Mass Effect 2 is the sequel to the 2007 BioWare title Mass Effect, set in the far off future the mass effect series is an action RPG, with echoes of BioWare's previous hits as Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire.

You play as Commander Shepherd (of no fixed gender or race)you are a hero of space conflict, and it falls upon your shoulders to save the galaxy… again. Except a couple of year ago something big happened and Mass Effect 2 sees you working under the hand of Cerberus; an organisation clouded with bad press and extremist ideas

The first game saw Commander Shepherd and the galaxy pitted against an ancient threat called the Reapers, who every billion or so years wipe out a civilisation as they reach a certain peak. In Mass Effect you successfully repeal the reaper threat by destroying the mass relay that was bring them to into citadel space. However the fleet are still waiting to wipe out the various races of the galaxy, and it seems they have a different plan up their sleeve.

If you think after playing Mass Effect this would be exactly the same you would be terribly wrong, BioWare have striped Mass Effect down to the core essentials that made it a solid game and got rid of all of the random mechanics that were unnecessary. Gone is your inventory, gone is random planet exploration, gone are the many different skill specialisations. I couldn’t believe when playing Mass Effect 2 (after getting round to finishing Mass Effect) just how much had changed, not to mention how much more I ended up enjoying it.

If anything this game is close to perfection, its good points overflow from its very start.
The combat is far more attuned then the original, there are no more clunky controls, you are taking place in real combat, not clumsy firing; a headshot can take down a foe, and shots at legs topple your enemies, the more realist approach to combat achieves far more than its predecessor, making it far more challenging and engaging.

The dialogue is stupendous, not only has it become more mature, but each character has its own mannerisms that come across in their speech, shining examples like Mordin, Tali and Thane come to mind, rivalling Henpecked-Hou, Black Whirlwind, or even the great HK-47 from KOTOR. Each member of your team has interesting aspects that take them away from the ridiculous stereotypes that most games create.

One of the big let downs in Mass Effect was that it effectively had only one real city; The Citadel. However Mass Effect 2 has made up for this, including more than 4 city sprawls, each individually different from the slums of Omega to the busy shopping districts of the Citadel. Even the wastelands of Tuchanka make an interesting addition to Mass Effect’s worlds, the galaxy has more of a spirit, it’s just a shame there were no more inhabited or explorable planets.
Although the game is utterly amazing it does of course have its bad points.

Combat is far too predictable, you know you’re in for a fight when you see hideable cover. Another downfall is the animations can get very repetitive and somewhat annoying, there is only so many times you can see someone shake their fist, their head or look down at their feet.

However these are just little issues and don't hurt the games playability much at all, the real gripe with Mass Effect is you are light-years ahead in the future, with the pinnacle of space travel at your fingertips, but you can only explore a few minor planets. Really, I think I am missing the Mako from the original; at least exploring planets that were not inhabited could have been kept.

On top of all of this Mass Effect takes all the best ‘effects’ from Science Fiction films of the last 40 years, you’ve got the great reveal at the very start, working with questionable people, lush environments, exotic races, a galaxy in peril, and a killer ending – who can deny a game where all of your crew can die in the last hour dependant on the choices you make as a leader and player throughout the game.

At one point whilst playing Mass Effect 2 I did consider knocking Deus Ex off the top spot of best Science Fiction games, however with the few minor grievances I determined Deus Ex is still up there, however Mass Effect is still a great contender and definitely one of the best games of the year. I cannot wait to see what BioWare do with the third game. No matter what, the Trilogy will hopefully be remembered as one of the great space opera’s something that very few games can accomplish.

Although I do hope it will not spawn a host of poorly thought out space games.

As a small advertisement to anyone that may care, this weekend sees the 5th bi-annual Bugfest show taking place at the Bucklers Mead Sports Centre in Yeovil.

This will be the first time that I have attended the event, but I hope there to be many interesting bugs to peruse as well as maybe purchase a few bits and bobs, maybe I'll even return with a little friend.

From what I can gather it is far smaller than for instance the grand AES show, but should have more bugs than your usual reptile show.

In my opinion there is a lack of bug shows, especially now that Kettering has moved up to Newark which is far too long a distance to get to.

So, this past week I've been extremely busy, one of the most important things that I accomplished was last weekend which saw the second Global Game Jam take place.
This year I travelled to the Qantm College in London, as it was the closest event to us.

The theme was deception, and we had the constraints to include in our game a sink, a wink or a rink.
We lost a lot of time at the start of the jam coming up with the concept, usually we're done in about thirty minutes to an hour, however it took us 4 hours until we had chosen our idea and had begun discussing mechanics, assets and programming needed to finish our game.

In some ways we had a better experience this year, but similarly there were some aspects that we preferred taking part at Newport. The event at Qantm was good and the organisers were fantastic, we did have a great time and a great game came out of it too.

As we learned from our last game jam, simple is best, so we chose our simplest most fun proposal of; small children hiding behind objects and scaring people.
We called the game Pikabu, and managed to achieve everything we hoped to achieve.

You can download the game here, however I will be making some polishing touches to this version and then subsequently release it through my website.

