Video Games

One of my favorite iPhone games is called Game Dev Story. It’s basically a simulation game where you build a game studio from the ground up. You hire staff, pick which games your company creates, market them, etc… Once you build your company up and start putting out great games, you get high ratings, win awards, and most importantly, you sell a lot of games (which allows you to hire more staff, etc… and thus put out even better games!). It’s an addictively fun game, but it’s also not particularly deep.

That’s not the worst thing in the world, of course, and when it comes to iPhone games, that sort of simplicity is actually a plus. Enter a new game called Game Dev Tycoon. It seems to be the same basic concept, but it looks to have more depth to it, so I’m halfway there in terms of wanting to purchase it. It was made by Greenheart Games, an indie developer consisting of two brothers.

And get this: Knowing it would be pirated anyway, they went ahead and released a cracked version of their game on torrent sites. They even helped seed it. However, they added a twist to the version they released:

The cracked version is nearly identical to the real thing except for one detail… Initially we thought about telling them their copy is an illegal copy, but instead we didn’t want to pass up the unique opportunity of holding a mirror in front of them and showing them what piracy can do to game developers. So, as players spend a few hours playing and growing their own game dev company, they will start to see the following message, styled like any other in-game message:

Boss, it seems that while many players play our new game, they steal it by downloading a cracked version rather than buying it legally.

If players don’t buy the games they like, we will sooner or later go bankrupt.

Slowly their in-game funds dwindle, and new games they create have a high chance to be pirated until their virtual game development company goes bankrupt.

It’s a brilliant and ironic move, but the irony doesn’t end there. It turns out the players of the pirated version are a little dense. They started going out on the internet and posting absurdly unaware comments in forums, wondering (for example) if there’s an in-game way to research DRM to protect their (fictional) games (!?):

“I can’t progress furher… HELP!” one user wrote. “Guys I reached some point where if I make a decent game with score 9-10 it gets pirated and I can’t make any profit.

“It says blah blah our game got pirated stuff like that. Is there some way to avoid that? I mean can I research a DRM or something?”

Said another user: “Why are there so many people that pirate? It ruins me! Not fair.”

Oh the irony. It hurts! But I’m guessing it hurts the developers even more, so I just went out and bought the game. If you like sim games and this sounds interesting, why not give it a shot. This sort of genius should be rewarded (and so far, 93% of their users are pirates!). (Thanks to Steven for finding this story)

So I’ve been pretty mum on video games of late, and there’s a reason for that: I haven’t been playing them much. I seem to have moved on for a while. For instance, those 50 books didn’t read themselves. The last game I was really into was Mass Effect 3, but this dip in interest was already in full swing when I started that one (which did nothing to reverse the trend, sad to say). But maybe this sort of thing is cyclical, as I’ve started to get the itch for some video gamery again. What have I been fiddling with lately, and what am I looking forward to?

• BioShock – Note, I’m not talking about BioShock Infinite. That would be timely, and we don’t do things like that here at Kaedrin. I actually picked up the BioShock 1 and 2 collection a little while ago and have slowly been making my way through it. Great atmosphere, some harrowing choices, and a combat system that’s not all that fun. It’s a first person shooter, but something about it just strikes the wrong chord with me. Part of it is the way enemies move, and another part is that ammo is scarce (there seems to be some sort of scaling system that allows you to find more stuff when you’re running low, which is nice I guess, but also just annoying). I suppose expectations play a role here too, as this is a game that gets praised to high heaven by everyone, and it’s been around for so long that at this point I’m bound to be disappointed. That’s the drawback of the Kaedrin system, I guess. Still, I’m interested enough that I will most likely finish.
• Soul Calibur V – I’ve never been that into fighting games, so I figured I’d give one a shot a while ago. Let’s just say that I’m not very good at this game and that I’m not really willing to put in the practice time to figure it all out. I’d rather just create dumb custom characters, and even that gets dull pretty quickly. So this is perhaps not the game’s fault, but I’m not doing so well with this one.
• FTL: Faster Than Light – Now this is a little more my speed. It’s a pretty straightforward looking strategy game that nevertheless has a deceptively deep gameplay. The game basically amounts to micromanaging a spaceship as you try to guide it across several sectors, all whilst being pursued by an enemy fleet. Simple setup, and basic gameplay, but it’s fun, and it’s something that’s pretty easy to pickup and play, no huge investment of time needed. A single game can last an hour or so, but it has a high replay value. I’m no expert or anything, but I’m enjoying it and will continue to play.
• Hitman: Absolution – The only game in this post that I haven’t started yet. Hitman: Blood Money was a game that really grew on me. I still think it’s absurd to win the games exactly how you’re supposed to without consulting outside guides or anything like that, but the value is that it’s fun to come up with alternate strategies or just go completely rogue and kill everyone. Anyway, this is the first entry in the series since Blood Money, so I figure I should try it out.

