Topic: The Presidium - A General Mass Effect Topic

@FuriousMachine I can't imagine wanting to rush to the endgame! If you're not enjoying it enough that late into the game to check off all the boxes, maybe it's just not worth finishing. That said, considering what I'm about to post, that might seem a little ironic...

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In honour of having just finished the Pinnacle Station DLC, I wanted to dedicate a post to sharing my intense hatred for this piece of "entertainment". For anyone who may be unfamiliar with it (it is unavailable on PlayStation consoles), I present you with an introduction: Did you think mining minerals was boring? Did you find the mini-games tedious? Don't worry, I have just the thing for you! There is less fun to be had! Just try out Pinnacle Station. Imagine the combat arena from the Citadel DLC except you suck any and all enjoyment out of that and also your grandpa just died and it's this DLC's fault. Somehow. But it is. Did you think the Council should've taken the Reaper threat more seriously quicker? How could they when this living abomination was already right there torturing the world? Maybe the Reapers were trying to do everyone a favour.

I believe this is the only piece of content throughout the whole trilogy that is not created by BioWare. When they published the Legendary Edition, they expressed regret for not being able to include it because of corrupted source files. I would like to thank each and every pyjak who contributed to destroying the integrity of those files and would like to firmly tell BioWare: Frak you for even thinking about making people go through this again. Now you may ask: How was I able to play this again? As much as the power of the modding community adds many great contributions to the game, they also added this back in. I could've not installed it. It's true. But somewhere in the last six years since my last playthrough my trauma was repressed enough that I didn't instantly get triggered by the name... until I did the very first assignment. Once I read the words "Time Trial" and "Tropical", I remembered the hell I found myself in. Shudder. Thanks to an obsessive personality however... it was too late for me. Let me save you from the same fate.

If you're wondering what the storyline here is, it's practically nothing. After your first trial, you'll be confronted by some random turian who doesn't like humans beating his high scores. Nothing better than a little casual racism on a Friday evening. Your mission? Show him what a loser he is by beating all of his high scores! You do of course, because this turian clearly thinks way too highly of himself. I suppose that's how you could describe the whole First Contact War in general. I thought there would just be one part of this DLC in particular — the aforementioned Tropical Time Trials — but little did I know that there was more hate to come I didn't yet remember.

As for the Tropical Time Trial, somehow this useless turian got a score of one minute and twenty seconds. I don't know how he managed that considering all his other high scores are relatively easy to beat. He accuses a fellow human of rigging the system or cheating, but I feel like this is more evidence to the contrary than he would ever be able to present for his case. Generally, the squadmate AI in these games can be... unreliable. Which is absolutely unhelpful when you also need to finish something with one hell of an unforgiving timer. If Garrus and Wrex would like to get a move on for once, that would be HIGHLY appreciated. Pain and suffering is the only way I can correctly describe this part of the DLC. It's the exact part that inspired me to write this. It's awful. I had to do it so many times, and most of the times you don't even come close to this motherfrakker's time. Eventually, after much frustration, I got lucky and managed to beat his time by one second. One. Second. You can imagine my heart rate was reaching unhealthy levels. Had I dropped dead, I hope someone would've sued EA for it. The one redeeming quality of beating the first eight levels is that you get a fairly overpowered gun. Should make my life easier in the future at least... right?

Because oh yeah, don't think you're done after making it through that hellscape. Good news! Another four different trials unlock after! They just didn't want to stop the fun. And if you weren't yet convinced of this DLC being creatively bankrupt, then let me tell you this. These new four levels are still in the exact same environments that the first eight were in. Tropical! Warehouse! Volcanic! Subterranean! Or in other words: Virmire rip-off! Planet discovery mazes but worse! Overrated volcano! Cave but biiig! There's not a single piece of original art direction in this DLC. It's just reused asset after reused asset with at its worst just entirely copied level design (looking at you, Virmire rip-off). You would hope they could put in at least a little effort here considering the rest of the DLC took about five minutes to develop, but not even that was within the budget of butter and a slice of bread apparently.

Finally, I finished these last four trials as well. Subterranean Survival was a pain in my butt, but I got through it in the end by cowardly running away from every enemy and hoping my squadmates handled it. Thanks to it being a fairly open level, they were able to keep most enemies in check. Besides, if I just stayed in one position and killed enemy after enemy, by the time you got to 1m20s Geth Juggernauts would start spawning. Kill even more? Have a Geth Prime that can also kill you in one hit! Everyone knows one-shot-kill enemies are so much fun! But it's okay. I made it through this newly remembered trauma again. The universe however was ready for one last joke. How about you do ANOTHER trial where the game just spams you with a ton of enemies who love to rush you and you have to survive for five whole frakking minutes?

