My First Thoughts On: Mass Effect

This is going to be a tough one for me. 'Mass Effect' is the first BioWare game I've ever played, and it's so different from most everything I have ever encountered, I have little to compare it to. I never got into 'Knights of the Old Republic' back on the original XBox (save the hissing and spitting until I finish this post). Ditto for the Baldur's Gate series. I'm simply lacking a formal vocabulary that I can use to discuss it.

Like with most of my gaming discussions, I guess you'll have to suffer through another post of me talking about how fun [insert game] is.

So far, and I've only put three or four hours into it, 'Mass Effect' is...fun? I think? I'm definitely enjoying it, even though I've killed fewer than fifty people so far (and what video game is any good that isn't a complete and utter massacre), and the last few hours have consisted of running around a building and talking to random people. I assume that's going to take up a great chunk of the game, which is actually fine by me.

At one point, an assassin tried to take me out in a hallway leading to the station's closest approximation of a strip club, and I felt that the combat in that particular instance was getting in the way of my aimless conversations with aliens. It took me entirely too long to kill my assailant, and I am a casual gamer, but had I known my destination, I would have fought much harder for the cause. The fact that I was somewhat disappointed in the club itself does not mitigate my point.

Being a sci-fi noob, I am still unsure of the plot, but it seems as though a Predator has turned on the Empire and is causing a human army to go all Starship Troopers on a few of the surrounding planets. That is the reality I've created, so I'll let it stand at that. I spend most of my time thinking about what choices I'm going to make in the dialogue trees, but I am reticent to take any longer than normal in my actual decision-making. I'm playing Shepard as a centrist, a cypher, in all of these proceedings, and I think I'm doing a fairly good job of it, as well.

Commence your hissing and spitting now.