Mass Effect is back and guess what? It's like, pretty much what I remember. And what I remember fuckin RULES.

Mass Effect is a series that lives outside of time as we know it. It is eternal. The first real video game saga. A lot of people like to compare Mass Effect to Star Wars. This is incorrect. It fails to grasp the true magnitude of how great, how impactful, how everlasting Mass Effect is. Mass Effect IS the Odyssey of video games. It's Beowulf; it's Canterbury Tales; it's the Magna Carta; it's the Rosetta Stone. It's the Expanse BEFORE people knew that they wanted the Expanse.

Mass Effect 1 created video games. You can actually draw a line of video game history pre Mass Effect and post Mass Effect. Mass Effect 1 came out in 2007. According to Eurogamer.net, the best video game of 2006 was The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess was NOT a video game; it was a 26 hour long tutorial.

What was the best game of 2008? Mass Effect 2. 2009? Mass Effect 2. 2021? Mass Effect 2.

Mass Effect 2 IS a perfect sequel AND a perfect AAA game. It came back with a bigger budget, and, in a move that most developers still cannot replicate, Bioware actually used it to make the game BETTER. The combat is tighter. The menus feel better. There are more companions AND they're all as good, if not better, than the companions from the first game (no easy task).

Mass Effect 2 was the peak of downloadable content. There has never been a piece of downloadable content that reaches the quality of Lair of the Shadow Broker. I am in love with Liara T'Soni. I'm going to ask her to marry me, and she will say yes. Do you know what kind of DLC came out after Lair of the Shadow Broker? Fortnite's battle pass. Fornite is a game for children. You can't have sex with aliens in Fornite. You can in Mass Effect 2.

Mass Effect 3 succeeds in the impossible task of wrapping up a trilogy, and only takes a slight stumble toward the end. Honestly, the end isn't even that bad. It's just that we're so used to Mass Effect figurately and literally knocking it out of the park that anything short of perfect feels subpar. And the ending is fine. It works if you think about it for a couple of seconds. You owe Mass Effect a couple of seconds of consideration. You know what didn't wrap up a trilogy in the right way? Those new Star Wars movies. Now I haven't seen those movies, but the way people talk about them, let me just say that Mass Effect 3 does it way better than Episode 9. The multiplayer part was surprisingly good too.

Mass Effect is the most influential video game series of all time. Play through Mass Effect 1, and you will realize that Breath of the Wild would have never existed with out it. Link is an evolution of the Mako. The planetary exploration speaks for itself. Gears of War would have never gotten sad if Mass Effect didn't tell people that you could have a narrative in your third person shooter video game. Mass Effect literally created Spec Ops the Line, and you love that game.

Elden Ring found me at a transitory part of my life. The cultural shift to work from home due to the pandemic allowed me to purchase and move into my first house on March 30th, 2022. In the following weekends since that time, I've wandered through this house while performing some much needed updates, and the whole time I can't help but wonder what the story of this place is. The selling agent told me that the house was previously owned by a husband and wife who lived here with their four children.

There is not enough space in this house for four children. The upstairs has two bedrooms. One, I imagine, was used for the husband and wife. I am now using this bedroom as an office; it has a door. The other bedroom on is slightly larger, and is what I am using for my own bedroom. This room did NOT have a door. I've heard stories of parents who don't respect their childrens' privacy taking the doors off their bedrooms. I have to imagine the 4 children crammed into the room that now houses my queen sized bed grew up, generally, without any sort of privacy. Perhaps the door removal wasn't even malicious on the parents' part. It's totally possible that there wasn't ever enough room in the bedroom for a door and the necessary 4 beds.

Which makes me wonder why they didn't convert the large downstairs living room into a bedroom. You could even fit 2 bedrooms down there if you wanted to. Maybe some of the children did sleep down there. I'm not sure.

The owners left me a poorly written note about the light switches that control the outside lights. I've spent weeks trying to decipher the arcane method with which the previous owners turned off the LED floodlights; and, for the most part, I've failed. The guidance from the Elder owners left me feeling confused and lost.

The note, combined with the NRA stickers that were slapped on both the front AND rear doors of the house caused me to wonder whether lead could be present in the water. It's in a lab being tested right now.

All that to say, I've spend a lot of time thinking about the history of this place and how I'm going to change it.

