As far as I can tell, Mass Effect 2 has only one major problem with it. To get the full, immense investment and joy of it, you have to play the first Mass Effect.

That’s not to say that the first Mass Effect is a bad game. Without the existence of Mass Effect 2, the first Mass Effect stands alone in the slickness of its presentation and the immediacy of its interactive story. But compared to Mass Effect 2, it’s a much less refined game in every way, writing included.

Nevertheless, if you are going to play Mass Effect 2 and you can play the first Mass Effect first, do it. Having a character to import into Mass Effect 2 means more than it’s meant in any other game. It’s not just (or even) your stats that carry over, it’s your choices. And the consequences of nearly every action you take in the first game, major or minor, has payoff in the second.

The single most badass and engaging character in the first game is Commander Shepard, the character you play. For me, Commander Shepard is a rather butch female with red hair and a buzz cut who tries her hardest to look after her crew and see them through to safety. She’s an inspiring leader, but she can be stubborn with a bit of a rebellious streak. She believes in inter-species harmony in the galaxy, but if someone’s being stupid or manipulative, she has no patience for them. She’s a lesbian. She was born on earth and ran with gangs before being the sole survivor of a thresher maw attack and rising to become a spectre and a hero. That’s just as it should be. This is an interactive game; the most interesting actions in the game should be the Player’s. Otherwise, it’s just a vaguely interactive movie.

Playing Mass Effect 2, then, is stepping into a familiar role, a feeling magnified by the fact that the rest of the game world acknowledges that this is the same character. Not some vague approximation of the same character as in Baldur’s Gate 2 where “You defeated Sarevok!” is the extent of what the game knows about your character’s experiences. Instead of the slightly disconcerting feeling that I’m the only one who remembers the last epic adventure, I get a world that continues with my character and reacts to my character accordingly. Reacts to me, down to the kiss my lover from the first game gives me when we meet again after several years of forced separation.

And yet, even as the world reacts to you, there is still the sense that it moves at its own pace. It’s a tricky balance to strike, and without spoiling anything, suffice it to say that events transpire that allow a certain amount of time to pass between the first game and the second. Time that allows characters from the first game to grow and change in surprising ways and again enrich the experience of the Mass Effect universe as a real, living world, and the Player as an important part of it.

More than anything, more even than the first Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2 gets the feel of role-playing right. The stat crunching is reduced. There are fewer rolls and fewer ways of grinding xp. It’s not needed. In a different universe, Mass Effect 2 is the natural evolution of the third and first person shooter genre, an outgrowth of Doom and Gears of War, not Ultima and Baldur’s Gate. It’s the polar opposite of Diablo in the action RPG genre. Where Diablo takes the RPG as a genre and distills it to the loot and xp grind, Mass Effect makes interactive story and player choice the focus.

There are other nitpicks: the overarching plot is plenty exciting but a little thin. The objection is minor, because this game isn’t about its overarching plot. It’s about the Player’s interaction with the characters and the world. It’s the Russian novel of videogames, more intent on spending time with individual characters and fleshing out small dark corners of its world than on filling its plot with twists and turns. But boy are those characters fascinating. Of all the characters that join you on your ship, only one of them is really a dud. The rest have interesting personalities coupled with genuinely complex motivations. And that makes the ending the most intense, exciting thing in videogames. I won’t spoil anything, but it’s a suicide mission and the survival of the characters you’ve come to care about depends on your leadership.

If you aren’t enjoying the first Mass Effect, by all means, don’t let that put you off playing the second. The first game is merely good where the second game is a phenomenal can’t-miss experience. But it’s absolutely worth the payoff.

2. A sense of humor. Okay, so Grand Theft Auto IV wasn’t completely devoid of humorous moments, or attempts at humorous moments, but much of the main plot was dire, both in tone and quality. You met some colorful characters, but none were as wonderfully over-the-top as Zhou Ming, the arrogant psychopath from Chinatown Wars’s plot, who simultaneously courts the paparrazi while trying to meet secretly with the world’s most notorious criminals. This is no down-on-his-luck immigrant story, and it fits the mayhem and tone of GTA far better. In a world where you can bribe cops and go free just seconds after murdering hundreds of civilians and blowing up a building, the self-seriousness of GTA IV’s story just doesn’t fit.

