I have to go and get party supplies, but can check out the rest of the strip on the way. This Arena looks interesting.
The Arena fights are fun! I could totally see me and some friends having fun shooting simulated opponents in there, even though we shoot the real thing for a living, and having a great time. I've gotten ally licenses for Kasumi and Jack, and they're my go-to squad for now. I'll call them "Team Outlaw", since Hammerhead, Mako, and Prothean were all taken as team names when we were fighting the forces of Fake!Shep.
The music at the beginning and end of matches is good for getting pumped up for a fight, dare I say almost as good as the Rocky theme? Listen to it!
I'm looking at my "fan mail", not all of which is from fans. A hanar is trash talking me and daring me to try to win a match without medi-gel available. Okay jelly, you're on!
There's also an e-mail from a guy who is complaining about how they have matches against Cerberus when Cerberus are actually heroes, and that he isn't racist (which, if you want to convince somebody you aren't racist, you should never, ever say) but that he guesses this is what happens when the turians run the sims. I get that this is a parody of Fan Dumb who complain about the silliest things, but as a guy who only six months ago (in game time, that is) would have agreed that Cerberus wasn't actually so bad, I can see his point of view, sort of.
It's kind of like how in the real world, I wouldn't want to play a FPS where the goal was to shoot Iraqi insurgents in a replication of the Iraq war, because I can understand why people like that would be pissed about the invasion of Iraq and it just feels wrong to label the invaders the good guys and label the Iraqis the bad guys who need to be shot. I wouldn't go so far as to say that American or Coalition troops were bad guys either; the point is that it isn't so clear cut. That is why I prefer FPS's like the Left 4 Dead series, Team Fortress 2, and games like this one.
(I wonder if we can unlock battles from the First Contact war where you can kill humans or turians, your pick. Maybe that would shut the guy up?)
Actually, when I got an e-mail saying (to paraphrase) "Hey Shepard, could you fight some geth for us like in the old days, please? Seeing you fight Cerberus and Reapers just reminds us of what's really going on out there." And no lie, I actually thought "I don't really want to fight geth. I have a geth friend. He's cool, and there are lots of other cool geth like him. Okay fine, it's just a sim and I'll play it, and I can tell myself I'm fighting 'heretics', but still, I would rather be fighting another enemy."
(Btw, I know it's not really correct to refer to Legion as "he", since there are over 1100 geth consciousnesses inside of him, and they kind of control the body in the same way that a crew controls a ship, except much better-coordinated and with all of them voting on what to say as well as where to move and what to do. But it's easy to think of Legion that way nonetheless.)
The hanar who wanted me to finish a match without medi-gel sent me another message after I did, subject line "This one eats its cranial covering." But two things: you didn't actually bet that you'd eat your hat if I won, and hanar don't even have craniums, so isn't it your...um...some other kind of covering?
HWOOF! My lord, I got a message from a mother with a dying daughter who wanted me to kill Super Elite Reapers in a match for the Make-A-Wish Foundation of the future, and it was HARD! I hope that little girl wasn't too disappointed that I died two or three dozen times before finally winning. Team Outlaw wasn't cutting it, so I replaced Kasumi with Wrex and turned off all the handicaps that were increasing my score (handicaps like no ammo lying around, no medi-gel available, increased enemy damage) because I finally decided that I needed to take the easiest route to have any shot at winning! Lowering the combat difficulty of the game would have been a last resort, but fortunately I was able to win without doing that, eventually. And I finally beat Aria's high score! YES!
Wait. I thought I was in first place after I beat Aria's first place score, but now Barla Von has posted an even higher score than before and is ahead of us both? BOOOOOO! Hey Shadow Broker T'Soni, as your captain I order you to order your employee to stop playing so well!
Anyway, here's the thing. I learned that in order to get everybody who I would like to have at the party I'm throwing, I will first need to make contact with all of those people. So this is going to turn into the longest party-supply-buying trip in history, since I'm going to take detours back and forth across the galaxy doing missions before finally buying the stuff. Fortunately the game does let me return to the Normandy and come back. If I had been committed then that would have sucked.