And that’s that. Not an entirely successful reentry into the world of gaming, but it’s something.

I never played the first Mass Effect game, but the second game has become one of my favorites. It’s not a perfect game – I had my issues with certain aspects – but once I got into it, it was very involving and fun to play. I can’t think of any other game in which I’ve been this attached to characters in the story, so naturally, I was looking forward to Mass Effect 3. It’s the “last” game in the series and it promised to incorporate decisions and actions from previous games. Unfortunately, this installment stumbles.

Most people will point to the ending, which I certainly think is lackluster at best, but my problem with the game is more emblematic of the series as a whole. My favorite part of the second game was the series of recruiting and loyalty missions. There’s an overarching plot about an implacable alien force called the Reapers, who periodically attempt to destroy all life in the galaxy, but I always found that aspect of the story somewhat trite and boring. To me, it was only interesting in so much as it gave me a reason to recruit my crew. It was a unifying evil force in the galaxy, so it worked, but it wasn’t all that special or interesting. So the second game focused a lot on your crew, gaining their loyalty through side missions, and stopping some Reaper-related threat. All is well so far, so where does the third game fall down?

Well, at the end of the second game, your crew is scattered and you end up starting over. This is a minor instance of the Video Game Sequel Problem, but one of the interesting things about the Mass Effect series is that your decisions from the previous game play into the current story. That being said, you kinda have to start over. My biggest issue with this third game, though, is that you’re not really building a crew that can defeat the reapers. You’re trying to align galactic resources, playing politics to get various races to cooperate, gaining strength for the coming fight with the Reapers. There really aren’t many new characters, and most of your former crew are relegated to supporting roles, cut scenes, or temporary missions.

The end result of this structure is that in the second game, I had built a crew of 12 members, each with their own personal backstory and independent, often interesting loyalty missions that illuminated their character. In the third game, I had a crew of 4 or sometimes 5. A few of them are characters I know and welcome: Garrus and Liara. EDI is the ship’s AI come to life, which is a great development. Towards the beginning of the game, when this happened, I found it very encouraging. Unfortunately, she’s really the only new character that’s really interesting and progresses through the entire story. Gone are the recruiting and loyalty missions where I grew to like all the characters. Heck, even Shepherd’s choices seem to matter less. The whole Renegade/Paragon thing seems to matter much less here, instead you get “Reputation” points, though it’s unclear what that actually means (and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t mean anything in the end). There are some side characters who showed promise, but they were either relegated to a small part of the game or they didn’t have a lot of depth. For instance, I enjoyed playing chess with Specialist Traynor, my Comm officer, but that’s really where her role ended (apparently she’s a romance option for female Shepherd).

Actually, my romance option from the second game was Tali, and she does show up for a while in this game, but I think some of the choices I made lead to her death (I had, essentially, chosen not to commit genocide against the Geth, but wasn’t able to broker a ceasefire between the Geth and the Quarians, so a lot of Quarians ended up dead and Tali committed suicide). This was a tough mission, but it sorta fit with the game and I can see why it happened. Inexplicably, Tali shows up after her death for one last go, just before I went to the final battle with the Reapers.

Anyway, the focus of the third game is to build up Galactic Readiness, aligning alien factions, many of which have longstanding grudges against each other (the Geth and Quarians being an example). This is all well and good, and the whole resolution to the Genophage is actually very well done, but while I got to spend some time with Mordin and Grunt, there was very little moving the characters forward. This seemed to happen with a lot of my former crew. I got to see what became of Jack, which was pretty great (she’s grown as a character between games, which was really nice), but it’s not like she joined the crew again or anything. Other characters showed up too, but it was all ultimately unfulfilling. It was all in service of fighting the Reapers. And, I guess, Cerberus… an organization I’ve never quite understood, though I must say that the Illusive Man certainly shows more personality than the Reapers, and thus defeating his plans was somewhat fun.

I think part of my issue with the whole Galactic Readiness angle is that it’s not entirely clear how much that helped, especially when you get to the ending. Indeed, the gamemakers even forced me to fire up the multiplayer missions in order to boost Galactic Readiness – though, actually, I really enjoyed the multiplayer for what it was – but while I got to see the pretty numbers increase, I never really saw what impact it had.

