• Title: Mass Effect
• Developer: Bioware
• Publisher: Microsoft
• Platform: Xbox 360

My e-boner was fairly short for this game when it was a few weeks from hitting the shelfs. Mostly due to a few gameplay videos that showed footage at an inhumane speed of 5-10 frames per second. But when the last reviews were in (usually those who haven't been paid to bend over and give like 2 thumbs up), it actually started to get more interesting. I've always had a huge boner for space exploring and RPG's morphed with, pretty much every other genre.

So what could go wrong? Well. Let's dip into this exciting text based adventure and find out exactly what!

Skippable cutscenes are far too mainstream for Bioware!

Is there ANY good reason for not being able to skip the shiny font presentation of "Bioware" and "Microsoft"? Bathroom break #1.

"Care for another face mask?"

I've pretty much already covered this in my review of The Godfather 2. A huge trend for the time being is the ability to alter the face of your protagonist. Today, our unfortunate test piggy is named: Shepard. Move his or hers facial features randomly around until you got a human'ish mix between the zit on my forehead and the zit sitting next to it. The only way to really see some change in character, is to change your gender. Too bad Rosie O'Donnell isn't a legally accepted gender option.. yet! Anyway, I played as a baby wagon the first time, so we'll refer to it, as such.

Aside from Shepards look, you also get to choose your psychological profile and pre-service history, which only serves as a jump-board for an extra side-mission later in the game and some few altered conversations. It mostly only adds to the illusion of a huge world, but never really plays in, in any significant way. I picked:

• pre-service history - "Went ape-shit as 16 year old and killed off a bazillion 'trick or treat'ers on Halloween"
• psychological profile - "Disturbed baby puking fairy"

But the game rejected my superior imagination and gave me 3 other lame choices.

The last customization option is your class, which grants you access to different skills, abilities and sets of armor. There are 6 classes to choose from:

• Soldier
• Engineer
• Adept
• Infiltrator ( a deformed abomination, made out of parts from the soldier, engineer and adept )
• Vanguard ( read: Infiltrator )
• Sentinel ( read: Vanguard )

But just like The Godfather 2. Half of them are just variations of the other half. The Infiltrator, Vanguard and Sentinel are only there because Bioware and Microfudge still wanted to fool around but didn't use condoms. There is one thing that all the classes got in common; the skill tree for each class are just as uninspiring as watching a video recording of me trying to pick between swiss cheese and neck cheese. It's mostly just bonuses to different basic attributes like; 10% extra damage, 10% extra health, 10% extra butt-hair and so on and so forth. Can't you just feel the originality, crushing your inner organs?!
 

Mass Effect: Realistic Edition

 

When you are all done, prepare to have your attention span tested!

Mission #0: Briefing: Bla bla bla

Unskippable talking and camera-shagging action intro. It's okay the first time, but after that, you'll be having your Bathroom break #2 here. A thing we learn here, is that in the future, spaceship travels by aligning itself up to a gigantic splitted penis and then gets fired into the vacuum of space like a projectile. This whole introduction is mostly ruined because of Keith David, the intro narrator and captain of your ship, The Normandy. His voice work is so bland and mediocre, just like all the games he appear in (Halo, Saints Row, Transformers: The Game).

Mission #1: Attack of the I, Robot Zombies

After finally having fought though a mountain of information and officers that just won't shut up, you finally get into the action! Accompanied by 2 of your fellow crew members. If you try to have a little bit of fun here, then you'll quickly learn that there is no such thing as friendly fire. You are locked and loaded from the very beginning with the 4 most generic weapons in history; a pistol, a shotgun, a machine gun and a sniper rifle. My first thought was: "Cool! I already got the boring weapons. So from now on, all weapons I pick up are going to be new and interesting!". But no, this is all you got for the rest of the game. They can be replaced with other stronger models, but they all look the same aside from a new texture. The only real difference is how accurate they are, how much damage they deal or how well they work as a hand held oven. I swear, it takes like 4 seconds before these futuristic weapons overheats. They must be made by the same company that manufactured the alien weapons for Halo 3.