Elden Ring feels like a game burdened by its history. How can you possibly create the next Dark Souls? We've seen something like this in the past. Little game (Dragon Age: Origins/Dark Souls) becomes something of a cult hit. It sells a LOT, but the sequels never quite live up to the original. Years go by, you make Mass Effect & Sekiro, some people like you, others don't. What the People really want though, is another of those Dark Souls games. But you can't just make Dark Souls 4.

So you make Dragon Age: Inquisition. You cram their face full of so much Dark Souls that they'll be satisfied for the next 25 years. You make the world so large, so densely packed with enemies and hidden dungeons and items and vistas and forts and other NOUNS that a player can easily spend over 100 hours exploring the digital landscape you've created.

But for what? What is gained by making the world so large? Dark Souls already had beautiful vistas, it had multitudes of memorable encounters, it had hidden dungeons and forts. It already had things! The quasi-open world nature of Dark Souls allowed for a game where encounters, either with enemies or with the environment, could be scripted. We all remember how to navigate the world of Dark Souls 1, and that's because it has intended, scripted pathways. How do you get from the depths in Dark Souls back to Fireline Shrine? There are a million ways, different paths, some hidden. It lights up the part of your brain that you use for navigation in such a novel way that even thinking about how to get from point A to point B is fun. In Elden Ring, you get on your horse.

That's my biggest issue with the game. When Elden Ring is Dark Souls, it's amazing. Scaling castles, hopping from roof to roof, uncovering shortcuts, challenging boss fights, fashionable clothes, it's all there. But where Dark Souls carefully guides you from moment to moment, vista to vista, combat to combat, Elden Ring meanders. It's a pacing problem. You'll spend 10 hours in a mega-dungeon (fun!), then 5 wandering around a giant snowfield on your horse while you mash LB and wait for a dragon to die (boring!). I'm just not sure what the Dark Souls formula gains from switching to an open world.

It's frustrating. You can see the good ideas they had (and I do like the game quite a bit), but I can't help but feel like so much of the changes FROM made were because they didn't want to make Dark Souls 4, but Elden Ring ends up feeling like Dark Souls 4 anyway. It feels like a half measure, taking the familiar mechanics from Dark Souls and slapping them into an open world. It's not as innovative as it could be; it's just More.

There's this sense I got while playing Elden Ring of being burdened by the past. The decisions made by those who came before you that weigh on your mind. The compulsion to wear their shoes, to try to understand who they were, what thoughts they had. How could you ever make the next Dark Souls?

And just where did all those kids sleep, anyway?

Mechanically Inscryption is a fun deck builder (even as someone who doesn't like deck building games!). But if you're reading this review on this website then you're at least vaguely aware that this game does Things. I like the story it's telling, but it wasn't super impactful. There are two big challenges with the story the game is trying to tell.

1) I got the game off of steam and it's pretty well regarded - I know it's not some random piece of shareware.
2) This game came out after Undertale and I have no idea how you tell a meta video game story in a post Undertale-world. I'd like to see something more ambitious and weird if you're going to go down that route.

All that being said, Inscryption at the very least is entertaining and doesn't overstay its welcome.

A pretty good One Of Those games. You know the ones. I usually don't like them that much, I didn't even think Hollow Knight was that great. Death's Door has one additional dimension, but still, it's One Of Those. Very pleasant to look at and listen to. Gameplay was solid and kept me engaged for its shorter run time (this is a good thing, it didn't overstay its welcome)(I played this game right after finishing Elden Ring, and oh boy, you want to talk about overstaying a welcome. I'll be a little sad to remove Death's Door off my hard drive. Maybe I'll keep it there for a couple of extra days so it knows how much I appreciated it. Not like I did with Elden Ring. No sir, I finished that game and pop, off the hard drive it went). Puzzles weren't quite there but then again I didn't engage much with the optional content. Does that really annoying thing that seems to be a genre staple where you have to backtrack and use the things you unlocked to get all the Good Stuff in previous areas. Well, I'm stronger now and I know how to fight all the dudes here, so that seems kind of boring. I would like to see more of the map if it's there, but not enough to repeat content. I think there's a world where Death's Door encourages exploration without necessitating backtracking and this game vibes with me more.

Also, please for the love of god if you want me to backtrack, include a map. I don't need to get relost in areas I was already lost in once.

Really can't overstate how much I enjoyed the crow btw. Wicked cute.