Like every red-blooded male born after the year 1975, I play video games. Unlike most red-blooded males born after the year 1975, who play games on overpriced little boxes with cheap pieces of plastic with buttons and joysticks, I’ve stuck with my keyboard and mouse. Â The first and only console I’ve ever owned is the PlayStation 2 collecting dust in my closet – which I bought myself with the pitiful wages from one of my first jobs.
Starting with my dad’s ancient 386 and the shareware copies of Duke Nukem II, Doom, and a bunch of other games on those huge-ass five inch floppy disks, I graduated to the likes of Command & Conquer and Quake II when the inevitable upgrade to Windows came. It was the fuzzily-remembered golden age of computer gaming, when the advent of 3D graphics and cheap CD-ROM technology began the transformation of video games from mindless diversions for sugar-hooked little brats to interactive story-telling experiences for people with functioning cerebrums. It was the age of Half-Life, Starcraft, Fallout, and Grim Fandango. It was the age of dreams.
Alas, all ages come to a close, and the technological gap between PCs and consoles was closing with each new generation of systems. When it became possible to have a game system that was technically comparable to a high-end computer, combined with the existing ease of console use, the PC gaming days were numbered. The computer game shelf at your average retailer is maybe a third the size that it was a decade ago because there are fewer and fewer titles being released, and they’re all either crappy shooters that regurgitate the same plot and gameplay mechanics, or those useless black holes known as MMORPGs. When the PC game industry began its slow slide into mediocrity, my interest in it pretty much died.
I can count the number of new games I’ve bought in the past two years on one hand, and Mass Effect is one of those games. Developer BioWare’s games are the equivalent of a summer blockbuster action flick – they won’t enlighten you or make you think, but they provide some solid entertainment and leave you feeling good at the end. I had a damn good time with the game, roughly about the same I’d had with prior BioWare titles such as Jade Empire and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and upon beating it I filed it away without much thought. Now that I’ve beaten the January sequel, I’m filled with blog-worthy thoughts. Mass Effect 2 isn’t just noteworthy because it’s a fun game with an interesting plot, it’s noteworthy because it represents the next evolution of video games.
The story is a gussied up version of the standard game plot we’ve all heard before. It opens on a happy note, with the protagonist, Commander Shepard, getting asphyxiated in the cold vacuum of space as his (I know Shepard can be either male or female, but since I’m an Evil Knuckle-Dragging Misogynist with a Tiny Dick, I’m sticking with male) ship is vaporized by an unknown alien vessel. Fast-forward to two years later, when Shepard has been brought back from the dead by Cerberus, a nefarious group of Human-Firsters lead by a guy voiced by Martin Sheen. Human colonies have been vanishing all over the place and it’s up to Shepard to, once again, save the galaxy from certain doom.
While the ingredients of Mass Effect 2′s plot are relatively ordinary, what pushes the game from average to memorable is its presentation. The plot is relatively unremarkable with only a couple of memorable twists, and the characters are remixed varieties of various stock sci-fi clichés. But the game does its damndest to immerse you in the experience. The writing is top-notch, the graphics are mind-blowingly superb, and the various camera angles in cutscenes and dialogue sequences are exactly like those you’d see in a Hollywood big-budget spectacular. But the clincher is that unlike a movie, you have near complete control over what happens.
Oh sure, allowing the player to affect the outcome of a game isn’t new – we’ve had it going all the way back to the RPGs of the late 90′s. What’s different is that the control Mass Effect 2 gives you is incredibly extensive, and the fact that it’s paired with such an immersive presentation. The last game I remember giving the player this much control was Planescape: Torment, which was a top-down RPG with almost no spoken dialogue in which you spent most of your time reading. Mass Effect 2 looks and feels like a god-to-honest movie. The existing dialogue choices combined with the new “interruption” feature and the ability to import your Mass Effect savegames and see how the choices you made in the last game have played out really shoves you into the experience. As I played the game, I grew to really care about the main characters and whether they would live or die, and when I finally finished the game, my feeling of triumph was not that of overcoming a difficult challenge (as is typical with video games), but of watching a band of heroes vanquish evil and ride off into the sunset happily (more typical of a feature film).
