Not much has happened work-wise, except for us still not having much free time.
In our limited free time, we don't really feel like doing anything productive generally, so we started playing the Mass Effect series together.
Lussy has never played it, I only played it a long time ago, and our work is kinda related to it, so it made sense.
But oh boy, it is hard.
Not the game. Everything else.
First, the original Mass Effect game barely works on a modern PC. NPC-s charge around, performance is unbearable and glitches are everywhere. But no problem, we own this game for the good ol' X360.
We have the original Xbox 360, without the HDMI out and with the fans what sound like a vacuum cleaner. But whatever, we have a component cable for it, and we can pump the volume up.
We started playing, but we couldn't even start a new game, the console just told us that the disc was dirty. Of course the issue is actually with the disc drive, but whatever, we copied the game onto the mighty 12GB HDD. It took some time and tries, but it succeeded eventually.
I always played the Mass Effect games on the PC, so I had no idea that the game's Xbox version was this... problematic. Low framerate, and texture streaming issues everywhere.
We played for a while, then got fed up, and installed the game onto our Xbox One. It's even in the Game Pass, so it was an easy install. But the game still ran horribly. Oh well, we slowly finished it. Lussy liked the story, so we looked forward to the next game.
That we own for the X360. It was the German version.
If somebody told me that a high profile game made in 2010 has no language options, I would call them an idiot. But lo and behold, there's no other language on the disk. And what about the Xbox One version, that actually just downloads the game files? Nope, still German only.
I got pissed off, so I just bought the game again. But first, the Microsoft store locked me out for some reason, so I had to contact support.
Mass Effect 2 has some pretty important DLCs. Like whole stories and characters are locked behind them. So I got to buying the DLCs on the store but there was only 2 of them. The Arrival and Kasumi - and also some appearence set. What?
Installed the game on the Xbox One. Main menu, connected to Cerberus network. Tried to download the Kasumi DLC I bought, and it just said that it was going to download. But nothing happened.
Tried to download the other one, still got the same pop up notification. Then nothing.
Got fed up again, checked it online. In our country (and in some other ones around us), we can't download any kind DLCs (besides Arrival and an appearance pack) on Xbox One. No reason, we just can't.
So we tried buying the DLCs on the Xbox 360 so that we could trick the Xbox One into downloading it. We put the glorious German disc inside the crappy disc drive, and it started grinding it. Very loudly. Error message, and the disc drive opens without warning. Disc got some pretty big scratches - not a big loss - but the disc drive now doesn't want to stay closed. Not even when we turn off the damn console.
 |
| shame. |
But the machine itself works, and I'm not the type who gives up if it's about a video game, so I installed the digital version of Mass Effect 2 onto the X360's HDD. It was slow, but it downloaded. Game starts, I enter Cerberus network and then download all of the relevant DLCs.
But the X360 only has a tiny 12GB HDD, so I had to wipe everything else on it. And we still can't download the Overlord DLC.
Well, at least everything else is installed and ready to go.
I moved the console against a furniture so the disc tray couldn't open, and we played the game. And man, it's just as good as I remembered. Lussy and I are having a great time playing.
But the damn machine is loud and sometimes the HDD doesn't start, so we're gonna buy a slim version soon.
Maybe with that we can finally play the game without issues. One can only hope.
Anyways.
It sucks that we can't talk about our work publicly now, but until we get more time to work on our personal projects, there's not much to say.
