Much like Mass Effect‘s Commander Shepard, we return to action completely rejuvenated and analyse BioWare‘s most ambitious release yet.

Making this review was ridiculously time-consuming not just on account of my shoulder injury, but also because Mass Effect 2 has so much notable content! Of course, it’s not always the good kind of notable, but even when it fails, it fails spectacularly. I’ve really surprised myself by keeping the video under twenty minutes, as I could have easily done a Let’s Play of the whole thing.

As such, a lot of scenes were canned but, hey, maybe they’ll find their way into Mass Effect 3…

Special thanks to DM of the Rings and Darths & Droids, two genius webcomics that helped me illustrate a point in the review!

Bioware, one of my all-time favourite developers, nick their flawless record by releasing the relatively botched Mass Effect for the X360.

In unrelated news, if you receive a complimentary review copy of a game and want that to keep happening, make sure to only write glowing reviews. Unless, of course, you care about things like integrity.

Anyway, back on topic, as this review predicted, the PC version came soon after and was indeed superior and worthy of purchase, even though it did stir up a lot of controversy with its overwhelming piracy protection measures. Overall, Mass Effect is poised to be a memorable trilogy, so long as the follow-ups show a bit more care and attention to detail than the original.

Trying to lighten the workload as I peruse the freshly released Nintendo Wii, I take another look at Pressfield and review Tides of War.

I opt to avoid reviewing more than one title in the same franchise as much as I can: I rarely focus solely on the game reviewed, but also touch upon the series it belongs to as a whole, so I am afraid reviews of two sequels would appear too much alike.

However, since the entertainment industry is infected with sequelitis, reviewing multiple entries in the same franchise is inevitable, so I figured it was high time to give it a try. With my book reviews not gathering nearly as much attention as those of video-games, Pressfield’s historical fiction series was a safe place to experiment on and things apparently turned out relatively well.

After attaining some degree of notoriety with my popular Football Manager and PES articles, I decided to bum everyone out with a book review. Few were better candidates for the spotlight than Steven Pressfield‘s Gates of Fire.

At the time, there was a slight buzz surrounding Frank Miller‘s graphic novel 300 making the transition to the big screen and it was quickly apparent that people would quote it like crazy.

The line on everyone’s mouth was, of course, “This! is! Sparta!”, but I was far more entertained by the historically documented “then we’ll have our fight in the shade” retort I had already seen on Pressfield’s book.

Pressfield’s “through the eyes of the sidekick” technique absolutely blew me away when I first read it and I knew I’d inevitably write about him, eventually. The timing finally seemed right and, even though Last of the Amazons is my favourite, I said my piece on Pressfield through his Gates of Fire.

Maybe we’ll get to Amazons when the Wonder Woman movie is approaching for reals.

I remember a menacing figure telling me: “Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed. The novelty of moving pictures is insignificant next to your Knights of the Old Republic review.”

It might have been a dream.

Getting ready for the bonus d-day review of Football Manager, I decided to re-examine one of my all-time favourite games: Knights of the Old Republic. The piece also includes a glance at the sequel and a nod to Mass Effect, then still in development.

My love for Bioware was probably apparent, which led some people to believe I’d be very interested in reviewing Mass Effect and that I would love it by default. Surprisingly though, it turns out I am quite objective when push comes to shove.