Demigodess with a Conscience

After having been completely devoured by this particular series of games I couldn’t help but write a review of the games. I know that it has already been done several times, but I’d still like to share my feelings over the games with my friends, readers and corpmates.
I’ll begin today with a review of Mass Effect. The first game in a planned trilogy in the Mass Effect universe, released May 28, 2008. This review will not contain any major spoilers in case anyone of you haven’t already played the game and intend to do so. Revealing plot or deliver spoilers would literally spoil your experience. And boy, what an experience!

Mass Effect begins by asking you to log in as your character, Commander Shepard. Since Mass Effect is a role-playing game, you are given several options for you character. If you’re feeling lazy, you can always select the default male or female character and thus play as Soldier class.

However if you are more like me, wanting to fine-tune your experience, you are given several options. First off you choose gender and first name. The first name is mostly fluff for yourself since it’s never displayed in the actual game except on your character sheet. People will refer to you as “Shepard” or “Commander” regardless of your sex.

Next up is choosing your class, which is the most important choice. You can select any of six classes: Soldier, Engineer, Adept, Infiltrator, Sentinel, and Vanguard. They are arranged in one primary specialist group and one “jack of all trades” group, with Soldier being the Combat specialist, Engineer being the Tech specialist and Adept being the Biotic specialist. (Biotics are Mass Effects equivalent to fantasy games’ magic).

The other three classes are dual classes that combine two of the above into one class. Not as specialized, but more versatile. Infiltrator is the Combat/Tech combination, Vanguard being the Combat/Biotic and Sentinel the Tech/Biotic combination. In addition to the above classes, any class can choose to specialize further after reaching level 20 and doing a specific mission, thus further enhancing his or her power in a specific field.

After this you are asked to choose a background, which affects some side quests (called Assignments) and your Paragon/Renegade scores. I’ll get to these later. Once your background is chosen, you select your psychological profile, which again affects some assignments as well as Paragon/Renegade scores. Both the background and psychological profile will also affect dialogues here and there in the game, and serve as an identifier for who Shepard is. (Since I’ve played Mass Effect 2, I can let you know it carries over to dialogue here too.)

Once you’ve made your choices you are treated to an intro where you overhear a couple of voice discussing you (Shepard) for a special assignment, while watching yourself staring out a window on a spaceship or space station with a planet looming below. Then you are pretty much tossed right into the story where you have been chosen as the XO of the “Normandy”, a secret stealth vessel of combined alien and human technology that is now having it’s shakedown cruise. Things rapidly change, and you are told this is no shakedown cruise at all, but a covert pickup on a colony on the far fringes of space. Things quickly go bad from here on in.

I won’t go more into detail here, but Mass Effect treats you to a rather cliché-ish “Save the Universe” story, but with many unusual twists and refreshing details that makes it all feel new and creative. The Mass Effect universe is ripe with interesting races and cultures, and will inspire you to read codex entries, talking to aliens and whatnot only to find out more about this cast universe.

Something I particularly like is the way they solved the fact that you have the right to use any means necessary and have clearance to go through almost any logs, something that is generally overlooked in these kinds of games. In Mass Effect, Shepard is, after a while given a special rank that allows her to step outside the law in order to do her job in Citadel space. In most games, you simply do as you please in spite of it being illegal, but none seem to react. Small detail, but adds to the whole believability and immersion.

Immersion is something Mass Effect definitely doesn’t lack in any amount. The graphics are very good, even though some of the character textures looks slightly blurry up close,and runs fairly well on a modern gaming computer. It’s also available on the Xbox 360, but from what I’ve heard, the revised PC version is miles ahead of the Xbox version, unfortunately.

What really sets Mass Effect aside from “Generic RPG #2097″ is a combination of an engaging story, spectacular voice acting and a unique feeling of companionship. During the course of the game you will recruit others to help you in your venture and every character adds something unique to the group, not only through their skills but also through their personality. You’ll find that you are just as engrossed in their back-story by talking to them as you are exploring the universe. You might even develop an affection for them. In fact, the game even allows you to develop a relationship with some of them.

