Perhaps a better title for this column should be my two months in gaming. I haven't written a column in two months but that doesn't mean I haven't been gaming. Quite the contrary really, I have been gaming instead of writing... and Tim has been letting me know it. Enough chat... ONTO THE GAMES!

Bioware proves once again that Western developers can create quality RPGs, in fact I'm hoping some Japanese developers *cough* Square-Enix *cough* will take note. I was a huge fan of Star Wars Knight of the Old Republic, KOTOR 2 was fun but it didn't feel the same and then there was Jade Empire. I enjoyed the setting and characters, but the game felt rushed and the story was lame. Bioware appeared to be going in downward spiral, at least in my eyes, but then on November 20 Bioware released Mass Effect upon the eager public.

The game was well worth the wait. I preordered my copy online; I spent a total of 86 dollars making Mass Effect the most expensive video game I have ever purchased. The ten-dollar overnight shipping really hurt but I couldn't wait any longer for this game.

Mass Effect is set a couple hundred years in the future where humans have begun to explore the traverse outside of the Milky Way Galaxy. But humans aren't the only ones exploring the traverse. Mass Effect introduces a lot of alien races and these aren't your Star Trek original series aliens either. Great detail has gone into the creation and history of each of the alien races, making them unique in both appearance and culture. So much information about these aliens is spread throughout the traverse just waiting for the player (Commander Shepard) to discover.

The story is fantastic. Yes it's your standard "save the galaxy from an evil bad guy" plot, but it's done in such a way that makes it believable. There are so many subplots that weave in and out of the main plot and everything is brought together in the end. The pacing of the story is incredible and proves that video games can tell an interactive narrative worthy of any other type of media.

Is the game perfect? No, but damn close. There are some small flaws: at times it takes a few seconds for textures to load, it can be difficult reading the text in some environments, the auto save function could use some work and the game did crash on me a few times. But these are only minor problems. My only real issue with the game is the item management and organization, or I should say, the lack of. I would have liked to see the items split up by category: weapons, armor, upgrades, etc., but instead they are just presented in one long list. Also, you can equip characters with weapons they can't use... what's the point of doing this? I really wished they would have took some time to organize the inventory... maybe an update will fix it, but I'm not too optimistic.

The voice acting in Mass Effect is awe-inspiring; a video game has never done it better. The dialogue trees are so varied that you can really get into creating the personality of your character. Doing this allows for different experience each time you play. In fact, Mass Effect is one of the only RPGs that I re-played immediately after beating it for the first time. It took me 33 hours to beat it the first time and I didn't even complete 50% of the game! There is so much to see and do and there are so many cool aliens to talk to, this game never gets old... and who knows what the downloadable content will bring.

I took a break from Mass Effect a few days ago to play a PS2 RPG that I have been meaning to start: Star Ocean: Till the End of Time. I was a big fan of Star Ocean: The Second Story for PS1 so I had high hopes for the PS2 sequel. Now Star Ocean: Till the End of Time and Mass Effect share a lot in common. Both are set in the future, they allow the player to explore numerous planets filled with aliens and they have a feature that keeps track of all the information you uncover while playing (Mass Effect has the codex and Star Ocean has a dictionary).

I tried to enjoy Star Ocean, I really did. But Mass Effect has set the bar so high for what a console RPG should be it was hard to look past Star Ocean’s many flaws. Case in point: let’s look at two alien races, one from Mass Effect and one from Star Ocean. In Star Ocean there is a powerful race of aliens from the planet Klaus III known as Klausians. The gravity on Klaus III is much higher than on Earth, so the Klausians are stronger than earthlings. The appearance of the Klausians is exactly the same as humans except that they have green lines along their necks… real original.

The Krogan are a species of large reptilian bipeds native to Tuchanka, a world known for its harsh environments, scarce resources and over-abundance of vicious predators. Krogans reproduce at an extremely high right and are vicious fighters and colonizers. A biological weapon known as the Genophage was unleashed on them to curb their reproduction rates. Now only 1 in 1000 Krogan births are successful.

So much more time went into the creation of the Krogan species than did the Klausian species. The history and appearance of the Krogans make seem as if they could be real… or at least plausible. But the Klausians are just a lazy excuse for an alien race.

The voice acting in Star Ocean is absolutely terrible. In the Japanese version they used a top notch cast not in the English speaking version though. I got to the point where I had to turn the dialogue off and just read the text boxes. It’s too bad they didn’t include the Japanese dialogue as well; it could have saved this game for me. Compare this to the voice acting in Mass Effect, which is worthy of a Hollywood film. The conversations feel real and allow for the player to direct the course of what is being said. Gone are the days of talking to villagers who are always standing in the same place, doing nothing and saying the same thing over and over again.

I think I could have enjoyed Star Ocean: Til the End of Time, but only if I would have played it before playing Mass Effect. After five hours with the game I got fed up and went back to playing Mass Effect... and I haven't looked back. Mass Effect is one of those games that makes you proud to own the 360. If you don't have it yet, do yourself a favor and pick it up. And if you do, tell 'em John sent ya!