As well as my activities at the weekend I also had the opportunity to attend two premiere screenings, one for the Dante's Inferno 'animated epic' which I quite enjoyed, if not for the sometimes shocking animation. Then I also attended a screening of the Halo Legends collected animations, which was slightly disappointing, the animatrix achieving far better.
Either way, both screenings were a great experience, and it was great fun going out to London two evenings in a row.

Now I’m off to fix some new wheels on my arcade machine, and play some Mass Effect 2!

Just before christmas I was doing my last minute present shopping to see if I could pick anything any good up after work, looking in my local blockbuster games in farnborough, I was baffled when one of their arcade machines (they had two) had a sign on it 'for sale'

I couldn't believe it, rushing up to the desk I enquired about it, and within five minutes I was given the option of buying it. After some frantic phone calls and much umming and ahring I agreed.

Almost a month later (the game had to be switched by another party who couldn't get down due to the snow) last sunday I gave Neil a ring checking on its status while I was in town. Everything had been sorted, I could pick it up when I liked!

Five seconds later I had a copy of the local newspaper in my hand phoning man with a van ads, I managed to find one nice man, by the name of Gordon. He agreed to meet me in farnborough in a few hours time to pick it up and take it to mine, as well as take it up the stairs with us.

Two arduous hours later and hey presto! I have my own arcade cabinet together with a copy of Dyna Blaster (bomberman) its a jamma pcb, none of that mame crap, I've always wanted the real deal and now I've got it. Now I just have to save up some of my wages so I can scout about for some cheap boards to play on it then I'll have a library.

Just hope I don't have to move anytime soon!

OH, before I forget, if anyone is interested you can check me out on youtube, in my element at work! Check it out here

My twitter usage spiked the other weekend as some of you may have noticed, and it was due to me taking part in the Ludum Dare contest.

Not unlike the global game jam, Ludum Dare is a bi-annual competition, where you are tasked with the goal of making a game in 48 hours pinned to a specific theme, the only difference with the two contests are GGJ allows team work, whereas Ludum Dare is a test of one persons ability.

After 4 rounds of voting on themes that were first suggested by people wishing to take part, they were whittled down to the theme of exploration, which I was pleased with, such a broad theme would allow for much interpretation.

Unfortunately being an American run contest it began at 2am on Saturday morning, so we prepared well with a run to Tesco's purchasing as much sugary food as would keep us awake - although with further reflection, more savory items should have been bought - after a quick nap I was up in time to find out the theme that had been chosen, and started brainstorming on it straight away, I came up with certain ideas that would have worked very well, and others that would not have.

After careful deliberation from my previous experience at GGJ, and the only tool on hand for me being game maker I decided to opt for as simple a game as possible, and definately not a platformer!

The 48 hour experience was not as pleasant as my last one, I'm not sure if it was the create-your-own Asda pizzas or the thousand island dip I had, but something upset my stomach, which led to at least 6-8 hours (possibly longer) wasted by having to sleep, then throwing up, afterwards I wasn't too bad and carried on like a trooper. I had come too far to give up.

I only had a few little issues, solved by cheating, I came around to finishing it at around 12am Monday morning, leaving a few things that I should have fixed, but hadn't the energy considering I had to be up for work 4 hours later.

All in all it was fairly successful, I made a working game, that fulfilled the criteria of the competition, and was pretty neat at the same time, the title 'Did you see it? I saw it' was a take on one of the discarded titles for Dead Rising on the wii which I was taken with, and has no real basis on the game unless you wish to interpret it that way.

The game is centered around a young man -some might call him a youth- who feels compelled to show off to his mates after a conversation of boasts. He decides to look around his house and garden for bugs, to complete the elusive hunt for an 'uberbug'.

Not exactly a dab-hand at drawing everything had to be compiled in paint, however windows 7 paint is nothing compared to the original version! I managed to successfully draw a serious of assets, including characters.

However not having the time to finish an animation for the main character was a slight let down for myself.
I also didn't manage to polish the game as much as I could have, this was due to the distractions I had of course.

In my spare time I do hope to take the game further; I did want to draw illustration-like pictures for all the bug pop-ups. As well as stop the game lagging at the end, and fix the animation on the scene at the end, then for me the game will be perfect, after this positive experience I cannot wait for the second global game jam at the end of the month, where hopefully I will be going across to Qantm college in London to take part.

Link: http://www.amentsoc.org/events/exhibitions.html

October 17th marked the annual Amateur Entomology Society's show at Kempton Park Racecourse, this was the first time I had ever attended but felt that a show report would be necessary as when looking up about the event and exactly what takes place I could find no real information.

So here I am, helping all you lovely people find out.
Unfortunately I did not take many pictures, I'll have to make up for those in descriptions.

The show sees a turnout in the thousands, from elderly visitors to very young children you'll find all walks of earth interested in entomology and insects.

So I was very pleased to find that the previous day I was watching the one show on bbc one where this young girl Kiara was showing off her bugs, little did I think it, she was there too! I'd even met her on the train!

Now the one thing I didn't welcome too much with the entomology show was the high proportion of stalls selling dead bugs for the actual sense of term entomology, however to this there were also a lot of people selling live-stock.

