I finally decided to take the plunge into playing Mass Effect lately, after having purchased it for what I initially thought was an exorbitant amount of money. Insofar, it has proven to be nothing but a gaming gem; a masterpiece of both writing, programming and artistic works of epic proportions.

It’s simply staggering; the amount of effort gone into developing every facet of the game from its storyline, to its widespread alien cultures the player is exposed to right from the beginning of the game.

Call me out on being too inexperienced to say this - but to me, this is true science fiction. Don’t bother with any of that Star Wars/Star Trek nonsense; grab Mass Effect as it is what I would honestly call an investment in true gaming.

You can bet on a review for the game surfacing in the coming weeks over on QFT.net. I am going to take my time with this game…

Frag out.

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After just under a month of keeping track of my actions while playing games and doing anything else in general, I think I’ve gathered enough material to make another entry in the Sore Loser log. Things begin to get a little more complicated as I begin to put some real thought into kicking this habit, as I find that the problem stems out to far more aspects of my life than just gaming. …..Click here to read more

Popularity: 88% [?]

As a student, I make part of the ICT Student’s Association of the University of Malta. Compared to most other associations officially affiliated with the University, our presence is nothing short of paltry. The reason for this is that although we have the initiative… We lack the drive. Sadly, the way our course is laid out it is only expectable that the students with more experience (fourth year and third year students such as myself) and hence, more power to act on behalf of the association, are often unable to spare the time from working on their assignments to hold a meeting. Unfortunately this is somewhat contradictory to the whole logic behind the association being “voluntary,” mainly because.. Well. Nobody really ever seems to be doing the extra effort voluntarily from what I usually see. I’m aware that it’s merely a case of the pot calling the kettle black as I’m probably the most unmotivated person I know of, but for chrissakes I’ve had it with hearing the excuse that people can’t spare just 2 hours to meet up and discuss events that are fast approaching and which we haven’t even prepared everything for. It’s frustrating.

On a more positive note, I’ve finished the implementation of my SL assignment, and only have testing and possibly the documentation of the final product, should it be necessary. Either way it’s inspired me to eventually try making some projects that may actually be of some use, and that I might be able to sell on SL itself, possibly making an extra bit of money on the side. In the meantime however, work has started on one of the other assignments which is group related, and it looks like we’re off to a good start as everyone has clearly defined roles and tasks to tackle within the project. Thankfully, my own work isn’t dependant on much else other than my own effort, although I’ll need to be very careful as others’ work will eventually depend on mine. Either way we all seem to be on the same page regarding how everything is supposed to go down, so that’s nice. That, and the fact that we all live close to one another, so laziness will never come into play as a factor against being able to meet up if necessary, not that it should, anyway.

Halo 3 MP has also been taking up a lot of my free time lately, and I really don’t care what anybody says about this - it may be a plain old shooter, but it does one thing better than any game I’ve seen so far. Its community features are easily the most intuitive and fun to use. Being able to make custom maps (albeit ones restricted to the base models of existing maps) and custom gametypes is just so easy, and amazingly fun. Unfortunately, there always has to be a group of people who are out there to spoil it for everybody else in as tasteless a manner as possible - i.e: swearing, teamkilling and other general assholery. I’ve so far only encountered one really troublesome group of such people, and although I still lack a headset (thankfully for the time) I managed to get my own back in a rather amusing way. I’ll be dealing with that in further detail in my following Sore Loser log, which should be soon as I have enough material to make a solid entry. If anyone would like to buddy up and play a few matches together, my gamertag is EpicFragMagnet (as FragMagnet was sadly already taken).

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To all those who actually read QFT.net on a regular basis, you may have noticed that I had a “post per five days” pattern going on for a while, and that would essentially mean that I had to make another post last Wednesday. Unfortunately my assignments have to take priority, and as such I’m making progress in leaps and bounds, but sadly they leave me little time to plan my posts to QFT in advance. I’d much rather post fewer entries with content that’s actually interesting to read, rather than churn out more frequent posts with content nobody really wants to look at.

Thanks for your patience, I assure you that things will be up and running again soon enough.

Popularity: 80% [?]