And in time honoured tradition, it’s been a few days since the release of the last podcast featuring another game review of dubious quality, and like the sun rising and setting every day, the text of said review is posted for your vomiting eyes to over eat.

Episode 4’s review focused on EA’s Mass Effect.

Well I say EA’s Mass Effect, it’s from Bioware who were swallowed up by the mammoth Electronic Arts evil games corporation in an attempt to bolster its gaming catalogue and creation of original game franchises. Bioware have made quite a number of Role-Playing games in the time it’s been around. We may remember Knights of the Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights and the ever popular with those suffering from various skin diseases, Baldur’s Gate.

All have been received with good reviews, and now moderately fresh out of the factory on PC, with the Xbox 60p version being released being released last year in yet another great decision to release things far later on PC.

First off this game features SEX! There’s a bit of naughty in the game, and it caused such hoopla in yankland, the land of the free and depressed. Fox News, those lovable rogues of the news world, who can find tragedy and outrage in someone not saying please., they brought out their news casters, and even had some fella from EA on just to accuse him of lying and that EA was responsible for 9/11 and probably World War 2. Who knew Hitler worked for EA?

There was even more made up controversy with this version of Mass Erect due to the internet connection requirement. Every 10 days, the game would check to see if it was a legit game and then deactivate if wasn’t able to authenticate. On the plus side of course no disc was required in the drive, which Steam has been granting that handy advantage for quite some time now.

So for the brief period of timing you would be playing the game, just hope you don’t lose your net connection and all will be well. The truth even behind this, was not of any evil “oh my god, I can’t play any more, EA have robbed my money” but one of “Nice, the disc stays in the box.” For those annoyed we have to prove we bought the games, this is here to stay, so get used to it, we have no choice.

And speaking of the brief gaming experience, it will only be brief depending on how hard you play it and rush through the main storyline, the game experience was completed in just under 15 hours and that was stretching the time out over a weekend and one evening. So what will you get for your “pain-taxingly worked your arse off for” thirty pounds?

Well you get a game in a vibrant sci-fi universe with a story that well, er, it’s not overly exciting.

You are Colon Shepherd who is a big man or woman depending on your choice at the start of the game. He/she goes around space dealing with naughty people are all shapes and sizes. One scary fella shoots another scary fella and then you go off finding said scary fella who is in love with a bug thing who wants to royally screw over the entire universe.

You will meet and annoy new people along the way; all with their own stories to fill out about 5 minutes, before off you go shooting people with guns and other things which glow.
I have two words to describe Mass Effect. It just happens to be followed by other words which when put together form a sentence.

Basically if you haven’t guessed by now, I am not impressed, and I’ll tell you why. What’s new in this game?

Please, you will look at the graphics, going that’s nice and shiny, these characters are new, well colour shipyard I’m convinced was stolen from Stargate Atlantis, and all the others are basically the same ones from nights of the old public toilet.

Rex basically reminds me of the evil robot fella, the love interest was the other Jedi lady who depending on your naughty ways would be good or evil with you.

That’s quite a damning piece of judgement there, and already you will smell the stench of failure, but hold on, it’s not all bad news.

Despite the fact the story is largely the same typical baddies will take over unless you stop them affair which Bioware have produced before, it’s still done in a compelling way which will carry you through the game to get to the end.

And they even deal with Racism which is rife in this game; basically humans are viewed for the most part with the same level of hate as Asylum Seekers. One of the hot human lady characters you have the choice of using in your squad really despising any aliens in the same vein, and depending on your feelings or how many playthroughs you go through, the way you respond to this will determine if you have naughty with her.

To their credit, to deal with something so obvious in a computer game should be applauded, but you even have a choice on how you deal with it, and that can make you feel strange. Anything which can evoke emotions even negative should be recognised.

But let’s move swiftly onto the meat and potatoes of the game, the game play.

You will go through a series of landscapes and situations with two other computer played companions who vary through the game, and all the while you will use you trusty mouse and keyboard to move your third person placed arse about the screen. Enemies come onto the screen, and you shoot them. Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it?

Unfortunately, the game’s console roots mean that your aiming doesn’t have to be accurate as even shooting with a shotgun from long range caused injury to the hapless naughty bad guys. And using the sniper rifle will make you cry, because each time you use it, it appears you need huge amounts of Dutch courage, there is no way you can steady the scope to shoot, not that it matters, you get them anyway.

The choice of Swiss army weapons never change through the game, but you can add bits found out and about or bought which make them fancy. Which is nice considering you have to scroll through a huge number of items of different bits when purchasing new and shiny things. It just takes far too much time. Inventory system is therefore not the best in the RPG space.

But without chums these battles will get difficult and just like lights of the bold Arctic, you will have a choice of companions to do the good fight and they become available through the course of the game. Problem is, once I found two characters which made life easier, you are tempted to stay playing with the same team members all the time. Forget the rest, for the record; T-Rex and Suzuki Liana are the best for that.

