The Dord of Darien

Musings from the Mayor of the Internet

Things that bug me about Mass Effect

It’s been a while since I’ve complained about a video game, and I just finally got around to playing Mass Effect, so, hey, match made in heaven, yeah? Now, don’t get the wrong idea: it’s a decent, albeit overrated, game. It’s a space opera featuring all your favourite Warhammer 40k races and the Dark Eldar, and the human nation is called the Alliance, which: fuck the Horde. But there are a bunch of things about it that just ain’t right.

First off: the Asari. The Asari do not reproduce sexually. It’s not exactly asexual, either; their reproduction is actually via some magical Vulcan mind-meld nonsense. Fine; I mean, it’s a video game. They reproduce through magic thought transfer. I can live with that. But they have both primary and secondary sex characteristics, and are capable of engaging in what we would recognise as sexual intercourse, even though it’s entirely unrelated to their reproduction. How the hell does that evolve? Why would the Asari have a fully-developed set of human-like sexual equipment and a sex drive and absolutely no use for it?

Frogger. Remember when I whined about Bioshock making you play Pipe Dream all the goddamn time? Well, hacking things in Mass Effect means playing Frogger. And there are about as many things to hack as there are in Bioshock, so you end up playing Frogger about as often as you play the actual game. Later in the game at least it’s more viable to use the "omni-gel" to auto-hack things, but early on you just can’t afford that. So get down with the Frogger.

Speaking of items: they’re a pain in the ass. The game dumps huge amounts of loot on you almost constantly, and the inventory limit is a stupidly-small 150, which means the game is constantly throwing up this nag screen about how you have too much loot. It’s a floating text box that sits on-screen for about twenty seconds and covers up a good deal of information you’d probably rather like to read. Getting rid of items is also a pain in the ass; whether you’re melting them into omni-gel or vendoring them, you have to do it one by one.

Making the items even worse is the fact that they don’t have descriptive or meaningful names. There are about a trillion different item "brands," all of which are fairly meaningless names. There are also multiple "levels" of each item, so you’ll get, for example, the Striker III or the Tsunami VII, neither of which means anything. And it’s not always the case that a higher number is better; the Scorpion VI, for example, is better than a whole lot of armours of level VII or VIII. Also, have you spotted another problem? Yep: the game uses roman numerals. Makes it pretty damn hard to spot at a glance if an item is better than something you already have, and contributes to the general sense of item names being meaningless gibberish.

The dune buggy sucks. I’m sorry; it just does. You’ll be rocking the game for a little while, running around on the citadel, solving problems and getting involved in intrigue, and then you finally get access to the galaxy and you’re probably pretty pumped about it. And then what? I’ll tell you goddamn what: you spend hours and hours flying around to featureless bumpy planets and driving the stupid dune buggy. The buggy controls really badly, too, and the gun never seems to aim where it says it’s aimed. And it’s very easy to get stuck somewhere on an enemy fortification. Seriously, Bioware: would it have killed you to add some details to the ten thousand planets in the game? Like some trees, or some architecture, or some critters, or something?

I mean, something other than lava. Because you better goddamn believe there are planets with lava. And there’s a planet where you have to drive up and down this windy path through some lava, and, if you fall down, it’s instant death. The other feature on the planets: giant worms. They take about a billion shots to kill, and if they randomly pop up underneath you? Instant death.

Mass Effect is a Bioware game, so, of course, you’ll have to deal with at least one mob giving you an unprovoked lecture about racism. Seriously, Bioware. We get it. Please chill the hell out.

Also, hey. I’m sick and tired of games where the villain turns out to be a good guy who’s being controlled by an evil monster from space. That’s just about the oldest twist in the book — nearly every Final Fantasy game ever made used it, for fuck’s sake — and it’s sort of lame. Let’s somebody make a game where the villain is actually the villain, hey?


November 14th, 2009 Posted by | Games | 2 comments