What the !@#$ was Bioware thinking....?

[GodlessAstronomer]

What on Earth was Bioware thinking when they allowed that stupid fucking probe mini-game in Mass Effect 2? The game is so close to perfect.... so damn close, it's such an amazingly awesome game. But the fact that I need to play 5-10 minutes of that fucking probe game for every hour or two I play is so fucking stupid. Is there a way around this shit (assuming I want to actually buy upgrades from time to time)?

 

[Corporate Thug]

have played thru ME II but I know a lot of people who had the same reaction to the guitar hero like mini game in god of war III

 

[PieIsAwesome]

I didn't do that until the end when I needed the upgrades for the final battle. Didn't take all that long. Still stupid and not fun.

 

[Skurge]

I just used a trainer, I couldn't stand that crap.

 

[Schadenfroh]

Mini-games like the "hacking" in Bioshock and the "lock-picking" in Oblivion fail to amuse me. I am imagine I would also find this aspect distasteful.

 

[Bateluer]

It was interesting for the first time or two, but it fails pretty quick because of the limited upgrades for the Normandy. On my second play through, I finished with more than 200K in every resource, even after buying every single upgrade save for the medical bay.

 

[StinkyPinky]

Yeah, I'd love to meet the designer that thought that was a good idea. It gets repetitive after the first minute.

It would have been better if you just got some after doing each side-quest.

 

[Zenoth]

I know how you feel, I also dislike that mini-game a lot. I'd rather go back exploring in ME with the Mako (as a side note, I still preferred the Mako over the Hammerhead). When I first played ME2 I honestly thought that eventually during the course of the game's progress we would eventually be able to upgrade the mining scanner.

When I saw that Miranda offered such an upgrade I almost jumped in joy like a schoolgirl, only to find out the next time I scanned a planet that it barely changed anything (it simply increases the speed at which the cursor moves on the planet's surface). I for one was thinking something more substantial for a scanner upgrade, along the lines of a complete surface planetary-wide scan that would take perhaps a few seconds and then would discover the most important patches of resources automatically, only to leave the remnants to be found manually if so desired. I actually sent this very idea to BioWare, and as expected only received an automated e-mail reply so far, I don't except more either, I just tried.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Yes, that was a lousy bit of game design that made the ME1 resource gathering seem fun by comparison.

 

[thedosbox]

I didn't mind the mini-game, and certainly preferred to the bouncy bouncy mako. You only need to mine planets flagged as "Rich" in order to get every single available upgrade, with plenty to spare.

 

[GodlessAstronomer]

Mini-games like the "hacking" in Bioshock and the "lock-picking" in Oblivion fail to amuse me. I am imagine I would also find this aspect distasteful.

Well at least the Oblivion lock picking and Bioshock hacking only lasted a few seconds. Scanning an entire planet takes (depending on size and amount of resources) ~60-180 seconds, and you need to do several planets for each upgrade.

On the other hand, I just played the part where you

Spoiler

play as joker to help EDI

and all is forgiven, that had some of the best video game jokes I've heard since Portal "I just like the sight of humans on their knees.... that was a joke."

 

[punjabiplaya]

I want to play it again as a different class, but I cannot get myself to do just because of the probe mini game. I guess once finals are over, I'm going to just trainer past it.

 

[CP5670]

I did this minigame for the first third of the game or so, and then got fed up with it. You can get the ME2CC program and just add in console keybinds that give you the resources.

I worked around a couple of other annoyances in the game as well, such as removing the UE3 framerate smoothing (which causes the 62fps cap) and adding in time speedup hotkeys. These make the game far more enjoyable, as you don't waste nearly as much time running around anymore. I also took all the irritating unskippable loading movies out of the game, which improves loading times from 15 seconds to 2-3 seconds.

 

[Ika]

It's a lot simpler if you have a DPI-switching mouse (I typically run my G5 at 800 dpi; boosting it to 2000 helped a LOT), but yes it is still a very stupid and repetitive thing. I liked the inclusion of anomalies but there need to be either more anomalies or less planets to explore. there were a fuckton of planets and sure as hell didnt' want to explore them all, so I looked up an FAQ and hit all the planets that had anomalies.

 

[TheVrolok]

While this may be a slight spoiler, I'm going to say it anyway. You do NOT need to waste a lot of time scanning every planet because well, you don't need that many resources. I decided to go hardcore with ME2 and scan every planet to depleted .. well, I ended up with over 1mil of each resource after buying all upgrades. There are FAR more planets with resources, than upgrades requiring them. There was definitely a poor balance of planets to anomalies/upgrades.

 

[CP5670]

It's a lot simpler if you have a DPI-switching mouse (I typically run my G5 at 800 dpi; boosting it to 2000 helped a LOT), but yes it is still a very stupid and repetitive thing. I liked the inclusion of anomalies but there need to be either more anomalies or less planets to explore. there were a fuckton of planets and sure as hell didnt' want to explore them all, so I looked up an FAQ and hit all the planets that had anomalies.

I found it too slow even with the max 1600dpi on my MX518, combined with a doubled mouse sensitivity (over the highest ingame setting) in the ini files.

I did the same thing with the N7 missions. Although many of the planets had interesting descriptions and I visited them just to read those, even though I didn't want to spend time scanning them.

 

[OVerLoRDI]

I also used a save game editor to get around this. After I played through the first time and beat it and got all the upgrades, there was no way I was going to spend my time scanning for random junk again.

 

[Sylvanas]

"Launching probe"

Yeah I hated this. Towards the end I just didn't bother upgrading anything anymore. Bioware makes awesome games, but their mini-game / UI department sucks the big one.

 

[Kromis]

"Launching probe"

Yeah I hated this. Towards the end I just didn't bother upgrading anything anymore. Bioware makes awesome games, but their mini-game / UI department sucks the big one.

You don't like Pazaak? :awe:

 

[VulgarDisplay]

I actually hated it at first then I realized that you just need to skim over the planet as fast as possible and only launch probes at the stuff that really lights up the scanner. Usually takes about 20 seconds.

 

[Dangerer]

You don't even need to hit the peak for the maximum. Mouse over a peak, and then slowly move away until the hump is barely noticeable and launch the probe. You'll still get the same amount you would have if you tried to sweet spot it.

 

[frozentundra123456]

If you imported a character from Mass Effect 1, you got to start with quite a few resources, especially a lot of element zero, which was hard to find.

I agree, it took a lot of time and did not even require any skill. I also was really disappointed when I upgraded the scanner and it did not seem to make that much difference.

 

[Dumac]

How does the scanning work on PC? Can you move the scanning like a mouse cursor? If so that sounds a lot less annoying than the console version.

On the 360, the scanner area moves SOOOO slowly, even when not scanning. It takes forever.

 

[StinkyPinky]

What's funny is that they keep saying this is an improvement over the previous games "tedious" mako missions.

I can only conclude they're snorting gas fumes.

 

[shortylickens]

Mini-games like the "hacking" in Bioshock and the "lock-picking" in Oblivion fail to amuse me. I am imagine I would also find this aspect distasteful.

At least in Oblivion you could quick-pick it, of course, that runs the risk of breaking the pick.
Yeah, that shit was annoying.