So I feel badly about implying this, and am fully cognizant of (and in agreement with) our Meho’s postulations regarding this sequel. In fact, years ago a friend of mine ruined the original Mass Effect for me – I’d been absolutely loving it until he deconstructed the entire game before my eyes, embarking on a litany of completely valid complaints ranging from the miniscule to the monumental. I still blame him for shattering my illusions.
So how do I feel about the sequel? Clicky the clicky to find out. No spoilers, I promise.
Let’s start with the obvious: Mass Effect may have come in space opera clothing, but the game was actually about racism. It was about smallmindedness and bigotry, and how such views lead inevitably to destruction. In it Bioware reminded us, none too gently, that we have bigots on this planet who actually hate and fear members of their own race because they look or behave differently. Two humans, with the same genetic makeup, can look at each other and find the other lacking. What would happen, Bioware asked, when we had to deal with intelligent life that wasn’t human? As a species were are hateful and destructive; worthless. Encounters with extraterrestrial intelligence would only exacerbate these flaws.
Mass Effect 2 is a little more subtle. Oh, not the main storyline – Meho’s critique of it is spot-on. it’s hackneyed and sophomoric compared to, say, Battlestar Galactica. This game is more Starship Troopers, in that it uses an absurdly cliched and ridiculous plot, but there is considerable thematic depth underneath, if you look.
Bioware is a Canadian company. Canada has always had an interesting relationship with the USA – (Canadian) network news anchor Peter Jennings once noted that being Canada is like sleeping next to an elephant. On one hand, you’re very safe, because who would challenge an elephant? On the other, though… what if that elephant rolls over in its sleep?
What the United States went through on 9/11 was transformative, and not in a good way, to many Americans. For the first time since Pearl Harbor we were frightened, but worse, we were angry. These are two emotions that are very dangerous when mixed in Americans. The rest of the world watched its collective TV on 9/11 too, and surely had its own emotional reaction to the images it saw. But I can tell you that while we Americans are very good at opening our hearts and wallets when we see tragedy (witness our actions in Haiti), to us there is a huge difference between viewing those images and spending days watching footage of soot-covered Americans running and screaming in fear. It may be egomaniacal to claim such, but it’s true. When we see that we are less likely to try and help, and more likely to lash out. While this nation has always been eager to use force to get its way, after 9/11 there was a growing view that it was just and right to use force, even in the face of global condemnation. But beyond that were small changes that took place internally, things that our international readers may not realize.
The W. Bush administration established practices unheard of in this country, all in the name of national security. They tapped our phones, listening even to conversations between American citizens, and did it without warrants. They limited our free speech protection, to the point of the Secret Service arresting citizens who wore t-shirts with innocuous anti-Bush slogans. They started intercepting and reading our emails using NSA software that sniffed for alarm words. They established absurd travel rules related to the carry-on allowances for shampoo and bottled water. They tortured people, and established the government’s “right” to lock individuals away forever, without trial or even arraignment, even if they were citizens, if they were labeled enemy combatants. People simply disappearing did not happen in America until this age. Meanwhile, these acts accomplished essentially nothing in the context of preventing another 9/11 attack.
Mass Effect 2 mirrors those things. At about 5 hours of play, what I’ve seen is a fascinating allegory of what’s been going on in the United States, even under this far wiser President, and what’s going on in Mass Effect 2. I’ve seen a low-level security officer tell an underling that she’d “Have to make him scream a little” if she wanted to get any information out of a prisoner. I’ve seen lockdowns and security checkpoints at formerly open public areas. I’ve heard mention of “designated Free Speech Zones,” a famous nod to the corralling of protesters to protect W. Bush from ever hearing dissent.
And I’ve seen human beings usurping what had been a flawed, but operational, galactic republic, co-opting spaces held by alien races that had many thousands of years of seniority over us. And why did we do it? How did we do it? By telling them that we had saved them from an uncompromising evil, and that in so doing, we’d earned ourselves a place at the front of the line. This is a satirical mirror to the common idiot-American remark “you’d all be speaking German if it weren’t for us.”
What else does Mass Effect 2 make a point to highlight? The fact that suddenly, other races hate us even more. What we see as divinely-awarded superiority they see as arrogant upstartism; what we see as protection and nation-building they see as occupying forces and cultural co-option.
