Save the Robot – Chris Dahlen

So this is my last Mass Effect post. Two things: From now on, I’m going to call it Ass Effect, in honor of all the writhing blue ladies stocked throughout the game.

Second: Like other recent BioWare games, Mass Effect feels lumpy. It’s cinematic, with long, movie-like sequences – and even though you can nudge the dialogue, I still found myself doing my bills in front of the screen, an honor I usually reserve for The Colbert Report. At the same time, you’ve got shoot-outs. You even have to aim and take cover. When you’re flying around in your big space ship, you zip around a 2-D map of the galaxy – but before you get to whale on the alien flora and fauna, you have to take down notes on the mineral content of Whoozitarius and the length of the day on Badabingus. In fact, there’s a ton of text content to read through if you feel like it, about the aliens, the worlds, the histories, the technologies – and when you pick up new information, the game doesn’t even stop to make you read the dialog – it just gives you a little “ding” to tell you that you’ve written something in your codex, and you can look it up at your leisure.

When I put on my game critic hat – which looks something like this –

- I don’t like lumpy games; I like well-balanced, seamless games, where every element comes together into one killer experience – like Half-Life 2, or Portal, or Jets ‘N’ Guns GOLD.

But Mass Effect gave me an idea. Why should you have only one way to experience this game?

I’ve been looking for games that work on multiple platforms. Skyrates supports a Flash web client, e-mail, and instant messaging, but it’s still a relatively casual game. But let’s look at what you could do with Mass Effect.

- Play the game on your XBox

- Use your cell phone or a Flash client to keep your ship flying around the galaxy – maybe for a trade game, a la Skyrates. (This wouldn’t fit neatly into the story, but there must be some kind of errands you could send the ship on, to keep them busy when you don’t have time to play.)

- Use your cell phone or a Flash client to visit some of these random planets and play little mini-games on them.

- The cinematic content is great. Why not give you the option to sit back and watch a couple hours of it – to pipe it to your TV and watch the protagonist walk around talking to the other characters, following the romance stories, and getting into arguments? You would lose the interactive dialogue options, but the game could pick a script that follows the way you’ve been playing: if you’re compassionate, you’ll see the compassionate version of each scene.

- And as for all that background story stashed in the game – as you unlock it, the game should throw it on a personalized website so you can read it at your leisure when you’re at work.

Mass Effect’s biggest hook is the story – the giant, space operatic narrative and grand backdrops and smokin’ dead aliens at your feet. You want the big-budget game to get that big-budget experience. But adding more platforms won’t dilute that – it’ll just suck you in deeper, and make you more excited for the main show – beating the boss battle, on the XBox 360, in a world you now know inside and out.

Tomorrow I’m headed to the Future of Entertainment conference at MIT, where some of the brightest lights in the multimedia biz will talk about when you’ll be able to watch a movie on your iPhone while playing the online game in another window and tapping into the ARG using the built-in GPS – and then remix it all and post it to YouTube. Raph Koster for one wants games that support multiple platforms; Mass Effect offers a template for how you could do it right.