Thanks to the power of networking only a few years late I had the chance to play Mass Effect. Yes, the first one. I started off by loading up a save near the end of the game (contacts, okay) but after deciding it was probably spoiler-ridden, and after finding out that I couldn’t actually shoot my party members, I decided to start a new game. I knew this would not last long, so as I did with Fallout, I made the best of a short play time. You see in Fallout I made a psychopathic Latino woman (that hot Latin blood, Aye Chi Wa Wa! Or was that Chihuahua?) who was clearly the result of an affair that her mother had with anyone but her white as bread father. Well, a few years later she found out of this fact thanks to computer records in the hospital, and she was furious.

She exorcised the anger from her body by way of a vivisection carried out on the head of the honcho of the Vault. After which she flirted with his daughter, beat some of her class mates with a baseball bat, and almost got lucky with a giant cock roach. She had to try very hard not to kill the man’s daughter and wipe his family off the face of the earth for good, but her latent-lesbianism that she had not yet discovered did not let her. If I had been able to play for longer she no wonder would have discovered her self sexually after a very disappointing three way with three cock roaches that ended with her covered in cockroach man-eggs.

So as you can see I know how to make the most of short play times. I started out by calling my Shepherd “Sheep” and without any ambitions of lesbian teletubby sex I made Shepherd a woman. Then the fun began. While Mass Effect doesn’t have the deepest customization around, I managed to successfully make an Albino Goth Negro. She was ready to take the world on after her parents had abandoned her for these ailments. Err, just the emo part! One of my favourite rappers is Brother Ali! So with rap and albinism combined you can see I have nothing against either the people from Albino or the people from Afrimerica. Yes, I just used the famous Kevin-V defence!

So after the surprisingly mediocre at worst voice actors recounted my characters life story, and totally skipped over the text that wasn’t a repetition of what I’d already read, my character walked across the galley of a ship, walking directly towards people them pushing them out of their way as if it was their fault. The game started of action packed. I pulled my gun out and immediately fired the group. This gal was bad to the bone baby! Unfortunately her weapons were not, as they merely gave the crew a proton massage, but she proved her coldness by refusing to give the main characters on board a massage. So she gets evil points for that I suppose.

Then she started talking to a group of racists. Being an Albino Goth Negro she was obviously opposed to racism and said so. The better-than-mediocre voice acting suddenly started to drone on until it bothered her almost as much as sunlight. Well, I’m not a sadist so I couldn’t bear to see her suffer so. I started pressing space bar with a vengeance, unfortunately this meant that the character’s Botoxed faces twitched even more as they stumbled over their words, and even worse she started to accidentally begin sentences. Since when were skip and select the same button? Imagine if that was the case in Broken Sword! You’d have to listen to Khan’s speech at the Bull’s Horn over and over again only to accidentally select the handkerchief instead of hand buzzer. Then you’d have to do it all over again.

But eventually she made it past the Botoxed and met up with Lobster Face.  Now, while Lobster Face was clearly an alien of the lobster variety, he had no claws. Indeed, his Lobster Face was the only distinct alien feature he had. His neck looked much like Cristiano Ronaldo’s only judging by the colour of Lobster Face’s face, he’d been hanged by one of his two mandibles with a rope made out of Botox. Still, his voice was pretty cool. Anyway naturally there was some quest to save the universe that would finally give Sheep a chance to prove herself.

The ship landed, people died. Yet the combat was not the first thing I noticed as I stumbled through the Oblivion gate. No, Sheep’s outfit was as tight-fitting and revealing as Space: 1999’s Testicle-Fest flared jeans and high heels. There was a nipple in her camel toe for God’s sake! Now here’s where you’d think I’d say “thank God I didn’t play a male Shepherd” but unlike GameSpot I’m not a homophobe, and as such am perfectly comfortable with my sexuality.

After shooting some robots a cut scene broke out. A body was penetrated from behind by some aliens that looked like black lobster faces, which I thought was actually pretty offensive. Vegemite painted onto red lobsters is not in any way culturally sensitive. Another nipple-toed woman fled from them like a coward, and this was how I knew she’d join my party. It wasn’t long before she’d left it through death.

Eventually I found two people hiding in a shed. While I couldn’t shoot them, I could beat them down with my gun, and finally Sheep was in her element! She was throwing exploding Frisbees with finesse and killing survivors!  Eventually lobster face died. He was shot in the back as unfortunately he couldn’t turn his neck to check behind him because it was so badly Botoxed.

There was a sleepy guy behind a box who I could neither beat down nor shoot, so I played some more Frisbee to console my self. Eventually I arrived on a linear pathway, which was surprising given that this is meant to be a non-linear game. So disgusted with this resemblance to the horrible scourge that is the JRPG I stood around, letting the plasma blasts massage my fine physique. Unfortunately after many minutes of massaging I still wasn’t dead. Apparently casual difficulty had the hardcore gamer’s idea of casual in mind. Fact is, a casual gamer could have made their way through this with nothing but a balance ball.

I didn’t die, but my time was up so I’m afraid Sheep was never able to succeed in her quest of revenge against all the evil lobsters and teletubbies that once bullied her, but I imagine it probably wouldn’t have been a simple case of finding the artefact then using it to destroy human civilization. Actually, I imagine that the latter probably wouldn’t have been an option. Oh, and I didn’t even get up to the part with Marcus Fenix or HK-47! Still, the dead girl looked a little like the gal on the cover of Jade Empire. Only in even more revealing clothes and a bicycle helmet.

Oh, and the male Shepherd’s voice acting? Totally overrated.