Mass Effect

Standing in front of a giant Mass Effect 3 graphic at the BioWare booth at PAX Prime, Jennifer Hale seems out of place. In a sea of mostly young male gamers with eyes glazed over from either standing in line or staring at screens most of the weekend, Hale looks bright eyed and exudes excitement at being surrounded by, in her own words, “my people”...

Before you get started with this article, we’d like to begin with a very sincere, simple statement: we love BioWare a whole squishy huggy bunch. Their narratives are usually awesome and we’ve spent an embarrassing number of hours playing their games.

That said… with the recent release of Dragon Age 2, it dawned on us how many similarities there are in their recent games. It’s gotten to a point where we can immediately recognize an NPC archetype after only spending a couple minutes with the new character; we took some time to jot down a detailed guide of each of these copy-paste characters so you’ll know precisely how to act the moment they open their easily written mouths...

Mass Effect is one of the greatest series of this console generation – in the top three, easily. But even our dearest loved ones get on our nerves from time to time, like when they make you take really slow elevator rides, or clutter the whole house with piles of tedious inventory. It's better to get these things off your chest from time to time, rather than let everything build up, so here are our five biggest grievances with our dearly beloved space opera. We hate because we love...

As a Spectre, Commander Shepard is devoted to justice and security by any means necessary. And while most of us would still choose to guide him down the friendly Paragon path, Shepard's sweeping authority gives him the right to punch people in the face for any reason. So, with a galaxy at stake (and a vengeful gamer at the helm), his trip through the Mass Effect galaxy quickly devolve into pure assholery.

We don’t know much about Mass Effect 3. But we do know what we want to see before our personalized Commander Shepard saves the universe in the final chapter of the trilogy. Match your wish list against ours and let us know what you think…

The insidiousness of mind control is a major theme in Mass Effect, with the Reaper ship Sovereign slowly asserting its will on both Saren and Matriarch Benezia without either of them realizing what's happening until it's too late. The key to Sovereign's mind control is in its subtlety, and as the sound of Saren's track ebbs and flows, you can imagine the not quite audible background hum of Sovereign's influence seeping into his subconscious...

Two tracks inside!

The ending of Mass Effect 2 was quite the climax. Tense. Dramatic. Good. And, depending on your choices, maybe just a little bit sad. But what next? Obviously we don't know. Nobody does. Apart from maybe some people at BioWare.

Of course the absence of any actual fact-based Mass Effect 3 facts leaves the shuttle doors wide open for us to throw out a few educated guesses and optimistic wishes about what we think/hope will be in the

Though Mass Effect's interspecies lesbian sex scene will forever be emblazoned in the sensationalist headlines of 2007, the game was much more than sizzling blue vice. If you're new to the franchise, or just can't remember all the details about your snap decisions and their far-reaching consequences, this guide will bottom-line it for you. Our goal is not to be completist, but to make you conversant enough to enjoy the sequel.

Making games is hard. Making fun of them isn’t. It’s really, really easy, actually. Of course, we wouldn’t be so critical if we didn’t love them so damn much (and if we weren’t, you know, critics). We think games are just the bee’s knees, and that’s why we get so pissed about all the stupid crap they do

So, today is the day when George Bush finally - finally - exits the White House. His eight year stint in the presidential hot seat will be remembered for many things. Most of them bad and with terrifyingly global ramifications. But GamesRadar isn't the place to pick apart George W Bush's political legacy. No. That's what the rest of the internets is for.

Instead, we mark the historic momentousness of today by cooking up some