Alien vigilante Garrus is not pretty. He wasn't pretty before his face got shot up, and now, he's even less pretty. Lucky for the kids, then, that this plush based on the Mass Effect gunslinger is so adorable.

Sadly, this isn't an official piece of merchandise from developers BioWare. It's instead a hand-crafted piece, so if you want one, you're going to have to contact craftster eitanya and pay for one yourself.

She takes commissions, though, so if you don't want Garrus — or Mass Effect villain Saren — why not pay her to whip you up a plush reporter getting punched in the face instead?

[eitanya @ DeviantArt, via Game Informer]

Mass Effect 2 is landing on the PlayStation 3 a year after the 360 and PC versions. So does it look better? The short answer is "no". The long answer is "it's complicated".

The technical specialists at Digital Foundry have sat down with the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of the game (now that there's a demo on the PS3) and found that while the PlayStation 3 version is using the same engine as the upcoming Mass Effect 3, that doesn't translate into a universally superior performance on Sony's console.

Why? Thank/blame the Unreal Engine 3, which the game was built on, which has always run better on Microsoft's console. While some things, like shadows and the game's resolution, look better on the PS3, other things — like normal-mapping, anti-aliasing and effects — are downgraded.

This inconsistency continues through to the game's performance. While the PS3 version is locked at 30 frames per second, meaning in busier scenes things run smoother than they do on Xbox 360, there is also a lot more "screen tearing" apparent.

If you don't own a PS3, this won't matter. Likewise, if you only own a PS3, again, this won't matter! The game is wonderful, and these are minor quibbles. But if you own both, and are such a big Mass Effect 2 fan that you were swayed by the prospect of a wholly superior version, you may want to hold off. Or wait until you can see it with your own eyes and determine if it's worth it.

(Or, yes, before anyone chimes in, get the PC version, which looks better than either console edition ever will)

For a full break-down of how the two versions differ, including some handy video comparisons, head over to Digital Foundry.

Mass Effect 2 Demo [Eurogamer]

The PlayStation 3 gets Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3 in 2011. Getting Mass Effect 1 as well would just be too ridiculous. But PS3 gamers will be able to speed through a short version of the 2007 game.

The January-launching PS3 version of Mass Effect 2 will include an interactive comic called Mass Effect Genesis. It doesn't just summarize the original Xbox 360 and PC-only Mass Effect from 2007, it simulates the experience of playing it. The comic allows gamers to make six key decisions from the original game and see their ramifications in Mass Effect 2.

The brief digital comic starts shortly after the playable introduction to Mass Effect 2 on the PS3. That introduction won't surprise Xbox 360 and PC players who have been able to experience it since the second Mass Effect game launched in January of this year, but let's not ruin things for Sony-only players. A PlayStation 3 gamer will start the game, pick a gender and look for their version of the series' hero Commander Shepard, will play the opening sequence and then reach the comic.

The comic recounts the main story of the first Mass Effect. It also exposes what I hadn't realized were the surprisingly few key decisions players made in the first game. Maybe the six choices do set up a lot of consequence, but it was odd for me, someone who spent well over 20 hours playing the first Mass Effect, to see that the actions I took could be presented in a brisk re-telling with a mere half-dozen narrative forks. Some forks involve who lives and who dies during Commander Shepard's quest to save the galaxy. One involves sex. There's some politics too.

Mix up your responses and you get more than 700 permutations, if I'm remembering my middle-school math correctly. That makes the six choices available feel not so slim a picking after all. It also presents PlayStation 3 owners with one of the only bragging points they can make to Xbox 360 and PC players who have a more than three-year advantage in Mass Effect experience: the PS3 player can re-play the comic at the beginning of Mass Effect 2 repeatedly with each new start of the game, crafting a new Mass Effect 1 history for Shepard in just a few minutes. The player can then see how any tweaks affect the story of Mass Effect 2. What if you made some pivotal decision pivot differently? It's easier to test on a PS3. You don't have to replay many hours of Mass Effect 1 and import the save file over.

I saw the comic at a Sony showcase for PlayStation 3 games in New York last week. I was also shown some mid-game action. The people showing the game say it looks better, that the graphics engine has been overhauled, but without an Xbox 360 running the game right next to the PS3, it's hard to say if and how much better things look. I was encouraged to look at the mesh on Shepard's uniform. You look at the mesh. Better lighting, they say. Better reflections.

The PS3 version of Mass Effect 2 will include all of the downloadable content released for the Xbox 360 version as well as reflect changes made in patches. A representative for the game's development studio, Bioware, said we can think of this version as what Bioware would release if they ever sold an ultimate version of Mass Effect 2.

The game will also support the Cerberus Network, which is Bioware and parent company EA's way to release free and paid downloadable content to Mass Effect 2. The Genesis Comic, in fact, is a Cerberus Network item, which probably means that it, like other freebies on the service, will only be freebies if you buy the game new. Otherwise you have to pay extra for the Network if you have buy a used copy of the game. Bioware plans to release more Cerberus Network content for all platforms in 2011.

Chances of Mass Effect 1 coming to the PlayStation 3 were always slim. Time was against it. The fact the Xbox 360 maker Microsoft published the game was against it. But in the history of humankind, comic books have often solved intractable problems, or something. So here's a comic, PS3 fans. That's your Mass Effect 1. Make your decisions, and make them again.

Mass Effect 2 is out for the PS3 in January; Mass Effect 3 is set for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC in the "holiday" season.

For the wee Mass Effect fan in your life who prefers coloring inside the lines and navigating mazes, as opposed to making hundreds of dialogue tree choices, give them the Mass Effect Coloring and Activity Book.

