Aram Zucker-Scharff

What makes a game good? It has to have the whole package. Sadly, Mass Effect 2 lacks in every category and the game’s design is no exception.

With Mass Effect 3’s demo coming out in less than a week, I’m revisiting Mass Effect 2 in a four part series. This second post takes a look at some of the awful choices made in the construction of the game and its mechanics. We’ll follow up with a post examining the writing and concluding with the five worst elements of Mass Effect 2.

10: Waking up in a room and fighting a bunch of robots.

So, you wake up in a room with no memory beyond the brief interactive cut-scene that failed to explain how you survived falling from orbit. Then you get the standard new game walk-through, which involves fighting a bunch of personality-free robots that have, unsurprisingly, gone rogue.

Why is there absolutely no value in the beginning of the game?

Image used under Fair Use from EA

By integrating choice and multiple user-controlled view-points into the game, Dead Space 2 provides a refreshing alternative to traditional video game cutscenes.

In the extraordinarily crowded field of video games, many seek attention through cutscenes of increasing complexity or realism. I found it somewhat ironic then that Dead Space’s particular unique treatment of cutscenes was mostly ignored.

Despite increasing complexity, user interactions with cutscenes, excluding quicktime events since there are whole games based around just that mechanic, have been pretty limited. You have two choices with a rare third. Choice 1: Skip. Choice 2: Watch. Then some games, oddly, allow you to fast-forward through them.

As a result, video game players and participants in video media in general tend to present two types of video. You can skip this or you are not allowed to skip this. Video games, television, web videos, heck, video advertising in general all subscribe to this binary choice.

The problem is perspective. For almost all video engagements, only one point of perspective is presented and one line of narrative. Participants are only presented with the whole of the screen and its single focus. Despite our allegiance to single viewpoint video the technology (starting with …

By integrating choice and multiple user-controlled viewpoints into the game, Dead Space 2 provides a refreshing alternative to traditional video game cut scenes

Related posts:

1. Whoever wrote the ending to Red Dead Redemption is one dumb cowpoke [Reasoned Reviews]
2. First Episode of Patriot Games!
3. Drawn by Pain [Cool Stories]

By integrating choice and multiple user-controlled viewpoints into the game, Dead Space 2 provides a refreshing alternative to traditional video game cut scenes

Related posts:

1. First Episode of Patriot Games!
2. Whoever wrote the ending to Red Dead Redemption is one dumb cowpoke [Reasoned Reviews]
3. Conservatives Race to New Levels of Stupid Over Mass Effect