It was a long day in Mass Effect as I finished Feros, involving a long slog through the Thorian part. Afterwards, more was revealed about Saren’s ship and how he controls people, though I still don’t know where he is.

Upon returning to the ship, the romance plot kicked in and I was forced to choose between Kaidan and Liara. A whiny marine, or blue boobies, hmmm, a tough choice indeed… I went to Luna and got my specialist class for finishing the mission there, and then worked on some more of the investigation assignments I’d picked up along the way. None of them are really related to the main plot, but they’re good for loot, xp, and bits of lore.

My level is somewhere in the 30s now, and it’s been getting annoying having to stop to break stuff down into omnigel, since there’s no convenient way to do it for large batches of items. I hit the Rich achievement, which let me buy the high-end Spectre equipment, so I don’t even really need any more weapons for the main characters. (I can’t afford them for all the crew members yet, but I’ve been sticking with Liara and Tali as my other squad members.)

I’m also starting to get personal requests from the other crew members. So far I’ve helped Wrex retrieve some old family armour, and next up I think I’ll do whatever it was Garrus requested.

Getting back to Mass Effect, I finished up the side quests in the Citadel and resumed the main quest, wherein I was suddenly promoted to being a Spectre and sent off to investigate some leads.

I first headed off to find Liara, the final crew member, and had to search a few planets before finding her. Upon landing on a planet, you drive a vehicle called the Mako around, and the controls are a bit unwieldy since it has a large turning radius and tends to bounce around a lot once you hit uneven ground. I got the hang of it though, and soon found the ruins Liara was hiding in, cleaned out some Geth, and rescued her. Some of the fights were actually pretty tough in this part since I was still getting the hang of trying to make the most of my biotic abilities.

Now that Liara’s part of the crew, I talked to her for a while and she eventually brought up her people’s mating rituals (hubba hubba). Apparently they don’t even need to touch their partners…

I returned to the Citadel to finish off a few random quests I’d picked up along the way, start a few more new ones that appeared, and headed off to do some random exploration. There are plenty of planets that aren’t directly plot-related, but you can still land on them to find various minerals, artifacts, loot, or minor side quests, like the one where a monkey stole the data module from a crashed probe and I had to hunt down the one that stole it in another set of ruins.

I eventally landed on Feron, one of the potential leads, where I’m now in the middle of helping a group of colonists there fend off a Geth invasion.

I’ve been busy lately, but I finally got around to the just-released Fallout 3 DLC, Point Lookout. It’s a completely separate, swampy area that’s much bigger than the rest of the DLC so far, with a lot more to explore and do, and even some new monsters in the swamp people and swamp ghouls and a new form of mirelurk.

There’s various side activities and I went through a bunch of them right away, including pillaging some bank vauls, tracking down a spy’s 200-year-old mission, a “safari” expedition in a cave, making moonshine, and various other caves and loot points. The primary quest was getting involved in an old vendetta between a ghoul and a scientist who turned out to be a brain in a jar. Although straightforward, it introduced some neat game mechanics like a house defense standoff.

Overall, it’s probably the best piece of DLC so far for Fallout 3, and well worth it.

Mass Effect continued on with a lot more talking in the Citadel. One quirk of the conversation system is that you’re given a few choices for different responses, but what the character actually says often doesn’t quite match what you might have expected from the phrasing of the choice. It doesn’t really matter that much though, as it’s usually pretty clear what the ‘good’ and ‘evil’ responses are.

I found and did some odd jobs, usually involving questing or talking to people, and picked up a couple more levels that way. I also picked up Wrex and Tali as squad members, and ended the evening with some action as a firefight down below led to finding more information about what Saren, a rogue Spectre, is up to.

I’m guessing I’ll be leaving the Citadel to pursue missions on other planets soon, but there’s still a few minor quests I need to wrap up here first.

Since I’ve shelved Fallout 3 for now, I finally went back to another PC RPG I’ve been meaning to work on for a while now: Mass Effect.

I went with a female character this time, with the magicbiotic-based Adept class, and made it through the initial Eden Prime mission. The biotics aren’t too useful yet since they take so long to recharge and I don’t have many yet, but guns were good enough for now. Now I’m exploring the Citadel, which could take a while since it’s fairly sizeable with a bunch of people to talk to.

It was another long day in Fallout 3, starting out with cleaning out Fort Constantine for some decent weapons and a suit of T-51b power armour, and then a trip to Hubris Comics. The only other notable loot was a couple of Fat Man launchers, though I’ve never used them anyway.

Along the way, I finally picked up enough Nuka-Cola Quantum to finish the quest for them, and then I went and got the rest of the bobbleheads that I was still missing. That pretty much took care of the important things, as the one remaining quest achievement was impossible to get due to having already killed a certain slaver camp.

So, I then went and redid the last main quest, kicking off the Broken Steel pieces. Unlike the other expansions, this one actually affected the main game area, with some terrain changes and quests involving the water purification. It did eventually lead me to a new area though, an old army base where I had to sneak around a lot just due to the large number of enemies and turrets. The goals were pretty straightforward, though it often took a lot of slogging through enemies, and after a few hours I’d finished the area off.

There are still various minor areas to visit, but I think I’m once again done with Fallout 3 for now. At least until the next DLC comes out, uh, next week…

It was yet more exploring in Fallout 3 tonight, the highlight this time being the Deathclaw Sanctuary. There, I found the final stat bobblehead I needed and a couple of unique weapons, including a rather deadly-looking minigun that I’ll have to give to a follower.

I think I’m running out of major landmarks to visit, as a lot of the remaining unvisited map markers are minor stuff like campgrounds and broadcast towers, so I’ll have to get back to the Broken Steel stuff sometime soon.

I finally got around to a quest in Fallout 3 that I should have done a lot earlier: Reilly’s Rangers. I’d passed by their area before, but it turns out that the initial trigger is actually in Underworld, and I hadn’t been there before.

It was a much slower quest than I expected, with a lot of slogging through buildings since I couldn’t just fast-travel to the destination. It was further complicated by there being quite a few Super Mutant Overlords along the way. Even at level 24, with maxed out skills and some of the best weapons, they take a lot of hits to kill and I have to blow a handful of stimpacks just to survive the fight.

I eventually pushed through to the end, though, and got the ranger armour reward. It’s a pretty good suit — a bit less DR than the winterized power armour I was wearing before, but better stat bonuses.

I also picked up Charon from in Underworld along the way, but I’ve been preferring to explore on my own lately (Dogmeat and Fawkes are waiting at their home spots), so I plunked some armour on him and parked him outside my home in Megaton.