How Mass Effect Affected All My Modern Gaming Preferences

Mikkel: Right before I went off to St. Louis for college, I knew I wanted a game. I wanted something to satiate my gamer habits and it had to be for the PC since I wasn’t about to drag a console across the country, especially without a TV. I have a distinct memory of standing in the store with Dragon Agein one hand and Mass Effectin the other. I needed an RPG. I needed something in depth and epic. And in my heart, I am a tech nerd above all else, so I took Mass Effecthome with me. Mass Effect holds the distinction of being my first M-rated game. Mass Effect 3 holds the honor of being the only game that ever melted my graphics in my laptop and onto my mother. Mass Effect set me to be the Destiny player I am now. Out of the entire trilogy, I’ve always been partial to the original. It’s the only incarnation that I managed to play through multiple times, and the origin story of Shepherd meant a lot to me for a couple of different reasons. It was the first time in major gaming (for me) where I could get the protagonist to resemble me and a nice little training wheels shooter with lots of bombastic abilities. I was an engineer through my first run, a biotic in my second, and in round three I tried really hard to be a sentinel, which was not advisable back in ME1. I do appreciate ME2 for making the tech armor OP, but for me, I’m always going to think fondly of my heatsinks and the binary decision on the initial planets.

But ME1 also brought *the* Krogan, Urdnot Wrex. Wrex is the te…