Playing Mass Effect 2 has made me realize just how far human technology has advanced in the past decade. The Fifth Horseman has been predicting, as part of his “Misandry Bubble” thesis, that virtual reality sex will cause a tumble in female sexual market value over the course of the 2010′s. I can believe it because the graphics technology to simulate reality to a 99.9 percent degree of accuracy is already here. Take a look at these screenshots from the opening part of Mass Effect 2 if you don’t believe me. This is how the game looks on my computer running at 1600 x 1200 resolution with all of the graphics options cranked up to 11. Click on the pictures to see them in their full glory:
But anybody can make explosions and space jetsam look pretty. Where the game crosses into sublime territory is in its rendering of the human body. More pics of characters from the early part of the game:
If Mass Effect 2 is any indicator, the uncanny valley is in the rear-view mirror, a minor speed-bump on the road to virtual nirvana. And if you seriously think a platoon of virginal geekazoids aren’t jerking off to Miranda’s sexy polygonal curves right now, you’re kidding yourself. Back when Tomb Raider was released, hordes of sex-starved nerds spent countless hours hunting down a nonexistent nudity code for the buxom protagonist, in spite of the game’s poor (by our standard) graphics. There’s a reason why Lara’s boobs were so pointy, and it’s not because the designers wanted them to look like that!
Now, we already have an entire community of weirdos who went to go see Avatar and were so entranced by the film’s visual beauty that they became depressed when they left the theater. A couple excerpts:
“Ever since I went to see ‘Avatar’ I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na’vi made me want to be one of them. I can’t stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it,” Mike posted. “I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and the everything is the same as in ‘Avatar.’ “
“When I woke up this morning after watching Avatar for the first time yesterday, the world seemed … gray. It was like my whole life, everything I’ve done and worked for, lost its meaning,” Hill wrote on the forum. “It just seems so … meaningless. I still don’t really see any reason to keep … doing things at all. I live in a dying world.”
And that was just a movie, where all you do is sit on your ass for three hours and munch popcorn. I’m honestly surprised we haven’t been seeing “Mass Effect 2 Withdrawal Syndrome” or some other game-related phenomenon, with nerds committing suicide once they beat the game or dying of exhaustion due to being glued to their TV sets for days on end. We already know how addictive video games are due to the interactivity factor. Long before we had “World of WarCraft widows,” there was EverQuest, which despite looking like shit was colloquially called “EverCrack” for the way it entranced its players into abandoning their children to bake to death in hot cars and killing themselves. And we’ve had motion sensing technology for years now with the Nintendo Wii. All we’re waiting for is someone to put all these pieces together.
The neon-lit neo-noir Blade Runner/Matrix future will happen within our lifetimes. We’re looking at a world of guys who, after getting home from their dead-end jobs, will spend the evening having hot sweaty sex with their custom-designed HB10 virtual concubines and waiting out the refractory period by playing MMORPGs on the same device. Change is coming. I doubt any number of technologies could make me interested in MMOs, but provided I survive the Franchise Wars, I’ll be looking forward to collecting my monthly Minimum Consumption Entitlement and spending it on the finest Afghani opium and blowjobs from the digi-bordello. The Singularity awaits!
Other notes on the game:
The word everyone’s using to describe Mass Effect 2 is “streamlined,” and I concur. Just about every idiotic gameplay element from the first game is gone. No more driving around in circles on unidentified worlds in the Warthog from Halo’s retarded cousin. No more playing mission after mission in the same three or four rooms repurposed a dozen times. No more watching your party make small talk in thirty-second long elevator rides. The most annoying feature is the new resource collection minigame, which plays like the planet-exploring mode from Star Control II sans the fun, but even that isn’t too obtrusive, especially considering that if you spend the early part of the game mining out every planet you find, you can ignore this feature the rest of the time and still have enough resources to buy every upgrade and get the best ending. (Did I just reference Star Control II? Jesus Christ, I AM an old-timer.)
