Most Poignant Gaming Moments of 2007
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3. Let's Get It On (Mass Effect)That last question is pretty funny, because despite Gamasutra's attempt to fit it into the context of the game's philosophy, it highlights exactly how BioShock failed on an epic level when it came to player choice.
Mass Effect contains enough player-driven story elements to occupy invested players for as long as they like the lore alone could equate to hours of gleeful reading for sci-fi buffs. And the character creation screen alone is a delightfully liberating exercise, one which it's easy to conceive of repeating over and over, just because you can.
We've never quite been able to shape a character in our mind's eye in a console title the way Mass Effect permitted us to, imbuing Shepard with a sense of personalized humanity before the game even begins but it doesn't stop there.
Shepard can make like humans do with one of his or her comrades as we know, because we've watched it on YouTube a million times. Though there's much more to the game than an alien lesbian sex scene, you can customize a female character down to the most minute of details, and then have her get it on with a female alien and it's not a hentai game.
Of course, gamers love visual thrills, but hopefully it's not too generous to say that the real feat is that Mass Effect is the first to understand our need for intimacy with our characters and their worlds, and to grant it to us to such an extent to give us a choice of partner, and to give us the option of declining those relations altogether (are you crazy?)
2. A Man Chooses, A Slave Obeys (BioShock)
Scenes that take control away from the player are nothing new. But in this pivotal situation, control is the crux of the issue having just realized that you are little more than the puppet of forces who want you to kill your own father, being able to take control might have saved you.
Morally and probably physically unable to fight his unfortunate son, Andrew Ryan makes the bequeathing of his principles his final act. It isn't the Little Sister choice or your inability to achieve redemption should you wish it that makes BioShock a linear game it's this moment, where both those wicked ones high on their plasmid-enhanced power and those careful agents of salvation must face their complete helplessness.
BioShock's real thought-provoking question isn't (harvest or rescue) would you have let Ryan live, if you could have?