Indeed they were so adept at taking care of business with the force or whatever powers they used, the only times I did direct them or indeed had to properly take charge using the fancy pause thing which comes up when you press space. Other than that, didn’t even bother. I doubt you will either.

At some point you will be required to explore places, again just like in Bites of the gold bucket, solving issues and you will also be expected to drive a 2657 Volkswagen Space Wagon, well it’s just a space vehicle is what you will drive when landing on most of the planets in search of Bovril or whatever it happens to be at the time, and you would think that this is a welcome addition, something different in the RPG space.

But frankly it appears they have modelled the handling of said state of the art transportation on the broken shopping trolleys with a wheel missing. And try and drive the thing while trying to zoom in enough to fire at the baddies. Its great fun, you just have to take bets on what piece of child-safe tarmac you will get stuck on. Or what pot-hole you’ll fall into.

Other times aside from fighting baddies, you will take on a number of tasks given by the usual suspects to clear people’s names, commit espionage or other things, and it again breaks up the combat quite well. Bioware have done the good thing in introducing responses before the end of a conversation so you can select something to keep things going if you so wish, and despite that sounding like a little thing, it is very much welcome, and was much appreciated.

After you’ve completed your silliness wandering around, having words with the denizens of the world, you go back and say whatever and the rewards you gain can vary depending on what type of person you are by your actions.

And it won’t matter what you do in terms of being good or bad, you will still be able to complete the game with the same type of ending, so unlike the aforementioned star wars games, you will get the same story as everyone else, only the details will change slightly.

As for the side missions in the game…. Well, they’re there. And that’s it. You don’t have to do any of them, and frankly unless you are a completion freak who fears the sun, then move along, nothing more to see here.

Now let’s move onto the technical aspects of the game. Graphics have been done to a very high standard, with spackles on the screen giving the impression you are viewing from some CCTV type display and somehow it’s rather good. At max resolution and anti-jaggy line thingy-ing, it looks more attractive than a super-model. But not Jessica Biel, I’m sorry it will take something special to beat her.

You will need once again a special kind of PC to run it in all its glory but now that is considered the norm so never mind that point.

Bioware have polished the game to a fine shine, but in typical fashion there are still bugs which have affected game play on more than one occasion. And it involves those lovely lifts you will spend half your life in.

If you dared to get a lift at certain points, normally points where you had no choice but to use them, your chums would all face the same direction again, but the door would stay open. You would be stuck for all eternity or until you alt-f4 out of the game. Not the best thing really, considering the elevators are among the most annoying things about the game. Before you just resented them, now they become your reason for becoming a super villain against the world.

The elevators to their credit have the annoying music in them and just like in real life, people seldom talk in them. You sit in your chair and watch as they go up or down a lift and take unknown amounts of time getting there. I had gone off for a cup of tea at one point and I swear it was still going.

Unfortunately this turned out to be a bug in the game where every so often, if you dared to get a lift, you would be stuck for all eternity or until you alt-f4 out of the game.

So what else is there that we can possibly comment on? Oh yes, the sex scenes. With such fantastic coverage by the media in regards to these inclusions into a mature gaming experience, heaven forbid we have that, it was obvious that when it came to the sex scenes in Mass erect that we needed some items before proceeding:

A tub of popcorn, a nice big screen, and Vaseline in case it gets truly funky.

Right because this part of the review hinged on a badly edited series of audio bits for humorous effect on the podcast, when translating this to the website for reading for anyone bored of playing with the scrubby bits of your elbows, perhaps we should go further? Perhaps we should make the effort and allow the real thing to be shown?

So with that in mind and perhaps proving the next point, let’s watch the actual scene using the video porn merchant that is YouTube, involving the male version of Hewlett Packard and the female character Suzuki Liana.

Now after watching the above, I dare you to think anything other than: “IS THAT IT?”

I’ve seen more pornographic scenes in Bambi! People’s grandparents have gotten a big rise out of me than that? Even with the female, female action which could take place, the most you would see if that have a bit of a friendly cuddle. The moral of the story for this is: don’t believe everything you read and see in the media.

Don’t forget that the expansion “Bring out the sky tv” or whatever it’s called, is available for free download from the Mass Effect website, along with a patch which fixes some issues, and the content in the expansion does give you slightly more of the universe, if you were after more after the end of the main game. For Free can’t knock it.

So after all that huge amount of text, which is almost far too much to write in one post, what do we have?

• A RPG from the makers of fine RPGs, Bioware
• There’s not an awful lot new
• The vehicle sections are well, err, there and you can get past them.
• So are the side machines.
• The sex scenes are welcome, despite the limpness of them; shows at least there are signs of wanting to make more mature games without the silliness around them.
• The bugs are silly
• The elevators are stupid. Just get rid of them.
• The story is actually a real good reason to keep playing.
• The characters are thought out despite some similarities to other ones.

So now using the legendary points system passed down from generation to generation, let’s find out what pointless number will be assigned to Mass Effect for the PC.

Sorry Bioware, your luck is now starting to run out. With your next effort, make it more exciting. Like Rambo or Predator exciting with big guns, a jet and show us more naughty bits! I demand it!