Mass Effect offers a blend between an RPG game and a first person shooter. All combat takes place in real time in a FPS fashion. You can, however, pause the action in order to relay directives and tell your squad members (who can only be two active at a time, chosen prior to the mission) to use their powers and abilities at specific targets. If you find this micromanagement to detract from the action, you can simply set your squad mates to “Full power use” and let them decide when and where to apply their powers, while assigning your own abilities to quickslots and blast away without ever having to pause.

It’s fairly well balanced and I found that playing on “Veteran” was “just about right”, with “Hardcore” (available after finishing the game once) was offering me a challenge and “Insanity” (available after finishing the game on Hardcore) was really tough, but doable. I am by no means a FPS god so this should be true for the casual player.

Mass Effect also treats you to a gigantic universe with races, cultures and plots peeking at you from every nook and cranny. Once you are given your own ship you may travel the universe, land on pretty much any planet that isn’t a molten rock or a gas giant, and explore to your heart’s content. You do this by landing on the planets in the “M35 Mako”, which is something of a combination of a tank and a terrain vehicle. While on planets you can discover usable gear, weapons or more lore. You also gain experience, which will make the game a little bit easier to finish. The Mako does have the unusual ability to scale almost vertical mountains, which makes for some rather hilarious moments sometimes.

You are free to advance the story at any time by flying to any of the Mission Planets and progress, but you’ll be missing much of what Mass Effect has to offer if you do. There are lots of assignements to do, planets to explore, people to meet. I think I spent some 50 hours on the game the first time I played it. Of course, I’d finished it once by then but there was so much I’d missed, so much to do different and still other classes to test. To this date, I’ve still not played neither Engineer, Soldier or Sentinel.

What really makes Mass Effect feel so real is that your choices matter, and I mean really matter. The choices you make throughout the game will follow you, not only through this game, but through the other two games in the trilogy. Yep, you heard me, you can import your ME1 character into ME2 and have all your history brought with you (in addition to some bonuses, depending on how well you did) and your ME1/ME2 character into ME3.

Now, this wouldn’t seem half as awesome if I didn’t tell you what overwhelming choices you can make. You choices can mean the difference between life and death for a teammember, wether the universe will radically change politically, the life and death of an entire species (!) and much more. Mass Effect really does a good job making you agonize over choices since they will come back and bite you in the hind end. As always, there are no “right” choices. There are simply bad and less bad choices, which makes the whole thing much more interesting.

Bioware (that made the game) also thankfully let go of the tired old “good/bad” mechanic where everything you did was on a sliding scale of good or bad, which usually ended up with me being somewhere in the middle. In Mass Effect, most choices give you “Paragon” (diplomatic and helpful, “no one gets left behind”) and “Renegade” (selfish, callous and efficient) points. Being a renegade doesn’t mean you are a bad person. It’s kinda “get the job done, no matter the cost”, while paragon is more trying to find the best for everyone involved, and let the mission suffer.

With giving you the ability to amass both kinds of points, Mass Effect really lets you tailor your experience and choose differently in situations without suffering for it (ie losing “light” or “dark”). You simply amass whatever points resulted from your choice. More points in either will grant some bonuses, such as Ability Cooldown reduction (Paragon) or Increased Weapon damage (Renegade).

So, in closing, I can’t really say anything but “PLAY THIS GAME!”

Seriously.

 The Good Stuff

• Exceptionally well thought out and presented story that really pulls you in
• Fantastic voice acting allows incredible immersion
• Smooth and mostly problem free combat system
• Vast universe that actually seems to work together with its history and cultures
• Unique and creative aliens
• Sounds and music flows well with the action and doesn’t get in your way
• You get the feeling that you really do, in fact, matter in the scale of things
   

The Bad Stuff

• Might be tough on old computers
• Has some annoying texture popping when loading new scenes
• Long elevator rides (loading times)
• Assignments tend to feel a bit copy&paste at times (main missions are however excellent)
• Enemy combat taunts can get really repetetive when you fight mercs.
   

