Mass Effect 2
System: Xbox 360
Developer: BioWare
NA
Release: January 2010
Back
when neon was king and Paula Abdul was coherent, environmental
matters were an issue of great media attention—by which I mean
exploitation.
The
global warning debate barely garners a yawn on the airwaves anymore,
but the '90s bombarded us with tons of bright, whimsical shows and
games that fell along the same general lines: Nature good! Big greedy
dirty corporations and their machines bad! Evildoers—you could tell
because they were ugly and often voiced by Tim Curry—sought to take
over worlds by pillaging them of their resources and overrunning
their dry, smoggy husks with metallic contraptions. These plans, of
course, would be foiled in extreme '90s fashion by wildly colored
characters like Captain Planet, Sonic the Hedgehog and Widget the
World Watcher.
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| You know! Widget! The World Watcher? Ah, forget it. |
Setting
things in space does change things significantly. In the Mass
Effect series, the metal of
ships and stations becomes a primary means of life, with the natural
settings of planets mere specks compared to the grand void of it all.
Still, I had to muse how the influence of environmental messages has
seemed to wane as I shotgunned probe after probe onto every planet I
could find to satiate the game's never-ending demand for natural
materials.
Mining
in Mass Effect 2 is a
simple matter of scanning planets from orbit and firing probes onto
locations that spike the readings. Whatever needed materials are
found there are automatically added to your store. Ores include
Irridium, Platinum, Palladium and “Element Zero,” which is
probably what powered Ma-Ti's heart ring.
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| Even he knows his useless ring's going to get him hurt. |
On
the surface, probing is a fun little mini-game, but go deeper and the
propensity for environmentally based backlash rises right along with
the likelihood of making dubious metaphors. For a series that enjoys
delving into moral quandaries so often, I'm surprised I haven't come
across any sort of tough choices in this department. Firing probes at
a planet from space can not be the safest means of exploring. Many of
these planets are noted as being inhabited, so it would only be a
matter of time before you hit something important. It's much the same
reason they banned lawn darts, only now you're playing it in someone
else's backyard with stakes the size of the Eiffel Tower.
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| "I'll build on that Palladium deposit!" I said. "Who's ever going to need Palladium?" I said! |
And
how do the materials instantly transport to your ship? It doesn't
look like the universe has teleporters yet or else you'd be Star
Trekking all up in this place. I
can only imagine a long, Dr. Seussian hose snaking out of the
Normandy and onto the planet, sucking all the elements up while fluffy Neptunian dodos or what-have-you shriek and flee in terror.
Of
course Mass Effect
shows that the universe has a lot of gray areas, but when my '90s kid
mind sees me hopping from planet to planet, depleting planets of
their metals in order to fabricate weapons and war machines, I'm
suddenly Dr. Shepbotnik. I just can't get around it.
Perhaps
I've missed a scene where mining is brought into question or one is
coming my way, but I think it would be an interesting subplot. Trust me, though; even if it's not, this definitely isn't the end of the world for me. I can
only shudder to think of what Mass Effect
could have been if media's extreme '90s environmental push was still alive today.
We could be playing some cross between Star Fox and
Awesome Possum.
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| Remembered so it may never happen again. |
