Back in Mass Effect tonight, I stole the Normandy back and got out of the Citadel easily enough, and then celebrated my freedom by finishing off a couple minor side quests and the item collections. There wasn’t much of a reward for the collections, though, just some money and xp that I didn’t really need by this point anyway.

Then it was off to Ilos to track down Saren. This also triggered the infamous sex scene, though it’s actually pretty tame and tasteful by gaming standards. Really, the worst (best) you see is a blue butt. Anyway, on Ilos I learned a lot more about the Protheans and what happened to them, and then it was back to the Citadel to save the universe.

To say more would be too spoilery, but the ending was appropriately epic. I doubt I’ll have the time to do an opposite-style playthrough (male/soldier/renegade), but I’m definitely looking forward to Mass Effect 2 now, and hoping that there’s a PC version that isn’t delayed too much…

It was another long day in Mass Effect, starting out with saving some space hippies. The side quests are getting a bit repetitive, though, since there’s very few different ship and planetary base layouts. So, next I headed to Noveria, where after an introductory corruption investigation, I went off to confront Matriarch Benezia. I didn’t really learn much from this segment though.

I did a couple more side quests I’d picked up along the way, and then headed off to an asteroid to do the Bring Down The Sky DLC mission. Although it only encompassed a single planet, it was still fairly meaty, with multiple places and quests to work through. The end result was a fairly nice piece of armour for Tali, for whom it’s been fairly tough to find any armour.

I then headed to Virmire to continue the plot again, and it was a fairly long segment in which I lost a crew member (though he won’t really be missed that much…), and fought Saren, though it turned out to be an unwinnable fight. I did learn a lot more about Saren’s plans though, and the Reaper that seems to be pulling all the strings.

The Council isn’t so convinced though, so now I have to find a way to work around their lack of cooperation…

It was a long day in Mass Effect as I finished Feros, involving a long slog through the Thorian part. Afterwards, more was revealed about Saren’s ship and how he controls people, though I still don’t know where he is.

Upon returning to the ship, the romance plot kicked in and I was forced to choose between Kaidan and Liara. A whiny marine, or blue boobies, hmmm, a tough choice indeed… I went to Luna and got my specialist class for finishing the mission there, and then worked on some more of the investigation assignments I’d picked up along the way. None of them are really related to the main plot, but they’re good for loot, xp, and bits of lore.

My level is somewhere in the 30s now, and it’s been getting annoying having to stop to break stuff down into omnigel, since there’s no convenient way to do it for large batches of items. I hit the Rich achievement, which let me buy the high-end Spectre equipment, so I don’t even really need any more weapons for the main characters. (I can’t afford them for all the crew members yet, but I’ve been sticking with Liara and Tali as my other squad members.)

I’m also starting to get personal requests from the other crew members. So far I’ve helped Wrex retrieve some old family armour, and next up I think I’ll do whatever it was Garrus requested.

Getting back to Mass Effect, I finished up the side quests in the Citadel and resumed the main quest, wherein I was suddenly promoted to being a Spectre and sent off to investigate some leads.

I first headed off to find Liara, the final crew member, and had to search a few planets before finding her. Upon landing on a planet, you drive a vehicle called the Mako around, and the controls are a bit unwieldy since it has a large turning radius and tends to bounce around a lot once you hit uneven ground. I got the hang of it though, and soon found the ruins Liara was hiding in, cleaned out some Geth, and rescued her. Some of the fights were actually pretty tough in this part since I was still getting the hang of trying to make the most of my biotic abilities.

Now that Liara’s part of the crew, I talked to her for a while and she eventually brought up her people’s mating rituals (hubba hubba). Apparently they don’t even need to touch their partners…

I returned to the Citadel to finish off a few random quests I’d picked up along the way, start a few more new ones that appeared, and headed off to do some random exploration. There are plenty of planets that aren’t directly plot-related, but you can still land on them to find various minerals, artifacts, loot, or minor side quests, like the one where a monkey stole the data module from a crashed probe and I had to hunt down the one that stole it in another set of ruins.

I eventally landed on Feron, one of the potential leads, where I’m now in the middle of helping a group of colonists there fend off a Geth invasion.

I’ve been busy lately, but I finally got around to the just-released Fallout 3 DLC, Point Lookout. It’s a completely separate, swampy area that’s much bigger than the rest of the DLC so far, with a lot more to explore and do, and even some new monsters in the swamp people and swamp ghouls and a new form of mirelurk.

There’s various side activities and I went through a bunch of them right away, including pillaging some bank vauls, tracking down a spy’s 200-year-old mission, a “safari” expedition in a cave, making moonshine, and various other caves and loot points. The primary quest was getting involved in an old vendetta between a ghoul and a scientist who turned out to be a brain in a jar. Although straightforward, it introduced some neat game mechanics like a house defense standoff.

Overall, it’s probably the best piece of DLC so far for Fallout 3, and well worth it.

Mass Effect continued on with a lot more talking in the Citadel. One quirk of the conversation system is that you’re given a few choices for different responses, but what the character actually says often doesn’t quite match what you might have expected from the phrasing of the choice. It doesn’t really matter that much though, as it’s usually pretty clear what the ‘good’ and ‘evil’ responses are.

I found and did some odd jobs, usually involving questing or talking to people, and picked up a couple more levels that way. I also picked up Wrex and Tali as squad members, and ended the evening with some action as a firefight down below led to finding more information about what Saren, a rogue Spectre, is up to.

I’m guessing I’ll be leaving the Citadel to pursue missions on other planets soon, but there’s still a few minor quests I need to wrap up here first.