Corusca

I know I did say I’d post a review of Mass Effect 2 here, but I just lacked the time to go beyond my Mass Effect 2 – Not (Really) A Review post at the point where I had just finished the game and now it’s pretty much too late. Sorry.

I will say I liked the game a lot. I ended up not having any of the romances available, and preferred to stay faithful to my Mass Effect romance, Liara, who shows up briefly in this sequel. I hope that means I’ll be able to continue that romance on Mass Effect 3, since the romance options (at least for female characters) were very lacking in the sequel. That’s my only real complaint about ME2.

Meantime, I’ve been slowly going through Dragon Age: Origins’ – Awakening. I’m liking it a lot. The new possible party members are all very cool so far (except the elf mage, who the impersonation of annoyance), and I’m only missing the dwarf. Anders is the funniest of all so far, and has some of the best lines and conversations I’ve seen in a roleplaying game. Too bad he’s not romanceable. In DA:O I had all three possible romances, and ended up somehow ‘tricking’the game into a situation where I had active romances with both Alister and Leliana and neither of them dumped me or made me choose between them. Huh. So I was wondering what would happen if I started a romance with Anders. No chance for that though.

Other than playing Awakening, my geek activities have been reduced to having my current reading be ‘The Dark Mirror’ by Juliet Marillier. Someone had recommended it to me two years ago, and I’d bought it but never actually started reading it. Now I have, and so far I’m liking it a lot. The story goes on in a ‘celtic’ setting, and involves druids, the forest and such. Me likes.

Not really a geek activity but I’ve decided to keep pushing at my attempts at watercoloring, to try to improve. And the last try was better. Not as good as I’d like, but better, despite being still unfinished. I’ll post it here if I manage to fully color it without screwing it up too much.

My gaming time will probably be lessened as Summer approaches. The weather has been perfect and I’ve taken all the chances I could to go out. Last Friday, I had one of my walks downtown. Checked out books and clothes in stores, read a bit on the way there and back, bought myself some icecream, and generally just enjoyed the fresh air until I was too tired to take another step aside from going home.

Summer is coming. :)

When I’m a millionaire, I’ll have a room dedicated to pen & paper RPGs, similar to this very cool Ultimate D&D Room.

I’d do it slightly differently, but love the detail where the Dungeon Master ’screen’ is a castle wall. :)

Series 7 of World of  Warcraft action figures is coming. I’m excited, and my wallet is getting scared.

Why? They finally made a Human Paladin with the only tier armor I’ve ever loved – Judgement. Woohoo! Just added it to my wishlist. :p

I think this will be one of the non-premium figures (at least from Kotaku’s description, the only figure name that seems pally-like is listed as a regular figure), but with my luck, and considering that this figure seems a lot more detailed than the other four in the set, it will be around 50 euros instead of 20-30. Let’s hope not…

EDIT: Forgotten Planet provides! It’s listed as costing £15.99, so it seems to be indeed a regular figure. The downside? It’s only out after my birthday. Ah well.

I haven’t been able to play as much Mass Effect 2 as I would want, but have already formed some opinions on a few aspects of the game. I’ll try not to spoil you about the story, and talk about Sheppard’s room decoration and her character looks. For now that will have to do since besides recruiting almost all of my team, I’ve not progressed much story-wise. Besides, if there’s something you can easily find online is a bunch of game reviews that don’t talk about these aspects.

Among the details I liked, was the fact that you can buy fish in some stores throughout the game. Then your room’s aquarium, empty at the beginning, starts containing some fishy inhabitants. Which you have to remember feeding from time to time or they will die.

You can also collect several spaceship models, which are then shown in your quarters. I particularly liked this since I’m a fan of collecting models of my favourite ships, and characters (*), and I was not expecting that BioWare would add such details to the game. It was a pleasant surprise.

I also got my Sheppard’s hands on a couple of ‘novels’ from a store in the Citadel if I’m not mistaken. What about those, you ask? They were called Revelations and Ascension, and the description said they were written by Drew Karpyshyn. If you go here, you’ll see what makes it a cool in-game detail.

Another thing I was able to buy in Mass Effect 2 was… a Space Hamster. Yes, you read right. Sadly we can’t name the little critter, or apparently, feed it (I hope this is true or it will die a horrible virtual death), but it’s still nice that they thought of a pet other than a fish.

I liked that we could customize the N7 armor’s colours, but was disappointed with not being able to do the same with other armors.

That’s all for now. I’ll eventually talk about ME2 more here, but since I’ll be away from the PC for a few days, don’t count on it too soon. At this rate, Dragon Age: Origins’ expansion, Awakening, will be out and I’ll still be on my way to finishing Mass Effect 2. And people say geeks don’t have lives…! ;)

(*) – Geeky(er) unrelated note here: just yesterday I found this specific Kotobukiya Boba Fett, which I’ve been wanting to buy for a couple of years now (my Kotobukiya Darth Vader and Clone Trooper are feeling lonely T-T), being sold on a portuguese store. It’s always either unavailable (even on eBay) or too expensive, the later being the case here (I’ll go cry a little bit over there right now :p). There’s another Kotobukiya model which I found cheaper, but it’s not anywhere as cool as this one. Boo!

