A taste of good things to come!!
More than a game, Mass Effect is an experience. Upon playing this game it suddenly dawned on me that while I was having fun playing it, as I would any normal game, I was actually getting involved in a whole other level. Mass Effect challenges your imagination to a point where you actually believe that you’ve been to these places and met these characters, who exist in this parallel dream world. Achieving this level of immersion is only possible if the game has compelling and extensive writing, a fantastic art direction, superb voice acting, and you have a vivid imagination to begin with.
As a game Mass Effect is a flawed experience though. The game is filled with bugs, frame-rate slow downs, texture loading issues, and inexplicably long loading times. On top of this, the game play and combat is not really compelling either, it is merely passable. However, Mass Effect is more than that.
Mass Effect does not only show how impressive an experience can be under current gen consoles and technology, it also shows where games can go from here. How games can transcend their initial purpose of merely being fun and become truly an escape from reality. In this dream world of Mass Effect you can meet interesting character, travel across galaxies and even fall in love!
I am exited about Mass Effect more for what it means in relation to what can be achieved. This is truly the future of entertainment. Mass Effect shows how much better the experience of a video game can be from the passive experience of just watching a movie of reading a book. The basic principle is that you care much more about a character when you can actually have a meaningful interactive conversation with it.
Admittedly we are not there yet, and many Wii party games will come before we actually do get there, but the promise of this fully interactive compelling and fantastic dream universe is what makes me love this “Game”.
