20 terrible things from Mass Effect 2: the flawed writing

No matter how many 100s Mass Effect 2 received from the gaming press, it was a deeply flawed game. This post examines the abominable writing.

To prepare for the release of the demo for Mass Effect 3, I’m revisiting Mass Effect 2 in a four part series. Let’s examine 20 instances of the terrible writing in Mass Effect 2. The series will then conclude with the five worst elements of the game.

20: Don’t invent a lame excuse to take away all my stuff.

I think the only reason they killed you in the beginning was so they’d have an excuse not to transfer over your items. Being killed off and coming back to life doesn’t seem to have had any real impact past the first 30 minutes of the story. You don’t struggle with the existential crisis that should come with having been dead for two years and come back. You don’t spend more than perhaps a line or two on thoughts about the afterlife.

You were dead, then you “got better.” This should be a major plot point, in Shepard’s character arc in ME2. At the very least, there should have been more questions about the process.

Instead Shepard walks through the game like an unthinking automaton, stumbling around the edge of this enormous plot hole. They missed an amazing storytelling opportunity.

Shepard’s death in ME2 also negates anything you might have accomplished with multiple play-throughs on the same character in the first game.

As a result, Shepard’s death and unexplained recovery seem only to be an excuse to take away your stuff.

I liked my stuff.

Love Interest: Second Date – Ikezawa Hanako, a Trans* Narrative

In Love Interest, Mattie Brice picks a date from a visual novel and breaks down how they represent culture’s expression of sexuality. Today she talks about her time with Ikezawa Hanako from Four Leaf Studio’s Katawa Shoujo. Spoilers ahoy!   (Warning:

10 terrible things from Mass Effect 2: game design hell

What makes a game good? It has to have the whole package. Sadly, Mass Effect 2 lacks in every category and the game’s design is no exception.

With Mass Effect 3’s demo coming out in less than a week, I’m revisiting Mass Effect 2 in a four part series. This second post takes a look at some of the awful choices made in the construction of the game and its mechanics. We’ll follow up with a post examining the writing and concluding with the five worst elements of Mass Effect 2.

10: Waking up in a room and fighting a bunch of robots.

So, you wake up in a room with no memory beyond the brief interactive cut-scene that failed to explain how you survived falling from orbit. Then you get the standard new game walk-through, which involves fighting a bunch of personality-free robots that have, unsurprisingly, gone rogue.

Why is there absolutely no value in the beginning of the game?

Punk baby, lycanthropy rock

KEYBOARD DRUMSET FUCKING WEREWOLF is a 2011 independent game by Cactus and can be played here. Something in the freshly-minted Swedish air made KEYBOARD DRUMSET FUCKING WEREWOLF a totally feasible, attainable thing. It’s an attitude – some counter-cultural, punk, piss

After pressing start: Super Metroid and efficiency

(After Pressing Start is a new series running on Nightmare Mode every Friday by resident narrative guru Tom Auxier. It focuses on beginning, on the stories that happen directly after pressing start, and how those stories influence the arcs of

How You Got Videogames Wrong #3: You’re Pretentious as Shit

Pissing you off in installments, the monthly series “How You Got Videogames Wrong” delves beyond appearances into the slimy interior of The God’s Truth (about videogames).  This month we’ll be looking at difficulty in games, and what exactly it makes

Looking through Rule of Rose’s sepia ending tinted glasses

(Spoiler warning. Trigger warning for violence, childhood bullying and implied sexual assault.) “I am the Bucket Knight, keeper of promises. …Yet, time can be so cruel, for I have aged and cannot remember the past. You know what I refer

10 terrible things from Mass Effect 2: the awful characters

It would be fair to say that Mass Effect 2 received universal acclaim from critics when it was released. It didn’t deserve it. Whatever the reason, the game journalism community gave ME2 a critical pass.

With Mass Effect 3’s demo coming out in less than a week, I’m revisiting Mass Effect 2 in a four part series. This first post will look at some significant flaws with characters in the game.

10: Mordin the geeksploitation.

Mordin’s character is the geek on the team. While the rest of your team have superpowers or are action stars, Mordin’s the guy who spends the time he isn’t in your squad sitting around doing research in the lab. Mordin, “the professor,” is a stand-in for the average video-game-playing audience, or at least the type of person who’s expected to like the RPG-stylings of the original Mass Effect.

How is he characterized then?

Portal 2: A labor of love

(Warning: This article contains spoilers for Portal and Portal 2. Read at your own risk!) Every now and then a video game comes along that is able to tug at my heart strings and force out a tear or two.

Persona 4: The Golden has lots and lots of bikes

  Persona 4: The Golden seems to be adding a lot of new things that weren’t included in the original Persona 4, one of them being bikes. That’s right, bikes. At some point in the game you can obtain a