Top 10 Games (updated)

Halo: The Master Chief Collection

Mass Effect: Legendary Edition

Knights of the Old Republic 2

Doki Doki Literature Club!

Bioshock Infinite

Portal 2

Quantum Break

Control

Alan Wake

Asassin's Creed 2

'Enjoy it despite its flaws' is one thing, but Mass Effect somehow invented its own category: 'simultaneously one of the most flawed and the most well-crafted sci-fi stories I've ever experienced'. These games are incredible. They’re the worst. All the women are sexualized. All the women have deeply flawed and complex personalities without being either demonized or romanticized. The first available f/f ship seems to be written along the guidelines of 'what would a straight man find hot'. As the games go on, they effortlessly include multiple same sex romance options given just as much care and development as the the opposite sex ones. You can play as a xenophobic murderhobo asshole. You can play as someone genuinely caring but also harsh, who inspires growth and co-operation wherever you go but who makes hard choices when you have to. You can kill civilians and punch reporters and commit genocide. You can stop a generational war and mediate peace and save several species from extinction. The robots are stereotypically evil cannon fodder. The robots are deeply complex with a tragic history. Your team mates are assholes with xenophobic opinions or justifications for police brutality and genocide, or they just want excuses to Do Murder. You team mates are deeply flawed and can be urged to grow alongside you. The most important aliens are all humanoids. There are plant aliens and jellyfish aliens and insect aliens and elephant aliens and aliens who can’t share an atmosphere with us. You have to drive around countless identically boring planets with little to show for it. You get to discover hidden secrets and civilisations millions of years old and live through some of the most emotionally harrowing scenes in storytelling history. I am going absolutely insane about it.

littlest furth shop

@laikascomet

mordin solus most character of all time. blorbo of the century. he is babygirl (he is an old man but also in his 30s). committed so many war crimes (but sees inherent value in all life and will die to preserve it). he is a doctor and a healer (will also fucking kill you). he doesn’t understand romance (but provides enthusiastic sex education for people in cross species relationships). worked in espionage doing unthinkable things (also performed in gilbert and sullivan). he has everything. he is the ultimate. he is the very model of a scientist salarian

Bee (that’s me) would like to thank all voters who have participated in the BioWare Blorbo Beat Down of 2023! Congratulations to Tali and Fenris for winning second place in their respective titles! Check back in tomorrow to see who has become The Best Blorbo!

my favorite thing about loyalty missions in mass effect 2, aside from how absurd of a concept they are already, is that none of them are made equally

like on the one hand you have missions like mordin’s, which require you to make the extremely difficult decision of whether or not to keep the research results that could potentially cure the genophage, which will have MASSIVE implications for the inevitable clash between the krogan and turians/salarians in the near future

and on the other hand you’ve got people like jacob who show up and go “my dad sucks” and then you find his dad go “wow your dad SUCKS lol put this man UNDER the jail” and now jacob will survive the swarm of alien bees 20 hours from now

(they're both texting garrus.) ro shepard belongs to @gammaraydeath 🖤

Drawin' turians, Nihlus was cool and should have been saveable 😤

Some art style practices with Mass Effect because i love these games a very normal amount

I really want to draw something meaty and put some characters into The Situations but I am dealing with a double whammy of art block and some REALLY insane migraine/Sinus issues the past 3 or 4 days.

So all I managed was a quick Solana. I wanted to give her a cool leg prosthetic but then I didn't really draw her legs sdjfdsjkfsdhf So that's the level of cognitive function I am dealing with at the moment

Fun fact! I really dislike a lot of the female turian design! So I just... ignored the parts I disliked lol.

The more time I sink into andromeda, the more I suspect the biggest reason it ultimately failed commercially was because of the massive tonal shift I've already mentioned, and how there was probably a pretty big chunk of original trilogy players who simply no longer fit as a demographic, while the game failed to reach the people who might’ve enjoyed it.

The original trilogy, much as I love it, feels a little bit like a wishfulfillment power fantasy for a very obvious demographic. Almost all women are overtly sexy in design and the f/f relationship in the first game seems to be written along the guidelines of 'what would a straight man find hot'; you play as someone cool and confident and powerful, the most specialest human ever, and maybe you aren’t always respected but YOU and the NARRATIVE always know you're right and you get to be rude to and sometimes punch/murder people who disagree with you so it’s fine. The game then salvages all this by means of genuinely well-written characters and arcs, really cool sci-fi tech and lore, a fantastic story, and meaningful and hard-hitting choices and consequences (which also allow and often encourage you to steer away from that exact macho ideal).

Enter andromeda. Instead of being a super powerful supersoldier from the start, you're the kid of one. You barely know what you're doing. Everyone doubts you, including yourself. You don’t get the assuredness of knowing you are Right and Cool that you have as Shepard. You don’t demand that same respect. And I'm sure there are a lot of people who hated that.

making tali a purple human: boring, uninspired

making tali as scrangly and inhuman as possible: absolutely fucks, incredibly based

Those two guys are so cute. But it seems still nobody knows who those adorable cosplayers are. Nonethelss, they did a great job – with their costumes and their performance! :)  

People always be like "Oh I left Ashley on Virmire because it seemed like her sacrifice was a satisfying way to end her arc" but also, like. Do you ever think about what it means to save her instead

Shepard actually has the choice to confront her martyrdom. She says "It should have been me, I'm the lower-ranking officer" and Shepard can basically be like "Are you trying to be a martyr? For whom? Your grandfather?? Listen. What the Alliance did to your family was unfair. But I'm not going to lose a good soldier over it"

And it's like, now Ashley has a chance to keep going. Because Shepard gave her a second chance in life

There's no redemption in death, is the point here

"So, Archangel?"

"It's just a name the locals gave me. I don't mind it, but- please, it's just Garrus to you."

im in such shock and hangover over The long way to a small, angry planet; i'm not even sure I have it in me to read the other books