Final Verdict: 9,5

• Gameplay 9
• Graphics 9
• Audio 9
• Replayability 9
• Controls 7
• Entertainment 10

The day that started out so well continued in the same manner through the evening. I took some well needed R&R in station before waking up to continue my adventures in the wormholes. As I signed on I found several of my corpmembers online and was greeted by several nasty grins. Apparently, they’d read my logs. Yeah, yeah, you wannabe bad guys.

I kept sifting through wormholes and found six (!) of them in Rephirib. After having looked through five of them with not a single piloted vessel in them, I started losing hope. Is wormhole space really this empty? As I entered the sixth and final wormhole, my sensors registered two vessels in the vicinity. A Hyperion and a Raven. After the previous wormholes where every ship I came across was safely parked at a POS, I wasn’t too excited, but I dropped my probes and got to work nonetheless.

My heart raced a bit as I narrowed them down. They were nowhere near a moon! This meant they were certainly piloted and active. I quickly recovered my probes as to not spook the pilots, and warped to 50 km off their position to observe. What met me was a glorious! Two enemy ships, marked red by our standings, were battling a Sleeper battleship and it’s frigate escort. I knew they would probably had killed the battleship and be off if I left now, so instead I observed, waited for them to move on.

And they did. Once the sleeper battleship exploded, the Hyperion aligned for warp out in the void, and I retreated to a planet, decloaked and redeployed my probes. After less than a minute, I had pinpointed his location, again nowhere near a moon. I opted for simply bookmarking the spot and hurried back to K-space.

As I entered Rephirib again I blared across the corpchannel for people to get ready. Reds were to be destroyed! Unfortunately, most of my valiant corpmates were in no position to join up as they were 30+ jumps out, but Isaac and Klown were ready and willing. Isaac mounted his Armageddon and Klown jumped into his newly acquired Onyx Heavy Interdictor. Sweet, a bubble!

I opted for firepower and jumped into the Asmodai. Those pesky reds would get a real surprise when this Sansha monstrosity warped in on them. We formed up on the Rephirib gate, I was given squad command and issued the interlinked gang-warp. We landed at the mouth of the wormhole and slid through into the class 3 system. Silently and quickly we aligned towards the Hyperion’s position and I again iniated gang-warp.

We landed almost right on top of them. The Raven were 15-18 Km out and I quickly put my warp disruptor on him. He wasn’t going anywhere. The Hyperion however, was 37 Km off, too far off for either of us to get a point on. Klown valiantly engaged his microwarp drive and sped towards the Hyperion, catching it with his infinitpoint. We opened fire on the Hyperion, but when I attempted to reload my guns with Scorch crystals for range, I recieved an error message.

Apparently,  I was out of cargospace and there was no room for the crystals to be moved back for the swap. Crap! I forgot to drop off the loot from HOPTOH earlier. Damnit, oh well. It didn’t matter much, since just as Klown got ready to deploy his bubble, the Hyperion somehow jammed him and warped off to a safespot only 300 Km away. Furious as we were, we turned to the Raven and Klown deployed his bubble around it. He was certainly not going anywhere now!

The Raven was well in range for mymultifrequency crystals and it didn’t take many volleys from me and Isaac for the Raven to evaporate. The pod was swiftly destroyed and it’s pilot sent home to the vats. The Hyperion glared at us from a distance, but there was no way we would catch it, so we returned home.

As we were about to dock in our home station, a red undocked a Drake straight into us. We couldn’t believe our eyes! Klown quickly locked it down while me, Isaac and some LEGIO guys opened up on the Drake. It buckled in less than 10 seconds. It was completely obliterated and it’s pilot sat dimbwitted in his pod looking at the smoldering mess of metal that used to be his ship. Tydcrims made short work of his pod, further killing his security status. Tyd has gone from 5.0 to 1.33 in one day. Well done there Tyd…

A few hours later, we spotted a red gang of two Abaddons, two Guardians, an Absolution and some other escort rabble. We formed a fleet together with some other guys and got hunting, but by the time we caught up with the red gang, they had been joined by a Megathron, a Golem and carrier support in their staging system. There was no way we’d be able to break that, so grudingly we returned towards Hoshoun. As we landed on the Hoshoun gate in Mamet, we saw a red Drake in tackle range! Points were issued, weapons were fired and the Drake was beginning to buckle.