The game? The game’s pretty good. Meho’s complaints about it are right on the money; it’s slow, it’s ponderous, it’s dialogue intensive. But it does improve most of the flawed play elements from the original, and I’m greatly enjoying my Steam-purchased PC version. As with any good RPG, I’m totally overwhelmed right now with all the to-do items on my list, but looking forward to each experience. For reasons I can’t adequately explain, this game has hooked me far more than Dragon Age. Gameplay is good, story is mediocre, but if you play, I recommend playing for the themes rather than either of those.
Whoa, interesting calls there. Can’t say I actually saw all that but then again I must have been blinded by hatred. I’ll give Mass Effect (1 and 2) this: they make the idea of humans being seen as pesky intergalactic noobs rather convincing to the extent their space opera is convincing. That’s a good basis for any space opera and any heroic quest too. And that certainly is one of the things that makes me play these games despite my many gripes with them. So, the writing is not actually good, but themes are.
Space Shotgun!!!!
Video Game Review | Mass Effect 2
Mass Efect 2 was reviewed in the NYT today. I am always surprised when they review a game. Here is what the reviewer said to start with. I didn’t seem to get the entire article but if you are interested I suspect you can find it. My whole point is that when the NYT is reviewing games, games are in the big time economically. Who knows about artistically.
Dragging Out a Galaxy Rescue
Electronic Arts
Mass Effect 2 is a less complicated but more action-oriented experience than the first game in the series.
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CloseLinkedinDiggFacebookMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalinkBy SETH SCHIESEL
Published: February 2, 2010
The original Mass Effect was my favorite game of 2007. At the time, back at the dawn of the high-definition gaming era, Mass Effect was a revelation in its embrace of more powerful technology not only in the service of bigger and badder explosions but also in the service of portraying some of the most natural, realistic characters and stories yet seen in interactive entertainment.
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Mass Effect 2, released last week by Electronic Arts for the Xbox 360 and Windows PCs, is more refined than its predecessor. It is far more self-aware and considered. All of the rough edges in the first game have been polished to a high gloss. Or I could say they have been sanded flat. Electronic Arts and BioWare, the game’s esteemed developer, were clearly taking no risks with Mass Effect 2.
Commercially, that makes sense. As a less complicated, more action-oriented experience than the first game, Mass Effect 2 should appeal to a broader swath of customers. Mass Effect 2’s design and science-fiction space-opera storytelling are of excellent quality, yet each is maddeningly restrained for a developer of BioWare’s creativity and imagination.
Mass Effect 2 is certainly a great game. It is never boring and kept me captivated throughout the more than 40 hours I spent traipsing around the Milky Way and progressing through the main campaign.
But I came away with the overwhelming impression that the main job of Mass Effect 2 is to build the audience and anticipation for Mass Effect 3. (The franchise was always intended as a trilogy.)
I could almost see the portfolio theory at work at Electronic Arts headquarters. Next week, the company is scheduled to release Dante’s Inferno, a game based on the epic poem. Now that qualifies as a risk. And so I could almost hear the executives saying, “In that case, we need our other big game this quarter, Mass Effect 2, to play it safe.”
Of course, the result of BioWare’s playing it safe is still more interesting and impressive than most developers’ most inspired efforts. And the most interesting and impressive aspect of Mass Effect 2 is how intelligently the game melds the combat systems of a third-person action game with the storytelling and characterizations of a traditional role-playing game. The term “role-playing shooter” may have been coined by the creators of 2009’s Borderlands, but the phrase almost perfectly describes Mass Effect 2.
This is an important distinction and it signifies a new stage in BioWare’s development. BioWare has been known over the last 15 years as one of the world’s top makers of single-player role-playing games. Going back decades to Dungeons & Dragons, one of the cornerstone concepts of a role-playing game has been that players primarily build up their virtual characters through the meticulous accumulation and selection of equipment and skills. In a role-playing game, even those played online in real time, combat generally revolves around the shrewd, strategic use of gear and special abilities rather than on the human player’s spatial perception and eye-hand coordination — the province of a shooter or other sort of action game.
Hybrids are certainly possible. The original Mass Effect was a role-playing game that BioWare was ambitiously, almost rambunctiously, trying to cram into the form of an action game. With Mass Effect 2, by contrast, BioWare clearly decided to build the game as a shooter type first, leaving in only the lightest of customization options for each character — with far fewer skill options than in the first game — and fuse them with a combat system that can be played almost entirely as a real-time shooter. In terms of the combat dynamics, imagine Gears of War lite with some science-fiction magic powers.
There’s nothing wrong with that; it works well. But it leaves Mass Effect 2 feeling a bit generic. By role-playing-game standards, it is unacceptably thin in its core play systems.
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