuff/Splitreason: These are canadian thinkgeek-style stores, and they’ve got some pretty good stuff. It’s also the official VGCats outlet, which is a great canadian webcomic. (PS: ZeStuff seems to be down as of the time of this writing)
• PureTracks: I haven’t used this, but this is a canadian digital music store. It looks alright.

Digital Distribution stores that Canadians can buy from: eMusic, Steam, Direct2Drive, Audible, Telltale Games, Gametap(Limited)

News

• Canada reddit: At least there’s some way to get this kind of news
• Macleans: A pretty beefy news site

If anyone has anything else, be sure to leave it in the comments.

Yaaaay! The gallery is now beautiful and not annoyingly difficult to use. Thanks, Mike! <3 I’m really starting to draw a lot more now, so I’ll be reorganizing my artwork and taking out some things that should not be there. Expect some new additions soon!

This is pretty cool, this Japanese company makes adult shirts of Pokemon, the idea being that those kids that were into Pokemon when they were 8-10 years old are all grown up now, Like me and Callyn, for instance. Pokemon has been around for over 10 years…

Japan only for now. There’s more on the Pokemon 151 site.

So the game I made for Callyn using RPG Maker VX is now online!

The game is about 2-3 hours long and features music from two of my favourite SNES games (Chrono Trigger and Donkey Kong Country 2).

It features some pretty intense random-encounter dungeon mazes so don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Download Callyn’s Adventure.

I also organized the games a bit better and added a new one: Solitare programmed in VB.Net

urf...

The first step is admitting you have a problem.

Here’s just some misc. pictures and videos from PAX2008:

Lineups were rediculous everywhere.

Video games weren’t the only games at PAX…there was also Magic/TCGs and D&D stuff. Yah, I dunno. It seemed cool I guess.

Only panel I really wanted to see at PAX. From Right: Doc from Sarcastic Gamer,

This was that M.C. Frontalot playing his “tut tut” song live. We tried to miss his concert, but after we saw some of it it turns out he was pretty good.

This was M.C. Frontalot doing a surprise duet with Johnathan Coulton, who headlined the day we weren’t there.

This was the only good pic I got of Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, who are actually from Burnaby. Check out those costumes…

This is probably the best video I got from PAX. It’s from the guys who headlined that night: The Minibosses. They did rock covers of NES games.

This was pretty cool: The whole computer is submerged in mineral oil. Water cooling to the extreme..

Felicia Day from Dr. Horrible/The Guild

PC Freeplay area. You get a computer for a little while and play some games. We played UT3 and some Starcraft.

The Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway booth was giving away free copies of the game if you got your head shaved with a “hell’s haircut.”

I <3 my companion cube.

Just some picture that Mel took. I wish I had Mel’s camera, her pictures are all clear and most of my pictures were all blurry.

Sumo Lounges were everywhere, especially in the handheld lounges. They were really comfy. They’re supposed to be the definitive gaming chair.

And that’s PAX2008! Thanks for checking out my pics and videos.

And now for the pictures of all the weird cosplayers I saw this year.

This is one of my favourite pics from the PAX trip. Seriously, me and the Dark lord of the Sith are best buddies.

This was taken with melissa’s camera. I have no idea what game this is… or what’s going on… and I’m not going to even try to explain it.

Umbrella employee guy was pretty cool.

Yah I don’t know who these guys are supposed to be either. They were nice enough to pose though when they saw me take the camera out. I saw them sumo wrestling on the floor later.

Princess peach was there selling classic games. I bought Burgertime from her.

Together at last…(Que romantic music)

The Fruit Fucker live at PAX! There was even a demonstration of him..erm…with some fruit.

Godot from Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations, drinking his coffee.

I don’t know who she is..either.

Okay so that’s it for Cosplayers, one more gallery to go up with just misc pictures and stuff and that’s it for the PAX 2008 posts.