Mass Effect is a balancing act between the kind of game Bioware wants to make and the kind of game that makes money. This isn't a bad thing; in fact, it's actually a very clever blend of simplicity and complexity, one that allows for a cinematic, once-over and its done experience while smashing at least three times the amount of informational bliss that accompanies any cleverly built world in every nook and cranny of the world.
The wheeled conversation system smartly organizes conversation in a fashion that leads to direct, human interactions, and considering this games age I find it a miracle it hasn't been absorbed into a hundred RPG's. It works, and it works exceptionally well with the realistic facial expressions and postures that each character adapts over the course of a conversation. What every conversation loses to the Paragon - Renegade balance that makes the main character Shepard an iffy balancing act between xenophobically ruthless and mindlessly angelic, it gains in the simple emotional power that talking to people has. I don't find Shepard a good character, as main characters often aren't - but the slight sacrifice of interaction with a difficulty has never stopped me from loving every individual piece.
Mass Effect 2 finds the moral uncertainty that the first game didn't have, and it does it while massively improving the balance and interaction of combat, dialogue, and story. I'm not super keen on the way the game shifts from Alliance two shoes to Renegade flunky - adopted by an agency that I've had clearly unpleasant run-ins with in the past, I am forced by the game to adopt a string of people who each have at least one unpleasant mental defect from a Paragon standpoint. But space, and the plot, are clearly open to me as much as it was before: why I am compelled to follow an openly xenocentrist directive as part of the plot seems a little mystifying.
Din's Curse is probably a bad game, but has amazing concepts that drive what some people might call emergent gameplay. Essentially it plays like a heavily complex Diablo clone with shittier graphics than the original, where dungeons actually threaten the town landscape. After taking a quest to kill the boss on level 3, one will find that the boss will, after about two or three minutes, spawn a bunch of skeletons on level 2 (starting a whole new questline), and, after five, send a hero skeleton assassin to start killing random people inside the town. We quickly had to run up and dispatch him, but not before we lost a few civilians in the process.
Logan was AFK for the five minute that the game was fun unfortunately: After depriving the major boss of his lichly burden of unlife, I went back up to level 2 to kill another boss who had already created two uprisings of hellhounds, just after I received a quick text that he had declared war on a rival clan of orcs. Finding the hallway I had missed to the room I had ignored, I entered upon a bloodbath - demon dogs and orc hounds running every which way, archers and mages and sorcerers spraying each other with projectiles. By the time I cleared the room I'd completed all the quests, though I couldn't tell you how or why, only that in the blood-soaked ruin of copper coins and damaged support beams, I, and I alone, had saved the town from true destruction.
Well, that was like good writing. We shall have to do this again sometime.
