Ubisoft said it was pirate-proof. They were wrong. The DRM was cracked in under 24 hours. That’s not the funny part.

The funny part is that the DRM servers that Ubisoft’s customers need to call in order to play their games have been down all day. If you bought into their fuck-the-customer DRM, you can’t play the single-player game that you paid $60 for, but the folks who stole the game, who didn’t pay one red cent, can.

The moral of the story is: don’t buy Ubisoft games.

. . . [N]o-one of any sense has ever bet against the scorn and resourcefulness of young men.

Jerry “Tycho” Holkins, A Cyclical Argument With A Literal Strawman

Holkins was writing about Ubisoft’s ridiculous new digital rights management scheme, but this principle is just as valid when applied to prohibition of any kind.

Some new elements of the UI are pretty nice. Your ‘control groups’ are displayed at the top of the unit pane and can be selected with a click. Each group lists the group number and the strength of the group (in number of units). Although not strictly necessary for someone like me, who has long since developed standards for control group assignment over decades of strategy gaming, it’s definitely a handy feature to have, especially for keeping track of group strength in the middle of battle. I now realize that I forgot to check out how many units can be selected in a single group. SC1 had a group limit of 12 units, but I do not know the (current) limit for SC2. I will find out and report it later.

Another nice feature is the improved end-of-match report. There is a new screen on this report which shows each player’s build order. This will be a great tool for helping to improve one’s game when matched against significantly better opponents, to be able to see in detail when they build their resource gatherers, when they expand and build their armies, etc. A good build order is key to victory in multiplayer matches, and a poor one can easily cost a player the game.

The graphics are also quite good. I  will, however, admit that I am a sucker for the way Blizzard’s art style can make even low-poly models look beautiful. The movies and screenshots that were available before this beta really do not do this game justice.

Of course, playing the game only highlights how utterly terrible I am (and always have been) at multiplayer strategy games. This Penny Arcade comic about Warcraft III (NSFW for language) sums up my experience with online strategy games. My opponent disconnected in the middle of the match, but I took a look at his forces and he would have stomped me quite soundly if he had stayed. Hopefully over the beta period I’ll be able to improve my skill. It also looks like I’m going to have to install FRAPS because printscreen does nothing in SC2 as far as I can tell.

I’ll say it up front: I loved the first Mass Effect game. I completed the game eight times at more than 30 hours per playthrough. Yesterday I completed Mass Effect 2 for the first time. Does it live up to its predecessor?

The short answer is, “Yes,” the long answer is the rest of this review.

One of the immediately noticeable changes is that the gameplay of  Mass Effect 2 was significantly streamlined from its predecessor in almost every way. Each squad member has only a half-dozen stats to spend points in, where in ME1 they each had more than a dozen. Almost all of these stats provide an active ability as well as a passive bonus. Weapon modifications are gone, instead rolled into active powers for each team member. In Mass Effect 1 there were a few dozen suits of armor and firearms to choose from, Mass Effect 2 eliminates armor swapping entirely for everyone except the main character, Commander Shepard, and includes comparatively fewer weapons. The inventory system is thus significantly easier to manage and the upgrade paths for your gear are much clearer in this game than in the last. Players will no longer compare individual weapon stats to puzzle out whether it’s worth sacrificing two percent accuracy for an extra 5% damage. Weapons, armor upgrades, and squad power upgrades are far more potent (per upgrade level) than they were in Mass Effect 1, making the hard decisions about where to invest your precious skill points easier.

The developers at Bioware have stated that one of their goals with Mass Effect 2 was to address every criticism that was leveled by reviewers at Mass Effect 1. To that end they cut the widely-disliked planetary exploration segments for much shorter, but more varied, “planetary anomalies.” When Shepard discovers an anomaly from orbit, the player can embark on a mission to the surface via shuttlecraft. Gone is the MAKO rover; when you begin such a mission your team is placed on foot in the close vicinity of your initial objective. In Mass Effect 1 these sidequests were marked by very little variation in scenery. There were a couple of types of buildings and a few floor plans for caves to explore, and most of the missions would take place in these stock environments. The missions of Mass Effect 2 have no such stock set pieces, the design for each excursion is unique. At the conclusion of the mission you receive a brief “Mission Complete” summary screen at which the player is awarded experience points, cash, and other items for their hard work.