So the ending. It’s a non-sequitur. It doesn’t really logically follow what came before it. Since I wasn’t that invested in the main storyline, it didn’t actually bother me that much. I was much more bothered by the lack of focus on characters throughout the entire third game. The ending only exacerbated that complaint for me, though it’s pretty bad in its own right. As usual, Shamus has done an excellent job breaking this down, in particular the parts about the Reapers and the Galaxy are insightful. There are, of course, contrarians, and I think there’s an interesting discussion to be had about the authorship of video games. Devin comes down squarely on the side of the writers at Bioware, but video games as a medium are interesting because of interactivity. Because we, as players, have some sort of ownership of what’s happening on screen. There are certainly limits to our ownership, and I think I might agree with Devin about certain pieces of this, but it’s an interesting topic of discussion. It gets at the heart of the video game and storytelling problem, the thing that Roger Ebert keeps wanking about (interestingly, both Roger Ebert and Devin Faraci are primarily movie critics, so it makes a bit of sense that they’d side more with the creators than the players). A quick summary of Ebert’s argument against games is instructive:

Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.

I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful. But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art.

This, of course, has been debated ad nauseum over the years, but then, it’s the core of the problem with Mass Effect 3.

One of the reasons the series has been so successful is that Bioware promised that our decisions would matter. Not only would they matter in the immediate story, but they would be accounted for in future games. This is astoundingly ambitious, and I enjoyed most of the game… right up until that ending, which just doesn’t logically follow from the rest of the story. It’s not just that my choices weren’t taken into account – I don’t think I would have been frustrated at all if that were the case. I understand that the nature of branching decisions would result in an impossible task for Bioware. There’s just no way they could account for everything. But that doesn’t mean they should account for nothing and completely change the whole purpose and goal of the story, all in the last minutes of the series. This could have been a game series that settled the whole Ebert debate in favor of video games… instead, it just gives the Ebert argument more credence. The reason people are upset is that it didn’t really need to be that way. It’s not like Bioware wrote themselves into a corner. There are a million possible endings that would be better than what we got. Dark, happy, depressing, confounding, whatever. It would have been better than “stupid”, which is where we’re at now.

Ultimately, I had fun with the game, but not as much as with the second game, primarily because of the characters. This whole grand overarching storyline was always underwhelming to me, but I had fun with the characters. Unfortunately, the third game disappoints on that front. The combat is good, the dialogue is well written, a lot of the big conflicts in the series are actually resolved in a satisfying manner… the game plays well. There are some things that aren’t as successful. For some reason, the notion of “slow motion” Shepherd seems to fascinate the developers, and those sequences are annoying. I’m still frustrated that navigating to different decks on the Normandy requires a load screen each time. But those are nitpicks. The real trouble was the lack of emphasis on character, exacerbated by a non-sequitur ending. Again, I had a lot of fun with the game, so to me, the ending didn’t ruin the whole series (as some folks are saying). Indeed, I find myself contemplating a second play through (starting back at ME2 with the Interactive Backstory (if I can figure out how that works)), perhaps as a female Renegade Shepherd.

Update: Just wanted to point to this video, a very long explanation of why the ending of ME3 doesn’t work for him. It’s sorta done in the style of those Red Letter Media Plinket reviews, but it’s pretty good. The part where he talks about the Lair of the Shadow Broker DLC (from ME2) and how “Sometimes I’m not sure Bioware understands the magnitude of what they’ve done here” is particularly good, and it gets at exactly what I loved about ME2 – the characters! I don’t know that Bioware recognized how attached players were to the characters…

Here at Kaedrin, we pride ourselves on being timely. Well, not so much. Especially when it comes to video games, where I’m a cheap bastard and only buy games after they’ve fallen in price (usually a year or more after original release). Cases in point:

• Batman: Arkham Asylum – It’s an unwritten (ok, well, probably written many times) rule in the video game world that games based on existing properties from other mediums generally suck. Like, hardcore suck. Like, worst games ever suck. This happens for a variety of reasons. Usually the games are only made because the suits know they’re guaranteed to sell a bunch of games to people who love the existing property. Or, more likely, friends and family of the fan. They know the fan likes video games, and they know he/she likes the property, so they naturally figure that game would interest the person. As such, the budgets are usually low on these games. And they’re often released as a tie-in with some big happening in the existing property’s universe (i.e. the movie release, the start of season 5, etc…), so production schedules are very constrained. All of this usually yields a game that is poorly conceived, plays jankily, and is full of bugs. We’ve all been there, and we’ve all been disappointed by the results. Batman: Arkham Asylum‘s claim to fame is that it’s a game based on Batman that doesn’t actually suck. And it doesn’t! It’s actually pretty damn good.

