[SPOILER WARNING: As with all entries in the Critical Mass Effect series, this contains various degrees of spoilers, in this case for Mass Effect 2]
The unimaginatively titled Mass Effect 2 may as well have been called Mass Effect². Bioware’s approach to the sequel seems to have been to take everything that was distinct about Mass Effect and […]
In the last entry, I highlighted the most egregious problems of Mass Effect. But the fact remains that I’ve played it to completion twice, when I don’t manage to complete most of the games I start. Clearly, it’s doing something right. To round out my coverage of the first Mass Effect, I’ll take a stab at explaining […]
Welcome to the first real entry in Critical Mass Effect, a compendium of articles that will poke and prod at all the design decisions that make up the Mass Effect trilogy.This will not be comprehensive; as much as anything, I hope that this can start a conversation about Bioware and the choices they make.
In this entry, I’ll […]
Author’s Note: This is the first entry in Critical Mass Effect, a compendium of articles on Bioware’s ambitious, troubled space opera trilogy. The next two entries will focus on everything wrong and right in the series’ first entry, but my contempt for that game’s sidequests needed an entry of its own.
Mass Effect’s sidequests are not all […]
Every self-reflective games writer (and I like to think that’s most of us) is dogged by one question above all others: “How do you measure the value of a game?”
When we review a game, the implication is that the game is being judged against some larger metric, but usually this is just a purely relative standard […]
Earlier this month, Joel Goodwin published “The Ethics of Selling Children,” an article questioning the increasing prominence of confessional writing in games blogging. He expresses the ambiguity I feel better than I ever could, and so I won’t repeat his points here (you really should read it); I can merely explain my personal struggle in […]
Taking a page from Brendon Chung, I present one sentence on each of the games I played in 2012 (or at least all the ones I can remember – inevitably a lot of cool indie things will be left out).
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
By the end of 2011 I had a lot of issues with […]
