Despite a lifetime of gaming there are a few significant moments that I've missed. Join me as I attempt to fill some of the gaps. This week: Mass Effect on PC.
I haven't played the original Mass Effect for nearly a decade. I didn't really get on with it. Honestly - I thought it was a bit boring.
The first few hours featured very little action. They seemed to mostly involve listening to people talk, and having meetings. I have meetings at work. I don't need them in my games as well.
Somehow that tainted my whole view of Mass Effect, and after that it couldn't get anything right. I didn't get drawn into the universe. I wasn't interested in any of the aliens, or their motivations and backstories. The combat felt clumsy and uninteresting. It was all too much of a chore.
So I gave up. But having invested several hours into it, I kept my savegame, even through my next three PCs.
Giving it another go
I'm not sure what drew me back. Lockdown boredom, perhaps. But more likely the promise of what the game was supposed to be - a richly detailed universe, filled with choices and consequences, blurred moral boundaries, combat and intrigue. In theory, it should be brilliant.
I have to admit, it wasn't as bad as I remembered. I might even go so far as to say I enjoyed it. I think I should have originally persisted a bit longer, as it definitely got better towards the end.
It's not perfect, but it gives me hope that it might be worth trying the sequels, if they improved at all on any of the obvious shortcomings.
This is where I start complaining
One of the most obvious problems in Mass Effect is navigation. Loading time is disguised by travelling between areas in elevators, but there are far too many of them and they seem to take forever. Maybe this is quicker on a better PC, but I found it a real barrier to the flow of the game.
Navigation is also a problem when it comes to travelling around the galaxy. I couldn't see where I was supposed to be going on the map, so I had to keep going back to my mission detail to figure out where I was supposed to be heading. I also kept getting lost when walking around. Particularly in, but not limited to, the Citadel.
Other problems were more subtle, but equally annoying. In conversation I kept accidentally choosing a random thing to say next, because on PC skipping through dialogue and selecting the next conversation choice uses the same mouse button.
I can't remember where I picked up most of my squad members from but I managed to get two of them killed. I should have felt remorse about that but it meant I had two fewer backstories to listen to and care about.
Lacking an emotional investment in the backstory and characters, I struggled to get into other aspects of Mass Effect. Having a wide range of weapons offered flexibility in combat, but at no point did I find the sniper rifle in any way useful. Or any of the other guns, really. Most of the time I just used the pistol.
The pausing problem
Pausing for nearly ten years mid-game meant that I'd also forgotten some of the basic aspects of how to play. Although it turns out that I may not have known some of these things in the first place.
For example, weapons. You can arm your character with only one weapon of every type (pistol, shotgun, etc.) but if you find weapons of the same type you can switch to the better ones. It took me nine hours to realise that - up until that point I was just selling everything I found.
Around about that time I also realised I was earning XP and could spend it to improve my character traits. Both of these things helped my progress considerably.
Very late on I discovered that I seemed to be having a relationship with one of my crew, but it was so subtle I genuinely hadn't noticed. I thought I was just looking out for her.
Still complaining
There are still some things about Mass Effect that I want to question. I'm going to stop after this, I promise.
During the course of the game I landed on at least a dozen worlds and trundled around in the rover seeing the same old things, then suddenly on one planet a giant worm thing started bursting out of the ground at random to attack. Where was this brilliant feature for the whole of the rest of the game?
The character of Joker was smug and arrogant. There's conversation options for almost everything in Mass Effect, but I can't fire my insubordinant pilot?
It would it be nice to be able to equip the female characters with body armour that isn't ridiculously sexist.
On the subject of body armour, all of the best armour seemed to be overly colourful and garish. At the start of the game my squad looked streetwise and tough, like a futuristic SWAT team. By the end they resembled a game of Fortnite full of teenagers.
On a more positive note
I've clearly been quite negative, but after I'd realised some of these things and persisted a bit more, Mass Effect started to grow on me. I became familiar with the basic mechanics, and learned how to get through a firefight without getting stuck to a wall. There was still a lot of 'go here, talk to this person', which felt a little formulaic, but the main story was at least interesting.
Overall I'm pleased that I went back to Mass Effect. It was good enough that I might even consider thinking about getting the Legendary Edition, once it comes down in price to something reasonable.
And you can even go to the moon. I liked that.