The “town” design is a bit different than in Mass Effect. Instead of having one big hub area (the Citadel) that you explore at the beginning and have to constantly re-visit, Mass Effect 2 has about four hub areas that are smaller than the Citadel from the first game and spread out over the course of the story. I approve of this development.
I was surprised at how smoothly the game ran. With all of the graphics turned up to the highest settings, the game ran without a single hitch in frame-rate that I can recall, on a machine that hasn’t been upgraded in over two years. In fact, it ran more smoothly than Mass Effect (which I had to re-play and beat in order to get a save-game before starting Mass Effect 2). Not sure what to make of this.
Have I fallen behind the curve? On the default brightness setting, the game is so damn dark I have to crank the settings on my monitor all the way up in order to see anything. I don’t recall having to do this with older games. I’m wondering if this has to do with the fact that LCD monitors, which are naturally brighter than the ancient, fifty-pound CRT monitor my home computer has, are now the industry standard.
“Romance options” – in quotes because the mere act of typing this phrase makes me want to put my fist through my computer screen. A staple of BioWare games, Mass Effect 2 allows you to pursue relationships with a female teammate of your choosing. (I presume female Shepards can do the same with male teammates.) There’s no real point to doing so, aside from a brief twenty-second clip in which you get to see Shepard and the love of his life get frisky in the captain’s quarters just prior to the final mission. It’s the choice of characters that Shepard is attracted to that disturbs me. In the first game, you could choose between Ashley Williams, a tough-talking space marine who constantly spouts third-wave “I don’t need no man to take care of me” feminist rhetoric, and Liara T’Soni, a stereotypical sci-fi fantasy alien chick, but who at least had a feminine personality. So the “romance options” in Mass Effect were clichéd, but inoffensive. But in the new game, the three characters 
Shepard can seduce are the bitchy ice queen Miranda, the psychotic Aryan Brotherhood version of Sinéad O’Connor (with Michelle McGee’s fashion sense), and a Romanian-accented alien gypsy who can’t leave her vacuum-sealed space suit lest she catch a cold and die. I admit I find Eastern European accents sexy, but still…she’s the Alien in the Plastic Bubble! Thanks a million, nerds.
Verdict: play this game, but only if you’ve beaten Mass Effect and have a savegame to import. Without it, you’re missing out on half the fun.
Also, I’m sorely tempted to blow another $50+ on another recent BioWare title, Dragon Age: Origins and its expansion pack. Is it worth the money? None of my friends have played it, and I trust the average game reviewer as much as I trust the bum down the street to NOT spend the five dollars I gave him on booze. Any takers?
{ 25 comments… read them below or add one }
I used to be a pretty big PC Gamer back in the day. Nowadays I don’t really do it all that much with the exception of the Civilization Series, which is like crack cocaine to the obsessive micromanager type like myself. They really don’t make games like that anymore. Every now and then I fire up X-Com and Syndicate and relive the days when such games weren’t dumbed down.
Brings up a good question, whatever happened to the old school strategy games anyways? You know, back when it was about how much information you could juggle in your head at one time rather than how quickly you can twitch to onscreen actions.
I hated Dragon Age Origins, but I’m in the minority. Most people love it to pieces.
Psh … gamers. Manginas extraordinaire, in my book.
[I'm not a gamer, I just play one on Sunday afternoons. - ed.]
“Unlike most red-blooded males born after the year 1975, who play games on overpriced little boxes with cheap pieces of plastic with buttons and joysticks, I’ve stuck with my keyboard and mouse.”
You make it sound like PC gaming is the budget option, but in reality the x-box and PS3 are massively subsidised and (in terms of hardware) much much cheaper.
[But can you surf the web, blog, and watch porn with your PS3? Pwned! - ed.]
I think you’re a little hard on the nerds for the “romance option.”
They obviously did some recon at the local bar and made a pretty realistic assessment of the mating options men have these days:
1) Shit testing ice queen.
2) Loopy chick with weird beliefs
3) Unattainable feminine girl
Pretty biting social commentary . . .
I liked Mass Effect I better than II. Awesome games.
