Keeping up with my contrarian tendencies to buy and play games way after they’re released rather than blow my money right away on the latest whatchamacallit like all the good fanbois are supposed to, I have finally started to play Mass Effect. I picked it up mainly because it supposedly has good writing and character development and an awesome dialogue system. While I already like the latter, [1] I haven’t gotten far enough into the game to make an informed judgement about the former, so I’ll leave that for later.

I will, however, say that the first impressions I get from the narrative are mixed. It may just be my personal preferences talking, but I think it takes itself too seriously. It seems to be a bog-standard “we have to save the world!” space opera plot, and the characters occupy a bit of a weird space, not being cheesy enough to be campy or unintentionally funny, but at the same time, too far removed from reality for their supposedly-weighty concerns to be all that interesting. It might just be a problem I have with the sci-fi/action genre in general.

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I heard about this upcoming adventure game called Mata Hari some time ago, and found it rather intriguing. A Belle Époque period piece, with story-relevant gameplay innovations, designed by a pair of LucasArts veterans… sounds like a guaranteed hit for a highbrow game snob like me, doesn’t it?

That is, until I saw the proposed box art, which has the titular character scantily-clad and posed like she’s on the cover of freakin’ Maxim or something. Granted, she’s a prostitute, but back in the day, people practicing the world’s oldest profession looked more like this, so there’s honestly no reason to go with that kind of look unless you’re appealing to the adolescent male market. Which most AAA games pretty much do, because apparently, common business sense dictates that women don’t have any disposable income for games because they’re busy spending it all on shoes.

The problem with Mata Hari in particular is that it’s part of a niche genre whose target audience, as I alluded in my last post, actually does consist of a significant percentage of women, many of whom are too old to tolerate such childishness. Advertising to teenage boys is only going to exclude that market… and leave everyone else disappointed by the fact that oops, the game isn’t really about ogling almost-naked ladies! Why no one on the marketing team realised this baffles me. Let’s just hope the box art isn’t final, and the folks in charge magically come to their senses and fix it before the game’s release.

Another month, another Round Table topic. This time, it’s on games based on the intellectual property of Hollywood movies, the very bane of my existence. They contribute to what I believe is the continuing destructive public impression that games, rather than being an art form in their own right, are nothing more than toys, to be lumped in with all the lunch boxes and action figures. Hence, it’s very hard for me to get excited about games that are based on movie IP… or any other kind of non-original IP for that matter. [1]

It is therefore interesting that my first-ever commercial project was CSI: Hard Evidence, [2] and even more interesting that it was a project I actually enjoyed working on. Beforehand, I hadn’t ever watched a single episode of CSI, and given the choice of projects at Telltale Games in 2006, I would have much rather worked more on Sam & Max instead. That said, as a newly-minted programming intern entering the industry for the first time, I was grateful to work on just about anything, so I sucked it up and jumped into my new role with enthusiasm.

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