Mass Effect is back for a new generation

I understand if you're still enjoying your time with the tall vampire lady. A lot of people are. We gave it a near-perfect score. But there's a different dating sim back on the market: Mass Effect. When I say that Mass Effect is back for a "new generation" of gamers, I mean it's back for PC, PS4, and Xbox One. That notably does not include PS5 and Xbox Series X.

What I mean when I say new generation of gamers is: Mass Effect is kind of old now. At least the original trilogy. And definitely the first Mass Effect. This series launched in 2007, my dude. There are teenagers getting ready for their learner's permit that were born after Mass Effect launched. Even if that example sounds extreme, we still have some very knowledgeable and experienced gamers on staff that just never got around to Mass Effect, and are using this launch as an excuse to finally check it out. I envy them. Playing this series again for the first time is one of those wishes old gamers never get to expererience.

But 2007 was a heckuva year for video games. There are a lot of games launched that year that still hold venerable positions on the Board of Video Games Old Bloggers Refer To. Games like BioShock and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Portal and Assassin's Creed. There was The Witcher and the last Half-Life game we would ever get until VR reintroduced Alyx in 2020. World of Warcraft got its first expansion, Burning Crusade. Even lesser-known hits like The Darkness (a personal favorite) and Crackdown carved out 2007 as one of the best years in gaming—and I'm holding back.

So, there I was in 2007, still on my first of three Xbox 360 consoles that would Red Ring, a nefarious breakdown that went above and beyond acceptable rates of hardware failure. And Fox News aired a horribly titled segment called "SE"XBOX, where they made Liara T'soni (the "blue alien lady") the face of pornographic decadence. Geoff Keighley, venerated game journalist, is actually in that Fox News segment, too, though he's maybe a little more standoffish than necessary. But hey, a psychology expert threw a laughable study into the mix that said boys can't tell the difference between video games and real life, so, yeah. "We gotta go, we gotta go," the host says after that. 

Oh hey look, there's a launch trailer today for Mass Effect Legendary Edition. All three games of the original trilogy, remastered with visual enhancements, technical improvements, and gameplay adjustments. Most of those improvements hit the first game, since Mass Effects 2 and 3 had things pretty much figured out by then. All the DLC guns, armor, missions, and companions. Too bad you couldn't DLC even more softcore "glance at a side boob" sex scenes. I'll stop there. Probably getting in trouble with the family rating on this site right now. It's all single-player stuff, though. It broke the developer's heart when it had to leave multiplayer on the cutting room floor this time. I personally won't miss it, but I can imagine it's hard for a developer to let that much of their baby go.

Mass Effect Legendary Edition launched on PC (finally giving the series gamepad support  on there), PS4, and Xbox One on May 14. It's the number one seller on Steam right now, by the way. Pretty good pull there, Valve.