TFH exaggerates his case for VR sex causing a tumble in female sexual market value. The “sex starved nerds” who beat off to Laura Croft were never in the sexual marketplace to begin with, so if they move on to VR porn, who cares? For most guys it will be the equivalent of watching Redtube on rainy days, with maybe some of the social stigma of a blow-up doll.
[There are a lot more guys who are closer to that point then you think. You just don't notice them. - ed.]
i have re-found my love of a handful of PC titles. THe R.U.S.E. open beta is like a super advanced version or RISK + Stratego with deception as the focal point of winning warfare in Real time strategy. for the adult man, it’s a great man’s version of two classic boardgames made superbly interactive.
i have lamented the shrinking PC market for awhile now, even some games aren’t ported to PC or all they do is reformat the console version (a shitty FPS typically) and put it on PC…..
Ahh PC gaming. I don’t do it anymore since I haven’t run windows in over a decade, but it sure was fun. Xbox live captures a lot of that now, with great co-op and head-to-head multiplayer.
Star control 2 was awesome. So was dune 2, the father of all modern RTS titles. The ultima series were great also, at least the first six.
I’m afraid the Wii has put the red blooded guys born before 1975 under a spell so you are all hooked.
Off topic:
The Elvis link was an interesting read, thanks. It was always mentioned in the readings into the music world that he and his mom had a peculiar relationship and he had more than just a thing for the very young girls. Not to cut on Elvis, his fans gets very possessive and dude could sing. But he was still a little messed up.
Talia is the no-brainer female choice for romance options. She’s the only female character in the series except for maybe Liara who a normal man would actually want to risk his life defending. Miranda and Ashley would be the “have casual sex, end it in 2 years with an acrimonious divorce” options. Jack would inspire most men to more readily use her as a human shield in battle than risk their life defending her.
***Though in their defense, Jack’s biotic powers make her an awe-inspiring candidate as a human shield.
Games are making a big push forward, I’d agree.
Mass Effect 2 was spectacular in its presentation, if a bit short. But a fantastic game.
Dragon Age is more of an “old school RPG” — you micromanage your party, you can hit the pause button to issue commands, you crawl through dungeons and so on, yet all with that trademark BioWare storyline and character interaction, including romance options. It’s a fun game, but different from Mass Effect in that Mass Effect is a hybrid third person shooter/RPG, whereas Dragon Age is a straight up old school RPG.
I’m also not much of a console gamer, but there have been some spectacular console releases recently as well. One, in terms of the increasingly disappearing uncanny valley issue, is a title for the PS3 called “Heavy Rain”. It’s more interactive fiction rather than a “game” (most of the action is controlled by quick time events), but the realism of the character models, voicing, the way emotion is effectively conveyed and so on … it’s another step up.
And, since we’re on games, the recently released God of War III is probably the best action video game ever made — a truly spectacular thing.
On the romance options, *spoiler*, you can do Miranda and then break up with her afterwards. If you then go directly to the collector ship after the Normandy is attacked, you can save your secretary from being killed (if you dilly dally, you get to watch her being killed when you get to the collector ship). If she survives, at the end when you’re back at the Normandy, you can invite her to your quarters and she will dance for you like the girls at Afterlife, and with the same outfit, too.
I’ve only ever played games on the PC, with a mouse or mouse + keyboard. I was born in the early eighties and whenever i’d go over to my friends’ houses to play nintendo, i always sucked at using the controllers and hated the games anyway.
I grew up on classic Lucasarts point-and-click adventures as well as the X-com series, Doom, the first Command & Conquer and a few other games, also operated with a mouse and a keyboard.
I’m not much of a gamer these days, largely because being a gamer while using a PC would require constantly upgrading my computer at great expense. While being a gamer while using consoles would mean having to use those fucking annoying controllers.
The third reason is, that basically almost all the top games these days are fps-variants.
I did enjoy Portal though.
Sir, you’re deluded. Those pictures indicate that ME 2 has decidedly not crossed the uncanny valley. Avatar, judging by popular response, has.
[The uncanny valley with games was five years ago with Half-Life 2. The characters in that game and its spin-offs creeped me the fuck out. This is a quantum leap forward. - ed.]