But he was already 20 or so Km off when we started, and we had no really fast ships, save for Klown’s Onyx. As the Drake was speeding out of my overloaded disruptor range, I feared he might escape, but Klown was on his tail and kept his infinipoint on it, and eventually the massive shielding on the Drake dissipated and it was short work from there on in. (The killmail went to someone else who has yet to share it)

In short, this day has seen more pewpew than I have had in the last month. In spite of the obscene amounts of lives lost in all this, I can’t help but feel absolutely fantastic!

So far it’s been a rather pleasant day in spite of some initial boredom. After having flown around buying modules for my Rokh and the Nightmare, I decided to stop trying to look for a fight in low sec. Pirates were nowhere to be seen around southern Domain these days. The only ones that were there were either lonewolves on their way out into Providence or gangs of battlecruisers camping gates. Both were of no interest for me seeing as a battleship usually can’t catch a speedy lonewolf, and the gangs of late have been a tad too large to do any solo attempts.

So instead I jumped in my trusty Anathema and headed out looking for wormholes. Of course, this could just end up being another wild ghost chase but I had nothing better to do. Hoshoun was, of course, completely devoid of any wormholes so I moved on to Ziriert. After a couple of minutes of searching, I located a signature that could be one. After yet another minute of tedious work I found it. A wormhole with a sharp red nebula hinting on the other side of the event horizon. My database suggested this were to be a class 5 wormhole which was good news for me. Class 5s were more likely to contain people that the lower valued class 2-3.

I entered the wormhole and immediately picked a couple of ships up on my directional scanner. A Heron, no doubt the prober, a Retriever, a Covetor and an Iteron V. Looks like a mining gang and without escort. I quickly dropped my Sister’s combat scanner probes and got a fix on the Retriever. I saved the location in my databanks and turned back towards the wormhole. It was time to bring something that packed a punch.

I chose my Phantasm; the Belial. It was quick, agile and had a respectable shield buffer, while spitting out decent damage for a cruiser. More than a match for a couple of mining barges. As soon as I was granted clearance to undock, the Belial glided out of the hangar and into open space. As usual with the Sansha ships, it took a while to get used to the ship’s computer and yet some more time to adjust to the creepy sensor array. I willed the Belial towards the Ziriert stargate and once there, was swiftly granted departure clearance. After rematerialization in Ziriert, I immediately aimed for the wormhole, wishing to catch the miners before they finished their operation.

Once at the wormhole, I aimed the ship straight through the center and was, in a nearly magical way, transported across the vastness of the universe. Away from the safety of “Known Space” or K-space as we called it, and into the unknown of “Wormhole Space”.

As luck had it, the ships were still on the scanner once the Belial realigned it’s sensory equipment. I willed the ship into warp as soon as we cleared the wormhole and soon I landed in a massive asteroid field, only meters from a Covetor with mining lasers blazing across the void. I quickly moved away from the ship as to not collide with it, and I carefully maneuvered away from the mining lasers. While weak compared to my own laser banks, I still didn’t want them singeing my shields. After what felt like an eternity, the Belial’s targetting system had aquired the Covetor and I opened up with everything I had on the mining barge.

It was lightly shielded and folded quickly under the volleys of supercharged energy. Just as my final volley hit the side of the Covetor, turning it to spacedust, the Iteron landed right next to me. He must have been in warp already when I attacked. Or so I hoped, because noone would be foolish enough to warp to this situation in an industrial ship.

After another couple of seconds, the Belial had locked down and scrambled the Iteron as well, and as my first volley struck his shields (obliterating them in the process), a message was sent from the Iteron pilot.

