Mass Effect 3

                So today, I figured I would tell everyone a little more about my topic for project 1. Maybe it will help me with the paper portion of the assignment. Here’s what I ended up with.

                Mass Effect 1, released in 2007, promised to be the beginning of a very interesting trilogy. Interesting for pretty much one reason; the choices you make will not only directly impact what happens in this game, but the second as well. Then your choices for both one and two will accumulate for the third and final installment, making each game truly unique to the gamers. It was an interesting concept but no one really knew how they were going to pull it off. Creating an interactive story had been tried before, but never on this scale, and never came out to be very good. Felt like a first person shooter dressed up in a costume for Halloween. Mass Effect however, has come through with flying colors, creating deep characters that you really miss when they die, and who many would actually die for (which is, in a round about way, an option on Mass Effect 2. Yes, you can DIE before you even get to the conclusion of the series, and it still flows together without a hitch). Another thing is the designers actually sat down and created culture, a history, and previous confrontations in the galactic species long before your character was even born, which is fairly important, especially in the third game. You are introduced to a species that has been systematically wiping out all intelligent life for several million years. You figure this out slowly through the first game, culminating in a battle between you and one of these giant machines that is here to signal the others that it’s time for another harvest. Long story short, you blow him up in a fairly epic battle and the aliens are stopped. WOOT! Then it turns out they’re not but no one else will believe you and here’s where we spill into the second game. In this one, you spend the game hunting some of the servants of the machines, all the while knowing that a galactic fleet of these things is coming. Enter the third game. They are here, earth is all but conquered, humanity can’t stand on its own against this onslaught, and no one is coming to help. You escape earth and go to unite the races that you have been interacting with, for better or worse, through the entire series. The developers made one point very clear however. You will stand together, or you will fall alone. Mass Effect 3 comes out March 6^th, 2012. I hope some of you at least, will give it a try.

word count -- 461

Pictures

                Describe a time when you were reading a text with pictures and the pictures changed the experience.  How about this morning?  I woke up way to early and decided to read web comics to pass the time. This isn’t overly unusual as I follow around twenty to twenty five comics daily, but back to this mourning.  Reading text with pictures seems to have both a positive and negative effect.  Positively, the artist and author can defiantly be sure they are communicating the right message with facial expressions, color and shape of the eyes, the color filter of the background, the fact that there is a constant background, and it all just seems to flow together to form a cohesive story.  It’s amazing and I’d imagine it to be quite difficult depending on the level of detail. But that is how I read into web comics; the images let me see exactly what the author/artist wanted me to see. That is also the negative though.  That is the negative in that I only see what the author/artist wants me to see.  There is no imagination on my part, no “everyone sees the characters in a different and unique way.” For people that do not have very active imaginations, I can see why that might be a plus but I personally have a very active imagination. Always have and I consider myself lucky that I got to keep it after my childhood.  It seems a lot of people seem to lose their imagination when they get introduced into the world, at least that’s how it seems to me. But I’ve always enjoyed imagining what characters look like in novels and what the back ground might look like. I might miss an emotional inflection on those dry colorless pages but I think that it is more than compensated for with the colorful images that fill my head when I read.

Word count -- 321

Minecraft

Hello. Today the topic is MInecraft. For those of you that don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, Minecraft is a computer game dissimilar from any that have come before it. Everything is blocky including the animals and the people but the graphics are fine. The movement scheme is up to par as you move across this blocky world, constantly discovering new biospheres and discover whole new uses for materials you thought useless.

The history of Minecraft is actually pretty incredible as well. For the first I think 6 years, Notch programmed this game in Java by himself. No team, no office building, no real support in a language that was never intended nor designed for that. He made it almost free and constantly available to the web from day one as he moved through his first Alpha to what it is now, constantly using user feedback and viewing the mods people were using as ideas to help him better the game, and better it got. We went from a simple exploring game, it something filled with wolves and wild cats! Pigs, cows, and chickens dot an ever-changing landscape that sprawls off in all directions as far as the eye can see during the day, and unspeakable terrors during the night. It’s an amazing game that you can get lost in for hours, if for no other reason than because the world is always new, always random. It never repeats. It is a game of mindless oblivion, which is pretty impressive for a game where the player has no purpose.

That’s right, I said no purpose. There is no end goal of Minecraft, no final destination or quest to follow. You are (or at least were) the last Minecraftian and, as far as you can tell, the only Minecraftian to have ever existed. You build a structure, hide from the badies at night, try to make your way in whatever way you want. You can be a farmer, an explorer, or an artist. You can live in a small dirt hut, or a huge mansion, limited only by your imagination. That’s how a game with no purpose is so addictive and so popular. That is one of the many things that set it apart from any other computer games to date. Every world is truly unique and every world is your world.

Word count--395