Michelle’s (second draft) Review of Mass Effect by Bioware

At first, this game impressed me to the funny bone. Seth Green is the pilot of your spaceship, something I wouldn't have known unless I was told since his voice isn't particularly distinctive, but in the game his virtual character wears a baseball cap and acts belligerent (perhaps so you know he's 'portraying' a stoner). The conversation is well done, with the various options you can choose to advance the plot organically mesh with what your character says. The reactions NPC's have to your conversation options are well presented and the voice acting is top-notch. It keeps you immersed while you’re talking to characters, and I was assured by someone who’d completed the game I would be seeking out new conversations to enjoy.
Pity then, that is the only thing I did enjoy about the game for the next hour or so. I'm no longer impressed by graphics at all, but it is nice to see a game which attempts some photorealism with characters and model design without limiting the colour palette to grey and brown (we all know reality is brown). If you'd like to see the best bits which showcase Bioware's attempt to create an immersive world in rainbow colours with aliens who look like humans wearing masks or robots, or various H.R. Geiger inspired insectoids, then I would recommend watching the previews on youtube and not playing the game. If you're hoping for the slightly cinematic interactive experience of such fondly-remembered games like Wing Commander III they promise you're sure to be disappointed by the mechanics of the game environment. Particularly the combat.
I'm not much for game combat. I hold varying levels of belts in Karate, Tae Kwon Do, Judo, Kempo and have even attempted to learn some “kendo bushido” style stuff but I didn't enjoy being hit with big bits of bamboo by guys who think that because a female is interested in forms and katas she has to be bruised and battered in any partnered sparring. I can shoot a gun although I've never owned one, and in Mass Effect I had to try not to laugh when a crack marine can't hit the side of a barn when she's standing right in front of the fucking thing. So, I set the difficulty level to the lowest possible and when it tried to put me into a "realistic combat simulation" I tried not to laugh my head off then press the quit button. In Mass Effect makes a valiant attempt to blend FPS and RPG combat systems just winds up overly complicating things unnesscessarily. The conversation RPG is a LOT stronger and pressing and holding spacebar to bring up a completely ridiculous menu breaks the illusion of immersion completely. Apparently this game was only playtested by people who’s closest contact with reality is going to the 7-11 at midnight to buy jolt cola from some surly clerk.
Apparently this game will take the average gamer 15-20 hours to complete. I played this game for a bit over an hour before getting bored, frustrated, and annoyed at what it had to offer other than finding people and talking to them. Overall I wish there was a way to make this more an interactive movie along the lines of Wing Commander III, without the bullshit of running from place to place in badly thought-out "archeological digs" which look more like the level designer spent a week in a canyon or gully thinking about what it would look like if a hundred people set up a trailer park and lived there, then dropped a spaceship on the whole mess, said "Fuck this for a joke!" and started writing a fake resume for their next abomination. While we’re on this level design topic let me mention that my friend who’d played this game thought that the citadel would win me back to the point of immersion again but instead it crashed and I decided to end the experience before I committed violence against computer hardware.
Moving on, the AI for your companions is sometimes impressive but its still pretty clear that nobody really thinks about these things beyond removing annoyances they have encountered in previous games. For example; when your character bumps into someone in your party they get out of your way quick smart, but in combat they will still let enemies without guns run up to them and start hitting them in the head before you have to step in and assist your brain-dead NPC to execute the fucker with a single bullet to the brain. Because of this I would have preferred an option to execute my companions for sheer stupidity and inability to follow orders like a proper captain from WW1. This is hard when your character can't hit a building without you jumping into several levels of menus and choosing the one option out of a hundred that will have a 95% chance of killing anything. If I wanted to be a dice-rolling geek I'd go play LARP with the vampire wannabes, this tried to be Rolemaster meets id software and failed utterly.
Eventually I'll re-play this game and see if it has anything to offer someone who isn't so pissed off with the world in general. Perhaps just after a truck full of raw sewage hits parliament house and I get to see that on television would be a good time but I’m not keeping my fingers crossed.

