Mass Effect
This morning I got up early, made coffee, and saved the galaxy, a.k.a. finally finished Mass Effect. I logged about 39-40 hours, just to give you an idea. Some thoughts about the game follow.
I definitely loved that it was a sci fi RPG, because frankly I get sick of magic and swords. The game was made by Bioware, and it sometimes felt like the spiritual continuation of the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic franchise. Except without Jedi. You can be a biotic, though, which is sort of like throwing blue gel at people that freezes them and makes them fly up into the air in slo-mo so your party members can shoot at them freely. You can also be a techie (basically involves explosions and shield damage), a straight gunfighter, or a couple of hybrid classes that involve two out of the three areas of expertise.
The game operates like a first-person shooter, rather than turn-based combat. I was like, “Oh great. I’m going to suck.” Actually, I found it to be the most fun part of the game. Maybe I should’ve been trying FPS games all along, because I was money with my gun. There were only about 3-4 places in the game where I died more than once in a row. The main questline provided by far the best storyline. I found the smaller assignments less interesting, and your party didn’t really talk to you much unless you were on the main quest, which disappointed me. There are some planets that aren’t part of any quests, but you will find stuff on them anyway if you choose to land and explore. This would have been a highlight of the game for me (I log into TES: Oblivion to spend hours leaping through the woods picking flowers, after all) were it not for something I shall touch upon later.
The romance (well, the one I picked) had its bad and good points. For one thing, I never felt that compelled by Kaidan. I’m not sure why, but I think it has something to do with the fact that he’s voiced by the same actor who did Carth in KOTOR, who I enjoyed flirting with a lot more. Kaidan sucked at flirting. It was like he was Carth Lite. I kinda had a crush on Garrus, but of course he wasn’t an option, and I’m not sure it would’ve worked, ya know, biologically, since he’s sort of insect-looking. Sigh. On the good side, you get an actual sex scene. Sweet! Oh, and the game gets points for making a female-female romance available, I guess, although I didn’t go that route.
Three other things for which the game designers get feminist gamer brownie points: 1) Your version of Shepard, the main character, can be male or female. 2) The armor is fairly realistic– it always covers you, and while you can see that the characters have boobs, they’re not molded and… pointy… in the usual video game armor way. 3) I loved female Shepard’s voice. It’s very no-nonsense and somewhat low for a woman. You never sound sexy– you sound military, which is exactly how you should sound.
And now the thing I hated about the game: My truck.
Oh, truck. What a relationship we had. Truck, truck, truck. Every time you landed on a planet, you explored in a little all-terrain tank-like vehicle called the Mako. I just called it “my stupid fucking truck.” I would say I had a love-hate relationship with it, but the only time I loved it is when I got to use the shift key to zoom in on itty bitty people and turrets far away and blow them apart in one shot with my guns. And I am afraid the reason I loved this so much is that the truck was so frustrating to drive, by the time I got anywhere with enemies, I was so stressed out I really, REALLY needed to blow things up.
The truck was a pain in the ass to maneuver, and they decided it would be fun to add realistic physics to the mix. So if you hit a little hill, you go flying off in entirely the opposite direction, sometimes landing slightly upside-down, which causes you to flop in the OTHER direction, just as you were straightening yourself out. Long story short: it is very hard not to get turned around backwards every 5 seconds. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me. Mike loved the truck. But there were several times it made me quit the game out of sheer annoyance. And oh, did I mention that EVERY SINGLE PLANET is mountainous? What are the odds of that? As the ship was dropping us, and the truck’s landing gear went on, and you saw the pretty whatever-colored sky flash by, I’d optimistically think, “Maybe this one will be flat.” Heh. Or not.
I don’t want to spoil the ending of the game, so I won’t. I will say, though, that somewhere in the last mission, as I maneuvered down an aqueduct and got stuck with the nose of my truck pointed up a wall, unable to pull a 3-point turn, I thought, “You know what the perfect ending would be? If at some point in the next half hour, something happens to the truck and it gets utterly destroyed and my party is all, ‘Oh no! We will just have to carry on on foot!’ And I would be like, ‘YES! YES! YES!’”
And then that’s exactly what happened. And as I sat there inwardly smiling with glee, I wondered if someone at Bioware had a sense of humor…
I am an aspiring writer. This mostly translates into consuming a lot of coffee and sunflower seeds, and hoarding rejection slips. I love science fiction, gaming, and other geekish things. I also love the NBA, the city of New Orleans, and a frequent gin and tonic. Believe that I'm a mixed bag, friends. I discovered the internet in 1996-- it was love at first sight, and I never looked back. This is my new site.