The XBox 360 is a strange platform. On the one hand it has probably the best lineup of current games out there on the other hand it makes me hate the games that I'm playing.
A couple of weeks ago I borrowed Mass Effect from a friend of mine hopeing it would find some way of not being as monotonous and shitty as most RPGs seem to be. There was enough hype around the game to convince anyone who has half of an ear to the gaming world that it was the next best thing to deep fried Jesus on top of a pile of gold and chocolate. Not to mention the gratuitious sex-fest orgy that was your reward for playing whatever cookie cutter bad/good characters they had probably whipped up. After the somewhat dissapointing illusion of choice that Bio Shock had brought to the table I was about ready to throw the whole 'consequence gameplay' out on its ear for being another exagerated marketing fantasy. If I'd gotten a dozen or so hours of gameplay and some wierd alien skin I would have gone away happy.
Well Mass Effect did not dissapoint and even took it a step farther and made me downright love it. That's not to say that I was wrong about it pretending to give you choice but they do manage to make you care about the decisions that you do make. Bio Shock didn't really make me feel bad for being a savage douschebag baby killer. It let me close my eyes and hum away while all the nasty bits were happening and just did some quick baby murdering math at the end of the game to see whether you get to be Lincoln or Hitler. Mass Effect does manage to completely overwhelm you with so much dialog that whenever a big choice comes up you feel like you've gone through so much crap to get to it that you should really make the right choice. For a while at least. Then once you realize that you can treat everyone like a snot covered tissue and still have them do whatever you want it becomes a little less engrossing. Not that the game doesn't try to colour your good/bad deeds in glowing light when you're doing them but you still get parts where you come up to people, tell them that you're going to kill them in cold blood, then have them care about as much as if you'd just drank the last of the milk and didn't buy a new one. Mash that up with a parade of people who have I AM EVIL and I AM GOOD stamped on their forehead and you get the notion that the game really, really, really wants you to play it a certain way.
ALl that said i've still plugged what must be closing in on 80-90 hours on the game in the past few weeks. At first I was having a great time choosing at my leasure whether to start waxing my Snidley Whiplash moustache or start looking for the nearest cancer charity to deliver some of the 100,000,000 credits I had before I was finished with the game. Then I started in on the achievements. I say this now and I'm sure I'm not the first but there are some games where the achievements really suck the fun out of the entire process. Mass Effect has a few different types of them, most of them involving grinding the fuck out of your abilities or just beating the game 18 times. There are 6 achievements for beating most of the game with a certain person, then there are ones for beating it multiple times, on multiple difficulties and for starting new characters. I think if you were really careful about it you could get everything in 3 complete (or as near as makes no difference) playthroughs and two partial playthroughs with new characters. I'm probably on my 6th or 7th. By the time I was on my third run I was mashing on the 'dialog skip' option at a rate of approximately 100 times per conversation. The ally achievements are especially annoying because not only do you have to beat the game with them you have to grind all of the sidequests so you have to do almost everything in the game at least 3 times in order to get them all. The game seems like it's trying to compensate by giving you tonnes of points just for beating major plot worlds and literally landing on any of the dozens of other plantets but once I got all those I was still pretty sucked in so I kept going.
So now the game has become a monotonous chore that I'm doing out of sheer momentum of having done so much crap for it in the first place. It's like a date who wears the sexiest little dress you've ever seen but is mormon so you end up with a savage case of the blue balls and you still have to pay for dinner.
And if that's not enough I really felt like I owed it to myself to go out on a positive note so I bought the Bring Down the Sky expansion which I am going to save until I get my last 2 achievements finished and finally get this thing out of my life so i can get down to some serious GTA IV which I apparently bought today on somewhat of a whim.
Now there's a game that's going to drive me sideways with all the stuff there is to do.