The new mission design leads to a far more compartmentalized sidequest experience, and I’m not convinced that it’s a good thing. There are no vast and interconnected sidequests in Mass Effect 2 in the way that ME1 had the business with Admiral Kahoku or the Geth Incursion in the Armstrong Nebula. It leaves the feeling that the galaxy is a neater place than ME1′s more open and wild frontier and that is a feeling that I, personally, miss. That’s not to say, however, that ME2 is more linear that Mass Effect 1. You still have the ability to go anywhere and do any mission or quest at basically any time and in any order.

Bioware did make certain that Mass Effect 2 absolutely delivers where it counts. The writing, the plot, and the characterization is top notch. The characters in Mass Effect 2 are, with a couple of exceptions, more real than the ones in the first game. Each character has a “loyalty quest” that you can complete for them which provides background information and character development for each squad member. Earning the loyalty of your crew unlocks bonus abilities for them as well as other benefits. Bioware made good on its promise to carry over decisions from Mass Effect 1 on a massive scale. Just about everyone you interacted with in the first game returns in the second in some fashion, provided you didn’t murder them before. The major plot decisions from ME1 each affect the game world in some way, and it’s easy to see that many of them will continue to be important to the plot into Mass Effect 3.

My absolute favorite part of both Mass Effect games is the rich universe they inhabit. Bioware did a great deal of world building through the codex (a sort of in-game encyclopaedia), the environment and conversations with other characters. The games are full of superfluous facts and opinions about aliens, technology, and galactic society that really help the world come to life. The universe of Mass Effect is as full as any other sci-fi franchise, and I think that’s what really pulls the game together. Mass Effect 2 improves on the environment of ME1 by adding little touches like holographic video logs, where in ME1 such little details were audio or text-only. There are also advertisements and newscasts for various shops, products, and entertainment that play throughout the civilized sections of the game world. The hacking mini-games were updated as well; there are now two varieties which both boil down to memory-match games. Although difficult to describe, they are improvements over both the XBox360 and PC versions of the hacking game.

Speaking of PC vs. Console, I played ME2 on the PC. The graphics are great, there is no texture pop-in at all. I rarely experienced frame-rate drops and the game did not tax my PC any more than the original Mass Effect, which I have heard is the case for other PC users as well. I do have a pretty beefy rig, however; a 3.0GHz Intel Core 2 Quad processer, ATi 5870 graphics card, and 8GB DDR3 RAM can tame any PC game I’ve found to date. It’s worth mentioning that I did not experience a single freeze or crash-to-desktop during the 45 hours that I spent playing the game in Windows 7 64-bit.

All-in-all, despite the minor criticisms I have with the over-simplification of the sidequests and inventory management, Mass Effect 2 is an amazing game which I will definitely be playing several more times to uncover the various alternate plots and endings. It is a Bioware game through and through, extremely polished and rich with detail, dialogue, and fan service. The game is epic in scale and if you played the first Mass Effect the opening sequence is some mighty powerful storytelling. It’s too soon to call Mass Effect 2 “Game of the Year,” but I would not be surprised if, in 11 months, we find this game in the running for all the major publications.

Child’s Play assists Children’s Hospitals around the country by donating video games, movies, board games, books, and other forms of entertainment to help children keep their minds off the pain and loneliness of extended hospital treatment, similar to what Project Valour-IT does for wounded soldiers. Here’s how it works: each participating hospital sets up an Amazon.com wish list which anyone can use to purchase the items the hospital needs. This is, in my opinion, the one of the best things about the charity. With the Amazon wish lists, I know exactly where my donation is going, because I choose the hospital and buy the items with my own money, and then they get shipped directly to the folks in need. There’s no worry about how much of my donation is being spent on the children, because I decided how the money is spent. Genius! Better still, there are participating hospitals all over the US and Canada, so there’s probably one near you that you can help.

In addition to the wish lists, you can always donate cash at the main site, or at the Desert Bus For Hope fund drive, or if you’re in the Seattle area there’s a pretty sweet charity dinner and auction hosted at the same venue as PAX. All the cash collected (less 2-3% for administrative costs) goes straight into the hospitals.

Head over to the website. Check it out. I dare you to read the letters from grateful children and parents and not contribute.