Mass Effect 2 PS3 Preview and Comic Overview
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The brief digital comic starts shortly after the playable introduction to Mass Effect 2 on the PS3. That introduction won't surprise Xbox 360 and PC players who have been able to experience it since the second Mass Effect game launched in January of this year, but let's not ruin things for Sony-only players. A PlayStation 3 gamer will start the game, pick a gender and look for their version of the series' hero Commander Shepard, will play the opening sequence and then reach the comic.
The comic recounts the main story of the first Mass Effect. It also exposes what I hadn't realized were the surprisingly few key decisions players made in the first game. Maybe the six choices do set up a lot of consequence, but it was odd for me, someone who spent well over 20 hours playing the first Mass Effect, to see that the actions I took could be presented in a brisk re-telling with a mere half-dozen narrative forks. Some forks involve who lives and who dies during Commander Shepard's quest to save the galaxy. One involves sex. There's some politics too.
Mix up your responses and you get more than 700 permutations, if I'm remembering my middle-school math correctly. That makes the six choices available feel not so slim a picking after all. It also presents PlayStation 3 owners with one of the only bragging points they can make to Xbox 360 and PC players who have a more than three-year advantage in Mass Effect experience: the PS3 player can re-play the comic at the beginning of Mass Effect 2 repeatedly with each new start of the game, crafting a new Mass Effect 1 history for Shepard in just a few minutes. The player can then see how any tweaks affect the story of Mass Effect 2. What if you made some pivotal decision pivot differently? It's easier to test on a PS3. You don't have to replay many hours of Mass Effect 1 and import the save file over.