3. Huang Lee. The protagonist of Chinatown Wars is a loveable wiseass, who makes characters that would otherwise be annoying a lot of fun. Spoiled buffoon son of a Triad boss who blames you for all his mistakes? I’d want to ring his neck if it weren’t for Huang Lee’s sarcastic barbs making us both feel like less of a chump. When Huang Lee speaks, he speaks for me. He sees the ridiculousness in the people around him and their demands, and he voices it, cleverly. GTA IV’s Niko Bellic has some of these moments and is certainly the more ambitious character, but a third of the way through the game I stopped believing that Niko Bellic was a guy with a bad past just trying to start a new life. When Huang Lee offers to kill someone for somebody, it’s because he’s a sociopathic wiseass. When Niko Bellic does it, it’s a betrayal of the plot and it renders his moping about trying to start over ingenuine. Huang Lee is just more fun.

4. Controls. Chinatown Wars’s car controls are tuned finely to the joypad. There’s no fuddling with a finicky cover system. Individual cars control differently, but making turns and zipping around the city is much easier. The cars don’t float like in GTA IV. They demand precise control, and evading a four-star or higher wanted rating is still a bitch, but they feel right.

5. Touch-screen minigames! Hardware advantage: DS. Surprisingly, hotwiring a car with the stylus never gets old, and is much more satisfying than tapping a button repeatedly. Touch-screen controls make it into missions in clever ways as well. Try evading cops while using the touch screen to keep a man’s heart going.

6. Drug-dealing. You got Pirates! in my Grand Theft Auto. Six different types of drugs with a dynamic market. You’ll get tip-offs letting you know that so-and-so is selling a certain drug low, or buying it high. Later you get access to a turf map that shows the supply and demand of each of Liberty City’s gangs. Got a dealer buying coke high but no coke on hand? Look up who’s selling it on your turf map. You might not get the best price, but if you’ve got a tip that someone’s buying, you’ll almost always turn a profit. Just watch out for random busts because if the cops catch you with that coke, they’ll confiscate it, and you’re out whatever money you just spent. Of course, you can always stash stuff in your apartment.

7. Random characters. A dying girl wants to go for a final joyride. A hotdog vendor wants you to plant a bug on his wife’s car. A porn star needs a ride to an audition. Some of them are peurile, almost all of them have a punchline, but all of them make the Liberty City of Chinatown Wars feel more alive.

8. Missions. Most of GTA IV’s missions boiled down to shoot and chase, or shoot and escape cops. Those are the meat and potatoes of the GTA series, so naturally they appear in Chinatown Wars, but usually with much more flourish. Chase down a tow truck and steal the car off the back of it so you can plant drugs in it and then get a two-star wanted rating so that the cops will impound the vehicle and arrest the owner for possession. Escape a bank robbery by marching in a Chinese New Year parade. Smash the engine of a street racing rival’s car. Plant a bomb in a vehicle and destroy a drug dealer’s den.

And now, one reason why GTA IV is better than GTA: Chinatown Wars:

1. Radio Vladivostok

I just got done with Dragon Age and it’s a strange game made stranger still when played on console (long story, not my choice.)

I think I can safely say that its combat, for good or ill, absolutely lives up to the “spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate” moniker. Not that I got to experience much of that. Attempting to play the game the way it’s meant to be played on a console is quite clunky. The interface lends itself more to a hack-n-slash style experience even as the combat demands tactical precision. It’s an odd design decision that a full pause-and-select-attacks-for-all-party-members system was left out of the console versions in favor of cycling through party members in real time and then pausing to select an attack. In the heat of battle, I found the last thing I was capable of remembering was which trigger (left or right) to press to get to my teammates in the fewest number of clicks. Factor in the little delay as the console processes your request and that character you intended to heal could very well be dead by the time you get to your healer.

The inclusion of customizable AI tactics only alleviates this somewhat. There’s no way to nest tactics (that I could find), telling the game to check certain conditionals after checking others, and no way to include the party members’ full arsenal of attacks by the end of the game. Navigating lists and menus on a console isn’t exactly fun, and neither is re-tweaking your tactics before every boss battle in an attempt to compensate for the shoddy controls and sometimes baffling AI.

