Ah, good. Jade Empire was a pain in the ass when it came to replaying with the same character, so I had hoped that they would remedy that in future games. Personally, casual is good for me when I'm having a less-than-ideal day and need the ego boost. Look at that...I just killed all the Geth with one shot. Very cool.

That's good to know; I'll keep that in mind when I go back to Eden Prime...although I won't bother building up Jenkins' arsenal. Poor dumb bastard.

Find the Colossus armor? Um...yeah! I did! I did NOT use the console!

...okay, maybe I did. I wasn't actually cheating in terms of gameplay, though; I went through all of the human armors to take screens, to see what they all were. I have screens of all the male and female armors (light, medium, and heavy), and I'll be working on the other races once I get them...
...speaking of which, the light Colossus for Turians? Abysmal.

I actually *did* find the light Colossus for Garrus in a random pickup, though. Hell of a lot of good it does ME.
Cheating With Silver Sorrow:Go to My Documents\Bioware\Mass Effect\Config\ and find your BIOInput.ini file. Back it up first. Then open it (with Notepad, if you like) and find [Engine.Console]; add the line ConsoleKey=Tilde under it. It should look like this:
[Engine.Console]
ConsoleKey=Tilde
Save it. Now go to
this page and cheat like a bastard. Here's a freebie:
Bring down the console and type:
giveitem self 10 humanh manf_kassa_armor_colossus ...there you go. Level X Colossus heavy armor.

(For light and/or medium, substitute
humanl and/or
humanm for
humanh, respectively.
And that was
Cheating With Silver Sorrow. I am not responsible for any feelings of utter disappointment and self-loathing you may feel after screwing yourself out of an honest gameplay experience.

...anyway...
I don't like the light Colossus very much (biker suit, indeed); the heavy is great, though...I would've toned down the red to make it more ominous, personally. That guy in
that Bioware forum thread I mentioned has done just that, so I don't have to worry about cracking any of the damned files open somehow to get at them. Actually, I would have liked something in black and dark gray...
There's enough of a variation on the same basic weapon and armor designs that I'm not disappointed; I even like the white armors, oddly enough.

The black Spectre weapons are amazing...
The random armor pickups are a little wonky, though; during one instance on Eden Prime I got the
medium Hydra armor, which is a very nice-looking armor, while playing Eden Prime with other characters I would get things like medium Turian armor, heavy Krogan armor, or even heavy Phoenix armor. It's sort of strange, and a little aggravating, since by the time I can put those armors to good use, they're practically useless. (Although I *always* get the Scorpion armor right after meeting Ashley; that's obviously a deliberate placement.)
Here's something probably a little weird: I had taken one of my characters -- the guy with the weak chin, as depicted in my first post -- up to almost the end of the game; I could buy Master Spectre Gear (level 7) from my Acquisitions guy in the Normandy. I got sick of looking at his bad chin (I mean it...these things bug the HELL out of me), so I deleted the character and started over with a remake of his face --
as you can see here -- and...well, after Eden Prime when my new character went to see the guy to sell off the crap he had cluttering up his inventory, the guy was selling Master Spectre equipment. I couldn't afford it, of course, but it is nice to see a glitch going my way for once.
(Btw, the secret to getting that guy's face right? Build up his chin without the beard; exaggerate it a little. Then add the beard. That way, it will appear to be fuller, like an actual beard, instead of dirt smudged on a chin. The beards are a mess, but they're WAY better than that godawful shit Bethesda tried to pull on us.)
I also *finally* got a good female face. I ran into Maeko Matsuo (on Noveria), and liked what she had going on (sorta Joan Chen-like, in a way), so I think I got a fairly close likeness, with my own small adjustments:

Tell ya, getting that mouth right was a ponderous ordeal. I finally sat down today and recorded how many settings are available for each slider -- okay, so I have a lot of free time and I'm not well most of the time, so it's either that or experimenting with whatever's in the medicine cabinet -- and I think I have this down to a science now. For example, Jin's Facial Structure is:
Facial Structure: 3/8 (3 clicks to the right)
Skin Tone: 3/5 (ditto)
Complexion: 0/3 (all the way to the left)
Scar: 0/11 (ditto)
(Although if you count the the very first setting as 1, then it means that the Facial Structure, for example, would be 4/9.)
And so on. The benefit is that if someone likes a face I create, I can tell them exactly how to get it.
Achievements: Good to know. I glanced at the Achievements, but the benefits of achieving didn't really register at the time.

(Dr. Cooper: "That's because you've never excelled at anything in your life.")
They just phoned it in, eh? That bites. Actors: pfft.

Thinking about this, though: I wish the guys at Bethesda would look at how Mass Effect (and other Bioware games too) handles NPCs and such. If they have nothing to say, you can't select them or talk to them. You acknowledge them by tracking them with your head, but they don't talk to you. Had Oblivion done this, it would've made the game a lot less irritating. And really: what was the point of talking to those people, anyway? They're just boring and have nothing useful to impart (unless you like hearing the same crap about the Colovian highlands being bordered on the west by Hammerfell over and over again). If I wanted to hear important rumors, I could go to a merchant and ask them. Problem solved. And I wouldn't have to hear the same damn people's voices constantly. Here's a hint, Bethesda: you could probably hire a
bunch of lesser-known, yet equally-talented voice actors for the same price as getting six or seven lines from Captain Picard.
I mean it: people complain that the TES cities seem lightly-populated, and I agree. All they had to do was emulate, say, Jade Empire, by putting a bunch of NPCs without solid-body physics, voice acting, or RAM-intensive schedules into the cities. At 6 am, put 'em in the cities. At night, take 'em out. Easy.
And I go on like this. For hours. Never mind me, I'm just cranky. Don't get me started on Mass Effect's DRM, either.