As I mentioned before, I don’t make a huge deal of Valentine’s day, preferring to celebrate our own anniversaries and relationship events, more than a general event for people who happen to be romantically involved. Even so, on one of my previous posts I complained about the stupid differences between the technology (and other) lists of gifts for Valentine’s there were, between gifts ‘for him’, and gifts ‘for her’, because, well, they are pretty idiotic.

It wasn’t just intended as criticism, but also as an attempt to clarify that a lot of these lists are very retarded, and far away from the truth for a lot of women. This is, however, written in my point of view, so obviously what I mention here may vary from person to person, because we’re not all the same.

As such, and before I start making the list(s), I will clarify, that I believe most women would be happy if you would cook them a yummy dinner, made a nice dessert, got her a flower or two, and surprised her with a romantic candlelight dinner at home. In my view, that shows that you care a lot more than hundreds of euros worth of gifts, or going to an amazingly expensive restaurant does. (Note that this does not apply if you’re dating Miss Shallow, in which case you will have to sell your internal organs to be able to afford to buy her everything she wants. :p) Though I’ve tried keeping in mind more affordable gifts, this list has gifts with a wide range of prices.

So, let’s move on to this geek girl’s guide to Valentine’s gifts for geeky girls. Read the rest of the post after the break.

(continue reading…)

I’m not certain I haven’t used today’s post’s name some other time, but I am uninspired and couldn’t come up with a better title for another ‘what am I up to’ post.

One thing I am still not doing is playing Mass Effect 2. Though it came out in Europe last Friday, GAME’s package hadn’t arrived yet and as such my weekend did not include me playing what I hope is another drool-inducing BioWare RPG.

I was planning on getting the new Dragon Age: Origins‘ DLC and play it on Sunday (Saturday was populated with many activities already), but we were pretty tired and ended up slacking in front of the TV most of the day. I fell asleep, through the final third of the pilot of The Legend of the Seeker, which failed to impress me, and I should have guessed since the book it’s based on (Terry Goodkind’s Wizard’s First Rule) was also a disappointment when I read it, about three years ago.

We went to check out some houses, with a friend who was sweet enough to came along (hai Ana! *waves*), all a bit expensive, but that’s the problem with not wanting an apartment. Prices aside, we liked one of the houses a lot, as it had everything we wanted (including a small garden and an attic, and nicely located), and not much of what we’d prefer avoiding (houses glued to ours was still a factor here though), but it’s very expensive so we checked out other houses in the same ‘group’, slightly cheaper. I liked the second house a lot but it had a no-go handicap: the terrace was very small. Too small for a doggy, which is something we want. Too bad – the house was great.The rest all had major issues, despite a good construction quality.

These were the first ones we went to check out in person, but we also got some phone numbers of houses being sold in that general area, and we might want to check them out sometime in the future. The coolest of those houses is probably way too expensive for our budget, but it’s still worth checking out.

We had a friend’s birthday dinner, and had fun. The restaurant was a bit chaotic (and I wasn’t in greatest of moods which didn’t help), but the food was pretty good. We went to a bar near the Electricity Museum, since our first choice for a bar was packed. Time flew by – I was thinking of leaving relatively early because I have The Neverending Cold and had spent the previous night coughing my lungs out thus not getting much sleep, and we ended up staying and chatting (mostly with Ana, who I’ve missed talking face to face with *sends hugs in her general direction*) and only noticed the time when the bar’s staff gave us the bill since they were about to close.

I ended up removing someone from my social networks during the weekend. It’s funny that it went from me saying ’see how lucky you are with what you have!’, to me getting a rude reply. I wished him best of luck, and then I decided to ‘cut the evil by its root’, as we say here in Portugal. Funny thing is I used to bother sending him mails with things (contests or oportunities) he might find of interest to pursue his ‘career’. No more. End of story. I’m considering this a step toward one of my new year resolutions: ‘Stress less about everything’. \o/

Going back to relaxing matters: we went out for sushi on Friday, and I ended up breaking my attempt at not to getting more books until the Lisbon Book Faire, which is a few months from now. I really liked Robin Hobb’s Assassin’s Apprentice and they had a ‘buy 3, pay 2′ promotion going on at the bookstore. I was lacking the other 3 books published in Portuguese, so it seemed like a nice deal.

Oh, I didn’t forget to take yesterday’s 365 Project photo. It’s just on my sweetie’s camera and I haven’t uploaded it yet. Will do so today, and change the post’s date to the corresponding day (that’s not breaking the rules! ;)).

Have a nice week, everyone!

EDIT: This month’s visitor numbers (not hits, unique visitors) surpassed 6000, almost 6500, which is something that hadn’t happened in over a year. It may not sound like much, but since the blog is not highly publicized and has a niche theme (geek/gamer) when it’s not about generalist stuff, such as this post, I think it’s pretty good.

So, this geek gamer girl, thanks everyone for stopping by, and I do hope you continue to enjoy the generalistic/geek/gamer blog that is Corusca. :)