Wednesday, May 19, 2021

Today in space cars with poor handling:

Can we talk about the Mako? Huh? Right, sorry, it's a Mass Effect thing and-wha? Right, sorry, I keep forgetting that you're a responsible adult. Look, this is going to be about a video game-yes. Again. You knew what you were getting yourself into when you clicked on this.
Pictured: what normal, sociable adults do with their leisure time. I assume.
Can you believe all the FPS's? That's
 got to be what? 8K? 9? A ton of K's!
And look at all those rays. So traced!
Anyway, like I was saying. There's this remastered version of the Mass Effect trilogy and I, despite having played through these games years ago, am going to be devoting an embarrassing amount of time to replaying them. Like, an amount of time better spent picking up an instrument or learning another language. Again, you knew what you were getting into. So this version of the games, I'm told, is enhanced over the originals in terms of graphics and performance but I can't tell because I'm not able to distinguish things like frame rates. 

But whatever, the games look good for being fourteen years old. There's also some improvements in game play and load times designed to bring them up to more recent standards and that's all super but what I want to discuss is the Mako. Which still sucks.
I'm sure I'm far from the first person to make this observation 
this but it really is objectively the worst thing ever.
Above: every goddamn
planet in Mass Effect. 
Allow me to explain. The Mass Effect games are RPG/shooters in which the player is the captain of a spaceship and as such, ends up landing on planets. Planets with rough, mountainous terrain. Like, crazy rough, hence the Mako, a tank/car/ATV mode of transportation which is mercifully only in the first game. I say mercifully because driving it is a floaty, frustrating mess and the planets you have to navigate around are full of vertical topography and this military grade shopping cart with a broken wheel is woefully inadequate and I just want to ask why.

Pictured: the main character strolling past
one of the many flying cars at headquarters.
This always sucked, but with the rerelease it seems like a missed opportunity to fix this part of the game. I mean, give us a helicopter or a plane or something. A jet pack even. Anything. These people live in the future, shouldn't everything hover? Or even if they just flattened out the topography a little it would have gone a long way towards making the driving a less infuriating experience. I flipped it over yesterday and spent, no lie, four full minutes trying to right it again. 

I should be clear that I actually do have real life concerns and that I don't sit around fretting over the ill-conceived control scheme of a fictional space car, but I ask you:
How even is this ok?

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