Aram Zucker-Scharff

It would be fair to say that Mass Effect 2 received universal acclaim from critics when it was released. It didn’t deserve it. Whatever the reason, the game journalism community gave ME2 a critical pass.

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 first post will look at some significant flaws with characters in the game.

10: Mordin the geeksploitation.

Mordin’s character is the geek on the team. While the rest of your team have superpowers or are action stars, Mordin’s the guy who spends the time he isn’t in your squad sitting around doing research in the lab. Mordin, “the professor,” is a stand-in for the average video-game-playing audience, or at least the type of person who’s expected to like the RPG-stylings of the original Mass Effect.

How is he characterized then?

I don’t care anymore when George Lucas abuses Star Wars. But when BioWare gets the licence? That’s exciting. Star Wars The Old Republic is no exception. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oy-2E4YQpU[/youtube] I mean, that’s only one of the many trailers I’ve watched and it alone gets me more excited to play the game than all the Brewmasters in Pandaria. […]

Image via Wikipedia

In which Rockstar chooses to whistle Dixie.

I finished Red Dead Redemption and it was a fairly fun game. Despite excessive horse riding, I enjoyed myself. Then I got to the end and I never wanted anything to do with the game again. This is why.

Below are spoilers, so if you intend to play through Red Dead yourself do so and come back.

Rockstar has a tendency to write reluctant protagonists. Manhunt dealt with a main character forced into action by a threat to his family. San Andreas’s CJ Johnson falls into working with an antagonist to help his own family. Niko Bellic, from GTA4, wouldn’t stop whining about how he wanted to live the American dream in peace, even while he was shooting people. Red Dead is no exception. The main character, John Marston, is so eager to be done with his mission he practically gets killed in the first 30 minutes of the game.

Unlike previous Rockstar protagonists, Marston is justifiably reluctant to go on an armed rampage. Our player character is an ex-outlaw and the FBI is holding his family hostage to get him to kill off his old running buddies. He tried to get out and …

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 …