Also, Infamous worked well enough, in its dorky kind of way, so previously unknown superheros can probably still succeed. Also, somehow, the recent trend (well, at least in the Marvel universe?!) towards everyday/"accidental" heroes is favorable towards the "You've never heard of me, but here's my story" approach.

Ha, yeah we'd need someone with an actual idea of how to get it done.

First reaction: Awesome idea. I smell Kickstarter…?

Haha, yeah, I consistently wake up in the morning with an impressive list of all the professionally enlightening, household-improving, family-building and sci-fi-adventuring activities I'm going to easily get done today, based on the awesome mood that only the "first cup of fresh hot coffee before anyone else wakes…

So what you're saying is, video games are your primary hobby, you don't have kids, and you're completely booked with games for the next couple of months.

Yeah, get ready to take lots of notes. There's an in-game notebook that just populates itself for the first hour or so (i.e. your character has insights about what s/he just read, which boil down to hints about what to do next)— very useful at first, but almost felt a bit too handholdy to me after about 5 interactions…

Umm… maybe? The idea of the three different people was cool, but getting it to work in practice (even with the shortcut for passing items back and forth directly through the inventory menu) was kind of a pain. More generally, even though I'm a well-established fan of adventure game logic, it seemed incredibly…

Fair point. Hard to say, since I've been out of the industry for a long time, but one thing to consider is that a lot of the systems and/or major story points were probably locked down a lot earlier than that…

I hear you, but… hmm… One thing that I'm actually quite enjoying is that the explorable planet areas are much larger and more "alive" than in the OT. They don't do the "random encounter" thing nearly as well as Fallout, but it's great to have a big open space, and I guess it only makes sense to put stuff in there to…

Eh, there's a lot of really good people at EA/Bioware Montreal— I know and/or have worked with some of them. It's probably just a matter of not being the same good people as before, or just the fact of working together as a (presumably 100+-person) team for the first time.

Awesome. Just don't tell me/us anything else about the ending! I'm glad they got that right, though, and I'm not surprised to hear you hoping for "streamlining" in the next game (which there will be). Constant reinvention seems to be a Mass Effect tradition.

To be fair, that guy needed to get a hold of himself.
https://www.youtube.com/wat…

I think one of the hardest parts of my planned Renegade/Stupid Asshole run is going to be flushing the rachni… She's just so cuddly, I couldn't help but save her on my first 2 playthroughs!

Verbs— awesome. Unbelievable part of speech, one of my favorites. And adventure games WITH verbs? Even better. Already in my library.

I think it's safe to say that I'll be playing some more Mass Effect: Andromeda this weekend (and for many weekends to come). I've already said more than enough about the game on these boards for the week, so I'll just mention that despite my weirdly persistent attachment (so far) to playing in a completionist mode, I…

You're welcome! I also just remembered that some friends were playing a game called Sethian where you have to decipher a language called Sethianese. From the Steam store page:

Yeah, there's just something about the way it's explained in-game that seems off to me. These things are supposed to trigger memories that SAM "inherited" from my dad, but they are found on planets he never saw? My best explanation for it now is, since they are often on top of mountains etc., maybe it's the inspiring…

I'd say Andromeda goes one step dumber by making you collect "memory triggers" that you can later cash in for a log entry back at home base. Sheesh.

So, I had to go back and think about this, because (a) I don't play as many different games as lots of people here, especially recently, and (b) you're right, most games don't deal with language at all as an explicit "subject" of in-game writing. And really, it makes sense for most cases— I can just assume that the…

The "cunning linguist" joke gets trotted out all the time, it's like it's the only thing people know how to say when they hear about someone studying/working in linguistics (other than "How many languages do you know?"). I don't much care for it myself, but a lot of linguists seem to have "owned" the joke; I believe…