Let me set the scene for you: It’s the last Friday of January. My 2010 HP Pavilion laptop is my third consecutive laptop which starts to experience major issues. It still ran but it was slower than my nearly 30-year-old Macintosh SE. I tried starting it up when I get home from work but it’s dead. It won’t go past the splash screen. The hard drive has seized up and won’t go any more. Apart from some photos and some old radio show clips, I’ve lost nearly everything from the last two years of my life.

Why do I bring that up at the start of a Mass Effect review? I’m one of the many who played the Mass Effect series on PC. My three Shepards and two games worth of story were lost. When I got my computer back two weeks later (with a new hard drive), it was back to Eden Prime to stop the Reapers. And since I had to do everything over from scratch, I thought it would be fun to re-review Mass Effect some four years after coming out for PC (five years after XBox 360) to see how hindsight affects how we perceive the game and how it influenced games since. Continue reading →