“Stop it!”

I could hardly keep myself from laughing. What did he expect to accomplish by that? I fired another volley onto the Iteron and it lost structural integrity and exploded. Only then did I notice that the Covetor pilot had yet to escape. He was still just sitting there, right next to his wreckage, in his escape pod. I could hard believe it, but I started targetting the tiny little pod, and even after the 15 seconds it took to lock it, he was still there. Needless to say, he wasn’t around for long.

Quite pleased with myself, I scooped the now frozen corpes, whatever loot was left after the explosions and turned back home. What? Are you shocked? Did you think I was some defender of justice or something? No, I’m not. In case you didn’t know, I fire upon anything in my way, unless it’s friendly. Living in southern Domain just means that pretty much everything is friendly. Even neutrals. In wormhole space, however…there are only blues, and dead people.

Right as I returned to the safety of K-space, I recieved a report that HOPTOH, the infamous pirate, was roaming in Ziriert. I figured the Belial wouldn’t be quite enough to match up against his Hurricane, so I went back to Hoshoun and reshipped to the Asmodai, my Nightmare. After returning to Ziriert, I received a fleet invite from another blue. Apparently he was also looking for HOPTOH, and we worked together in pinning him down. Judging from the banter in local chat, HOPTOH had found a target and destroyed it. One less missionrunner ship around.

My friend soon located HOPTOH with his probes, and warped us in. As I landed in the safespot, my friend and another blue were already engaged with HOPTOH. A Curse and a Harbinger against the Hurricane, but it looked like the ‘cane had the upper hand. I didn’t waste time. I locked the Hurricane up and three volleys later, it was a smoldering piece of mangled metal. HOPTOH must’ve been in shock, because he didn’t warp his pod out in time, and Iat quickly popped it, sending HOPTOH back to his cloning vat.

All in all, a very good day so far.

A couple of days ago I was on my way up the Kheram pipe and recieved a report that Catrina was somewhere along the pipe as well. I saw this as a perfect moment to teach my sister a lesson, so  I parked my Armageddon on the Unefsih gate in Kheram and waited. Sure enough, there she was! She didn’t say hello, nor did she make any effort to run. I locked her Omen up, and willed my laser batteries to fire! The disruptor shut her warp core down, the web hampered her sublight engines, and the neutralizer crushed her capacitor.

She wasn’t going anywhere, she wasn’t doing any thing and most importantly, she was going down! I’m not even sure if she shot back at all, but in a few seconds, her Omen was reduced to a smoldering wreck. She quickly got her pod out, and I actually received a sneering remark over local chat.

Seeing as I was now under sentry fire due to crimes, I decided to warp my Armageddon to a safespot in empty space and wait out the aggression timer. I felt rather pleased with myself as I told the tale of my victory to my corpmates, but noticed that Catrina was back in system. I couldn’t really help myself, so I made a teasing remark how she was back for more, but she didn’t reply to that. Rather strange, seeing as she usually always have a snide reply.

Only a minute or two after her entering the system, she decloaks right beside me in a Pilgrim! I didn’t know she could use probes, so I wasn’t even looking! I was locked up, neuted and tracking disrupted in no time. I didn’t even have drones to defend myself with as they were left behind at the gate and destroyed by the sentries. I yelled out to my corpmates to come help, but most of them were far off. In the Citadel, noone lifted a finger to help.

I couldn’t touch her! It was so frustrating. I fired and fired, but the lasers kept missing, and my capacitor was going down fast, in spite of my cap booster. As my corpmates scrambled to get a combat ship ready and fly to my position, I ran out of cap booster charges and Aura’s dreaded voice hit me: “Your capacitor is empty.” My repper turned off, as did most of my other systems. Catrina’s drones were still eating away slowly at my armor, and finally breached the plating, attacking my unprotected hull.