There were millipedes, cockroaches, plasmids, hermit-crabs, spiders, scorpions, beetles and even a few stalls selling snails.

Not only was livestock available but there were also many stalls selling very reasonably priced tanks, books, substrate, and much more, in the past I've only been able to go to reptile shows as there are far more that take place, but I must say there was twice as many stalls if not three times as many as you would see at shows like ERAC and PRAS.

From the show I spent a small amount of money, I bought a new tank, a book on molluscs, some nicely cheap coir, some moss peat, and a new addition to my slowly growing menagerie.

Meet copernicus, an achatina achatina, or tiger snail, one of the largest snails kept in captivity, he isn't too dissimilar to their cousin fulica, however they do like to be kept slightly hotter and humid, hopefully he'll grow to a nice big snail!

If I could have I would have gotten a lot more than little Copernicus. I'm sure I would have walked away with a burrowing cockroach, a millipede or two, a couple of pill bugs (which were very very cute) and in particular a megalobulimus oblongus, a very special snail with an awesome mustache, however my bank would not accommodate to purchase one, or many of the other snails that I wished to purchase, so for now I will make do with little Copernicus and wait to see what I can get next year.. who knows maybe someone will come with me then.

In conclusion, if you are interested in insects at all, or found them interesting as a child, take a trip down to the AES entomology show next year, it only costs £3 to get in, and who knows maybe you'll come away with something that you'll treasure for years.

Say hello to Fortescue who is a Hadra Webbi, or Australian Tree Snail, he's a little shy and you don't see him much but he's always hiding somewhere, he definitely won't say hello to you like Cornelius and Phylis but if you're lucky you'll spy him out of his shell! He makes a happy addition to my little family.

Plus his shell is a beautiful shape and a nice earthy colour, hopefully he'll grow big and strong like my others.

Look out in the next couple of weeks I shall be attending the Entomology show 2009 at the Kempton Park Racecourse to peruse for any new and interesting little guys that take my fancy.. if anyone is selling that is, although I've promised not to come home with a cockroach...

I came to the realisation that I have yet to introduce my two pets, Cornelius and Phylis, I've had them for around 6 months now, having bought them for my film production the snail and the swan which as the title says required a snail.

In the six months that I've had them they've eaten, pooped and grown more than you would think imaginable for a snail, to me they are just as cute and exciting as any other pet you can own, if not better, they love baths and like to say hello every now and again, better yet they are easy to feed and don't cost the earth, they have whatever I happen to be having in a particular week, while they seem to enjoy cucumber the most, I give them occasional treats; they love a little bit of watermelon when I treat myself to them, the same goes for grapes. They also go crazy for sweet basil.

But recently they blessed me with a huge clutch of eggs in their tank, so I kept around 20 of them, and two weeks later I've got babies! to make things even better babies are five times cuter than their fully-grown counterparts!

So encase any of you want to see them here they are.

August 4th marked mine and Tim's 2nd anniversary, so I decided to treat us to a surprise trip to Chessington World of Adventures, although the day started a bit miserable we had a great time, managed to get on every ride we wanted to go on, and had a real nice lunch at their new pizza and pasta buffet which had an amazing salad bar!

The zoo section of the park was great fun as usual and even had some african land snails, including some little babies! Tim had lots of fun watching the penguins, plus I got to meet a dragon! He was extra soft and furry, made my day.

We were out the whole day which did suck a little, seeing as I had to work the following day but I wouldn't have skipped it for anything, an awesome time was had, and Tim has to top it next year hehe so looking forward to that!

So I went back to playing Bioshock a couple of days ago, and I must say, if I knew the horror aspect was going to fizzle out so soon, I'd of probably finished it two years ago.

The main disappointment of Bioshock was it's lack of variation; enemies were placed into the game far too often, the game would have been far more intense with less enemies.
Too much ammo was readily available is another reason I can feel this happened, where it got to the point that I was literally running into rooms killing splicers with no apprehension, because there was no need to fear them with such an arsenal in my hands,

There were certain aspects of the game that kept the experience fresh, throwing in the Houdini splicers, along with the 192 serum screwing up your plasmids, which I found entertaining.

Another good portion of the game was Sander Cohen's level, slotted in as the one section of the game where it was not a requirement to kill a boss, giving you the choice instead to just let him live, his level also put quite a nice spin on the game, taking photos of the people who had betrayed him once you'd killed them.

I did quite like the death of Ryan, and the 'Would you kindly' segment did play well, if not a bit cliche-movie-twist, but the whole idea of mind control with the phrase had been used to a nice effect, but to be honest I couldn't stand Fontaine, his voice was far too annoying, and as a final boss he was slightly disappointing.

Becoming the big daddy was lacking somewhat, and should have been slower, but again, it was a nice variation.

The end was definitely lacking, not sure what I was expecting, but it was not it. While it was half decent, I'd of liked to have known what had happened to everything else, such as Rapture itself.

I appreciate what 2K were doing when they made Bioshock, they pushed the boundaries on the appreciation of asthetics that FPS seem to lack, but too many ideas were put into the pot, and made for a disappointing game that was perhaps regarded a bit too highly.