Mass Effect 2: The Beginning of a Journey

I have previously confessed to having an unusually strong attachment to fictional characters that is both troublesome yet wonderful, depending on the situation.

Despite my overly sympathetic nature, few games manage to go beyond this superficial attachment and produce genuine affinity for the character.

Dragon Age, with its supremely personalized nature and ability to role play to a surprising-yet-still-limited degree, is one example. This helps explain my roller coaster of emotions toward the end of the game: I actually cared about the character I was guiding there.

It may not come as much of a surprise, then, to hear that the other example that springs readily to mind is another Bioware game: Mass Effect.

Click to read more ...

Dragon Age: The End of a Journey

Having recently conquered Dragon Age after a period in which there was much uncertainty as to whether I would be able to accomplish this feat at all, I’m finding it difficult to compile my feelings on the subject.

Typically after completing the average game, and especially one of such length, I am simply bursting forth with opinions ready to enslave my unwilling fingers into inscribing them onto digital paper, lest they torment me from deep, dangerous recesses of my mind.

It would be inaccurate to say that I am at a loss for words with Dragon Age. It is simply that the words I am able to find require a notable amount of effort on my part to force them from their hiding places and, once found, they form a less coherent message than my typical instinctive reactions.

It took me a lot longer than is usual to come to the conclusion that I was ultimately happy with the way my Dragon Age journey ended. This result is still under careful analysis and many of the details are yet to be solidified, but I know that when I look back on my final moments with the game, I am happy. This is enough for now.

During my introspective moments looking back upon this epic adventure, I realized that I went through many of the same emotions that my character must have during her journey to the end.

I was left uncertain as to whether the choices I had made would result in building a future that I was happy with. As I saw the sacrificial decision I was going to be forced to make looming in the disturbingly near future, I wondered whether it was going to be worth it; I didn’t want my character to die just like she, if real, wouldn’t have wanted to die herself. I selfishly wished that I wouldn’t have to make this sacrifice so that my own future could be happier. And ultimately, through a surprisingly organic series of dialog choices that set events into motion that I was not expecting, I wondered whether letting someone else take my place was the right thing to do or whether I had been cowardly.

This genuine roller coaster of real emotions I felt as I worked my way toward the conclusion of the game is itself indicative of just how powerful this game was for me. Sure my concerns were for my ultimate enjoyment of my game experience and my satisfaction with the story I had helped weave for myself, not my own life or the fate of the land, but, intentionally or no, Dragon Age had tricked me into a set of emotions that fit almost perfectly with my story experience.

Fortunately I was able to accept this organic progression and be happy with the experience I ended up with. In fact, those points where my regard for the game may have fallen to their lowest points due to my concern about where things were heading ended up making the high points all the more impressive.

Dragon Age is a game far too long to sum up in one measly post. I can already feel the familiar torrent of words building up in my brain, begging to be released. It is taking a lot of my willpower to keep them at bay, but regardless of whether I can ever congeal my detailed thoughts into a coherent argument, it is not those details which are truly important.

This was absolutely not a game without fault. Clearly if it were I would not be having these troubles analyzing it. It is, however, a game that overcomes troublesome little details to provide an “experience”, something that is far grander than the little building blocks used to put it together. It is when you start looking too carefully at the blueprints that things start to get messy.

If you can pull yourself back a bit and examine it on an emotional level rather than a technical one, the real level on which stories ought to be examined but a luxury games are rarely afforded, you’ll find a game that weaves a compelling tale highly personalized to the individual that played it while managing to tie up nearly all of the loose ends that matter in a satisfying manner (with one distressingly major exception that I will refrain from discussing here for fear of diving into those pesky details I said I would avoid).

Few games manage to accomplish so much and I am glad that Dragon Age was able to prove itself worthy despite the heavy doubt I was throwing its way in my final hours with it.

As to whether Mass Effect is better or not, well... that’s an entirely different can of worms. Seeing as how I’ll soon have finished both Mass Effect 1 and 2 within a few months of each other, I’m sure I’ll be opening it soon enough.

I can’t wait.

Best of 2009 - Dragon Age: Origins

As one year transitions into the next, I find it a healthy and refreshing endeavor to look back upon the past year and reflect upon those experiences which touched me the most; to discover which games stood tall above the rest and, for one reason or another, made a lasting impression.

Over the next few days, I will be sharing my own personal list of the ten best games of 2009, followed by those that didn't quite make the top ten and even a few of my greatest disappointments of the year. These are in no particular order, but they are the games I found most worthy of praise. Reflecting upon them makes one thing clear: it was a great year for gaming.

Dragon Age: Origins is a dangerous game. It’s right up there with those nasty, soul-sucking titles like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion that can completely consume you if you aren’t careful. 

It’s wonderful.

Few games indeed manage to hook me as thoroughly as Dragon Age and those that do receive a special place in my heart. There’s something about diving headfirst into a game world and becoming obsessed with it, relishing every detail and every minute, never wanting to leave, and spending hundreds of hours there that’s just so much fun. Few games have the chops to do it. Most are over with far too quickly or get boring and repetitive a short way into their lengthy play time.

Not Dragon Age.

Click to read more ...

