My review of Mass Effect is up on the site. 30 hours and a week in the making, the game was a hell of a lot of fun to play. I’m already planning my return after the holiday rush is over. I played a female Paragon Soldier, so think I’m going to try a male Renegade Biotic. Woot.

From the opening strains of the title music to the final wailing synth-song of the scrolling credits, this game encompasses what I love about gaming. Peter Molyneux nailed it at GDC this year, saying that it isn’t so much the story that matters as the emotion it instills in you. Across its storyline Mass Effect will have you laughing, furious, and deeply saddened - in some cases all about the same character. Slick graphics and heated combat aside, this title proves out the power of words artfully spoken. In some cases, the right words can mean the difference between salvation and damnation, between triumph and defeat. If you’re realistic in your expectations, if you come to the game ready for what it can offer, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more compelling reason to turn on your 360 this season.

I find it somewhat ironical that despite having spent about twice as much time playing TR as I had when I wrote my initial thoughts piece here, my actual ‘review’ of the game (which I’ve left scoreless and labeled as ‘Launch Impressions’) is nowhere near as detailed because of Slashdot’s broader audience.

If the question is whether Tabula Rasa is worth $15 a month, my answer is yes … for about two months. At the moment TR feels like all flash and little burn, with enough niggling details left unpolished that you’ll eventually get bored. It’s well worth giving a try, and if you have a friend with the game they’re currently running a ‘referral program’ that might get you some free playtime. Either way, taking the fight to the Bane is a fun and altogether different experience from your average Massive experience. The MMO field continues to fill with feisty contenders, and I have high hopes that the team at Destination Games will keep the sci-fi dream alive.

It’s been almost exactly six months since I began doing the Massive Update feature for 1up, and it’s been a hell of a lot of fun. Digging my arms elbow-deep into MMOG news every week has really kept me ‘in the loop’, and I think helped with writing here at MMOG Nation on more than one occasion. It also made for the occasional interesting discussion, and whatnot.

I hope you understand that it pains me to say that last week I told my 1up overlords that I’d be stepping back from the column, starting this week.

To give you a sense of the amount of time I put into this column, I’d regularly spend two hours a day -for four and sometimes five days of the week - working on it. The early columns were all done in one go, sometimes requiring me to (literally, not hyperbolically) type for six or seven hours straight to get all the news onto the page. Even up until last week the last push to finish the column usually required a three or four hour chunk of my life.

The problem is one of duplication and context. The asset that people seemed to value in Massive Update is that I know where each piece of news fits into the larger whole. I attempted to convey that through short, witty sentences. I tried to focus on the most important elements for every game out there, with extra ‘fun’ stuff, patches, videos, blog entries, and podcasts on top as a nummy candy coating.

In order to track all of this, though, I have many, many, many RSS feeds to cull through. Unlike on Slashdot, where I only pick the very best angle on a very few stories, to get it right Massive Update basically required that I read every site’s coverage of every patch, interview, preview, review, video about a given game over the course of a week. Now multiply that by all the Massive games out there. Yeah, for something like MapleStory there’d only be one or two stories worth posting in a week. For WoW, though, it was a struggle to make sure that it only showed up three or four times over the course of the Update.

Don’t get me wrong - I loved doing it. I want to thank (again) Scott Sharkey, Jeremy Parish, and Patrick Klepek for their support and assistance with the column. Patrick especially, as he had to deal with my awful formatting every week. :)

Over the course of the last few months, though, I’ve come to the conclusion that I *can* work too much. It got to the point, just after I got back from my whirlwind cross-country jamboree late in the summer, where the amount of writing I was doing was affecting my health and peace of mind. I’d also like to think I’ve done a good job with all the articles I’ve done this year, but I know that some pieces were not up to the level of quality I would have liked. So the new goal is to refocus. Do less, do it better, and most of all - don’t kill myself.

I hope you’ve enjoyed Massive Update, and my gratitude (again) to the many people who have complimented me on the column since May.

Hey Hammer … this piece on Kunark, that you call a review? The ‘review’ that has a score on it and has review as part of the title? It’s not a review. Not only is it impossible to review a MMOG expansion that just went live yesterday, the reviewer makes it sound like her exposure to the expansion content was just via the guided tour. That’s not a review. That’s a ‘preview’ or ‘first impressions’. Not a review.

Yeah, I couldn’t stay away a whole week. I’m so bad at relaxing. But I am getting really good at killing Geth.

I wanted to quickly run down Brent’s stats here, though, because he makes for a pretty good card.

Here’s his text :

• Forsworn Crusader - Human (2)
• 2 attack / 2 defense / 2 damage / 2 health
• Whenever this unit becomes exerted, deal 1 damage to your avatar.

Initially, the rules text is damned offputting. Every time you use this guy for attack or defense you end up hurting yourself. But he’s so cheap! That’s an amazing bunch of stats for such a low-cost card. The tradeoff is obvious, and has an equally obvious solution - put him in a Cleric deck. As a Cleric you’ve got plenty of opportunities to heal the occasional damage or whatever. My advice would be to never play him alone on a quest; put him in as strong support for a big attack, so you can make use of that massive +2 damage. At a quest with “add 1 to damage” as its text, or other similar cards in play, he’d be devastating. Alternatively, you could make use of rune cards when playing him. Those damage-reducing abilities and items are perfect for making full use of this card without paying a big negative.

Anyway, nicely done sir. Your card alter-ego is a most worthwhile addition to the game.

Simon has commented quite a bit over at GameSetWatch about the website ‘Surfer Girl Reviews Star Wars’ (which … wth does that name mean?). She’s a consumate rumourmonger, and yesterday she put up the ‘clue’, “Man, this quest seems to be everlasting, now we are on this third station of play.” She confirmed the thing you’re thinking now today, saying bluntly “Everquest is coming to PS3″. My assumption is that she meant to say EverQuest 2 because … yeah. Whaddya say, Scott? This lady have the right of it?

She also says the happy-day Animal Cross MMOG for the Wii is going to be a Japan-only enterprise. “An Animal Crossing MMO would not see release outside of Japan, NoA and NoE are obstinate in only wanting limited online functionality in the title.”

Interesting stuff, it it’s true. Oh, she also says “The next KOTOR is being worked on at BioWare, pre-production and some early production has been done internally at LucasArts, though.” Yeah, we know. It’s called KOTORO. Bit late on the rumouring there.