But there are other issues with the “spiritual successor” moniker. Dragon Age suffers from the affliction of a great many 3D RPGs in that it feels utterly claustrophobic. There are towns and there are dungeons and nothing in between. Unfortunately the nature of development these days seems to be that you either go the Bethesda route with your RPG and make a vast, explorable world at the expense of content, or you go the BioWare route and fill a very small world to the brim with meaningful content. I’d like to see more interesting quest chains and player choice in Elder Scrolls games, and I wouldn’t mind more locations in BioWare games that aren’t there just because they’re part of a quest. While even Baldur’s Gate didn’t allow you to explore the world freely, there were plenty of maps that were just wilderness to be explored, with maybe one or two quests or small easter eggs to provide pay-off.

There’s some very good stuff in Dragon Age, make no mistake. The main quest locations you visit are far more interconnected than in past BioWare games, and unlike the self-serious Mass Effect, there’s a fair bit of humor in the writing. Some dilemmas allowed for some truly surprising and creative solutions. Mages are over-powered, but they’re also the most fun part of the Dragon Age universe. There were places where my choices in role-playing felt a little limited (too much enforced shock at big moments), but on the whole, I was pleased with how far I was able to take my generally reasonable and compassionate human-hating city elf. The fantasy world itself is more than a little cliche (how disappointed my city elf was to find that the dalish weren’t the semi-feral pagan renegades he believed them to be and were, instead, the biggest pansies in all of Tolkein-inspired elfdom), but the attention to detail and history goes a long way to selling immersion in the setting.

One of the big selling points of Dragon Age is that it offers multiple origin stories–one for each race/background combination and one for mages–for Players to play through and make choices that impact the rest of their game. But perhaps the greatest selling point of Dragon Age is the end. Or ends. Just as it has many different beginnings, the game can end in so many different ways. Like the early Fallouts the finale of Dragon Age is careful to let you know how your actions have affected the world in the long run. It might be the only BioWare game to date that doesn’t boil down to a “good” ending and an “evil” one. That, more than anything, makes me curious to play it again. On PC this time.

Diablo II is smashy, smashy, killy, killy fun. My paladin, Ashenden, one-hits everything, except that cold-arrow firing boss in that one cave. It’s the kind of game that so far is ridiculously fun for twenty minute spurts. I suppose I’d get more sucked in, except the damned inventory is so very small and portalling back to town breaks up the action far more than I’d like. Then again, perhaps those trips back to town are good for my soul. Else I’m no better than the monsters, or something.

On the whole though, my other paladin, Ashenden, had a much more eventful weekend on his new server, running Karazhan for the first time. Yes, he’s level 74. Yes, his groupmates were 80s. Yes, he only gained ~4% of his next level. The thing about the raid encounters in World of Warcraft is that they’re the best, most elaborate scripted content in the game. Even stripped of the sense of achievement that comes from doing the content when it’s fresh, it’s worth seeing and experiencing. Also, some bosses are no respecters of level–I’m looking at you Netherspite (but not too hard, don’t take it the wrong way.)

When we weren’t beating on bosses (and running away from infernals), the lovely girlfriend and I spent some time with the fab four. We started late at night on guitar and bass, but after some beauty rest, it was time to break out the mic. Beatles: Rock Band is really a triumph of presentation. The between-set cinematics were great stylized slices of the Beatles’ history and added to the overall wonder that a single band could justify an entire game and such lavish presentation. Every element of the game says “Beatles.” You might not think of the Beatles as having a unique visual style, but they had several, and the visuals that accompany songs from the band’s various periods express that almost distractingly well. The only complaint we had was that it ended, minus a few beloved songs that we can only assume were held back for DLC purposes. But for anyone interested in a Beatles primer, I can’t think of a better way to first experience them.

Speaking of old things made new, the lovely girlfriend got me the Metroid Prime Trilogy for my birthday. I haven’t played much of it, but as an ardent lover of the Wii controls for Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, I can say that the Wii control scheme has arrived as good as ever to the original games. I thought the original Gamecube control scheme was rather ingenious when I first played the games–a clever way around the problem of aiming on a console, and of setting the games apart as first person adventures rather than pure shooters–but the Wii control scheme only serves to highlight its deficiencies. Make sure your sensor bar is at a comfortable height so you can rest your arm on your knee when you play, and once you’ve played these versions, you’ll never want to go back. I can’t wait to try Echoes, the only game of the three I never finished. I’m hoping that the breezier control scheme will ease the frustration of navigating the game’s oppressive dark world.

