My direct experience of the Mass Effect series is fairly limited, something which I plan to rectify. I have, however, spent a decent amount of time watching my friends play. If my half-playthrough of the original and observations of these friends are anything to go by, the games are satisfying to play, well designed and generally as issue free as you could ask a video game to be.
However, the most fun I’ve had with the series is when I visited a friend of mine when he was in the middle of a combat intensive mission in the second of the games. His two teammates were Jack and Miranda for this particular campaign. Throughout the course of the ensuing firefights, I noticed something which I found particularly funny. Whenever the party members’ shields are broken and they continue to sustain direct damage, they vocalise their pain, and none too quietly either. The alternating, drawn out hysterical screams of both Miranda and Jack had me buckled over on the bed, clutching my stomach and laughing to the point that my chest and throat hurt. Every time one would quieten down about their discontent, the other would start up. It didn’t matter what the characters were doing; if they were walking calmly towards you at the end of a battle or returning fire on an enemy, or ragdolling onto the ground as the last of their health was depleted, they would continue to scream until the sound file had exhausted itself. The spectacle was, for me, one of the most amusing I’ve seen or heard in a video game.
This experience (and the chagrin of my less amused friends) got me thinking about my attitude toward video games in general, and I realise I have two different premises for appreciating a game, and that in special cases, both can apply to the same game.
The first is the more obvious of the two. When a game’s design is tight, it’s fun to play and the experience of playing it is a memorable one, or if it has affected you in a positive manner. Games can be high-octane and intense, in the manner of Split Second and the previously mentioned Mass Effect. They can be moving and provocative and beautiful, as with Journey. They can be over the top and bizarre, like Katamari Damacy and Rhythm Paradise. Or they can be unforgiving but extremely rewarding, like Dark Souls. The games which score you would struggle to give less than a 7/10, even if it isn’t your style. This one’s simple, and I doubt many would disagree that it’s a good premise by which to value a game.
The second category is dedicated to games which amuse for reasons not always intended by the developers, and generally not looked fondly upon by my peers. Again, I’ll emphasise that there’s a lot of potential for overlap between the two categories, and that a game that is found in the second is not exempt from fulfilling conditions in the first.
I played Oblivion for hours and hours on end, exploiting the hilarious glitches, observing the bizarre NPC interaction and installing mods to, essentially, fuck up the game. My favourite videos of the Grand Theft Auto games are if the peculiar interactions between cars and swing sets, and most of my in-game time was spent standing at the top of a tall flight of stairs, nudging passerby’s and watching them ragdoll to their doom. When my against-all-odds recovery from imminent doom in Super Smash Bros., or conversely when a powerful series of attacks being chained onto my opponent is suddenly, shall we say, hampered by a random bob-omb, I can get faux-mad at my friends because they lucked out in a game not designed to be perfectly balanced or predictable. When Heavy Rain allows for a main character to continuously scream “SHAUN” at the press of a button throughout an entire cutscene, my lungs end up aching. When the camera in Sonic Generations gets so utterly bamboozled by my incredible haste that it locks itself in entirely the wrong position, leaving me or my friends to rush headlong into oncoming traffic or off the stage all together, I yell “what the actual fuck”, but there’s still a huge smile on my face.
It’s gotten to the point where if a game is flawed in a similar sense, it adds, rather than detracting from the appeal. I’ll play games in search of abusable ‘features’, and readily endorse them to my friends. I don’t know if this makes me a bad gamer. I don’t know if attitudes like that are ultimately unhealthy for long-term game design. I don’t really care though. All I know is that if the fifteen Dark Elf Warriors I spent 5 minutes summoning decide to simultaneously leap off of the map to their death, M A is getting L’d O.
Craig "Nancy" McAuley 