Now let me be clear, this isn’t a request for more violent games. I’m fine with violent games – something ignorant people all over the globe think will be the downfall of mankind, but that’s not what this is about.

I was initially taken aback a bit when it became clear that the largest DLC for Mass Effect 2 (Overlord) was about Geth. I wasn’t sure why, but now that I’m going through it, it becomes clear that it isn’t the fiction bit that I have a problem with – the Geth are quite fascinating, but the combats themselves:

I feel nothing.

And yet I remember enjoying the ME2 combat system very much during parts of the campaign. As I recall those moments, however, I can only points out to combats against Organics. Because that’s what’s happening here: I don’t care that I’m mowing down dozens of Geth, because they’re only Geth to me; the times it felt like I was truly going to combat were those times I had to go through squads of screaming, cursing and oozing Organics.

And I guess this comes from what Mass Effect is about to me: an epic story about sacrifice – except it’s not always mine. As I’m playing as a 100% renegade, the fiction in my mind is as follows: I have a mission of supreme importance to accomplish, and the loyalty and secondary missions (those with mercenaries) were simply delaying my oh-so-important mission. So I slaughtered them.

And it was a great feeling to buy into this larger fiction, this tale of horrors done for the greater good. But dismantling 22nd Century tin cans is taking that away from me.

So please BioWare, make the next DLC a bit more fresh, will you?

A lot of people have been asking about why they’d put the boring stuff in Heavy Rain. I think the goal is simply to lower the Emotional Baseline: most games are all about the shooting (or the action of some kind). Now there might be some more subtlety in the storyline, but it’s usually told through cinematics or non-interactive means, so every time the player does have the controller in hand, he’s always right there in the middle of the action, killing dozens, business as usual. By resetting the Emotional Baseline to a lower (mundane) level, the developers made it so that when something out of the ordinary happens, it does feel like something out of the ordinary to the player.

Or at least I think. Can somebody get me a PS3 over here ?!

It’s actually done only every single time in movies: rare are the ones that start with action right off the bat; it always begins with the hero living his ordinary, everyday life, right before the terrorists/aliens/bad guys show up.