I finished Mass Effect 2 last week, and it was the first time I have ever voluntarily replayed a final boss fight in order to get the ending I wanted. I was super mad that I lost Mordin at the very end of the game, and I had to scour the Internet looking for tips on how to keep everyone alive. Thanks to IGN, I did.
Due to the huge release list that is about to come out, I can’t justify buying all of the DLC right now. At the same time, I don’t want to stop playing. I already knew that I wanted to play through both games again as a Renegade, so this weekend I tackled the first Mass Effect again.
This may not seem like such a big deal, especially since I know so many people who have played both games more than once, but this is huge for me. I have not replayed a game since Super Mario Bros. 3, The Legend of Zelda, Tetris, Dr. Mario, and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? What do these games have in common? They’re all from the 80s and early, early 90s. Not to mention, I have a huge stack of games (and guides!) I need to get through. I don’t have time to replay games these days. I honestly meant to replay inFamous (and I still might), but I never got around to it.
But for some reason, I have to replay Mass Effect and I have to replay them NOW. My only explanation for it is that I’m hopelessly addicted to the series.
This time, I’m playing as a guy, as a Vanguard, and I’m very Renegade. Sometimes it hurts me to make this new Shepard so mean, but it’s been very interesting to see how the jerk choices have changed how things went. It’s even more interesting to see that no matter what I choose, the Council still hates me. For example, as a Paragon, I let the Rachni Queen go. The Council chastised me for making a huge mistake and risking another horrific war across the galaxy. As a Renegade, I killed her. The Council scolded me for genocide. So really, Shepard can’t win.
To help me burn through the game more quickly, I’m minimalizing on the side missions and I’m playing on Casual. That makes the game ungodly easy. I rarely take cover at all, because the AI isn’t as powerful and they aren’t as smart. Their snipers don’t even hide! After two days of gameplay, I’m already at the Virmire sequence, and I’ve only died once, but that was because I flipped my Mako into lava. I wanted to see if I really could flip it over, and yeah, when there’s lava involved, you can.
I’m not in any huge rush to finish them; the only thing I definitely want done before Mass Effect 3 is to have all of the DLC done. I am forcing myself to take a step back this week so I can finish The 3rd Birthday, Lego Star Wars III, and maybe start on a new game, like Portal 2 or one of the many games in my stack of shame.
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