But I must admit, the grenades are awesome! They aren't thrown in an arc as any other standard grenade. But rather thrown in a straight line like a frisbee untill it hits something which it will attach itself to. Pushing the BACK button again will detonate it remotely, which can be done at any time. It is simple, but any grenade that I can attach to the area between someones buttocks and blow them to pieces with, is a win in my book (the decapitation part is mostly only in my head though).

The controls are pretty basic. It plays like Gears of War, execpt no way as smooth. Half the buttons are used to draw your weapon. Which makes me wonder, why not have the weapon drawn all the time during battle? Except, that would make room for throwing grenades on the B button and actually make sense, can't have that!

Mission #2 "Just shut up already..!":

You've now arrived at The Citadel (which is no way as cool as the Citadel from City 17). It serves as the intergalactic capital of the world. From here on, the game changes from action adventure to elevator simulator. Apparently, the only way to travel around the Citadel, is by watching loading-screens or riding elevators. Bathroom breaks might vary from #3 to #15. It all depends on your will to do all the generic scavenger side-quests.

This is a good place to discuss the conversation wheel. It's very simple. Someone says something and you choose a respond from the wheel. Shepard then speaks a line that somewhat resembles what you picked from the wheel. However! Sometimes you get to choose between 3 lines: 

1. Please explain further, I'm an idiot.
2. What are you talking about?
3. Give me some straight facts or I'll rip off your nipples!

But the spoken line, no matter which respond you choose, is this: "Is there any more you want to tell me, captain?". Why give you 3 different choices, when the outcome is exactly the same?! It's just another cheap way to trick people into believing that they are in this huge game. But it's all just smoke and jokes on you.

Oh yeah, the dialogue is mostly bland and uninteresting. That's unfortunate for 2 reasons. First of all; because if you skip the talking, you're pretty much missing out on half of the game. Second of all; the universe and background story is actually very deep compared to most other games. But it's all presented to you in 1-on-1 conversations. Some visual story telling would really help against all these bathroom breaks.

Punch it, Chewie!

This is best part of any RPG. You've fought and talked your way to this point, but now the Normandy is under your control! So pick up your handbag and start free-roaming the universe! So what to do? Well, there are quite a few of deserted planets you can explore. The only problem is; they are all the same. Some of them might have a building or cave you can loot. But it's mostly just looking though debris for different items which some crazy lunatic will pay you for finding. Yeah, there are a lot of [find X out of Y of item type Z]-type side missions.

The only planet (it's actually a satellite) that is worth visitting, is our trusty moon! I thought it was kind of cool to visit Luna and look up upon our beloved Earth.

So, what's worth to do? The main storyline is al'right. Mostly because it takes you to planets that aren't just a big deserted square. But also because the story is good! But just like the background-story, the presentation of it, is awful. I can only recommend that you close your eyes and pretend that the characters at least blink once or twice while talking.

One last gameplay mechanic I'm going over before concluding this overrated piece of cheese, is the karma system. Basically, you can choose to be good or evil (or both, if your perception of good and bad is a little on the edge). But it all comes down to the choice between:

• I like you.
• I don't like you.

It's mostly used to avoid busy-work. Like not having to kill a bunch of suicidal jerks. Either by threatening them with wedgies or persuading them with compliments. The only difference is the choice you make at the end. Even there, it didn't really matter how you behaved earlier in the game. It's only another worthless gameplay mechanic that distracted the developers from really nailing the game itself.

Conclusion

This isn't a game. This is a book with voice-over and the occasionally "spin the conversation wheel" mini-game! Mass Effect does have a huge world which it does deserve some recognition for. Even if all the races are all humanoids (except for the flying jellyfish), their back-story is still deep and somewhat interesting. But when I anal-probe my Xbox with a game, I sorta expect to be in control instead of having the game play itself half the time.

The graphic is quite good for a Xbox game. But it comes at a price, the framerate is horrible! Throw two or three baddies in there and you got a formula for stop-motion action. This can be countered by buying 2 G.I. Joe dolls and slamming them against each other until the game catches up. That way, not only did you have fun, but you also recreated every encounter there is to find in the game.

This game recived an average score of 90 (X360 got 91, PC got 89) on Metacritic.com. That's the sign of a good game, right? In my world, that's the sign of bribing publisers and/or game reviewers that doesn't give a flying fudge about the game part, in games.