A New Game

Yesterday on the way home from work, I decided to stop by Best Buy to pick up a new game. I had been running through my fifth or sixth game of Civ IV, which usually means it's time to pick up something different to play. I did a little research and narrowed down my choices to two: Mass Effect 2 or StarCraft 2.

In the end, I decided I was going to pick up ME2. I never really liked the original StarCraft that much, though I think that largely had to do with the fact that I was playing it back before I had played many computer games, and never really understood how it worked. Every game went the same: I got hosed by the rush. It got boring, so I put it away.

Besides, Mass Effect 2 sounded much more my type of game. A single-player story that you run through, meeting characters, and playing in a large world. You know, the Fallout 3, Dragon Age type of game.

It helped that, when I got to Best Buy, they had no more copies of StarCraft 2 that weren't the $100 massive box filled with stuff I didn't need.



So I broke out the game last night. I never played the first one, so I'm a little fuzzy on the plot, but I'm filling in details as I go through the story. And man, it's fun! I've only played through a couple of the basic missions so far, grabbing two new characters for my team, but already I can see just how many are out there for me to find. Even moreso than Dragon Age, I'm enjoying talking to the characters. The conversation options are much more dynamic.

Top that off with one of my favorite features. A lot of games try to push the "good" or "evil" track onto characters, letting their decisions influence what they can do in the game. ME2 takes it another step. During the course of the game, you gain "Paragon" and "Renegade" points based on your choices. Then, during cutscenes, depending on if you've got enough of the particular points saved up, you can cause the scene to move in a different direction by clicking your mouse when the option comes up.

So, for example, there's one part where I'm trying to help a guy get free of a bunch of thugs. We're perched up on a building and he sees several of them coming across the bridge. He hands me the sniper rifle so I can see through the scope. Normal cut scene is that I just look and hand it back to him. But if I have enough Renegade points, I can choose instead to squeeze the trigger and knock off one of the bigger bad guys before the fight starts.

Clearly I'm playing for Renegade at the moment. I've already decked a reported on television because I didn't like the interview, and stuck a knife in the back of a thug whose group I had infultrated when I learned he was trying to skew the fight against the side I was going to betray them to.

The fights are fun too. Pretty simple, all said and done, but it has a fun part where you can drop into cover and use stuff around you to keep hidden, lean out and fire. My favorite tactic so far is using my sniper rifle, keeping hidden, then popping out, taking aim and blowing someone's head off before ducking back into cover. Ha!

I'm hoping the game keeps up as fun as it has been so far. We'll see, though...