The Paragon Homunculus in ME

Over the course of seven days I fell in and out of love, only to find it again in the arms of another.  I stopped a genocide, only to cause two others; I talked people off ledges, helped mend broken

In defense of boring

As games move towards noise and thunder, I’m inclined to retreat back into the eye of the storm. I’m retreating to boring games. The action movie palette, often robbed by games, gives us bright lights, flashing pictures, and melodramatic scenes,

Allegory of the Citadel

(Mass Effect 3 Spoilers Ahead) “…when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and

Play Mass Effect 3 with Nightmare Mode!

Get ready, soldier!  Operation Raptor is gearing up this weekend for Mass Effect 3 on the PC and Xbox 360 (more info on the PS3 below) for the weekend of March 30-April 1.  “The Reaper horde is growing, so we

A History of Mutual Looting, and What Videogames Can Learn From Non-D&D Tabletop RPGs

The historical relationship between videogames and tabletop RPGs is not hard to spot, and they work together very naturally (1): computers present the opportunity to automate the underlying mechanics of game play.  Although the majority of games based on tabletop

Fans, Capitalism, and Mass Effect 3’s Ending. Oh My.

How can something like this happen? My finger begins to cramp from scrolling through all the screaming and virtual facepalming over the Mass Effect 3 ending debacle on Twitter. I eventually felt pressured to race through the game just to

Soundscapes – Why Mass Effect 3 might be the best sounding game of all time

Mass Effect 3 might just be the best sounding game of all time. This is quite an achievement for Bioware when you consider how the series started out. The audio in Mass Effect 1 was barely passable and in some

Is JB Hi-Fi planning on breaking Mass Effect 3's street date?

For a brief time, I was jealous of all you Americans. You were going to be playing Mass Effect 3 on the 6th of March, while down here in Australia we had to wait untill the 8th. (Don’t even get me started

Could multiplayer be Mass Effect 3's saving grace?

I hate multiplayer. Unreal Tournament 2004 with my college buddies was the most recently I’ve enjoyed playing with other people. I tried games like Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead and didn’t particularly enjoy them. Borderlands was fun, but

The 5 worst things from Mass Effect 2

Mass Effect 2 did not deserve the highly positive response it received. The game is flawed at every level. Sadly, our love of its predecessor has blinded us to the ME2’s many problems. This post examines the five worst elements.

This is the final part of my four part series on the flaws of Mass Effect 2. The first post in the series was about the awful characters. The second examined the hellishly bad decisions in the game’s design. Part three enumerated 20 instances of terrible writing in Mass Effect 2.

These are the 5 worst things from Mass Effect 2.

5: All geth are good geth.

I would like to bring to your attention the codex entry for the geth from Mass Effect 1. Please note the last line:

“It should be stressed, however, that in all forms the geth are universally violent creatures.”

Let’s talk about why suddenly making the geth mostly good-guys in order to teach us a hackneyed lesson about sapience was a terrible idea.