One of the greatest things to me about using OSX is the integration between Mail, Address Book and iCal. I can hover my mouse over an address, date, phone number, etc and add it to Address Book, or iCal right from Mail. It saves a lot of fumbling around, looking for your contact or the right calendar. Its brilliant.

This is the one of my main annoyances about using a Mac. The home and end keys do not work the same in all applications! Depending on the app they go to the beginning and end of a line, sometimes to the end of the page, sometimes they do nothing! When they function as Apple intends, to go to the end of a document, your cursor remains where it was! I can’t remember the last time I ever wanted to go to the end of a document, but leave the cursor where I just was.

I have pretty much gotten used to using command left or right to go to the beginning or end of a line of text, but I still miss the way home and end keys work on a Windows machine.

So I am cruising along, handing every enemy their ass and enjoying the great plot that is slowly unfolding when I came across Matriarch Benezia. This encounter was so hard, and so frustrating that I almost turned off the game, put it back in the box, and traded it back to GameStop. Not only did she keep handing me my ass, my teammate’s asses’ were being handed to them as well. The most frustrating thing to me? Having to watch to her cinematic scene time after time when I died. It took me over a minute each time I died to reload the game, get through the cinematic to get back to playing.

David Jaffe writes about a similar encounter he had while playing Ratchet & Clank and ends up telling a story about how they didn’t play test God Of War’s hell scene enough and it ended up frustrating a lot of people, myself included.

This has happened to me a number of times, where I just don’t to deal with the frustration anymore. I never beat Metroid Prime because I was stuck on the second to last boss. I never got past the second set list in Guitar Hero 2 because Wolfmother’s song was all of a sudden the hardest thing ever. There was no easing up to it.

I am glad I stuck with Mass Effect though, I switched it to easy, beat Benezia a short time after, and went on to have one of the best gaming experiences I have ever had. It is so good that I am playing it through again, this time as a woman who won’t take no for an answer.