my beef with bioware

yet another procrastination post. i'm rewriting the end of my novel, again. what is it with beginnings and endings with me? the whole middle is fine, but i'm not happy with chapter 1 or chapters 33 to 36. hhuuuuuum.

to plants:
the pepper grows about a centimetre a day. it's gotten huge - it's about 2 feet high now. my tomatoes are also growing madly, one of them is really getting big - it's about 12cm tall with 5 leaves. no sign of the strawberries yet. the sun vanished just after i planted them, so i expect they will be a while. the kale isn't doing so well since i thinned it. i have four plants left. one seems to be wilting. two are ok, but don't seem to be growing. the last one seems to be growing ok, but it's the smallest of the lot.

to games:
i finished jade empire. it was fun enough. i figured out a neat fighting style that meant the bad guys couldn't get a hit on me. i don't know what that games problem is, but it seemed horribly unbalanced. the regular enemies could be taken down in about 5 seconds; if they hit you it wasn't a problem - their couldn't do much damage. they were pretty easy to beat. the bosses, on the other hand, were impossible. two hits from a boss and my character was dead. and it took about 5 minutes to beat a boss (that's 60times longer than a regular guy - that seems a bit extreme to me). anyway, i did finish the game, but i won't be rushing back to play it any time soon.
i played through dr ned and got half way through general knoxx in borderlands before i started playing mass effect. it's a fun enough game. for some reason, it seems to lack something. like, i'm kind of just playing it to see what it will present me with. i don't really feel much for any of the characters (my girl is pretty looking - that's about it) and i don't care much for the story so far. in fact, i don't really know what the story is yet. and i'm about 6 hours in... maybe. so i'll stick with it to see where it goes. jade empire was kind of similar - really slow to start and then it got going towards the end. but they spent too long on set-up and by the time the story got going i hadn't fallen in love with the characters. and then it was too late - i was too worried about staying alive.

in fact, i had another gripe with jade empire. it was supposed to be an rpg, but only the first two chapters had quests and stuff. after that, it was all fighting. there weren't even any puzzles or stuff, it was just, 'go here and kill this guy, then kill that mob of assassins, then kill this boss, then kill this mob of ghosts, then kill...' yea - you get the point. yea - schizophrenic game.

so, i kind of hope the bioware guys learned thier lesson from jade empire, and mass effect is better, but so far i'm not seeing it.

penelope_stone is up for the week (or two). it's fun having her around. we're thinking of going to sheila's for dinner some night - we really need to tell sheila about this.

right - it's ten past ten, i really need to get down to writing.