What I Did On My Thanksgiving Vacation, part 3

[mithriltabby]

rhylar and Mimsy lent us their Xbox 360 and the game Mass Effect, whose lead writer Drew Karpyshyn also created the scenario and dialogue for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. I’m impressed: the game has a good overall plot (with enough different choices you can take that there are at least two ways to experience the plot— as a Paragon or a Renegade— and three different love interests you can follow, depending on your choice of gender and supporting character to flirt with, so there’s plenty of replay value there), several interesting supporting characters, and a large number of side quests that aren’t crucial to the plot, but usually provide interesting exposition for the universe. Having played through all of the side quests, I got nearly 60 hours of enjoyment out of the game by the time I finished it. (Most of the time was while obsessivewoman and I were on vacation; we might have finished it, but we took a very pleasant side trip through Avatar: the Last Airbender.)

The gameplay is pretty good; I played on the default difficulty setting and didn’t have to spend lots of time learning the combat system in order to survive the combats. Based on the available character skills in-game, it could be possible to do combats through stealth and sniping like in Deus Ex, but I never figured out how one would go about doing it; there are sniper rifles in the game, but combat is usually pretty close to melee (though I never had to figure out how to get into hand-to-hand, either, for which there is also support).

I was quite impressed by the amount of work they did on the planetology. One of the things you can do as you race around the galaxy getting into or solving trouble is survey planets and asteroids that you pass, and every planet has both artwork and a matching description that goes into an impressive degree of detail, explaining such details as a gas giant’s color being related to the amount of sulfur or methane in its atmosphere. Someone with a side interest in astronomy would definitely enjoy that aspect of the game.