The Turian Year

My long-time gaming buddies, ex-Clusum and The Techno Turian, have started this weird, nerdy and awesome project of weekly posting a video of a Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer solo match with turian characters wielding each of the 68 different weapons in the game. That’s one weapon a week, for 68 weeks. I noted that this would make for more than a year of weekly solos; but later I realized that it would make for almost exactly one year on the turian homeworld, Palaven. Palaven’s year lasts 1.2 Earth years, which happens to be around 62 weeks. That’s just too much of a coincidence to ignore! What my friends are actually doing is celebrating The Turian Year. Watch it unfold here!

Image: Palaven, from Mass Effect Codex

Themed Challenges Halls of Fame

This is the fourth in the series of posts about Mass Effect Multiplayer Challenges and Halls of Fame. Previously, I wrote about Platinum Solos Hall of Fame (PHOF) and fan-created Themed Challenges. Now it’s time to talk about the halls of fame for those same themed challenges (TCHOF).

Playing Skyrim–Beyond Skyrim

It’s not a witticism. Beyond Skyrim is one of those overambitious projects you sometimes hear about with regards to the highly modable games from Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls series that aim to expand the already huge game world by adding new provinces or rebuilding entire previous games in the latest one. But unlike most (possibly all) of them, Beyond Skyrim is actually playable. And it’s excellent. The new content is of DLC quality, virtually indistinguishable from the vanilla game, and where it differs, it’s mostly for the better.

Themed Challenges

This is the third in the series of posts about Mass Effect Multiplayer Challenges and Halls of Fame. In the previous one I wrote about Platinum Solos Hall of Fame. Here, I’ll talk about fan-created themed challenges.

Platinum Solos Hall of Fame

This is the second in the series of posts about the Mass Effect Multiplayer Challenges and Halls of Fame.

The ME3MP Platinum Solos Hall of Fame (PHoF) is, I believe, the oldest community archive. The earliest entries in it date back to July 2012, possibly to the same day when the platinum difficulty was introduced with the Mass Effect 3: Earth DLC. Back then, even the best players needed about an hour to complete a platinum solo. Nowadays, veteran soloists can do it in under 15 minutes.

Anthem: Follow-up

I wanted to write about the ME MP Challenges and Halls of Fame this week, but I won’t have time, so here’s a short follow-up on my experience with Anthem instead.

Playing solo, on easy difficulty, I finished the main story in about 30 hours (two weeks real-time), at pilot level 16. I did every mission that was available for the three factions, but I only spent as much time in freeplay as was required to do the tomb-opening challenges, and I only played the Tyrant Mine stronghold once, with random teammates. I talked to everyone in Fort Tarsis and did not sprint through it, but I didn’t dally around either. All in all, as a single-player game, Anthem has about the same amount of content as, say, Mass Effect 3.