THUMBS ON FIRE

Quick Review: Mass Effect 2: The Arrival

I guess it’s time for Shephard to go on another suicide machine. I swear, he must just be quoting John McClane constantly by now. “Join the Alliance, they said…have a good tiiiime, they said…”

I’ll keep this quick, because I honestly feel that if you’ve played Mass Effect 2 you know exactly what it is you’re getting into with this downloadable piece of entertainment, and if you haven’t played ME2, then you shouldn’t be reading this, you should be remedying that problem as soon as you can. This and everything else can wait.

The Arrival is a quick, roughly 2-hour long addendum to ME2 which emphasizes largely on combat, and adds a nice little story bridge between Mass Effect 2 and the upcoming Mass Effect 3. I won’t spoil anything for you, but it’s your standard “galactic-scale calamity, scaly racist aliens can’t solve their own damn problems, and it’s up to Shephard to save the day again” type situation. Only this time it involves the Reapers!

Though the dlc is quite short, they do manage to pack a decent amount of storyline tension into it, and it actually gets pretty intense by the climax. The only problem is there isn’t really enough story content to keep ME fans truly happy; The Arrival is about combat, through-and-through, and moreover it’s almost entirely one-person combat, as the mission is played solely as Shephard (under some flimsy pretext of “silence and discretion”). I feel like Bioware must know this, but in case they don’t I (along with the rest of the internet, it seems) feel like I must re-iterate: people are playing Mass Effect for the story, guys! The combat’s cool, but it’s the icing on the damn cake!

What story there is in the dlc, however, is your typically-awesome Bioware fare, and I truly enjoyed an additional, if truncated, vacation back into the galaxy of Mass Effect. It is quite short, however, and at $7 for what’s mostly additional combat, this may not be everyone’s bag. Just keep that in mind when if you’re on the fence about buying.

Score:

Gaming and Aging, or, How I Learned to Start Worrying about my Dumb Hobby

I’ve been playing video games all my life. I don’t remember when I started, I just know that really as far as I’ve had cognition I’ve had a Nintendo system. I think that as the story goes my Grandmother got my brother and me an NES for Christmas, an event which I feel my parent’s sorely resent, looking back.

I guess I’m the definitive “2nd Generation” of gamer; I may have missed the bad ol’ days, when the Atari 2600 was releasing games that I can appreciate for their historical value but really never want to play, but I’ve been around long enough to see games evolve into what they were today. From Super Mario Bros to Mass Effect 2, gaming’s grown up alongside me.

And for the longest time I feel like I’ve been growing out of video games, and as devastatingly lame as it is to say it, it’s gotten me worried. Does anyone else remember being of the single-digit and just being uncontrollably stoked at the idea of coming home from school to play in front of the TV for an afternoon? Even though most of the games I was playing at the time were undeniably shitty (case in point: my first favourite game was Yo! Noid, a game in which looking back I have no fucking clue what was going on) it was still fun just to magically make the pixels move on screen.

             I figured the only pictures that would coincide with this article would be illegal (read: frowned upon) usages of stock angry gamer photos

I can’t really do that anymore. If I game for longer than an hour or two a day I get incredibly antsy and need to do something else. Maybe with age I’m just becoming jaded, but I’m wondering if this is something that happens to all of us as we grow up. “Putting away our childish things” or some such adage. Even though “statistics” (and I put that in quotes because I have neither the time nor the patience to dig up and verify the proof of this statement) show that most gamers are in their mid-20’s to early-30’s.

It’s an empirical fact that the best games ever were the ones that you played when you were a kid. Case in point, the three best RPGs of all time are Earthbound, Final Fantasy 6, and Chrono Trigger. I don’t care what anyone says, those three are the heavenly triumvirate and no game produced today will ever reach that pinnacle in my mind.

             And here’s another stock photo of an angry gamer. I don’t whether it’s awesome or sad that it took my eight seconds to find dozens of these

So it begs the question: is gaming something that can only truly be enjoyed to its fullest extent by kids? Granted, that question becomes naive and borderline insane when you factor in how most relevant games these days are blood-soaked murder simulators meant for me and jaded ilk. That’s not to say I’m about to stop playing video games any time soon, but it’s just something that I’ve pondered as of late.

And I don’t think I’m the only one. Look at how insufferably cynical so many gamers have become, how if one were to look at any gaming forum, and you’ll find dozens if not hundreds of posts of people bitching about every aspect of every game, be it a five-star blockbuster or the latest movie tie-in game (I know, it’s the internet, and should therefore just be ignored off-hand, but my argument remains).

             Hey, look, a cartoon stock angry gamer picture

I’m no different, really. Case in point, I plan on finishing and reviewing Dragon Age 2 some time this week, but I’ll give you a quick preview: I kind of fuckin’ hate it. But it wasn’t until I started seriously deconstructing why I hated it that I realized that the me of ten years ago would have been endlessly excited to have played the very same game. And that caused me to, for some incredibly lame reason, worry. 

So am I just becoming another cynical adult, has my “palate” potentially developed over the years, or am I just slowly starting this downward spiral into eventually hating gaming? Most importantly, am I just fucking crazy, or does anyone else feel this way?