But my new, minor gaming addiction from the weekend is Little King’s Story. A kind-of RTS, the lovely girlfriend says it’s a bit like Pikmin, which I’ve never played, so I’ll just take her word for it. You run around as the titular king, collect townspeople of various jobs to do your bidding, collect treasure, commission buildings, gather lost art, and generally aim for WORLD DOMINATION. Except that your advisers are so hilariously inept, they keep underestimating the size of the world. I’d object to the fact that the first group you attack are little black monsters whose culture has a generic-tribal-African vibe, except I just got a cannon that shoots me around my kingdom for ease of travel and I, uh, still need a few million bol for that shopping center I want to build.

The November game of the month is Diablo II.

Yes, I’ve never played either of the Diablo games.* With the third game somwhere on the horizon and the newly released Torchlight getting loads of buzz for its take on the Diablo-style action RPG loot piñata, it’s about time I got around to it. Also, I found a copy of it cheap.

So far I have been unable to get it running on my Vista 64 machine, so I’ll be running it on my 32-bit XP box, but I’ll let you know if I find a fix for that problem.

* If you guessed that I didn’t play the original Diablo because it had a skull on the box, you are correct.

Playing No One Lives Forever has gotten me thinking of Monolith’s more recent game: F.E.A.R. Up until now that was the only game of theirs I’d played. I enjoyed it a great deal, but I was baffled by the chief complaint everyone seemed to have about the game: the environments weren’t varied enough.

Now, at the time I hadn’t played Half-Life 2, but I’d played a fair number of other shooters. I could see how the office buildings and run-down apartments could feel drab compared to, say, Far Cry. But even Far Cry was severely lacking in the variety department. And apart from Xen, the original Half-Life all took place in one facility. I don’t recall a lot of different environments there. I guess you could argue that a mad science lab is more exciting than an office building, but I think that all comes down to context. It’s still nothing but grey corridors. But now that I’ve played more No One Lives Forever, I would like to think that those complaints about F.E.A.R. stem from people’s fond memories of Monolith’s previous work.

One of the greatest things about my experience with No One Lives Forever is the variety of environments. I can imagine the devs at Monolith brainstorming great locations and rejecting some amazing ones because they were not quite awesome enough. Or maybe they were just obsessed with modes of transportation.

So far I’ve been in a shootout in a Morrocan hotel, jumped from a crashing airplane with no parachute, snuck aboard a ship, escaped from the same ship while it was sinking, then scuba-dived into the wreckage of that ship, and captured an enemy agent aboard a passenger train. Yes, there’s been a fair number of warehouses, secret bases, and even office buildings in the mix, but where F.E.A.R. plays its locations safe, No One Lives Forever isn’t afraid to try anything, and it’s a better game for it.

Apologies for the late first post. No One Lives Forever was not initially intended to be the October game, but my original choice turned out to be deathly dull, and I found the prospect of spending a month writing about it singularly unappealing. As a result, I got a late start on playing the two games of the month that I finally settled on.

My first impression of No One Lives Forever is mostly a good one. Much like Sacrifice, it has style. Unlike Sacrifice, it has a style we’ve definitely seen before, though not often in videogames. It inhabits the exciting, colorful world of 1960s spy movies. The world of James Bond. Of gadgets and nefarious-yet-colorful villains.

The protagonist Cate Archer is a thief-turned-analyst-turned-field-agent, and it’s apparent that she’s been itching for field work for quite some time. In fact, she takes a delight in her first kills that would be sadistic if it weren’t so damn charming.

And she’s a terrible spy. Or rather, I am.

No, this isn’t another story about how bad I am at the game. Well, I am bad at playing the game a certain way. But this isn’t about how I had to repeat each mission in Sacrifice over and over again until I got the strategy just perfect.

I’ve had quite a bit of success at No One Lives Forever–I just get this feeling that I’m not playing the game exactly right. Maybe it’s the way my superiors chew me out after every mission for my failure to apprehend bad guys that are always one step ahead of me. Or maybe it’s that klaxon that keeps sounding throughout each level. The all-too-literal alarm bell that lets me know I’m running and gunning my way through a game that desperately wants me to lurk slowly past security cameras and stealthily take out mercenaries when no one’s looking. The alarm that lets me know that somewhere deep down inside, the game aspires to be Metal Gear Solid as well as Goldeneye.

