So I was thinking of what to write next and I’ve spent the last 40 to 50 hours playing Mass Effect 3. I’ve taken my sweet time with this and really tried to enjoy it and savor every moment of my Commander Sheppard’s trilogy ending experience. Besides the Xbox, PS3 and PC version of Mass Effect 3 there’s also the ioS Mass Effect Infiltrator game for $6.99 and the Mass Effect 3 Data Pad app.

The Mass Infiltrator game on ioS controls like your typical touch screen controls which provides a very clunky experience and often irritates the user. I played the first two levels and gave up on the game.

What I like is the Mass Effect 3 Data pad application. This data app provides you access to Alliance news, Mail, Media, Galaxy at War and Codex. The keys for me for this app was the Galaxy at War section this provides the player with a view of the map and how well from a percentage stand point how ready you are to defeat the Reapers. You start at 50% ready when you start Mass Effect 3 and throughout the course of the game doing the main missions and side missions you increase your galactic readiness. There is no skill required for the data app, click a system, pick a planet and send your ship to battle after a set period of time from 1 hour to 6 hours you’ll receive credits and your galactic readiness will increase. You start with 3 ships but over the course of completing missions you earn credits to buy more ships, better shielding, more readiness points. I’ve used this app a ton to help me in my battle against the Reapers and highly recommend that anyone playing Mass Effect 3 who has an ioS device get this FREE application.

There are a couple of things that I don’t really like about Mass Effect 3 mining and the lack there of a proper explanation on what Galactic Readiness is and why it’s important to your game.

We all remember how terrible the mining in ME 2 was well they’ve streamlined the process but god damn it just eliminate this useless feature. So how it works is you send off a beacon and EDI let’s you know there is an anomaly in the area. Once an anomaly is detected you go to the planet and start scanning. Scanning will detect where you should shoot a probe (unlimited probes!!!!) and generally after collecting whatever it was on the planet it’s time to head back to the Citadel and hand over the object to the mission giver. The catch here is that you can’t simply press the LT trigger to the beacon to scan the systems if you do it to much you’ll alert the Reapers and they’ll come ready to kill you.

When you start the game and do a couple missions your brought into the war room and your shown the galactic map and which outlines how infested the universe is with Reapers. Throughout the course of the game you need to procure war assets and increase your galactic readiness that will help shape the final battle and outcome in the game. I strongly believe the game did a piss poor job in explaining all of this to me.

What also surprised the hell out of me was the multiplayer and how fun, addicting and competent it is. The premise is Horde mode with 3 other players against 10 waves enemy forces. During the course of the match there are some objective based waves were you’ll need to hack terminals for example on top of killing on the baddies that are trying to kill you.

There is an RPG element into this as well that I really like. You can pick your class and race and set your character up. What skills do you upgrade, what weapons and upgrades do you attach. Most importantly through micro transactions or through earning in game credits you can unlock more characters and better weapons. You receive the starter pack when you first start the game. The recruit pack costs 5,000 credits and is a way great way to upgrade and unlock basic weapons, mods and characters. The veteran pack is 20,000 credits or 80MS points to buy which includes 5 random items or characters and 1 uncommon item. The Spectre pack is 60,000 credits or 160MS points, which includes 5 random items or characters with at least 1 rare item. In my experience of playing online I have yet to encounter your typical 14 year old tea bag mother cursing douche bag yet and that’s made me want to go back and play more.

Well I think I’ve avoided any spoilers and now I’m off to hopefully finish the game after milking it and doing every side quest I could.

The game starts off with a gentleman by the name of Lee Everett riding along in the back of a cop car on his way to prison for a crime he may or may not have done. Somewhere on his journey to his 8 by 8 cell the zombie apocalypse starts. Injured and freaked out Lee makes his way to a suburban neighborhood and comes across a young girl named Clementine and now it has become his duty to ensure she stays alive and safe and return her to her parents.

Since this was my first experience with a Telltale game the conversation tree was interesting and I had live by some of the lies I had Lee tell. When someone has a question to in the game your presented with three options and the fourth is not to say anything and remind silent. You have a limited time to choose an answer. There was a situation early on in the game where I lied to Herschel and later on in a cut scene he called me out on lying to him. So be careful on what respond with, as it will affect this episode and as well future episodes.

Don’t worry you’ll get to kill a lot of zombies throughout of this game with axes and ice picks and you’ll even have to decide on several occasions who should live and who should be eaten by the zombies. My favorite chapter in the game was the motel level where there were about 5-6 zombies that you had kill. You had to plot your way around the level to kill the zombie’s quietly in order to not to startle the rest of the herd. This brings me to my only complaint of the game, which are the controls. You use the left stick to control Lee and the right analog stick. You use the right analog stick to interact with the environments and to fight off zombies if they attack you. I just found it this cursor took up too much the space on the screen and often led to me dying repedately.

If you enjoy the Walking Dead comic and television show and can live by the decisions you have your character make you should really pick up episode 1.

My first move once inside the Boston Convention centre was straight to Astro Gaming to pick up a wireless mixamp and a 2012 upgrade kit for my A40′s. The gentlemen manning the astro booth was incredibly helpful and even showed me how to place the new ear pieces on my A40′s.

