I have slowly come to the realization that the Mass Effect franchise is my personal favorite when it comes to the modern era of video games. I will fully admit to being a BioWare fan with some major bias, but I feel that lends me a unique perspective on their games. While I generally love everything they put out, there are games in their library that do not tickle my fancy as much as others. Jade Empire stands out as one of those titles, it is a great game with a loyal fan base, but something about it just did not gel with me. Shattered Steel is another game, again, good game but I was a much larger fan of Mech Warrior and my bias towards that series did not allow me to get the full experience for Shattered Steel, something I still have not quite managed. 
 
Aside from those two examples, I am at a loss to name another title of theirs that I do not love. 
 
Mass Effect turned that love into something else. I am a sci-fi junkie, good, bad, does not make a difference to me for the most part. I love Star Trek and I enjoy Star Wars. Warhammer 40,000 is a guilty pleasure I have spent far to much money not playing. I have over a hundred novels from that universe sitting on a shelf next to me as I write this. 
 
Mass Effect grabbed my interest more than most anything that had come before it. I fell deep into the fiction and the story telling to me was excellent. I have spend probably two hundred hours delving into the two games currently in the series, three if you count the iPhone game but I have not access to that one.  
 
I spent dozens of hours scouring planets for ore and listened with rapt attention to the sometimes ham fisted dialog that was fed to me. John Shepard had become mine. I spent my dull drum work days thinking about just how I would have Shepard go forward in his quest, what choices were most fitting to me, how I wanted him to continue forward into Mass Effect 2.  
 
The day came that I had the chance to make that move and like any junkie I spent the better part of a week devouring everything I could why quietly setting aside the moments I wanted to revisit or maybe try to change in my second, third, perhaps fourth play through. My first completion of the game was perfect, I had achieved what I had hoped after I had found out about the decisions you had to make near the end. I was happy, but not quite ready to hop right back into the game, it needed to stew up there in my brain, I wanted to let the smaller moments to lapse so I could experience them anew once again. 
 
Then it happened. 
 
Corruption.  
 
To Be Continued...