Book Review - Mass Effect: Revelation

You could safely say that I wasn’t expecting much out of Mass Effect: Revelation.

I don’t even remember buying the book. It’s been sitting on my shelf for something like two years now.

I don’t remember what was going through my mind when I bought it, other than, “Hey, Mass Effect is a decent game, let’s see what this hack writer managed to do with it,” not realizing that said hack writer was, in fact, Drew, Karpyshyn, the writer/designer for Bioware, who worked on not only the story of Mass Effect itself, but also on Knights of the Old Republic.

So Mr. Author was not exactly a hack.

Still, I think I could be forgiven for my assumptions. It is a book based off of a video game property.

How could that possibly end well?

Sure the video game property it’s based on has one of the better stories seen in modern gaming. Sure the author of the novel is working on the game itself.

But let’s face it, these cross media transitions rarely result in products digestible by your average human.

I don’t know why I decided to finally start reading it the other day, but whatever the reason, you could say I was a bit surprised that the thing wasn’t utter crap.

Mass Effect: Revelation will not usher in a new era of sci-fi storytelling. It will not go down as a hallmark classic in the genre. It probably won’t even be remembered as a stunningly written example of science fiction.

And for good reason. It’s not any of those things.

The story isn’t original. The writing style doesn’t jump out at you. Some of the plot devices are awkward and forced.

But what the reader is left with is a perfectly enjoyable piece of fiction.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Mass Effect: Revelation is related to the reason it exists in the first place. The reason the book was written was to provide an introduction to the massive universe of Mass Effect in the form of a book. It was essentially a peek into the world of the upcoming game prior to its release.

It would be easy to assume that such a work would be more concerned with introducing races and worlds and historical elements than with telling a unique tale that stands on its own.

Indeed, exposition does sometimes get in the way and make the book feel a little clunkier than it might have otherwise. On the whole though, it’s impressive how little it obstructs the flow of the story. I came away feeling that the book was no less clunky than most other average science fiction novels. Considering the burden placed upon this particular title in terms of positioning and marketing, this is a fairly impressive achievement.

The thing that bothered me the most about Mass Effect: Revelation had relatively little to do with the marketing aspects of the novel. The most troubling element of the book’s construction to me is that the author has a rather annoying tendency to spastically jump from one character’s perspective to another.

In a longer novel this might have been acceptable, but a novel of only just over 300 pages does not feel substantial enough to support the number of viewpoint characters that this book asks the reader to follow. Having four or five viewpoint characters in such a small novel felt erratic - as if the author were using this technique as a crutch to deliver information he had no other way of getting across.

While the story as a whole is reasonably interesting in an “average science fiction/action romp” kind of way, none of the characters are interesting or unique enough on their own to support the book. You really do have to be hooked in by the Mass Effect universe for this book to hook you.

With that said, it’s possible that this book alone might fulfill its intended purpose and suck you into the universe and make you want to experience more of it.

The erratic multiple character perspective may be a detriment to the book’s attempt at storytelling, but it does allow for a more in-depth look at aspects of the universe that we wouldn’t have gotten to see any other way.

Another fear I had when picking up Mass Effect: Revelation is that it would feel outdated and unnecessary by this point in time since the actual game has now been released. I guess I expected it to be a giant, redundant tutorial for the universe.

Thankfully, I do not feel that this was the case. There was plenty of material shared between book and game, but the book did not spend so much of its time on any of these elements that it became annoying. Some of the material was presented from a fresh perspective that made it interesting all over again, and there were plenty of details about the universe I learned only from the book.

Keep in mind that this is all coming from the perspective of someone who hasn’t played the game in many a long month and, in fact, never finished it in the first place, so perhaps I do not represent your average reader of Mass Effect: Revelation.

The novel does tie nicely into the game’s story line, but in an enjoyable fashion that I didn’t think was jarring It tells an unrelated side story that sets up some key elements for the game to come while at the same time acceptably wrapping up its own plot arc.

Not every book needs to be the second coming of its genre. Mass Effect Revelation is a book I could nitpick to death if I tried, but I won’t because that would be missing the point.

This is a short, somewhat forgettable book, but I had a good time reading it, it presented the wonderfully compelling Mass Effect universe from a different perspective than that given to us in the games, and it provided a decent story of its own. It was a little erratic and told from one too many viewpoints, but was compelling enough to see the book through to the end while giving us a look at how the events in the game came to be.

If I do manage to finish the game, I would have no hesitation in picking up the second Mass Effect novel and seeing where it takes me. From someone who went into the book expecting a cheap marketing gimmick, I’d say that’s decent enough praise.

Mass Effect Revelation makes me curious to see how well it stacks up against other video game to book adaptations. Maybe I’ll do a little exploring and see whether it gets any better than this.

If you are into both books and video games, or have any sort of interest in sci-fi or the Mass Effect universe at all, I’d recommend giving Revelation a shot. It won’t blow you out of the water, but it will likely keep you entertained for the short time it’ll take you to read it and give you a great excuse to spend more time in the world of Mass Effect.

It’s a bit clunky, a bit unwieldy, a bit forgettable, and a bit predictable, but it’s fun. In this case, I think that’s good enough to warrant a recommendation.

Even from a hardened critic like myself.