The Wireless mixamp was a breeze to hook up once I got home from my flight. Since I had the previous wired mixamp hooked up. All I had to do was plug in the power source for the new wireless mixamp and than plug in the optical cable and turn it on. Next up was to put three triple A batteries into the RX (receiver), install the belt buckle, plug the headphones into it and the chat cable into the unit, power it up and were done. Once I turned on the Xbox muted my receiver and enjoyed my 7.1 surround sound into my ears.

Gunnar Optiks

On the last day of PAX I wandered over to the Gunnar Optiks booth to try and score a deal on a new pair of glasses. I got a pair last year however my biggest complaint was how heavy the frames were otherwise I enjoyed my purchased. I picked up a pair of MLG Phantom Neptune’s. There blue in colour with the yellow tinted lenses. In case your wandering I use the Gunnars frequently at work to avoid eye strain or after a night of little sleep I wear them to keep me going.

New Trent iCurve IMP70D 7000mah External Battery Pack

Before PAX I listened to the @thevowel discuss on the Major Nelson podcast how he just ordered a new external battery pack for conventions and while we all know how bad the iPhone battery is I decided this was a worthy investment for $45.99 from amazon.com but the kicker was no shipping to Canada. So this device has two USB ports one to charge and Iphone and one to charge an iPad and since I carry both devices this is a win. The good news is I really didn’t have a personal need for it but I did charge a few friends phones. I started writing this article at 1:53 pm with 62% battery on my iPhone and at 2:30 pm I’m 93% charged which is pretty impressive.

I also managed to pick up one of the official PAX shirts.

My Sunday plan off attack was to give the show floor a final walking and checkout Trails Evolution, Gunnar Optiks, The Witcher 2, Minecraft. I also watched people play Max Payne, Borderlands 2, Ghost Recon Future Solider which looked really good but I really didn’t want to spend my last day queuing for hours.

The first game I played was Trails and if you played the original Trails you’ll love this. The demo I got was a 3 player verus race on the same screen. The race consisted of 7 heats with points associated for winning each race but you lose points for crashes. If you somehow manage to crash which you will you’ll be automatically placed at the next checkpoint. You’ll respawn and start driving as soon as the last player goes through the checkpoint.

Next up I wandered to the Gunnar Optiks booth where I booked up a pair of the MLG Phantom Neptune glasses.

I left the show around 3pm, wandered around Boston for a bit, went bowling and called it a night.

Shortly after arriving at the convention centre I got in line for the Epic Games: Past, Present and Future panel hosted by Epic Games Design Director Cliff Bleszinski – President Mike Capps. Epic and Mike answered 10 questions from the community as well as a question and answer period at the end of the panel. The best part of this panel was this young lady asked a question when we will we see Gears of War on the Playstation. Cliff immediately said, Should I troll this? in which he did by going on to say when the Dual Shock controller doesn’t suck.

Next up we hit the show floor as we had a few hours to kill and we over to the Robot Entertainment booth to see @Six Okay – Justin Korthof and get a hands on demo of Orcs must Die 2 which was recently announced for the PC. There was a single player and co-op demo going on. Courtney and I got a chance to team up and kill some Orcs in the new co-op mode. The maps are two or three times the size of the original game and feature a new character. Our tactic was simple she would kill everyone and I would manage the tower defense portion by laying all the traps and such. After 7 waves of enemies and a few good laughs this was easily my favorite game of the show.

We had to queue up about a good 2 hours before the Major Nelson Podcast since Felica Day was guest staring on the show but I was excited to see Stepto join the show but there was no mention of puppy talk. If you’ve listened to the show before you know what to expect from this panel which is a lot of laughs. It was good to see the cast I listen too every week.

After the show was over the exhibit floor was closed we headed back to our hotel relax, eat dinner, find @ubersully some clothes at the mall and I went back to try and get into the Giant Bomb podcast but failed which kind of bummed me out a lot.

Our plan of attack for today was to walk around and figure out what was at the show and figure out what we wanted to see. We walked around for hours.

The first panel we decided to check out was an An Uncharted 3 Story: The Chateau, Creation to Ashes which went through the process on how Naughty Dog created the level. The panel was hosted by Justin Richmondc, Game Director, Eric Schatz, Game Designer, and Arne Meyers Community Strategist. The concept for this panel was to walk us through from concept to final product how they created the level. It was very interesting to see how they’ll place a headless drake (more later on this) in a level with cubes and objects to see how there initial concept pans out once in the Uncharted universe. Often times a really cool idea will be made into the game at this stage and get cut because it just isn’t working. They do this they don’t want to invest art assets into something that just isn’t going to work. For example the sequence where you climb down a well actually started as the player climbing out of the well. Another interesting tie bit was when Sully and Drake were running up the stairs that’s actually the same set of stairs used but with the scripting in place it allows each stair case to fire a different mechanic thus providing the player with one hell of an adventure. After the designed the level they didn’t know how to end it and they walked us through the various prototypes they came up with. One was a sequence they Drake and Sully climb up a tower, fight some badass’s and jump into a helicopter and escape. The art assets and time they had didn’t allow for this kind of ending so what they decided to do was have the roof of château collapse and have the player escape it by jumping off and not a pole, slide down and escape it.

