Pineconeattack!

As I’ve mentioned a time or two, I am a bit of a Bioware fanboy. I used to chug along to Baldur’s Gate with my massive Pentium 200, and its 64MB of RAM and 8 meg vidcard back in the bad old days. I still rate Neverwinter Nights as a vastly superior multiplayer game than World of Warcraft (even if WoW finally finished it off and stole my hard earned bucks in the process). I beat KotOR 2 six times just to beat it with every posible Jedi combination. It really should be no surprise that the first games I picked up for my 360 were Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect.

So to begin, I took my time to fully enthrall myself in Dragon Age, milking it for 60+ hours and knocking out as many side quests as I could uncover. That I earned the completionist and master recruiter achievements weren’t much of a shock. But once I polished that bad boy off I now had a dilemna, it was January 11, 2010 and in a two short weeks Mass Effect 2 would be on my doorstep. However, there was no chance in hell that I was going to be able to dive into it without knocking out its predecessor. So my gaming over those weeks was pretty obvious. I was going to need to get up close and personal with the baddest space cowboy this side of Spike Spiegel.

Fortunately, I wasn’t going into this game cold turkey. If I learned anything from being a connoisseur of Bioware gaming, I was certain that the engineer class was going to be the rogue/sentinel equivalent and would let me pick locks, hack systems, et al. What I didn’t realize was that in choosing the egghead, I would be limited to just pistols for the duration (lame!) and would have to pass all my awesome weaponry to the meat puppets that stood alongside me (more on them later). This sucked early on because needless to say pistols arent terrible strong and the engineering offensive talents aren’t very powerful. There is a tradeoff in that by being able to bypass locks and such you save a fortune in omni-gel (the future version of lockpicks), are able to loot much more gear while walking about and can unlock more side missions by hacking into data consoles, but this doesnt help much in the early going.

Then there’s the squad. The characters are very well developed with pretty extensive back stories if you take the time to shoot the shit with them between missions. They cover the spectrum of classes, and very early on you realize that only one of them is worth a shit when push comes to shove. Wrex love is pretty rampant, but the key to him is that he has access to “the force” but can still use rifles and shotguns. As for yer third teammate, it really doesn’t matter. The squad AI is borderline retarded, shooting into walls, getting lost on an open floor, crowding my ass when im taking cover, you name it. Their best asset for me was to act as decoys and meat puppets to draw fire away from me and my most common strategy was simply to order them into the middle of things to draw enemies into my line of fire.

Finally, there’s the story. This is where the Bioware aesthetic I know and love rears its beautiful head. The story is palpably epic, builds upon itself and keeps you enthralled for the duration. By the end of my campaign, I was truly sad to see the end credits and was thrilled that I would be able to tear right into ME2. Without giving anything away or covering well reported ground, you are on a mission to prevent the end of existence and you’re success doesn’t necessarily mean that all is well. The game is built to go right into the sequel and they even let you import yer character from one to the other. So while I was never going to be an objective player, Mass Effect lived up to the all the hype.

Pros:

• Bioware for the mother fucking win!

• No Influence balance, you mean I can kill every last sum bitch (earning Renegade rep) and still save the colony of zombiechow (earning Paragon rep.)

• Yer tank drives like a warthog on steroids, in the good way.

• Story, Dialog, Movie pacing, yada yada yada

• Not Killing Wrex so I could throw him in this fucking awesome armor.

Cons:

• Retarded squad AI

• Just a fucking pistol? Really?!?

—–Baldy