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I am thinking about pre-ordering a copy of Mass Effect 2. Besides the few annoying bugs that Mass Effect has, it's a really nice game and I had a lot of fun playing it. As Mass Effect 2 continues the story of Mass Effect, it is certainly worth the money.

So what will I get when I pre-order? This is a really interesting question which is easy to answer if you live in the US and order your copy at GameStop. Unfortunately, I'm living in Europe and this is the point were it's getting complicated.

If you order your game at GameStop, you'll get the following bonus items:

1. Terminus Assault Armor
   • Increases sprint speed by 10%
   • All weapons have +1 magazines of reserve ammo
   • Increase shields + 15%
2. Blackstorm Projector
   • Fires a singularity projectile that draws in nearby enemies, and then explosively hurls them away.

If you order your game at Amazon, you'll get the following bonus items:

1. Inferno Armor
   • negotiation bonus 10%
   • all power damage 10%
   • increases storm speed by 10%

Let me summarize this a bit:

People who pre-order at GameStop (which is not that easy if you live outside the US) get the awesome looking, heavily shielded, high tech assault armor and a portable "black hole" launcher.

People who pre-order at Amazon get a "negotiation bonus" so they can better cry for mercy and "increased storm speed" so they can run away faster.

Something is telling me that someone wants us to order our games from GameStop. Unfortunately, I can't.

Thanks Bioware.

Update: I just realized that my Anti Virus software is going to expire soon, so I won't be able to afford any new computer games anyway.

This is a message to all trolls and wannabe tech experts out there who think that "reinstall Windows" and "buy a new computer" is a problem solution:

Please shut up!

I'm going trough 39 pages filled with crap, posted by brain-dead monkey zombies to find a fix for another common problem in Mass Effect that the folks over at Bioware are either unable or not willing to fix.

General protection fault!
History: GMatrix2D::Swap() Address = 0x114de3dc (filename not found)
Address = 0xc62feb3b (filename not found)

It seems that every single person who somehow managed to find the power button on his computer has his own opinion that he has to share with the rest of the world, no matter how incredibly stupid it is.

Do you guys have any idea how annoying it is to read through a post with about 2375 bullet items of things you tried just to find out that the last line is something along the lines of but it didn't help!!!!11 XD lol rofl haxx?

And please keep your works for me posts to yourself or I'll take this as an invitation, come to your place, take your PC and carry it back to me so I can finally play the game.

I would also like to mention that Uninstall your Antivirus. XD lol rofl haxx is a stupid idea, especially when you spent a lot of money for professional Antivirus software and license updates. If the problem is caused by Antivirus software, I expect the software developers to get in contact with each other to find a fix.

If someone who comes across this blog post has any serious and meaningful suggestions to fix the problem described above, although I think that this is just another example of Bioware's poor coding, please don't keep it to yourself and write a comment.

Thanks.

Okay. How does Bioware get their customers to pay for their software that they call computer games? Seriously.

I finished Star Wars: Knights of the old Republic last week and that was the game that had the most annoying bugs I ever encountered in a computer game so far.

Examples:

• Triggering a cut scene while the active character is in "stealth mode" causes the game to crash
  
  Since the game can't find the person who is supposed to talk, it throws an exception and dies. Perfect. I did save before triggering the cut scene. But as this game fails to fully restore from savegames (see below), something like a "stealth" variable obviously got messed up and I actually had to activate stealth mode to make the script think that I'm not in stealth mode anymore.
• Motion blur effects cause weird graphic glitches on ATI cards
  
  Bioware blames ATI for this problem. Okay. Then please tell me why all my other games don't have this problem with motion blur. To me it seems that the guys at Bioware decided to realize this feature in a way that simply doesn't work well on ATI cards. They should be well aware that NVIDIA is not the only mayor graphics chip manufacturer on this planet?
• The game fails to restore properly from savegames and fails to restore certain information when moving from one zone to another
  
  On Tatooine, the sand people are not supposed to shoot at you if you are dressed as one of them. I saved before entering their enclave. A cut scene is supposed to play when you enter their enclave. But instead, the sand people turned hostile and started shooting at me. Loading the previously saved game caused my entire party to die within 2 seconds. The game didn't restore the friend/foe status and so the automated turrets outside reduced my entire party to dust. I had to zone in and out of their enclave about 10 times until the game finally decided that it should play the cut scene.

Okay. Star Wars: KOTOR is pretty old. I can't expect old games to run perfectly on today's systems.

So I decided to give Bioware another chance and bought Mass Effect on Steam. The game is really, really nice. It looks nice. It is fun to play. But... Bioware obviously didn't learn.

• The games locks up during conversations
  
  It seems to be a Bioware tradition that their games have to lock up during conversations. But instead of just crashing, Mass Effect causes 99% CPU load and therefore causes the entire operating system to freeze. The only chance to regain control of the computer is to push the reset button.
• Conversations have no voice overs
  
  I landed on a planet called Feros. On this planet, 50% of the conversations lack the sound output. Unless you enabled subtitles (which you won't need unless you are deaf), you have to read the characters lips or just guess the question to give the correct answer. This totally kills the atmosphere of the game.

I think Bioware should have spent a little more time on software testing.