Unfortunately, I have some form of a bowel obstruction, so no poop this week! :( However, I have a Mass Effect, which is more than enough to talk about.

Firstly the bad things - because yes, although ME is amazingly spunktacular, it still has its little flaws.

Bugs, and there are a fair few. Not really surprisingly for a game this big, there are a couple of bugs that range from annoying to laughable. I managed to complete the same quest twice [paragon, score]. You can get stuck on random, invisible objects... In the middle of a FUCKING BOSS FIGHT! You can also get stuck on objects you've just dropped - Survey an ore deposit and you have to hope to hell you aren't standing on the marker. Though this isn't a bug, it's an annoyance - the texture loading. To be honest, it's not such a big deal and I can understand that it's a limitation of the hardware, it doesn't affect the gameplay in the slightest and it's a damn sight better than a loading screen... But it's still a "bad thing". The number of classes is a little low, even with the unlockable ones. The framerate can get a little choppy, but it doesn't interfere with the action. Finally, I still feel a little cheated that you can't land on all of the planets in a system.

BUT!

This game is so sexy and amazing I can overlook any and all of these "issues".

The scope of the game - It reaches for the stars, literally, and gets them all. The story is a cheesy space opera with aliens, sex and magic. What more can a sexually repressed geek like me want?

The characters - The guys are pretty cool, you might've heard Wrex is one of the best characters of any videogame but the only nice purpose he serves is dying. Garrus is incredibly fun to talk to, and Joker is everyone's favourite hippie. Then there are the girls and Y HALO THAR! Serious hotness everywhere. Liara = cutest thing ever, Tali = mystery hawtness and Ashley = femdom. Personally, I didn't get on with Ashely, but the fact I'm talking about her in that way means the game has succeded at the most basic level, which is...

RP - The single most important reason why this game is so good. I can emphasis with Shepard [the player character, for you 'tards who don't have the game]. I don't like him as a character; I like him as a reflection of me. When he punched that reporter I really wasn't expecting it [you don't really know what the dialog options you choose will result in, only how much of a dick you will be in your response]. But as soon as it happened I thought... Fuck yes, that reporter needed to go down, that's what I would've done if I WAS Shepard. Shepard is being me. That's RPing and that's what every RPG should do.

Dialog - I immediately turned subtitles on when the game started. After about 30mins, they were off again. The writing in this game is perfect, the voice acting first class, the emotions the characters portray believable and most of all, every dialog instance is entertaining. For the first time since a long time ago, I wasn't skipping cut-scenes!

Action - I know a few people bitch and moan about this because it's not fantastically sophisticated. But wait, it's fun! That's something you don't really say about RPGs, but the combat in Mass Effect is enjoyable. There have been a number of occasions where I've died and had to retry the same area dozens of times, but never got bored, tired or frustrated. This is a feeling that games like Halo on Legendary give me. That's a Good Thing (TM). This can be a pretty hard game, that's good. Hard is challenging, challenging is fun. Even more people complain about the squad AI. That's probably because the squad AI is terrible. HOWEVER! Disable automatic squad actions in the options and micro your team to the max. Then they actually DO WHAT YOU WANT. Ok, it's harder to control a soldier, but you can still give them the rough idea, and they tend to roughly follow the plan. Biotics and Engineers are a lot easier to control, mainly because they rely on the abilities you have direct control over. I played as an Adept with another Adept and a soldier. Beat the game on Veteran in 13 hours, with some side quests and got the Tactician achievement. Second it was over I started again.
If the Mako could be upgraded it would be the perfect complement to the action sequences, as it is; it's merely excellent - jumping over incoming rockets is one of the most satisfying things to do.

Presentation - Sexy. Sound FX are nice and meaty, as stated before the voice acting is top notch. The music is epic, but doesn't try to overpower you. The graphics are pretty and the animation seriously lifelike [to the point I spent 15mins just wondering about drooling over Liara].

It's the little touches that make this game so great. I usually love humour in video games, and Mass Effect doesn't deliver too often. But when it does, it is 100% brilliance. The small motions during cut-scenes, the total disregard you can have for authority, the huge galaxy and the lovable [or hatable] caracters all come together to give one of the most immersive gaming experience ever.

Get this game or GTFO.

So, in the wake of all the HATE I received for last week's blog entry, I have decided to once again evaluate literary techniques I can use to encapsulate the glory of the poop.

Thus, I have come up with a plan! I will use a different and new literary device each and every week. This will ensure everyone gets their favourite one represented fairly. I think we can all agree that this will transform this blog from merely great to nothing less than grandiose.

This week's poop was an epic journey that took course over almost three days. I call it the ICBM, for it comes in three parts, the warhead, the rocket and the propulsion. But no more prose, no, not today! Today is the day for:

The sonnet of the ICBM

After three whole days of nothing but milk
A fledgling poopy took root and grew
On and on cometh the white tide of silk
Always awaiting the coming breakthrough
Yet with a stubborn pride, the poop didst stall
But a shifting was felt, a break, some hope?
Fly young sir, to your porcelain throne now crawl
A battle you fight, enshrined by the scop

Opening with a ball, so large you gnash
Now comes the body so soft and pliant
The ball has fallen, it causes a splash
The body drops meekly yet more pungent
Finally the tail, the trail, the end
It's over now and with this, you asscend!

