Mass Effect

See you in six light-months. Worth: $50
based on the Xbox 360 retail

Billions and billions of hours of gameplay.*

Mass Effect looks great, sounds great, and plays great. It's got awesome storylines, characters, and settings. It's Oblivion and KOTOR and GRAW all crammed into one colossal experience. It redefines "Life" itself. As in, once you get this game, you won't have one.

The GamerGal gave us this for Xmas. That was three days ago, and since then she and I have played Mass Effect for over 40 hours. She's way ahead of me because she played KOTOR 1 & 2, so she's got the vibe on how BioWare likes you to play. I keep running and gunning past all the goodies, but I don't care because I'll do this game at least three more times.

You can find a very detailed description of this game at Wikipedia, but something I wasn't ready for was how beautiful the galaxy is. Zooming in on star clusters, then down to star systems, then down to planets is a completely new experience for me and one I'll never forget. (It's awesome like the BFG9000 from Doom 1 was awesome, but adjusted for today's inflated awe-dollars.) I really feel like I'm traveling the galaxy and landing on alien worlds (and killing everyone I find there).

More on this outstanding experience as the GamerGal and I go along...

* UPDATE Jan 8, 2008
Well, maybe not billions of hours of gameplay. I finished my first play-through in about 35 hours. That's doing most of the side quests, and rummaging around for a lot of the collectibles. I had a great time. I'm playing my second character as a fast-paced gun-toting guy who always says the most obnoxious thing possible and ignores anything not related to the main quest. I'll do a third character as a primarily magic character that will attempt to do 100% of the game.

* UPDATE Jan 15, 2008
Second character done. The endgame is the same, but the final cut-scene is very different from what I got with my first character. This guy got the "Completionist" achievement, so I may never bother to get all the collectibles as there are a _lot_ of them and hunting for them slows the game down. I've started a 3rd character and found out something about the game. If you get an Achievement with a certain weapon type (like Assault Rifles), your next character can take that weapon as a trainable skill, even if their class doesn't include it. You can only pick one of these bonus abilities per character, but it's a great bonus because now I can have all my characters be gun-toting freaks, even if they're otherwise all-magic.

1st character: name "Hungry Joe", class Infiltrator (guns and tech combo).
2nd character: name "MachineGun", class Soldier (gun-toting maniac).
3rd character: name"AssBlaster", class Engineer (tech specialist).