Dubbed Ahern's special trial, this is what truly broke me in the end. This absolute masochist thought it was hilarious to recreate his First Contact War experience and let me be the lab rat. I wish he had died in combat so he could never have created Pinnacle Station. This level is just pure stress and annoyance. Ever wanted to be charged by about five turians at a time while your squadmates constantly die and Ahern keeps repeating his dumb chatter for five whole minutes? Did you ever wanted to go fully insane? They're pretty much equivalent. And to add insult to injury, the very first time I tried this trial I died. With one second left. I was murdered in a corner surrounded by a bunch of turians where I was stuck because the game's movement got locked into a direction I was not looking at. I sat there for a solid fifteen second watching my health bar go down praying it would last long enough only for some irrelevant NPC to gun me down in the very. last. second. I've never wanted to die more personally.

I don't like hard games. This is why I will probably never try games that consider themselves Souls-like or whatever. But this DLC should not be this hard. The difficulty ranges wildly and the gameplay is so incredibly uninspired that no moment of it is actually enjoyable. Maybe it would be easier had I done it later in my game, but I wasn't gonna let this piece of trash DLC beat me. I could not let it get to me. I'm Commander frakking Shepard and I have a reputation to uphold. Hey, at least you get an apartment at the end you can visit! In which you can — checks notes — buy randomised items for merchants? Angry: go to hell, Pinnacle Station. Truly.

Here's a screenshot to commemorate my awful experience and to remind myself to never put myself through it again. Ever. It's just not worth it.

@KilloWertz @Tjuz I don't get why anyone would rush through this either, but then I sorta, kinda did the same thing with Yakuza 3: I reached a point where I felt that I had spent enough time with the game, so I skipped the two or three substories I had remaining, ignored the Coliseum completely and the hitman missions not yet completed and just focused on getting through to the end of the story.

So while I can relate to the feeling, it is still inconceivable to me that anyone would not want to relish every minute of a Mass Effect game to its fullest... excepting Pinnacle Station... oh my, I had completely repressed all memories of that atrocity.

For the hell of it, I checked my achievements for Mass Effect on X360 and even though I would kill any and all squadmates and slap my own mother for an achievement, fully completing Pinnacle Station was obviously a bridge too far, even for me.

I think that is why I never finished the rest of the missing achievements on there either, I realized that even though I managed to nab the Medal of Valor for a complete insanity playthrough, I would never be able to get all achievements as long as Pinnacle Station was there to make my life miserable, so I moved on to other things.

@Tjuz I gotta say, your Pinnacle Station story is nothing short of heroic. I always wondered if I was missing anything by playing Mass Effect on PlayStation hardware, but I suspect reading your post will forever be infinitely more entertaining than trying it for myself. Thank you for sharing!

How is your playthrough going? I loved your screenshots on the previous page, by the way.

@RogerRoger Glad to see you're back! I was worried there for a second, you doofus. 😜 Sadly I haven't been able to continue my playthrough in a while due to life taking a rather unfortunate turn. Long story short, I no longer have access to the PC I was playing on. I backed up my saves before I had to leave, but I don't have a new PC yet and it might be a while before I have the will to go through modding the whole game again. Lord knows what compatibility issues might arise if I'm not in the exact game state I was before. On the bright side, at least my new PC will be way more capable in terms of hardware and I'll be able to enjoy the most recent games on it for years to come! It's currently with a specialist as I tried to put the components together myself with a friend to... "not working" results, haha. If and when I continue, I'll make sure you're the first to know.

@Tjuz Sorry! You can always shoot me a PSN message as an alternate, if that's an option for you.

And I'm also sorry to hear that things have been rough for you lately, and that you're having to pause your trilogy playthrough whilst you're between gaming PCs. I'm glad you'll eventually be getting an upgrade, though! That sounds like it'll be great (and respect for even attempting to build your own rig, even if you ultimately had to defer to a specialist)! Here's hoping you can successfully replicate the mod set-up and pick up where you left off, otherwise you might have to play Pinnacle Station again! The horror!!

@RogerRoger I'll have to dig up my PS password again, but that I can do! Good shout. Prepare to be harassed on PSN next time. 😉

Good news from the specialist today as they've gotten it working. Turns out the power supply arrived in broken condition, so I never had any hope in getting it working with that! Had to shell out a bit more money to get a new one for now but at least I should finally have a PC again. And hey, don't remind me of Pinnacle Station... too soon! TOO SOON!

@Tjuz Yeah, it's not a foolproof option, but even when I'm at my most anti-social, I'll still end up playing something on my PS5 or PS4 before too long. It's just another avenue, s'all. I don't have the PSN app on my phone, though, so I'll still apologise in advance for any minor delays!

Real glad you'll be up-and-running soon. Definitely play something as far removed from Pinnacle Station as possible; a kart racer, a cooking sim, anything! Get some real distance from those bad memories!