Rockband4Rivals in session report, well, those who bother to show up.

Lat week was a fun week with a fun theme, but For Honor, WoW and Blood Bowl 2 kept me away from doing all that I could've done. With BigOne's support, the crew maintained their spot in the Gold Tier. It looks a lot brighter for our tenure now as we're leaning against the green. I'm perfectly happy with maintaining Gold Tier as flip-flopping I'm not a fan of.

The song that I had to buy this week was Seventeen, by Winger. I'm not impressed by the lyrics (I like to classify lyrics like that as 'trailerpark poetry'.) but the score is solid, especially near the end, when the different guitars play lines independently from eachother to form a cohesive melody yet. Quite nifty, though I'm not going out of my way to listen to more music by Winger.

I'm a bit salty though, because the crew got a '5 week participation' badge that two people in the crew just don't deserve. The aim of 2o2p-crew is to not place unrealistic expectations on it's members, this is true. But I don't think that it is unrealistic to expect that somewhere in a 5 week period people fucking show up and fucking participate in a competition where participation counts and not hanging about resting on their twats. '5 Straight weeks of participation' is cynical as fuck in this context.

Well, I said what I wanted to say about it. In other news, I have re-installed the first Mass Effect and am planning to play through the trilogy before Mass Effect: Andromeda releases. I have pre-ordered the most expansive edition of Andromeda a while ago, so come the 21th of march, I'll be colonizing Andromeda with Sara Ryder. Sara Ryder, for a 3D computer-model, is too cute. I'm not even going to change her face. She has this big-mouthed smile that lends her a very endearing vibe. I approve!

People are afraid that the new Mass Effect will be Mass Effect: Inquisition and I can understand that worry. Inquisition is a lack-luster offering that drags on and on to end with a boss who dies like a little bitch. However, it offered exactly everything that the latest generation of gamers seem to want in a RPG-epic nowadays as Inquisition wasn't a commercial disaster by any stretch of the imagination. But things like  'classless'-builds allowing you to build your toon in any way that you see fit and the removal of the Paragon/Renegade system sounds very promising to my ears. The most annoying thing surrounding the the last weeks till Andromeda's release are the people who're still going around whining about the ending of Mass Effect 3.

I think that Bioware is showing Crystal Dynamics how create a girl-next-door protagonist the right way. Sara Ryder isn't as stylized as Jane Shepard was (who was also stereotyped as the soul-eating redhead.) and she doesn't present an unattainable beauty-ideal that Crystal Dynamics reset of 2013 Lara Croft was. CD even overhauled the reset to normalize the normalized Lara, but they still failed. Lara might not be an adult industry worker anymore, but you can't place her in the amateur bracket either. Sara Ryder's face, with the dimensional imperfections in it that makes her mouth larger than it actually is, a nose that sits too high and with eye-catching flaps of flesh called ears, gives an average, yet familiar, vibe that makes her instantly likable. (At least, to my tastes. I always create my characters with imperfections like that so I'm happy that Bioware saved me two hours in the character-creator with Andromeda.) That makes Andromeda the first RPG with character-creation where I don't feel to erase the titular person and to start over from scratch. Even Nora, from Fallout 4, was too perfect. 

Eleanor, my replacement for Nora, was a whole lot more recognizable as 'average', which made my playthough of Fallout 4 more interesting as a result. I have to say that I quite enjoy this shift away from pornstars to faces-in-the-street for videogame girls. It makes sense, even if they do unbelievable things, have bad-ass one-liners and kill like a crazy-person without flinching. In a weird way, it makes them even better.