Review: Mass Effect 3

Mass Effect 3 is the finale to an epic sci-fi series made by Bioware.  The purchase suggestion itself is pretty short: if you haven't played Mass Effect 1 or 2, don't get 3 (start with 1 if possible and work through all three); if you have beaten Mass Effect 1 and 2, you need 3.  Unlike most video game trilogies, the Mass Effect trilogy really is a series.  There is a grand sense of continuity and that your choices matter.  Obviously, the major choices you make in 1 and 2 (did you kill this person or that person, who did you romance, etc.) will impact the third.  But I noticed numerous times where even my more minor choices impacted the game or at least felt like they did.  And that is the key here, player perception.  If you can make the player feel like his choices mattered, then they mattered whether it actually changes any dialogue/events or not.

In the Mass Effect series, players take the role of Commander _____ Shepard.  They can choose whether it's a female/male Shepard, what the first name is, and what they look like.  The forced last name and title allow the main character to be mentioned by name in the voiceovers, which was a clever trick when Mass Effect first came out.  The first two Mass Effect games have you fight a threat to the galaxy, while building suspense towards the much larger threat you fight in Mass Effect 3.  Mass Effect 3 is essentially just one big set of cameos from all the characters you've come to know from the first two games.  The really interesting thing that comes out of this is that if you talk to anyone else who has played Mass Effect 3, the stories can be very drastically different.  The most obvious example being choice of gender - every time my friend talks about Shepard and says he, I get confused because I play as a FemShep (Female Shepard voiced by Jennifer Hale, my voice crush).

These choices and differences in story really help to solidify the Mass Effect story as a whole as a player story. I think because of this, the ending to Mass Effect 3 hit players much harder than a typical video game ending.  Typically, video game endings are nothing to talk about (Rampage only gives you a single Congratulation.  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the NES gives you a Game Over when you beat the game.).  There are a few exceptions I can think of (first off, don't click those links if you don't want endings to Splosion Man, You Have to Burn the Rope, Portal 1, and Portal 2 spoiled, secondly, I think I see a pattern in the video game endings I enjoy...).  Mass Effect 3's ending represents the culmination of 120+ hours of commitment to your particular Shepard's story.  I think just like Lost's ending, there's no way to appease everyone.  Maybe it's because I knew this ahead of time in both cases that I was able to enjoy both endings for what they were.  Yes, that's right, I enjoyed Mass Effect 3's and Lost's ending.  Not just "was okay with them", but was actually pleased by both of them.  Obviously, I can't really discuss the endings here without spoilers, so if you want details, you'll have to talk to me personally, but I'd love to do that to see where our stories differed and what you thought.

Indiana Jones and the Waggle Staff of Kings

So I just finished Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings. Apparently the Staff of Kings is Moses' staff from the Bible. I don't remember it ever being referred to as the staff of kings, but I guess I'm not a big archaelogist buff. This game started off incredibly fun. At first I was thinking all the Wii motion controls made a lot of sense and fit the game really well. You put your Wii-mote at the screen to fire the gun when you're in shooting gallery mode, you put up your dukes with nunchuck and Wii-mote in hand and do jabs, uppercuts, and hooks by doing the appropriate motion. You even fly a plane by holding the Wii-mote like you would an airplane joystick. As is always the case with Wii games (at least the ones I've played so far), it starts off making sense, but then the more you do it, the more you realize just how imprecise it is and just how frustratingly stupid waggle controls are in the heat of combat. At one point I'm surrounded by 8 nazis and was constantly just running around throwing things at them and fighting like a pansy because everytime I tried to stand and fight using my fists or the objects I was throwing at them, Indiana Jones would stand there uselessly while Eric Heine was shaking the circuit boards out of his controllers. Not fun. Another part of the game had the opposite problem, where the controls were too sensitive - the plane. I crashed into more walls because of overcompensating turns than anything else. Not fun. The last motion control problem was when the controls just plain didn't make any sense. The very very very final part of the game has you driving a motorcycle, but instead of driving it Mario Kart style with the Wii-mote sideways and you turn it to turn, you have to hold the Wii-mote AND the nunchuck as if they were one handlebar. How did that ever make sense to anyone? Half the time the bike wasn't turning because I guess I wasn't holding the controllers correctly and the other half was overturning just like the plane. Not fun.

Okay, so enough of my rant. Most of those complaints are from the final level, so if you bought the game and stopped playing right when Indy gets on a zeppelin, I think the game would still be fun. They clearly rushed the last level with no test time or just had very rookie designers and programmers working on them. At least that's how it felt to me.

Okay really. I'll stop complaining now. What's fun about the game is every other level; the exploration, shooting, and level design are all really good. The voice acting is good. It wasn't Harrison, but it was a very good sound-a-like. The music was very Indiana Jonesish. The two reasons I bought the game were co-op mode and the inclusion of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (including voiceovers!). Co-op mode is Indiana and his dad essentially playing a varied amount of mini-games working together with a completely different story than the main story. I haven't beat it yet, but I enjoyed what there was so far. I only started playing through Fate of Atlantis to see what it was like on the Wii (I've beaten it countless times as a child). The version I owned as a kid didn't have voiceovers, so I do look forward to playing through that at some point.

So if you take my advice and stop playing the main story when Indiana jumps onto a zeppelin, then I'd say this game earns 4 fedoras. If you hate yourself enough (or if you're like me and just have to complete things) then it earns 12 poisoned dates. What do those numbers mean? Absolutely nothing. If you remember my original purpose for starting this blog, then you'll remember I hate review numbers because they're meaningless. If you played Uncharted, Prince of Persia (the newer set, not the original), or any game that involves ledge climbing around ancient ruins with (in my opinion) combats that really mar the whole experience and liked them, then you'll like this. If you want a good Indiana Jones experience, this game will fit that well. If you want a really great Indiana Jones experience, get Lego Indiana Jones.