But the thing is, I never feel like I need to stealth. I try the stealthy approach in the early Berlin level, but find as soon as I reach the second gatehouse the ever-present klaxon is unavoidable. I don’t try stealth again until I’m trying to sneak aboard a ship later on. This time, I’m more successful, but I don’t feel particularly rewarded. The difficulty isn’t such that success is impossible without stealth, and if there’s a way to be stealthy without killing people I haven’t discovered it.

Aboard the boat I discover what appears to be my first set of optional objectives, as I proceed get chewed out by my superiors once more for not getting the requisite data. But again, I feel like that failure was determined by how fast I advanced down the path to a prescribed point–a failure of exploration rather than a failure of stealthiness.

I’m torn about this. A lot of people, myself included, are prone to resentment when a game forces them into a certain way of playing. I happen to find running and gunning more viscerally exciting, but I can’t help but feel I’m missing some opportunity by not taking the more thoughtful approach. I have amassed quite a few cool gadgets, but have found little use for them, whether I’m attempting the subtle approach or going in guns blazing.

You could say that if I feel that way about it, I should just play that way. But I also believe that players will almost always take the path of least resistance. There are always the exceptions–the people who inject perma-death in World of Warcraft, or who insist on playing Fallout 2 without weapons. But from a design standpoint, I think it’s the responsibility of the game to encourage players to play in the way that gets them the best play experience. If the best play experience in No One Lives Forever is to be sneaky and use my gadgets, I should find those gadgets somewhat necessary. Running and gunning should be more of a chore.

The ever-present klaxon is not enough to deter me. I take my headphones off and proceed to speed along, gleefully pulling the trigger at everything that moves.

This month’s factsheet is a little late because I changed my mind about which game I’d be playing at the last minute (more on that later.) However, this month will be a two-for-one deal. I’ll be playing No One Lives Forever, which meets the criteria of the 12/12 challenge, and its sequel, which does not (it was released a year late.) I’ll be commenting on both individually and comparing the original to the sequel.

Released: 2000, 2003

Developer: Monolith

Developer Claim-to-Fame: No One Lives Forever, F.E.A.R.

Genre: First Person Shooter

Platform: PC

System Requirements: 1st game: Pentium II 300 MHz processor, 64 Mb RAM, 8Mb 3D Hardware Accelerator Card, 4x cd-rom, 400Mb Hard Drive Space.

2nd game: Pentium III 500 MHz processor, 128 Mb RAM (256 for Windows XP), 32 Mb video card, 1.2 GB hard drive space.

Where did I get it?: Neither game seems to be available new through standard channels. I purchased my copy of the first game used from Half-Price Books, and borrowed my copy of the second game from a friend.

It’s worth noting that the first game wouldn’t run under 64-bit Vista, and the 64-bit part seems to be more of the problem than the Vista part. I played it on my 32-bit XP machine and it ran fine, except for an issue with sound files not playing entirely (which I’ll discuss in more detail later.)

After opening the DEMON GATE OF GOLGOTHA, I felt a little guilty. I helped Stratos oppose the forces of Pyro on my next mission, which earned me the ire of Pyro. I helped Persephone oppose Jadugarr, the unwitting prophet of the demon Marduke on the next, earning me the wrath of Charnel. I was well on the path to reform. I even accepted a mission from Persephone to close the demon gate I had worked so hard to open.

And then, I broke. It wasn’t the promise of riches, or power. It wasn’t a desire to be evil. It was restlessness, the persistent curiosity combined with indecision combined with boredom that leads me to pick one path and wish I’d picked the other.

I had closed the demon gate and was encroaching on Charnel’s territory, about to defeat his wizard, and he makes me an offer. I don’t hesitate. I’ve run too many missions for Persephone; I’m ready for greener pastures.

For my troubles, two missions later, Charnel gives me a little spell called “Death.” Death summons, well, death. And death kills all your enemies. And then if you’re too close, he kills you too.

