The Strategist

I haven’t made any wordy posts for quite a while now, so here is one. I’ll be talking about Call of Duty: World At War and Mass Effect 2. This is possibly going to be the last of the game updates for a very long time. I did want to play Gears of War, but that game just gave me horrible headaches similar to those you get when you read while in a car. Its funny, because Kotaku made a post about headaches recently too. I might get around to playing it one day, but it’ll definitely take a while. If you’re wondering why I’m getting sick from Gears of War, the camera moves around Cloverfield style. The problem is, the screen is smaller, and the graphics is much worse (anything below cinematic trailers or Final Fantasy movies is crappy graphics).

CoD: World at War isn’t anything great, to be honest. It follows the older CoD 1 and CoD 2 games more closely than it follows Modern Warfare, and the whole World War 2 weaponry thing just isn’t to my liking. What really annoyed me is that Nazi’s or Japanese would just keep spawning until you get past a certain game trigger. Sure, killing them slowly does thin them out, but come on, watching 50 to 100 people pour out of a building is just annoying.

What I do like though, is flamethrowers. Yeah, you get to use flamethrowers in quite a number of missions, and since they have unlimited ammo and pretty much kills people once the fire touches them, it makes the game much easier.

I think the problem with Call of Duty games is that they start to become very repetitive and typical after you’ve played a lot of them, especially if you play them one after another. I played Modern Warfare 1 and 2, and World At War just within a month. This might be the reason why Modern Warfare 2 felt less epic than Modern Warfare 1, and World At War was just a pain in the ass to me.

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On the other hand, Mass Effect 2 is a masterpiece. Mass Effect 2 allows you to use your Mass Effect 1 save game to continue the story, and even though you might be tempted to download a random save game out there, I really suggest that you play Mass Effect 1 all over again and continue using that character. Its much more personal, and you’ll feel a closer connection. Besides, when you use your Mass Effect 1 save file, its not only the major details like the survival of the council that will be brought over, but many other minute details that you might not even remember that would be brought over. People you’ve freed or killed will come back to jolt your memory one way or another, and when you remember who that person is, you’ll have that moment of surprise.

One thing I’m not sure whether or not I like is the change to the weapons. More specifically, the ammo. In Mass Effect 1, you had unlimited ammo, but there was an overheating system that prevented you from shooting too much in a short period of time. Now, weapons will never overheat, but they now use thermal clips that quickly cool the weapon, and well, its just a fancy way to say that the gun uses ammo. Finding ammo isn’t particularly difficult, but that doesn’t mean that I can go around shooting like a maniac either. The reason why I may not really like this change is that the effectiveness of the sniper rifle is reduced. Its not reduced in the sense that its weaker, but the stronger rifles only have about 10 shots before you’re out of ammo. Even then, these shots take off at least 90% of the life of the enemy, so its as good as a “one shot, one kill” thing because you can let your squad kill him off.

Speaking of squads, the AI of the squad has been significantly improved. In Mass Effect 1, they pretty much just stood there looking cool and killed the occasional enemy that decides to come too near (well technically they spent a lot of time dying and shooting at the air). Now, they take cover, use skills, and actively take part in combat, but that doesn’t make your job any easier.

You can now explore the galaxy actively, probing planets to collect resources that you will use to upgrade both your squad and your ship. This is pretty much something that you have to do, or bad things will happen to you and your squad. I’m really just being vague and talking only about gameplay, because the story is something that you should really find out for yourself.

There we go. That’s it. Don’t know whether I’ll have any time to play more games.