Marty requested that I revisit my Mass Effect post. Sadly, I must reveal that my XBox 360 was stolen back in January, and I have not yet gotten around to replacing it. We were watching TV one night, and I looked down, and the 360 and the PS3 were just... not there. To which my only response was, "hey, didn't I used to have a 360?"

I'll probably be replacing the 360 soon (one of my brothers is moving to Austin, and we have plans to found a Rock Band, if you know what I mean), but my jumping back into Mass Effect will almost certainly be dependent on the PC version being released. Still, I can comment on what more of the game I played between my last post, and the disappearance of my save game. (Oddly enough, that's what I was most upset about -- they stole my save game!)

Bioware has this structure to their games. There's

* the initial story hub area, which you must complete before you can unlock the "freeform" part
* the "freeform" part, which typically consists of three less-well fleshed out sections than the part that initially sucked you in
* a bizarre final sequence that you can identify because they've taken away your ship.

I am always a sucker for the first part. It's where they do their best work.

In Mass Effect, they tried to spice up the relatively thin pickings in the freeform part by adding some collection games. Being full of OCD, this initially satisfied me. Then I got irritated by the lack of in-game interface for keeping track of the collection games. I was keeping a pen & paper list of which systems I'd explored so far, and it was driving me nuts. When I revisit the game, I will probably skip most of the optional stuff, and just dig through the story.

That being said, I was still digging on the combat, the writing, and the visual look of the universe at the point I stopped playing. I just stopped enjoying the filler where I drive my ATV around the restricted subset of the planet to find the macguffins.

Marty also mentions the whole good vs evil problem. I didn't mess with the "bad" choices much in the game, but I guess I had more of an impression that -- like in Jade Empire -- that evil wasn't evil so much, as a philosophy of, let's say, personally-oriented goals. The good/evil stuff is just a way to hang unique snowflakes on the infinite hallway, however. The story isn't fundamentally going to change. Sure, the final cutscene may vary (see Bioshock), but it's a narrative trick to give you the feeling of agency in a story that cannot possibly be customized for you.