Mass Effect

The main way I evaluate a game is how much does it occupy my thoughts, and by that standard Mass Effect excels. While I was playing through it the first time, I read FAQs constantly, and thoughts of the mechanics, characters, and plots filled my thoughts. And as soon as I had beaten it on Normal difficulty as my female paragon Infiltrator (soldier and technician hybrid), I immediately started over on a harder difficulty level as a male renegade Adept (biotic).

It's hard to define exactly what makes the game so enjoyable. Some of it is certainly playing it on a computer monitor via the VGA port on my Pelican Air Flo Cooler. The game was beautiful before, but now it's simply gorgeous.

The game really lends itself to replays. The conversation wheel is wondrous in its simplicity. Compared to reading pages of text in games like Knights of the Old Republic and Planescape: Torment, this is a godsend. My second character has a fundamentally different gameplay experience in the ways that matter. His storyline is going to have his own nuances, and his skills are entirely different.

The ease of replay is in sharp contrast to a game like Assassin's Creed which, although I anticipated and loved it, was not at all replay-friendly. I completed nearly all of the sub-missions on my first playthrough. When I went back to complete the one I had missed or skipped, I found that I had to replay the entire mission. That's bad enough, but factor in unskippable cutscenes, and I quickly decided I would never replay it.

The main factor, though, in Mass Effect's appeal, is the Paragon/Renegade system. I cut my teeth on Knights of the Old Republic, and although it scratched my Star Wars itch, it was fairly simplistic in its mechanics. Some of the problem comes directly from the Light Side/Dark Side concept from Star Wars canon. In much the same way as I never really empathized with Voldemort from Harry Potter, I never empathized with the Dark Siders. Even after seeing Anakin's self-fulfilling slide towards the Dark Side in the better-than-expected Revenge of the Sith, the Dark Side never seemed more appealing than "bad is good". The same complaints could be leveled at Fallout's karma system. In both games, I had to really force myself to be so unspeakably evil. Kill civilians for fun or profit? Evil. Save the civilians? Good.

Mass Effect takes a notably more sophisticated stance on the topic. Kill civilians to accomplish a mission more quickly? Renegade. Place civilians more important than mission objectives? Paragon. Even the names are more apt. Neither side is bad or good or dark or light. Instead it's a reflection of overall military operating procedure. The Renegade side's actions may not be nice, but they have a more reasonable motive than eating babies. Renegades, in addition to having some great one-liners, are concerned about getting the job done no matter the cost, and at loyalty to the human government. Even what would otherwise be simple xenophobia and knee-jerk bigotry is instead framed in the context of protecting humanity because no one else will. Paragons don't exist to be goody-two-shoes. They seek to represent humanity in as mature a fashion as possible, working together with aliens on a basis of trust and accountability. Clearly this is a more developed morality system than the demon/angel model of a game like Bioshock.

I heartily recommend Mass Effect to anyone and everyone with an Xbox 360. I won't be able to finish this playthrough before GTA IV comes out, so I'll have to put it on hold. I'll come back to it and beat it at least one more time and enjoy every minute.