Welcome, fellow interneters, to the adventure of a lifetime! For I am about to embark on an epic saga of love, hate, betrayal, but above all, defecation!

Yes, that's right, I am going to blog about poop, but not just poop. What goes into poop? What makes poop hard or soft? And I don't want to bore you with "science", no! My entire investigation will be based on empirical evidence, observable results alone. I plan to record every morsel of food I consume and examine [with eyes alone, of course ¬_¬] the resulting poop. This will allow me to build up a mapping of (food |-> poop)! I shall start with basic, single food stuffs, then go on to combinations of food. For instance, would eating spaghetti and a banana at the same time result in the same poop as eating some spaghetti, waiting an hour THEN eating the banana. Well, this study aims to discover these ancient and forbidden secrets.

Fear not, oh faint of heart, for I hear you cry "Not the pictures, please, NOT THE PICTURES". A mere array of pixel information cannot truly represent the true beauty that is poop. No, I say! There will be no pictures! For the only way to capture the essence, the soul of the poop is with magniloquent, magnificent, marvelous prose!

For the introductory posts to what will come to be a masterpiece, I shall merely define the types of poop that I enjoyed most over the past week. This shall serve to smooth the path for those to whom poop is taboo.



So, without further ado...

The Poop Of The Week: The Chocolate Mousse


Bowel Consistency:
Smooth, with large pockets of air that sometimes produce small explosions if excessive force is used. No identifiable bits to speak of.

Bowl Consistency:
Usually ends up with one or two main turds with a number of smaller sub-turds [I shall formally define the sizes in the next blog, fear not]. If excessive force is used, splatter may occur.

Aroma:
This is definitely one of the top poops in terms of nasal stimulation. A full bodied smell without the kick of most other poops that allows this to be enjoyed in deep sniffs.

Length:
Another good point of this poop is the amount of time it takes to pass, it can come in several stages or waves, so be patient, a repeat trip to the porcelain throne is never good. A normal sized CM will take between 3 and 8 minutes to complete, wipeup is usually trivial.

Problems:
As stated previously, use of excessive force can result in splatter or small explosions. These are generally not large enough to cause complete splash back, and should not spread wide enough to cause the flush any problems in clearing. However, they an unseemly point to an otherwise nice poop that any real (wo)man should seek to avoid.

Conclusion:
A nice relaxed poop, not too long, a friendly aroma and no wipeup problems to speak of!

So, I have been forced (with threats of rape) by Sir. Johanakin Solo Skywalker the XVIII (aka wardrox) to join this here website.

And thus, I moved my cute little cursor to the "Get started - its fast and free" link. The first thing that struck me is the lack of apostrophe. I mean, I know grammar isn't fun and should be kept at school, but you could at least make an _effort_ in a place that's supposed to advertise to new folk who maybe, just maybe, find correct grammar positively spunkerific.

I looked beyond this possibly accidental mistake and clicked the link anyway. To my confusion I was presented with a form entitled "Welcome back" that was populated with but two fields, `email' and `password'. This seemed a little strange for a registration form, but being a well-trained sheep, I did what the page asked me and filled every last field in! Submit. And wait, what's this? Something about an incorrect username? But I didn't enter a username, I was never asked to! Aha, I see the problem. A quick glance at the url and for some inexplicable reason, the "Get started" link has taken me to the login page.



Well, shame on me for having the cheek to try to "get started". Instead, as Daniel Wallace would have me do, I clicked the "Join Us" button. Ah, the sweet taste of success!

So now I come to write my first "blog", as commanded by Mr. Wardrox. These are nice looking buttons; "BBCode Help". That looks like a good first target, I've not done any forum posting for a while, so it'd be nice to make sure my link tags don't end up as "delete my account tags"... After my experience with "getting started", I'm a bit wary, you see? The vorpal cursor went clicker-clack, and... Pardon me, what's going on here? This certainly doesn't look like a BBCode help page to me... Well, OK, let's try "Upload photos"... `Changes saved.'. That's really nice, but I'd like to "upload" some "photos" now, please? No? Well, I have a feeling I know who or what the culprit is here. Could it be my browser? Well, there's only one way to test this theory.



And now, I return. Driving a shiney new, memory whore of an open source piece of shit brower. Well, at least the buttons work. But seriously, making me change browser just to blog? That's a little upsetting really. For the record, Opera is my main browser because it's _not_ a pile of bullshit and chips like all the other browsers... Well, this is a little strange to say the least, "Save Draft" is now taking me to the "Upload photos" page. OK, I'll take the hint and upload a picture, after all, a picture says a thousand words. With no chance of a grammar mistake either!

That seemed to work, although this entire blogging malarky is seeming more and more like using a coffee mug as a helmet - a pain in the arse.

Well, with that little rant complete, I can now introduce myself. I'm a young lad from the United Kingdom of Kingdomshires known almost universally as "Tubs", "Tubby" or "Tubwald the Fourth". And that's all you're getting out of me. x(