How far ahead is Avatar? 5 years, 10 years? For geeks, it may already be here, but most people are not convinced. The woman pictured above, is not only unrealistic, but misshapen; she doesn’t look right. I’d give it at least 5 years.
Never understood video games. The last game I was really into was NHL 94. Yes 94. Sonic and Mario before that game and that’s about it.
I actually thought that the cutscene portrayals of human faces and so on in Dragon Age was better than in Mass Effect 2, although the latter is very good. Peter Molyneux of Lionhead Studios is working on something that operates in parallel to this, so that the user interface side of it is more seamless and less “gamelike”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Natal and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_and_Kate. Between the ever improving graphical presentations and the next generation improvements in interface, virtual reality is going to get a whole lot more convincing in the years ahead.
I am being conservative and say that it takes all the way until 2020 for this to have a major effect on the sexual marketplace.
Why, given that Moore’s Law means a 100X improvement in computational capacity per dollar in 10 years? Why will it take so much more?
Because I think it takes a lot for the reward centers of the male brain to warp to such a degree that they just don’t find the majority of women (7s and below) attractive.
It would take totally realistic graphics, tactile interfaces, voice and motion recognition, decent AI interactivity, etc.
Hence, I say 2020. Before then, it will be a curiousity, but not enough to truly warp the male brain.
that virtual reality sex will cause a tumble in female sexual market value over the course of the 2010’s.
Also, it won’t be a gradual decline, but a sudden one.
Things will be in the same status quo until a certain point (say, 2017 or 2018). after which the fall-off will be sharp. It will sort of like the Netscape IPO, when the WWW seemingly came out of nowhere, or like 1999-2000, when cellphones suddenly became cheap and everyone got one at the same time, changing our lives instantly.
That is how it will play out.
I’m playing Mass Effect 2 right now. It’s pretty awesome. It’s nice to play a sci-fi space opera game, since most RPGs tend to be fantasy based. The female characters were enjoyable – a lot of times in sci-fi they overdo Grrl Power, but ME2 managed to avoid Grrl Power while at the same time having plenty of female allies and enemies. Jacob seemed too much like a Token Black Guy, though.
Dragon Age: Origins is okay. I was playing it until I got Mass Effect 2. It’s enjoyable, but not as enjoyable as ME2. There are just too many other fantasy games out there for it to be very unique.
DragonAge kicks ass. The story is well-delivered, the dialogue and voice acting are top-notch, and I actually enjoyed the romance options. Some of the quests are extremely long (Orzamar and the Deep Roads take forever no matter what level you are), and the party injuries feature can make finishing a long dungeon crawl difficult, but those are minor issues in an otherwise fun game.
As for graphics, well, once I saw that bloodstains from fighting will stick to you for several minutes afterward, even during conversations, I was tempted to buy a better graphics card and see what else the game could do.
Not much of a gamer. MS Combat Flight Simulator (the WWII version) and Wolfenstein 3D is about it.
But I find it interesting that dedicated gaming devices are winning over multi-purpose PCs. I wonder if that is a larger trend, i.e. specialized devices.
I think there is definitely a trend towards more specialized devices and away from PCs.
Gaming devices, paired with HDMI monitors, have caught up to PCs definitely — it’s just a question of preference (playing at a desk rather than couch, using keyboard and mouse rather than controller and so on).
I also expect that some “pad” device will eventually replace PCs for many people. Maybe not the iPad, but some pad device that surfs the net, does email and boards and that type of thing reasonably well, does multimedia and music well, and has good storage — I can see that becoming a PC replacement device for quite a few people if the thing is engineered properly, because most people don’t have the need for what a PC does other than rarely, and they can probably use work PCs for those times.
Dragon Age: Origins is definitely worth it! I played that a few months back and loved it, although I wasn’t able to finish it as I had to rebuild my computer and haven’t reinstalled yet to finish it off (kept the save-game though).
Also, I just finished Mass Effect 1 the other day and loved it. In fact, I just began ME2 this afternoon. Strange coincidence finding this post the day I started it.
{ 7 trackbacks }