http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/03/03/mass-effect-trilogy-may-be-remastered-for-ps4-and-xbox-one
Bioware is thinking about releasing a remastered version of the Mass Effect Trilogy for PS4 and Xbox One. I probably would have bought this so I can keep my favorite video game series after my PS3 gets put away if I didn't just buy the Trilogy for $11 on PC last week. Either way, I'm glad they are still committed to the franchise and I'm excited to see what they do next.
In other news, I put Thief back in the mail this morning. I had posted earlier that I didn't think it was as bad as the reviews said even though it was pretty rough around the edges. This is still true. I still say the stealth gameplay isn't that bad if you can shut out the story and the terrible cut scenes. That part of the game is as unpolished as any game I have ever played. The framerate drops, the lip syncing isn't even close, and the character models look terrible. It's strange that the pre-rendered cut scenes perform so much worse than the actual gameplay. Still, when I was younger and only had access to a limited amount of games per year I would have finished this game and probably been reasonably happy with it. These days I have too many outstanding games in my backlog to waste time slogging through a mediocre, unpolished mess.
I usually like to pick one game at a time and stick to that until I can finish it. Right now, I find myself jumping back and forth between several games though. Saturday night I finished The Wolf Among Us Episode 2. It runs and looks great on PC. It doesn't have any of the slowdown I am seeing on TWD Season 1 and 2 on my PS3. I think I actually like TWAU better than TWD even though I am a fan of the TWD TV show and have read some of the comics and I have never see any of TWAU's source material.
I also jumped back into Don't Starve over the weekend. Something about this game is addicting to me even though I'm not doing very well at it. My record so far is 8 days and most of my attempts are ending at about 5 or 6 days. It's still progress though. When I first started playing I was struggling to make it 2 or 3 days. Don't Starve just drops you into a crazy world with no instructions at all and tells you to survive. I have died in many different ways from starving, to eating poisonous food, to being killed in the dark by who knows what, from trying to hunt an animal that was too big for me, to being smashed by a walking tree, etc. In addition to keeping your stomach full, you also have to keep your health and sanity meters full. The lower your sanity goes the more weird monster type things you will see. I still haven't grasped exactly how to keep the sanity meter up so these types of things will stop attacking me. I'm sure I could look everything up on the internet and breeze through this game but the part that makes it fun is learning for yourself how to survive. You have to learn which things to build and how they interact with the world with no help from the game. It's all trial and error. Some things might kill you right away, while others might give you a combination that makes surviving the next day or two a breeze.
I put some time into inFamous 2 over the weekend too. It's amazing how much they improved over the original. They used a different voice actor for Cole who doesn't have such a ridiculous, gravely voice. The whole world looks much better with a huge jump in quality for the character models. The writing is better too. I thought the first game was fun but I didn't really see where all the praise this franchise gets was coming from. A lot of that is probably because I was playing a game from 2009 in 2014 and there have been some big leaps forward since then. inFamous 2 is starting to make me see why people love it so much though.
Lastly, I have been playing The Witcher. I have heard so many great things about this franchise but I didn't have a gaming PC when the first two came out. The Witcher 2 made it's way to consoles but I didn't want to jump into a sequel without playing the original. I got both of those games for very little money and I wanted to get caught up before the Witcher 3 comes out later this year. I don't think I have OCD but with game franchises I seem to have some OCD tendencies. I have a really hard time playing a game in a story based franchise if I haven't played all of the games leading up to it. Even for something like Borderlands, where the story wasn't all that important I had to play the original first when Borderlands 2 was getting hyped up everywhere. That's the same reason I had to play inFamous 1 and 2 before Second Son comes out even though it's a completely different main character. This is why I probably won't play Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeros or Phantom Pain no matter what kind of review scores it gets. There are just too many games in that franchise for me to go back and try to figure out it's convoluted story.