  It’s not perfect. There are a few really obvious complaints about the game, notably “detective mode”, which activates Batman’s special vision where enemies and points of interest are highlighted. This is a neat idea, but it also means that you end up playing the game mostly in that mode. Which is fine, but it also means you’re missing out on some excellent production design and artwork in the game. Which, by the way, is probably the best thing about the game. I’ve never read the comic books, but I’m a big fan of the Animated Series from the 90s, and this game takes place in that universe (notably featuring a lot of the voice talent from that show, though many character designs have been updated), albeit a slightly darker and more grim version (to be expected, given that the game isn’t quite as cartoonish). The atmosphere of the game, which takes place entirely on the grounds of Arkham Asylum, is absolutely wonderful, and many of the video game tropes that are present in this game (i.e. the Riddler challenge) give you tons of background on the history and lore of the Batman world. You pick up audio interviews with escaped super-criminals, biographies of other villains, and so on. This sort of “collecting” is usually trite and boring in other games, but here it’s actually kinda fun to see what you can find.

  
  Batman’s Detective Mode

  Gameplay consists of a mixture of brawling and stealth, with the occasional platforming and (usually optional) puzzle thrown in for variety. The brawling is fun and deceptively simple. At first, it seems like all you do is mash the square button over and over again, which does work pretty well. But there’s also the ability to dodge, and if you chain together enough hits, you get some additional moves. I find it lacking the balance of something like the God of War games, in which combat is simple to learn but hard to master. The stealth sections are better, but again, I found myself relying on the same maneuvers over and over again. As with the combat, I didn’t really gain a full appreciation for the stealth sections until I started playing the Challenge Mode (which essentially forces you to do alternative takedowns). The Challenge Mode of the game (basically just bite-sized fighting or stealth sections of the game that are independent of story) is actually much more fun here than it is in most games, and as I just said, it helped me gain a better feeling for the complexity of both the fighting and the stealth aspects.

  The platforming and puzzles are pretty straightforward stuff, though I do really enjoy Batman’s trademark grappling gun thingy that allows him to climb and fly and stuff. I was also a big fan of the Riddler’s little question mark puzzles (which I didn’t understand at all for a while, but once I understood the concept, I had great fun trying to line that stuff up…) The story of the game is also straightforward – the Joker has taken over Arkham Asylum and all the prisoners and super-criminals are free! There’s some hokum about a Titan Formula that turns people into hulking monsters. For the most part, it’s just an excuse to stalk the Asylum and fight super-villains. The boss battles are middling. I enjoyed the Scarecrow sections, but I didn’t care for the Killer Croc area. The final boss battle was fine.

  Ultimately, a very good game. And, of course, I played this about 2 years after it came out, right when the sequel, Arkham City, came out. It’s apparently quite popular, and I think I did like Arkham Asylum enough that I might check out the sequel… in a year or so!

• Killzone 3 – Much like its predecessor, this is a generally competent first-person shooter with some odd deficiencies. The control scheme is strangely different than any other shooter (and it has some really weird consequences, as demonstrated by this hilarious tutorial on how to us the Sniper Rifle…) and the story is filled with stereotypical tough-guy bravado and cliched dialogue. There might be a minor improvement on that front, but it’s still not particularly good. There’s also a minor improvement in the visual design, with some actual variety here instead of the typical gun-metal color palette of these games (there’s snow levels and a brightly colored jungle level too). The game is slightly easier than the previous installment too, but I count that as a good thing because the last game got really frustrating at points.

  As with the previous game, I found myself surprised again at how fun the multi-player is… Oh, sure, I still suck at it, but the way this series packages the multi-player modes together in one big match actually makes it much easier to come up to speed with the game, as it gives you time to get to know various maps (instead of constantly switching you around). You get some more variety from the beginning in terms of your available weapons and character classes, but it still works well. I actually really enjoy the multi-player mode and will probably continue to play it for a while (a rarity for me). Ultimately, this game isn’t anything particularly special, but it’s worth playing. I get the feeling that Sony rushed this one out to be a showcase for their 3D technology (something that I didn’t use and wouldn’t really want to use anyway).

