Mass Effect: Enjoy the View

Road trip across Mars

I was having one of those “liquid luck” days when I picked up my copy of Mass Effect.  Not only did I get a pretty good deal on an Xbox 360, but the Gamestop attendant neglected to ring up the game, and it went from the shelf to his hands to the plastic bag without passing under an infrared-light-emitting-laser-gun of any kind.  During my subsequent trip to the food court, a friend suggested Arby’s.  As I made my order (the healthiest possible sandwich I could find there on short notice), their entire computer system shut down.  I don’t know if it was then because of pure embarrassment, the hungry tusken-raider leer I gave them, or an impetuous blend of both, but they gave me the sandwich for free.  It was one of my better-tasting meals that week, despite probably requiring twice the P90X to burn off.  Later, trying on shoes at a sporting goods store, a pair of black socks literally fell from the shelf and landed in my Gamestop bag.  Those, I put back.

Mass Effect ended up being one of the most engaging games I would ever lay my twenty-plus-year gaming veteran fingers upon, and not for the same reasons the Arby’s sandwich tasted good.  Excellent graphics (despite occasional texture pop-in, which Bioware has promised is fixed for the sequel), a shockingly original story, concentration on character development and subversive dialogue rather than cliche’-ridden one-liners and constant firefights, and an atmosphere and attention to detail that made me feel like these fictional reaches of outer space were the real thing; it caused me to not only believe it in its own fiction, but to believe that this game’s history could have been how we eventually discovered intelligent life in space and made our way into the galactic scene (making our undergrad history terminology such as the “world scene” seem like self-conscious humor [which, if you had the professors I had, didn't need to be added to the equation, but I digress]).  

This game did for action-based roleplaying games what the original Star Wars did for space opera films, and lo and behold, Mass Effect has been announced as a trilogy after the wallet-emptying success of the first installment.  I’m tempted to make comparisons, but there are no “oh, come-ons” to speak of here.  We’re in space, we’ve got plenty of believable races with interesting backstories: the turians, the first species humanity encountered after a discovery on Mars (where us real-life humans will be sending the Phoenix in 2011) and we of course started a war with them; the salarians, underappreciated tech experts and occasional mass-murderers (although they refuse to take blame for the attempted extermination of the krogan race to the extent that the Turkish government denies the Armenian Genocide); and the krogans, a warlike race of seemingly-barbaric, primitive, tribal people who make their living as bounty hunters, but their story is really quite sympathetic when we get to know them.  I won’t get deep into the plot, because that’s not what this is about, but Mass Effect has its own mythology, its own ancient history, and its own distinct future; there’s no transparent father-son relationship that makes one think of George Lucas’ films (in fact, not only can you choose to play a female hero, but you also choose what happened to your character’s parents at the start of the game, leaving no room for plot cop-outs later).  

Mars as it appears in Mass Effect (our solar system has been unceremoniously dubbed the "Local Cluster")

   Nothing seems farfetched.  The planets, dwarfs and all examinable chunks of space debris have measurements of radius, orbital period and Keplerian Ratio, and even their surface gravity and day lengths, habitability and whether there are any settlements there.  The systems, cluster and planets are all thematically named, as ours are, after Greek and Roman mythological figures, and so on.  They all possess their own contained systems of orbit and eccentric life-patterns, none of which seem too extreme, when you consider that Mars’ moons, Phobos and Deimos (named after the Greek characters whose names stand for panic/fear and terror/dread), take eleven hours and 2.7 days (respectively) to orbit the planet.  Even the planet surfaces in Mass Effect look authentic: some have debris captured in their atmosphere that will forever orbit/shower the world, most barely-inhabited or uncharted worlds have rock strewn across the landscape.

Human vehicles, such as the Mako, are just as clunky as our Mars Land Rovers

 The moral choice aspect of the game has been a major subject of discussion since its release, as we all know, and the appeal of finding ourselves in these intense life, death, or other people’s death scenarios are what sets this game apart from “slaughter the enemy,” “rush through the plot with the occasional drab cutscene to string the story together” games.  In fact, Adam Sessler of X-Play is quoted as saying, in the show’s 2007 Mass Effect special, “This is the only game where I said, ‘I wish I could get through this action sequence so I can make it to the next cutscene’” (and he feels much the same way about cutscenes as I do).  The “potential romance” angle in the game even got some coverage on the biased-and-uninformed Fox News station, where “correspondents” who never played the game claimed it portrayed polygamy and nudity  (an untrue statement which they later apologized on the air for).

So, at this point in the story, we all know Shepard is a hero, a mysterious race of sentient machines exists somewhere in the unexplored and unreachable areas of space, and that our moral choices in the first game will have promised grand effects on what happens in the next one (understandable, since one such choice involves deciding whether to completely exterminate an entire race of spacefaring people). 

Just relish the fact that there won't be a quiz later.

Bioware has released a list of moral choices in the original that will affect goings-on in the second, which you can find here.  We at AOOW will have our own checklist of preparations to make for Mass Effect 2 as the January release date creeps upon us like starving varren in a Feros basement.  If you know what that statements means, you’re probably as excited as I am about it.

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