I screamed for my corpmates for help, and apparently, two of them were en route. I kept thinking that they can’t go fast enough, just as the local beacon recognized Isaac entering system. I yelled at him to warp to me, but it was too late. Only a second after him landing on the grid, my proud Armageddon exploded. I quickly got my pod out, in case Cat was in a really bad mood, but apparently she was only interested in Isaac’s Harbinger, and was soon locked in combat with him. I saw Isaac’s desperate cries for help in the Citadel as I limped back home.

Thankfully, Catrina made a mistake and Isaac could get away before being destroyed, but I felt quite humiliated. I traded a battleship for a cheaply fitted cruiser which wasn’t quite what I had in mind. Not only that, I traded thousands of lives for a cheaply fitted cruiser with NO crew.

You will pay for this, dear sister…

“Eve goes well with drinking, hence lots of Russians and Germans. However, Eve contains absolutely no six-year-olds with cat ears and miniskirts hiked up high enough to see their panties. Ergo, Japanese players are completely disinterested.”

Istvaan Shogaatsu on the EVE Boards.

FUNNIE!

Ever since we had that fire in the kitchen last monday, I haven’t been able to sleep well. Always falling asleep early in the morning and waking up late, not feeling rested. Today, this was really put to test as I had to be at work at 6:45. By 2 am I gave up sleeping. It just wasn’t going to work.

So here I am, at work, half asleep and unmotivated to hell and back (normal when you are fatigued) trying to truddle along. I just wanna go home and sleep. Plox?

Oh and hope y’all had a good christmas holiday! I did. Was very nice to meet the relatives and have a good, massive meal together.

Harf. I’ll just stop now. Sooo tired. I’ll be back when I have something remarkable to write about. For now I only have a short message: Ancy can finally use bombs! Yay me.

My last peak into W-space left me thirsty for more. There was something alluring about W-space. So virgin, unknown and unexplored. So empty, yet could be filled with people and you just wouldn’t know. The lack of subspace beacons to announce your precence made W-space something of an adventure in itself, and I was itching to go back.

So, seeing as I had a lot of CPU to spare on the Phantasm, I tossed on a Core Launcher and went looking for wormholes. I soon found that probing one down was much harder with the Phantasm than with my Anathema. I had to actually make an effort in order to find these elusive little buggers. Not that I was overly surprised. The Anathema was bristling with electronics and had state of the art sensory systems, while the Phantasm was more focused on strong shields (that tend to wreak havoc with sensitive sensor equipment) and heavy laser banks.

I eventually came across 6 different wormholes in just under an hour, and after having looked them all through I found nothing of interest except for the one in Misaba. It had another wormhole inside, leading even further into unknown realms of space. I was tempted, I have to admit. Most wormholes I’d found in W-space inevitably lead back to K-space. Probable due to the Seyllin incident, which in some way seem to have linked W-space and K-space together in mysterious ways.

I chose to toss carefullness out the window and willed the Sansha monstrosity towards the pulsating wormhole and passed through the event horizon. In a very strange sensation very different from gate travel, everything sort of remained the same. My sensory systems registered that unknown radiation in the new system caused some rather strange things to happen to my ship, but other than that it was no different than travelling from one point in a system to another. No nasuea, no disorientation, no sensor recalibration. Just…nothing. Yet my camera drones were blinded by a massive pulsar, and a new nebula covered the “sky”. I was clearly not in the same system anymore.

I quickly got to work and launched my probes, while watching my directional scanner. Several Sleeper complexes showed up on my first scan. Not hidden by any means at all, but I also had a lot of faint signatures that I turned my attention to. It was, to say the least, very frustrating working with a vessel not designed for this kind of work. The Phantasm’s readings were blurry, inaccurate and apparently had a lot of deviation which made my job a lot harder than I was used to.

In the end though I managed to find a massive asteroid belt, dotted with asteroids the size of small moons. It was remarkable to witness, but I didn’t have time to stay for too long before the Sleepers that were roaming the belt decided I’d overstayed my welcome.