And that’s really the final word on Sacrifice. It is a game of infinite surprises, with numerous ways to play, a truly unique world and aesthetic. It is an RTS that cuts through all of the ponderous economy-building of standard RTSes to plunge players right into adrenaline-pumping action. Play it.

The truth is, Eldred, the wizard at the center of Sacrifice, is a bit of a–well there’s no really polite way to put this, is there? He’s a bit of a d*ck.

It’s only hinted, at first, but it becomes clearer as the game progresses. Eldred comes to the game’s world after the destruction of his own world and in a rare moment of piety, he prays to the gods for help. But the moment he learns that they may be manipulable, he notes that any of them might suit his purposes.

So why was Eldred praying? Not out of piety as we might assume. He is a powerful wizard, used to being in a position of power, in a new and strange place. He doesn’t just want protection. He wants power. Whatever status he held in his old world was lost, and feuding gods offer him the chance to grow in power in this new place.

And that’s precisely how it works out. Here, the mechanics of Sacrifice and the story fall into perfect lock-step. Eldred makes alliances with gods and learns new abilities and gains new minions from each of them. In addition, he earns boons on the successful completion of some missions that offer additional strength.

But I’m being ungenerous to Eldred. This is just one act of many, and how else would you expect someone to act, alone and friendless in a dangerous world? You would hope for a powerful ally, and you wouldn’t question if five such potential allies appeared before you.

After the Demon Gate of Golgotha was opened, a greater threat emerged in this world. Jadugarr, a centaur wizard claiming to be the follower of a new prophet, called Ashur, is converting people away from the gods. He must be questioned, negotiated with, and stopped, and Eldred is the wizard for the job.

But no sooner has Eldred confronted Jadugarr than he learns the true identity of Ashur–the demon Marduk. The same demon, it is revealed, that Eldred summoned in his previous world, who destroyed his previous world.

Summoning the demon that destroyed your world is pretty d*ckish, but maybe Eldred had a good reason? It seems unlikely, but perhaps it was a gamble to defeat a greater threat that didn’t pay off?

No, as Eldred reveals in his retelling of the story, he was the assistant to a wise and great ruler, and he helped that ruler build up his kingdom. And when that ruler died, the kingdom passed to Eldred. But Eldred was not liked by his subjects, and he summoned Marduke in a bid to keep control of his kingdom. He remained in power, but the world was destroyed.

I think we can all agree at this point: Eldred is a d*ck.

But wait, there’s more. Having arrived in this new world after causing the destruction of the old one out of a selfish desire for power, what does Eldred do? He teams up with Charnel to open the DEMON GATE OF GOLGOTHA. And that’s how Marduk gets into this world and starts the cycle all over again.

Except wait a minute, that last choice was mine. I chose to take the god Charnel’s mission to open the Demon Gate. It’s my fault Marduk entered the new world. Eldred could’ve taken a better path, favoring James or even Persephone. He could’ve steered clear of such things altogether, siding for the selfish Stratos or the ambitious Pyro. But I chose that he would continue to be a d*ck. Eldred’s story could have been one of redemption–and still could be, if the other gods will give me a chance–but I chose differently.

And Eldred’s backstory works perfectly for the whole range of choices. Is he sadistic? Maybe. Selfish? Maybe. Penitent? Maybe. I would go so far as to posit that for a game with a central moral dilemma that the Player controls to work, the main character has to be, like Eldred, a d*ck, if he has any developer-supplied backstory at all.

Compare Knights of the Old Republic to Infamous.

*SPOILERS FOR BOTH GAMES FOLLOW*

In KoTOR, the central revelation, that the Player is Revan, the fallen Jedi responsible for galactic slaughter, gives context for both the good and evil actions that the Player may choose to take in the course of the game. Either path makes sense, either as a redemption arc, or as a continuation of the darkness Revan embraced when he fell.

Compare this to Infamous, where the game’s protagonist is largely a blank slate except for his friendships. The friendships make the evil path feel very strange. His friends seem decent and don’t really hint at the level of depravity that the game’s protagonist is capable of if he takes the evil path, and so taking the evil path through the game jars feels slightly more artificial than the good path. If the devs had used the lead’s backstory to suggest he was a bit of a selfish d*ck before the event that gave him superpowers, the arc might have been clearer.

*END SPOILER WARNING*

So what do you think? Should more video game protagonists be d*cks?