Saturday, January 19, 2008

Your post made me laugh. I'm disappointed you didn't memorize the whole list... I bet you don't even remember whether Outlaw Golf: 9 More Holes of X-mas is on there. (Here's a hint: it is.)

About the Bioware games, Mass Effect is a lot more ambitious but Jade Empire is tighter and more assured. It's kind of like comparing the music we made in the JP Can't Come Over era, when it was really fuckin' improvisational and deep and shit, and we'd do things like wear a clown mask and a crayola outfit just because we fucking had the inspiration to do it, but maybe sometimes it was sloppy, versus the plastic, corporate bullshit we soft-served out into neat little piles in the Holophrastics.

Another good comparison would be comparing an ambitious but sloppy rock opera by The Who to one by Queensryche. (Note to research assistant: is this a valid comparison? Rudy likes music, so, I need this paragraph, fucking, rock-solid.)

Or another way of phrasing it, that isn't retarded, is that some of the issues with ME are due to things that Jade Empire doesn't implement, namely the inventory system and sidequest system that are the weak points of ME simply have no equivalent in Jade Empire. So in Mass Effect they're trying some different things that don't always quite work but when they do work they're really good. Jade Empire the experience is a little flatter.

I could go on.