Mass Effect 3 - The good the bad and the really, really ugly

I'm a huge Mass Effect fan.


I've bought each game on launch and I own at least three of the books. I've been in love with this universe since I started playing the original game.


I'm also a fan of more story and character driven RGPs. The types of games where you get to make choices and those choices have effects on what happens in the game.


Here's what I thought about Mass Effect 3.
Some tiny spoilers follow


The Good
The team at Bioware has done a great job of nailing down their flavor of third-person, character based combat. The fights have a solid cadence, they action can be quite furious and the abilities can be really devastating to your opponents. A huge improvement over ME1 and ME2. Solid stuff here.


Inventory management is now almost painless. They've managed to strike a good balance between customizing your characters items and abilities to your preference, while making it a breeze to control all of your upgrades and items. I want this inventory system in all Mass Effect games.


There's a lot of closure fore many different plots and story threads. Most of them were tightly wrapped up and in some very refreshing and interesting ways. There are also some genuinely touching moments. The writers did a good job helping players identify with several of the characters. I found myself both laughing and sympathizing with the NPCs who I traveled with. This was several notches above almost anything else out there, that I've played.


The Bad
The game has a lot of bugs and I mean a lot of them.


In the middle of a conversation, a NPC would disappear, leaving you to talk to the beautifully rendered scenery behind her. Items that NPCs would be holding would disappear, leaving a moment, that should have been special, feeling awkward. You'd occasionally have conversations about a NPCs death, when the NPC was still living!


There were some pretty awesome, action packed or story shaping events in Mass Effect 2. Racing those hover cars though the cityscape to catch a rouge specter. Infiltrating a Geth station to rewrite or wipe out half their people. Dealing with the repercussions of the effects of the genophage on the Krogans. The game was packed with cool things like this to do.


Mass Effect 3 has some events like this, which are awesome, but there is an obvious lack of depth and design for these events. You see this pattern repeated through out a large portion of the game :

1. This impossible to do thing needs to get done and countless of others have failed to complete it
2. Send Shepard
3. Encounter either reaper or cerberus troops
4. Kill them and move onto next impossible to do thing

Following a structure established by the other games, Mass Effect 3 has a nemesis that you have to defeat to get one step closer to stopping the reapers. In Mass Effect 1, it was Saren, the rogue specter. In Mass Effect 2, the collectors and their strange overlord, Harbinger. These are both compelling antagonists, and they have clear connections to your ever looming threat, the Reapers.

This all breaks apart in Mass Effect 3. Your antagonist now is an unknown super ninja, who has no personality outside of wanting to destroy Shepard. The Illusive man is still there, tweaking the system from behind the scenes. Yet, instead of focusing on the struggle with him and some of the really compelling story there, we get some random super ninja. 

Awesome.

The Ugly

One of the things I've always liked about Mass Effect 3 was that it had a pretty cool way of explaining everything. Mass Effect fields were things that could be studied and manipulated using scientific principles and laws. Whether it was via a chip installed in someone's head so they could manipulate mass effect fields more effectively or it was the cool tech that was used to communicate over vast distances or how the Normandy was able to store all of its heat internally to remain 'stealthy'. There was some solid, really cool tech.

Yet, all of the cool science, all of the cool plot development, the bad ass antagonists which were the reapers, is virtually disregarded for something which has no connection to the rest of the books, other two games, comics or anything else released prior to Mass Effect 3. This large break from the rest of the feel of the universe could be due to the departure of Drew Karpyshyn, one of the lead writers along with Mac Walters, from the title.

What does the end of Mass Effect 3 do? Take all of that cool reasoning we have for things and the very cool reapers we had as a main plot point and just throw it away. The ending of the game leaves you with a very muted and hollow feeling. 

In Conclusion

The gameplay is super solid and if you're looking for closure from the last two games, definitely get it. Though you may not like the closure they provide. If you aren't, I'd suggest you stay away :(

Video games, tv and self-worth

This entry is still in "beta"

It all began during summer in my high school years, when I completely cut out TV from my life, under the conditions it'd just be for just one month. Time went on and that period eventually became 2 months, then before I knew it, a whole year had passed without me turning on the television.

I didn't realize at first, but as I looked back, I noticed something interesting. The first thing to replace TV was increased time spent playing video games, watching movies and reading books. However as these mediums each, in turn became increasingly non-interesting, I began to pursue other activities.

It began when I realized the situation I was in at school, my home life, and my personal education. Almost instantly I began to reflect on the decisions I made, the way I presented myself and how I approached others.

I was hopelessly socially awkward, the result of thinking I only needed myself for near 14-15 years, and at first it was rough to get along in social groups other than my own. However, in doing so and learning about others different than myself, I began to see the benefits of meeting people and learning about who they are, and what made them that.

At first, I was startled to learn that the ones I found most interesting didn't play video games, at least play them often. Instead of revolving their lives around games, they instead either seldom played or never played at all. There have been situations where This came as a huge shock at the time, after all to me being good at Star Craft, and having beaten Fallout 2, 40x different ways, was life.

The dynamic began to become more and more apparent. The less time I spent playing video games, the more productive I became, and therefore the more interesting of a life I would lead.

As I became aware of this, my life radically changed overnight, without me even realizing it. I experienced a sharp decline in my time spent on activities such as games and as result a I almost felt the dramatic increase in my feelings of self-worth. Where this came from, I'm still not sure, though I think it has to do with working daily to improve yourself, even if small. And springing from that self-worth,  my motivation to accomplish great things in my life became not something I sought, but something I could not contain.

It was from this motivation that I set far reaching life goals and began to pursue them, even if when rationally thought upon, I realised it would be impossible to accomplish everything on my list in my lifetime.

Thinking upon it in that sense however is not the correct approach. For in even accomplishing one, be it great or small, I would be content with my efforts in life.