The Hospital Story of November 2008

Walking into a hospital doubled over with pain in my abdomen I wondered why there was a reason the emergency department had an entryway which didn't open, with a sign saying to go "around the blue wall". I surmised it was to keep people in urgent need of medical attention out. So upon walking around the blue wall I discovered myself in a corridor without any sign of triage, so walked back to the door and rang the intercom. I was then treated to a pleasant 10 minutes of filling out forms and being asked "What's wrong with you?" by nurses (some of whom made no attempt to speak passable english) who took notes on a small piece of paper. When I mentioned that I'd had a past problem with opioids she actually left the paper in the basket attached to the blood pressure machine and went to tell the doctor on duty that there was yet another drug addict seeking drugs, despite that I'd told them I'd already had some panadeine.
So after being left there, doubled over in pain, the doctor I'd seen before in 2007 wandered in and had a cursory chat to me about how I'd been since I was last in the hospital (again with unexplained abdominal pain, I recalled how last time I'd been there they waited until I'd actually shat myself in the bed before giving me any pain relief or anti-spasmodics to stop me throwing up while screaming), which wasn't good. I mentioned that I'd gotten over nine weeks completely sober and that I'd given up lots of drugs since I'd last seen him. A list of anti- depressants and anti-psychotics as long as my arm that I didn't really need. Experimental use of over the counter painkillers was quickly leading me into using stronger things like synthetic morphine. I knew things were bad because I've struggled with addiction before. So I was written up for IV buscopan and paracetamol and sent off for a CT scan, but not before they'd taken three vials of blood for their toxification screenings, to make sure I hadn't been taking anything I hadn't told them about. My take on this is no longer that they are completely untrusting of drug addicts, its just they think people who aren't in hospitals all the time lead really interesting lives and they're so starved of human contact they want to know what we've been up to. This of course defies logic because if someone was happy to pay to be treated by a doctor when all they wanted was drugs; wouldn’t it be a lot easier, cheaper and generally happy for everyone to just go out and score some? WTF is wrong with these medical professionals that they can’t think about the world in these terms? Doctors are elevated in status beyond all capacity for reason or critcal thinking, and from now on I will call them all by their first names rather than titles since they’re really just people who are highly trained professionals providing services, not medical gods in white coats who save lives or other such rubbish propitiated by Hollywood.
While on the CT table I was in complete agony. Being asked to raise my arms above my head for the purposes of the scan was causing me to stop breathing since pressure on my diaphram was way too much to cope with. After that ridiculousness I mentioned that I wanted to have a little chat about pain relief, since the main reason I went to a hospital in the first place was that I'd been in almost unbearable pain for hours before I arrived. So they solved the problem of me saying "I'm in PAIN, help me!" constantly by giving me, someone who SAYS they have a problem with opioids, five milligrams of morphine. Then of course when I pass out for ten minutes and throw up they gave me zofran, which makes me incredibly dopey (along with all the paracetamol in my system I was a mess). So I was functioning with impaired reason, was terrified, know that they don't really give a fuck about me because the CT didn't show anything conclusive like an intestinal bleed or appendicitis. I started to freak out because the pain was still there and when I asked for more morphine the night shift nurse was a complete bitch and offers me two paracetamol tablets, proving not only that her job is just to shut people up, but that she didn't even read my chart and see what I'd already been given.
I truly feel that its called 'morphine' because once you have some you need some more, and more, and more until you pass out. You can't just have one 'phine' and be satisfied. So with my impaired reason I tried to explain that unless they gave me more opioids, enough to knock me out for several hours, I was going to go to my friend's place and sleep in a proper bed. Somewhere with panadine forte. Ripping out an IV port and going home crying isn't exactly the most pleasant of experiences I've had.
Its been suggested I write a letter stating that I want to go on "A Current Affair" and explain to the general public how people such as I get treated in hospitals. I should add this suggestion was made in the vein that prhaps money would be offered in to keep such a story from the public eye, which doesn't sound so farfetched.