Hi! It's Geril.
We're working hard in our jobs and learning a lot.
Other than that, we started playing Mass Effect 3. And because it's us, it's never easy.
We installed the game onto our Xbox One, bought the DLCs and downloaded them. But when it loads to the main menu, the initialization never ends. Checked it online, and it's a typical issue – what else? – and the solution is that you have to go offline.
But to play the game, since it's backward compatible, the console checks the disc and looks it up online and only then starts it. So we have to start it up while the console is online, then turn it offline just to get through the main menu.
But it plays.
Except when the disc is somehow unreadable. No real reason – it's not scratched or anything – it's just when we turn the Xbox back on, sometimes it doesn't read the disc and we have to restart the whole thing, sometimes more than once.
When I was little, I had pirated most of my video games. A lot of things I learned about workaround methods and basic software trickery comes from that time. Later, in some of my late teenage years, I went to make up for it by buying most of the games that I pirated back then, to zero-out my karma (because how can I ask anybody to pay for something that I made, when I rarely paid for the things I liked myself?). And it was always surprising how easy it was to install an official copy. No cracks or tacky and long workarounds, just put the disc in, type the serial number in, install it and boom, it's done, and works as intended (well, if I met the system requirements).
Console gaming is even easier. Put the original disc onto the tray, close it, and it plays.
But somehow, our experience with playing the Mass Effect series reminded me of those times when I had to check .NFO files and online boards about game cracking and copy protection workarounds. It's as if we have no right to play this game.
It's a bit nostalgic somehow.
The funniest thing about this whole painful experience is that playing Mass Effect 3 right after playing Mass Effect 2 is just disappointing. The second game was the peak of this series, and the third is missing the quality of the writing, and it's just very unpolished.
But we'll finish it, we're just not as enthusiastic about this game as we were about the second one.
Oh, and out "new" Xbox 360 Slim came. It came a bit late, and in retrospect, we should have waited for it before we started playing the 3rd game. Maybe on that console we would have fewer issues.
Other then this, I finally got my GPD Win 2.
It's the same old Win10 palmtop, but stronger than the first one. I like it, and will probably use it to play some games, and even for some of my work.
I may write about my experience with it next month.
