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 Posted: Thu May 29, 2008 2:23 pm
Ahhh reviews. We all love em, we all try to make em, and even more of us depend on them to tell us if what we are wanting, is really what we are going to get. Here at the Board I plan on showing alot of my own reviews, a few of them will be somewhat dated (or at least the game will be) but I'm hoping that I can do my best to show you more recent games and how they stack up.
PC games seem to be as old as time it's self, and the scariest part about them, is that they will never end. With hundreads of thousands of differant games out, and hundreads of thousands more to come, so long as technology advances, so will PC games.
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Posted: Thu May 29, 2008 2:27 pm
~Mass Effect~ “In the year 2148, explorers on mars discovered the remains of an ancient spare faring civilization. In the decades that followed, these mysterious artefacts revealed startling new technologies, enabling travel to the furthest stars. The basis for this incredible technology was a force that controls the very fabric of space and time.
They called it the greatest discovery in human history.
The civilizations of the Galaxy call it...”
This opening line helps to quickly immerse the player into the world of “Mass Effect”, the latest RPG created by Bioware, who have been the masters of RPG for years. Biowares latest masterpiece is Science Fiction adventures where you play as Shepard, and help defend humanity, while at the same time helping humanity define its role in galactic civilization. In your first mission that you are given, you are sent to Eden Prime, which is known as mankind’s first successful space colony, where you are soon forced with unexpected enemies. Before this however, you are asked to create your profile, which is an amusing process. You are given the choice to either use Biowares premade character for Shepard (You can change the first name, but for Dialog purposes your last name will always be Shepard), or you can make your own. For this you are able to adjust most aspects of your character, including facial features, skin tone, and more impressively, your physiological profile, which helps define your character. You are able to choose your history and one event in your life that you had become famous for. Colonist, Spacer, and Earthborn are your three history Choices. War Hero, Ruthless, and Sole Survivor are you choices for your Psychological profile. You can then pick your characters “class” which helps to define how you play your character.
In its own way, the classes haven’t really changed much from the other games that Bioware made for us. You still have your front line fighter Class “Soldier”, you still have your stealth Class “infiltrator”, and you have your Spell Caster class “Adept”. These are your three core Class choices that each specialise in their own fields of work, there are three more classes in the game, that are basically mixes of the above listed classes. However, the process of “making” your character has improved by leaps and bounds. You may only be given 3 choices for each (3 history choices, 3 Psychological), but they immensely effect how other people look at you.
 If you’re familiar with Bioware games, you will know that Dialog plays a pivotal role in developing the storyline. If you’re a fan of the dialog, don’t worry, they give you plenty of it, and it’s all even better than ever, thanks in most part, to the wide variation of the characters that can join your party. One such example that I enjoyed was when I was sent on a mission to get information from someone named “Fist”. There is another member in your party, who was hired to kill fist. When you start fighting your way through his bar to get to him, you come across two cargo bay workers who, when the door is opened have their guns pointed at you. If you use your “Charm” skill (which helps unlock new dialog options) you can get the choice to say “Now would be a good time for you to find new work”. If you say this, the cargo bay workers agree and say “yeah... your right, I never liked working for the guy anyway.” At which point your mercenary friend looks at you and says “You know, it would have been easier to just kill them” in a tone of voice where you can’t quite tell if he was joking, or telling you how to do your job. It might not seem like much, but that being only one example, of the thousands you’re sure to come across, I can almost guarantee that you’ll find one that you love.
Combat is a little different in this game, than in Biowares previous games. Combat in this game is a mix between 3rd person aiming, and tactical placement, and use of skills. Unlike previous games where you would almost take turns attacking each other, this game instead takes notes from shooting games, instead of table-top games. While the game does support an auto-aim feature (that I suggest you have set on medium for the best playing experience), you still have to point your crosshair in the general direction of the person you want to hit. Combat still fully supports a sort of almost “pause” feature that you can do in the middle of combat so that you can do things such as switch your weapons, look over your situation, and plan team tactics. So while you still want to treat this game like a shooting game, you can still take a second to think the situation over, and decide your plan of attack.
The graphics in the game are a little “under par” for what you would expect from today’s games, but this isn’t a bad thing. What they do in this game to reduce the graphic quality is that everything in the background or not in your direct area (as well as light sources like lamps) is pixelated. This means that while you are talking to someone in the foreground, the only object that will be at full graphic resolution will be the person you are talking too. While this is clearly noticeable at first, you soon do adjust to it. Though I have found this to be a problem in two situations. First, all light sources in the game are pixelated, even if they are in the foreground, which really stands out when you have a highly rendered model next to it, and can make the whole scene look kind of “ugly”. Second, this becomes a problem when you are using raged weapons that zoom (like the Pistol or sniper rifle) where everything starts out pixelated and only after focusing on an area for a few seconds does it stop. This becomes a problem because when everything is pixelated, it’s hard to pick out your targets in the distance, as you basically have to try and “See through” the pixels to find them.
Over-all I would say that Bioware has made another masterpiece that everyone should enjoy. The game lives up to pretty much every expectation that I had for it, and I expect to enjoy it till the very end.
Picture on the left: An example of the pixelation problem in the game.
Picture on the Right: The tactical HUD, that you use to command your squad members.
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