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Two Finger posted:BIG MACHINE GenericOverusedName posted:God I miss Vorcha.  I'M ALIVE! I have a comically old video card so I need to replace that before I join youse guys in Andromeda. On the whole, good?
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Apr 20, 2017 15:00
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| # ¿ May 5, 2024 09:23 |
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Is the multiplayer still going tho
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Dec 3, 2017 20:00
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I was one of those people who liked the exploring with the Mako bits in ME 1.
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Dec 7, 2017 18:36
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exquisite tea posted:You’re doing the lord’s work, my child. Glad you saved Tali for ME3, her death there is the most amazing thing in this series. I had no idea any of this existed Truth be told I usually play these sorts of games as a dream of personal effectiveness, so I want Tali to build a house on her planet with her friends and I lived through the final battle to bang my hot blue wifu and EVERYBODY IS CHILL, EVEN THOSE TELEPATHIC ZERG GUYS WHO'S NAME I CAN'T EVEN REMEMBER ANYMORE
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Feb 7, 2018 03:28
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Relentless posted:The general feeling seems to be that it wasn't a terrible game. Probably a solid 7/10 effort. Ah yes, the Deus Ex: Invisible War phenomenon
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May 6, 2018 02:33
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| # ¿ May 5, 2024 09:23 |
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I've a fun story So, while looking through my Dad's books, I noticed the title Beyond the Blue Event Horizon by Fredrick Pohl. I wanted to read it but noticed it was the second part of a series - the first being Gateway. Dad, being an old SF nerd, had a copy of it. Gateway is a good novel. Written in the late 1970s, in the future the problem of man is overpopulation, which drives space exploration. The novel is mostly Man starts colonizing the Moon, Mars, and then digging tunnels in Venus, when one guy discovers an alien spaceship. He hops into it and it automatically flies to a alien base in orbit around the sun, containing literally thousands of ships with FTL drive. The aliens, nicknamed the Heechee, are very mysterious; whatever they were up to, they very carefully scrubbed their bases (there was also a subterranean base on Venus) of any sign of who they were, save that of inexplicable artifacts nicknamed "heechee prayer fans", of no decernible use. The ships that have FTL are being investigated, obviously, but they too prove a puzzle. The FTL can't be analyzed, and the instruments are obviously alien. Through trial and error, and meticulous data collection, it is found the ships have a navigation system that can FTL be sent someplace, and then FTL itself home again - this soon proves lucrative. Sometimes, FTL takes a crew to where other Heechee artifacts can be found, and these can be reverse engineered and used by humanity - the ultimate hope being something can be done about the mostly wretched 25 billion humans now lousing up Earth. So the main character becomes one of these 'prospectors', people working for the Gateway corporation, the company chartered to run the alien base, Gateway. The whole thing is vaguely reminiscent of Mass Effect insofar as it is using a alien space station as a staging area to explore the galaxy, but aside from that it isn't really. The FTL it turns out is the only future tech - the spaceships have normal propellant and limited oxygen, and 'prospecting' is a terrifying crapshoot. Ships are called 'ones', 'threes' and 'fives' after how many people they can hold, so they are really big space capsules - except ones you may be trapped for months in while in FTL. So little is known about the navigation that it is possible to embark on a mission where you will run out of oxygen or supplies before you can return. Successful prospectors can become rich beyond the dreams of avarice - but something like 50% of the missions fail, with pods returning with partially or totally dead crew, or simply vanishing, never to be seen again. The novel itself is told as a flashback, with the main character rich back on earth (marked mostly by having 'full medical', IE being to afford maximal health care) trying to deal with the trauma of what he experienced with his AI psychologist. (Who is written in BASIC, btw.) Second book builds on this premise: prospecting discovers what Humanity is increasingly desperate for, a solution to Earth's food crisis. An alien "CHON" food production ship is discovered in the Oort cloud surrounding the solar system, manufacturing food from the carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and nitrogen locked in the frozen oort cloud asteroids. I'll cut to the chase here: there's A LOT of elements in this novel that show up in the basic setup to Mass Effect. The food production ship is more or less uncontrollable, just acting with its inscrutable software to make food - and send it someplace else - a vast space station orbiting another star nicknamed 'Heechee heaven'. On this space station is one half-feral 15 year old boy, and a tribe of Australopithecus people who've spent the past 50K years living on that station. The station, partially run down after millenia, is evidently a staging area for the Heechee to monitor the development of the human race, possibly interfering with our evolution. The heechee collapse into Prothean-like aliens, seeding the galaxy with creatures they hope will evolve into sentience. The menagerie of expernments on the station, the cave men, weird AI biomechanical hybrids, the recording of human personalities into AI to preserve them, basically most of the stuff in the second book, are part of this. We infer that Gateway, the heechee fans etc are a trail of breadcrumbs to get humanity out into space. In the end, mankind manages to capture the CHON station and 'heechee heaven', and more importantly, solve the mystery of the heechee prayer fans - which are prothean books. In the epilogue we get to see things from a Heechee perspective. They are bug-like aliens that sound a lot like Protheans. They live in the center of the galaxy, using their amazing future tech to hide inside a black hole's event horizion, having a whole constellation of planets and starts in there. We also learn the Heechee's motivation: they have decided some thing out there, unknown, is conducting experiments in the constructing of the universe, possibly trying to make the Big Bang and the Big Crunch happen to make the universe easier for life to live in. The seeding programs are ultimately as a buffer to the Heechee, who hope if this force shows up someday, they'll at least have a buffer to understand how to fight these creatures. Oh, and their FTL works by using energy to radically change the mass of objects, which is the basis of all their technology, as it has endless applications.
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Aug 27, 2018 00:35
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