• Ico – Originally made for the PS2, this was re-released in HD for the PS3 (in a collection with the same developer’s Shadow of the Colossus). It’s a sorta minimalist environmental puzzle game following a boy who is rescuing some girl from strange shadow monsters. I’m only about an hour into the game, but it’s quite interesting so far. And it looks great. It’s still a little dated looking, but it’s definitely nice looking (games like this on the PS2 had a kinda vaseline filter on the screen that made everything blurry looking, but this is very clear).

  

  I’ve actually played Shadow of the Colossus before, and the games both share a certain aesthetic and gameplay design. Unfortunately, since it’s a previous-generation game, you have to deal with annoying save points and replay various aspects of the game (a major pet peeve of mine – the only reason it’s acceptable here is that it’s an old game). So far, though, I think I’m enjoying myself more with this game. The puzzles aren’t quite as obtuse, and I’m usually able to figure them out without any help. I’ll hold off on any other judgments until I finish the game, but so far, I can see why this game is popular with critics (and is often cited as an example of “video games as art”). Not sure it would go over too well with the CoD/Madden crowd, but whatever. I’m enjoying it… and I’m probably about to go play so more.

There are definitely a lot of games out there that I’m interested in playing, including the next Batman game and the next Team Ico game (which should be coming out soon). I haven’t been playing games that much this year, and I don’t see that changing too much – I’m generally happy with picking up games a year after they come out. That should keep me busy for a while!

So I’ve mentioned a couple times that I’ve been playing Mass Effect 2. It certainly took me a while to get into it, but at some point, I turned a corner and became very enamored with it. It’s not perfect, but it is interesting, and at this point, I’m very much looking forward to the third and final installment.

I never played the first Mass Effect, which was an XBox 360/PC exclusive, but this PS3 version of Mass Effect 2 was supposed to include some sort of “Interactive Backstory” that is an introduction to the universe and happenings of the first game. Strangely, it’s only available as downloadable content and not really on the disc… at least, I think so. It never actually came up for me (at least, I don’t think so… there seems to be a lot of confusion surrounding this). In fact, what actually comes with the PS3 version of the game is strangely obscure. I believe you get the full game and some of the original DLC on the disc itself. Then there’s this extra pack of content that you can download for free, which I think includes the interactive backstory thingy, but I’m not sure because the whole thing was all very confusing. I get that this is a port of a year old game that already had a bunch of DLC, but is it too much to ask to make that stuff a little clearer?

Anyway, once I got started on Mass Effect 2 proper, it took me a bit to get acclimated to all the various gameplay mechanics. It could have been that I just wasn’t up for a new game at the time, or maybe it was because I had no idea what was really going on in the story at the beginning of the game, but for whatever reason, I found the beginning of the game to be a bit of a slog (I have to wonder how people who played the first game felt – were they ok with this, or does it suffer from the Video Game Sequel Problem). Once I got used to the mission structures and combat mechanics, it started to get a lot more fun.

There are basically two types of missions in the game – a main storyline concerning disappearing human settlements and a series of recruiting and loyalty missions. As previously hinted at, the main story was a bit obtuse at first (presumably due to my lack of context), but as I got used to the universe and the various things that inhabit it, it became simple enough to understand. However, I found myself much more interested in recruiting members of my team and helping them out. Perhaps because those stories are self-contained, I found them much more engaging. I became attached to most members of the team, each in their own way and for their own reasons. When it came time to launch the final “suicide mission”, I found myself dreading the prospect of losing a member of my team.

As an RPG, there are a lot of dialogue sequences and decision trees. Fortunately, the Bioware writers are reasonably good at writing dialogue. It’s not Shakespeare, but it’s funny and engaging enough. I particularly enjoyed talking to Mordin, who has a distinctive, clipped stream of consciousness grammar, but who is very witty and funny. In terms of choices, you are forced to make many, and each seems to be split up between two directions: Paragon and Renegade (basically good and evil respectively). At first, the system seemed much more interesting and subtle than other simple good-and-evil scales shown in games. For instance, in other games, when confronted with a puppy, you will get three options: 1. Pet the puppy and give it a snack, 2. Ignore the puppy, and 3. Place the puppy in a blender and make a protein shake. In order to play the “evil” side of the scale, you have to do some pretty heinous things and while pondering your character as he sips pureed puppy may be an interesting experience, it’s also pretty surreal. But in Mass Effect 2, the evil options are toned down. Sure, you still do some bad stuff, but it’s at least mildly plausible that someone would act this way. I dabbled a bit with both sides of the scale before settling on Paragon for my playthrough… and I do believe that indecision cost me later in the game. From what I’ve heard, these decisions are supposed to have consequences, but for the most part, I didn’t see much of that going on until the end of the game, but at that point, the decisions seem much more arbitrary and frustrating (more on this later). At some point, there may have been an element of implied consequences (similar to how Heavy Rain made me feel like my decisions mattered, even if replaying the game (which you’re apparently not supposed to do) reveals the distinct limitations of your decisions), but by the end of the game, I was well aware of how it all worked.