Another signature was yet more elusive and I decided to focus on that one. I was rewarded with a slight “pling” sound when the sensors, finally, identified the signature as a possible wormhole and an approximate location. I warped to the location only to find the wormhole convulsing at a rather unsettling pace. It definately didn’t look safe, and indeed, some more close range scans verified that the wormhole was in the final stages of it’s lifetime and would collapse within the hour. I wasn’t too keen on getting stuck somewhere in unknown space, and therefor set out to find another wormhole.

I have now been through five wormholes deeper into W-space and back again, and in spite of not finding anything but the eerie Sleepers to shoot, I’m quite satisfied. This is something I’m sure to be doing more often.

I’ve been having the worst of times, and best of times lately. I’ve had lots of stuff to do and never had a dull moment in the last few days, which is actually excellent.

It all started with me cloning to a nearly blank clone without implants for an upcoming roam into 0.0. I may be nuts, but I’m not crazy. There’s no way I’d take a frigate on a deep 0.0 roam with the risk of getting caught in a bubble and losing 2b when my POD pops. The inconvenience of dying is, in this case, far less than the liquid ISK lost.

In a turn of spontaneousness, we had a little talk in the corporation chat on how we should go roaming soon. It all really started with me talking about a roam that me and Tydcrims did a few days ago, just after I had blown up the Drake in W-space. Him and I jumped in to our stealth bombers in order to harass the two Caldari Navy Ravens that showed up to avenge their dead comrade. When we finally managed to get together and head into the wormhole, they were already long gone, but the idea sparked something in the corporation.

So what happened was that we got a small gang together and headed for Providence to find something to pewpew.

• Jade Blossoms – Incursus
• Tydcrims – Purifier
• Me – Purifier
• 4 LOM – Manticore
• McGowd – Malediction

With this little gang of frigates, we roamed all the way down to Paxton space, went up via 2-TEG and came back the “back route” up to R3-K7K without seeing many reds. We caught glimpse of a red that we didn’t know was a red that jumped into R3 just as we sat on the gate. He was in a Pilgrim, and we could’ve easily tackled him if we’d only known he was a red.

Slightly angered over this, we opened fire on a red Hurricane that had been chased from Mamet down to R3. He was shield tanked and with two bombers launching Mjolnirs at him, and several painters on him, his shields were down in no time, and his armor flew off in large chunks. Unfortunately, we had no webbers along with us, so it ended up with him reaching the gate just in time, and jumping back into Misaba. He didn’t make it out alive though, since half of the lower Domain citizens were sitting on that gate, but we felt slightly robbed of proof of our work. The other guys simply reaped the goodies of our hard work.

Nevertheless, we knew in our hearts that we had won. With no killmail to show for it, who cares?

So I had been scanning down some wormholes in Hoshoun and figured I’d take a look. The first one I enter, Class 3 system, has a Drake and a Buzzard in it. Kinky. I bookmark the site, the wormhole and go take a look. They are apparently cleaning the field. Nice opportunity.

I head home, switch to the Phantasm, go back and enter the site. The Drake is 35 Km away. Damnit! He’s totally going to get away. But no, he’s not. He doesn’t notice as I come screaming at 1200 m/s towards him. Point, web, lasers!

In about 10 seconds the Drake is reduced to rubble and I loot the field and leave, just as quickly as I got there. Just as I left, however, I noticed two juicy Raven class battleships on scan. Navy issue, no less. I quickly went to station and got out my trusty Armageddon and went right back.

Hey there! Right where I left you guys. This is where I learned that Devastator cruise missile volleys from two CNRs hurt a lot more than I thought. I had barely scratched the shields on one of the Ravens before I was in half structure screaming at my ship to EFFING WARP!!!

Limping home in an Armageddon venting atmosphere put a large dent in my pride. At least I got their failfit salvager Drake.

I couldn’t believe what I was reading. What sick, perverted and heartless bastard would do such a devious and cowardly thing? Worst of all was probably that I knew her. Ms Vailakkel and I spent some time together in the School of Applied Knowledge, where she served for a temporary assignment. I remember her as a dutiful and extremely talented woman.

It hurt me badly to learn of her current fate. I had to see if I could get in touch with her family somehow…