That was it for the day just a lot of relaxing after that.

We checked into our hotel to the Colonnande hotel, unpacked and proceeded across the street to the Prudential Centre, did a little bit of shopping at GameStop, Lord & Taylor and Shaw’s to pick up a few snacks for the hotel room. I picked up SSX and FIFA street for $30 bucks each.

We meet up with some friends and headed to Cheers were we waited forever a table all so we can enjoy a good beer, enjoy good company and say we had a beer ate Cheers.

Later we went on to the Microsoft NERD campus to meet up with some fellow Canadians. We than went to a place called Beacon Hill Pub and enjoyed some beverages.

Bed!.

What concern’s me the most about the Vita is the steep $249.99 price tag. I’m not saying this isn’t a sexy little machine but if you rewind a year ago the Nintendo DS launched for the same price and saw a distract price cut by $80 before the one year anniversary of the console. Yes, the Vita has a bigger and better launch line up but are customers willing to pay that price tag?. The games are ranging anywhere from $29.99 to $49.99 for retails game. If you care to purchase the game digitally? most games not all are 10% cheaper in the PSN store. Are consumer’s willing to pay such a step price for games given the risen of the ITunes App store and the content on there? Hopefully takes a cue from Valve and does some major promotions on games during the holidays. Don’t worry they will continue to rape us on the cost of the proprietary memory chips.

One of the first thing’s I noticed when I opened the box to my new Vita was this hideous three piece power cord. Seriously could make this any more complex. Plug A into B and B into C before you can start charging and it looks ugly. The cord is also 6 feet long. Please have a designer make things before involving an engineer or just take a look on how Apple operates.

One of the biggest complaint’s of the original PSP and PSP Go was the lack of dual analogs while that’s been changed with the Vita with dual analog sticks. The problem with the dual analog stick’s is there height above the screen is kept to a minimal to make it portable. The issue with this is this handicaps them and makes games like shooter’s very tough because you can’t get a good enough grip and move them quick enough like you would on a console controller.

The Vita comes with a front facing camera and a rear facing camera with technical specs of 640×480 (0.3MP) VGA which on paper are the same specs the Nintendo 3DS uses. However, the vita’s image’s aren’t very good compared to the 3DS. The 3DS produces a better coloured imaged. Sure the iPad or iPhone camera will kill this thing but is the camera in the vita an essential element to the success of the device? I don’t think it is but I’m sure they could have put something a bit better in.

One of the most important things on any hardware device is how does the operating system and software cope with it. For the most part I like it but there are some little things that I don’t like. For example, I click an icon on the home screen like Uncharted, I expect that the game will launch and I can start playing. But that doesn’t happen it brings up an interstitial page and ask’s me are you sure you want to launch this game?. Another is that trophies still do not automatically sync, like come on Sony get with the times.

What I like about the screen is it’s gorgeous at 5 inches and it’s an OLED screen. Better yet it’s touch screen too and it’s really good. The touch is responsive and there isn’t any lag. For me it’s as responsive and as iPhone or iPad. Where the touch screen doesn’t get as responsive as it should is during games. I’ve noticed a bit of lag playing certain games.

One of the big surprises at launch for myself and the rest of the gaming world was that most Vita games that are bought on the PSN store are 10% cheaper. I’m hoping with a drop in the over priced memory cards and really kick ass playstation sales that can rival steam digital Vita game sales can sky rocket in popularity.

Overall it’s a sleek beautiful handheld device that’s lightweight, the triggers feel and respond fantastically. It has potential as long as the Sony continues to support it and developers continue to make great games for it. Everyone is waiting for that big killer game to make us go crazy. Do I think you should get a Vita? at some point in 2012 I think you should. It will have a great line up of games and hopefully cheaper memory sticks.

2012 is the year I get my life back on track and a get better sense of my finanical well being. It all starts with a budget and sticking to it. Coming from a family that didn’t have much and who’s parent’s weren’t great with money well that’s rubbed off on me. I’ve spent and not cared or kept track of it. This year that’s changing, it starts with a budget and sticking to it.

This got me thinking, how much did I spend on video games in 2011? The answer is I don’t know. For 2012 I’ve implemented a bit of a modest budget of $1000.00 on video games. This isn’t limited to just games it also includes points card, hardware, Xbox Live subscriptions, iOS,etc. A thousand may sound a bit extreme to some but I strongly believe I spent more than in 2011.

I’m going to use this post and continually update it to track my spending.

January:

Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land $4.99
Uncharted: Golden Abyss $56.00
Playstation Vita First Edition Bundle $0.00 ( EB trade promo’s)
Mass Effect 3 – $79.99
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13 – $69.99
Mass Effect Infiltrator – $6.99
Fifa Street – $39.99
SSX – $39.99
Yakuza 3, Borderlands, Bioshock & Bioshock 2 -$70.00

Running Balance $367.94