The combat is basically a third-person, cover-based shooter. My understanding is that this is different from the first game and that there was some consternation about the change, but most folks seem to think it was an improvement – and fortunately, I rather enjoy this type of gameplay. There’s also a system of “magic” powers, but since this is a science fiction setting, they’re called Biotics. I never fully got used to these, though I found myself relying on them more and more as the game went on.

In terms of production values, the game is fantastic – great visuals, great audio, and so on. The voice actor for the male Shepard seemed a bit on the wooden side, but he was alright for the most part (I’ve heard that the female voice actor is actually much better). The game has a really great auto-save system (I shouldn’t have to point that out, but I find that some games, even today, still have horrible save systems), but some major problems with loading screens. In most cases, this is fine, but the part that really drove me nuts was moving around on my own ship, the Normandy. It’s silly in the extreme that I need to sit at the loading screen for minutes on end while I’m just trying to go down one level on my ship.

So I assembled my team, gained each of their loyalty, and proceeded to scour the galaxy of missions and campaigns. There’s a lot to do, and like all RPGs, there are varying levels of satisfaction surrounding each of the missions. Still, these were, on the whole, positive. As I mentioned before, I really enjoyed the process of recruiting each member of my team, then gaining their loyalty by helping them out on another mission. It’s a pretty simple process, of course, but just when I thought it was getting too simplistic, I ended up losing one of my crew’s loyalty (it was Miranda, in case you’re interested) at the expense of gaining another’s. This was mildly frustrating, and because I had dabbled in Renegade actions earlier in the game, I wasn’t able to build up enough Paragon points to rectify the situation. I’m pretty sure this was the contributing factor that let the non-loyal crew member die in the final mission.

Speaking of which, I found that final mission very frustrating. The playthrough itself isn’t bad or anything – the combat is fun and the situation is actually somewhat tense – but the choices you make here generally lead to members of the crew dying. That would be fine, but the whole thing is rather arbitrary. All of the choices amount to picking specialists to do a specific job, and picking two team members to accompany you throughout the final levels. The specialists part seems straightforward enough – you pick the people who have strong tech skills (Kali and Legion), biotic skills (Samara and Jack), or leadership skills (this one is the least obvious, but Garrus and Jacob both seem to work). But who you take with you has a weirdly disproportionate effect. I played through the final level twice, with the second outcome being that one of my people died, and the first being that 4 people died. The only difference was who I brought with me on the final level. Miranda died in both scenarios (one time I brought her with me, the other time I had her stay with the others). I’m pretty sure that she died because I didn’t have enough Paragon points to resolve the whole loyalty situation (though again, it’s unclear what formula they used to figure this out). I think there may be a way to save her, but I’m not sure I really want to play the final level again…

This brings up another point on good/evil scales, which is that they generally work in a cumulative manner. You can’t do certain things until you get far enough along on either scale… but this isn’t how morality really works. People aren’t just an accumulation of their good or bad deeds. There are ways for good people to succumb to evil or for bad people to redeem past mistakes. This game tries to do something like that – if you’re far along on the Paragon side, some Renegade actions become unavailable. But it’s still a little on the simplistic side for me.

Once I got into the game, it was a lot of fun. I was actually surprised to learn that I spent a solid 35 hours or so playing the game… but most of that didn’t feel like a waste, as sometimes happens in RPGs of this nature. Oh sure, there are some dumbly repetitive elements, such as probing planets or hacking terminals, but those are relatively short experiences. Other games sometimes take those tasks to the extreme (this is generally referred to as “grinding”), or they make the main missions too long for a single play session. For instance, it was common for me to play Fallout 3 for a couple hours and not actually accomplish anything worthwhile. In Mass Effect, the missions are well delineated and substantial, but not too large or cumbersome that you couldn’t finish any one task in a single sitting. This leads to a better flow effect in the game, and thus it’s more fulfilling and interesting to play. Ultimately, I had a lot of fun with the game, despite its flaws, and I’m now very much looking forward to Mass Effect 3. I may even replay this game on Renegade. Who knows, maybe the interactive backstory will work this time around.