Making them contain resources was a good idea. BioWare wanted us to have some reason to explore all these little planets and asteroids they included on their map. Sadly, boring minigame in which you drag your mouse cursor in circles is not a good replacement. It appears that BioWare wanted to have something to replace the dull and boring Mako sections of the game. The worst part is that it is absolutely crucial to put in time into doing it, if you want your whole team to survive the suicide mission. I didn’t mind it that much on my first run through the game, but I hated doing it my second time around. Still, I don’t think anything beats lock-picking from Fallout 3 which you do exactly what is says on the tin: pick a lock.Īrguably the least enjoyable part of Mass Effect 2 was the mining: This reinforces my point that if you make a mini game look a bit like what it is supposed to be, it becomes less annoying. Once again, it is easy and requires no skill but is much less awful than the Frogger sequences from ME1.
You need to match 3 patterns in a row, under a time limit while avoiding the red rectangles. Surprisingly the game didn’t make me rage the same way Frogger did.
It has nothing to do with bypassing security but… Well, the way it is designed it almost looks like you are criss-crossing some electronic circuits, connecting them to each other to cause some kind of overload that will trigger the locking mechanism. You have to match symbols into pairs, and you can only see one of them at a time. The former is for opening doors and unlocking chests while the latter is for breaking into computer systems, deactivating stuff and etc… It makes sense. While Mass Effect used the silly circular frogger thing for everything ME2 expanded it’s repertoire to two distinct games: bypass game and hacking game. So instead I’ll just briefly comment on them here – talking about what worked and what didn’t. I initially planned to make an extended rant about mini games being stupid but I realized that I already posted that rant several times. I wasn’t going to post anymore but then I captured those videos and uploaded them to Youtube a few weeks back… It would be a shame not to share them. The amount of words I expelled upon this blog talking about that game is probably reaching obscene levels. I think I have already milked Mass Effect 2 dry in the last couple of weeks.