Created by Something Awful forum goer skoolmunkee for the Mass Effect Secret Santa event, the Mass Effect Coloring and Activity Book features hours of entertainment. Connect the dots, crossword puzzles, "Mad Dog Libs," jokes, the opportunity to color Miranda's ass the way you've always wanted... the activity book has it all!

Some of the content may not actually be suitable for the typical coloring book crowd, including the make-your-own-dialogue tree—a potentially awkward response to Liara's "Shepard, it's a boy!"—and the draw Jack's tattoos activity, but it's something you might want to give the Mass Effect fan with the maturity to handle a coloring challenge like this. Who wouldn't relish coloring Renegade interrupt moments?!

You can grab the Mass Effect Activity And Coloring Book in PDF format from Mass Effect Saves.

Mass Effect Secret Santa [ME Saves - thanks, Zachariah!] [Image credit]

Next week, the PlayStation Store will be graced with something PS3 owners have been waiting quite a while for: a demo for sci-fi role-playing game Mass Effect 2.

There's no word on just which part of the game you'll be playing - my money would be on the intro sequence where you meet your Cerberus pals - but it will be out on December 21 in the US and December 22 in Europe.

Mass Effect 2 was originally released in January of this year on PC and Xbox 360, but will be making its PS3 debut in January 2011.

To keep the show to two hours, they didn't hand out all the hardware on stage at last night's 2010 Video Game Awards. Here is the complete list of honorees. Neil Patrick Harris' compensation was limited to just one award.

Red Dead Redemption was thebig winner, with four awards, led by Game of the Year. It also collected Vector Monkeys for Best Song (by José González, pictured), Best Original Score, and Best DLC, for the Undead Nightmare extension.

Mass Effect 2 and BioWare took home three awards: Studio of the Year, Best Xbox 360 Game and Best Role Playing Game. God of War III landed two awards, for Best PS3 Game and Best Graphics.

Here's the complete list.

Game of the Year

Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar Games / Rockstar San Diego)

Studio of the Year

BioWare

Best Xbox 360 Game

Mass Effect 2 (Electronic Arts / BioWare)

Best PS3 Game

God of War III (Sony Computer Entertainment / SCE Studios Santa Monica)

Best Wii Game

Super Mario Galaxy 2 (Nintendo / Nintendo)

Best PC Game

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty (Blizzard Entertainment / Blizzard Entertainment)

Best Handheld Game

God of War: Ghost of Sparta (Sony Computer Entertainment / Ready At Dawn Studios)

Best Shooter

Call of Duty: Black Ops (Activision / Treyarch)

Best Action/Adventure Game

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood (Ubisoft / Ubisoft Montreal)

Best Role Playing Game

Mass Effect 2 (Electronic Arts / BioWare)

Best Multiplayer

Halo: Reach (Microsoft / Bungie Studios)

Best Individual Sports Game

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 (Electronic Arts / EA Tiburon)

Best Team Sports Game

NBA 2K11 (2K Sports / Visual Concepts)

Best Driving Game

Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit (Electronic Arts / Criterion Games)

Best Music Game

Rock Band 3 (MTV Games / Harmonix)

Best Soundtrack

DJ Hero 2 (Activision / FreeStyleGames)

Best Song In A Game

Far Away by José González (Red Dead Redemption)

Best Original Score

Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar Games / Rockstar San Diego)

Best Graphics

God of War III (Sony Computer Entertainment / SCE Studios Santa Monica)

Best Adapted Video Game

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game (Ubisoft / Ubisoft Montreal / Ubisoft Chengdu)

Best Performance by a Human Male

Neil Patrick Harris as Peter Parker / Amazing Spider-Man (Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions / Activision)

Best Performance by a Human Female

Tricia Helfer as Sarah Kerrigan (StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty / Blizzard Entertainment)

Best Downloadable Game

Costume Quest (THQ / Double Fine Productions)

Best Downloadable Content

Red Dead Redemption - Undead Nightmare (Rockstar Games / Rockstar San Diego)

Best Independent Game

Limbo (PlayDead)

Most Anticipated Game

Portal 2 (Valve / Valve)

While controlling shooters on the PC is made easier by the precision of the mouse, that's not enough for some people. Some people want it even easier than that. For them, there is the Dragon Gaming Speech Pack.

It's a piece of software that allows people to issue commands to supported games using their voice, the theory being that by replacing keyboard shortcuts and certain button presses with voice control you'll save both time and effort.

That's the theory, at any rate; the clip below makes the whole thing look both confusing and tedious.

The Dragon Gaming Speech Pack supports games like Mass Effect 2, World of Warcraft, Modern Warfare 2 and Starcraft 2, though strangely, anyone buying the pack for $75 won't get universal support, as they can only select three games to receive speech recognition.

Hope you're so lazy that you don't play more than three games!

[via Big Download]

Ukrainian artist Protsenko Pavel has a thing for Mass Effect 2, leaving us with this..interesting gallery, where men look like fire-proof war machines while women look like sexy little pin-up models.

Pavel appears to be compositing different elements of screenshots and actual photographs together, which explains why in some cases the character's joints look...wrong. Still, overall the effect is great!

You could go on about his feelings on gender representation, since Garrus and Grunt are shown walking through fire with guns drawn instead of reclining by a pool with towels draped over their alien junk (or, conversely, that the ladies aren't also walking through fire), but it's too nice a day for that, so let's just enjoy the pretty pictures instead.

Oh, and before you hit the gallery, you should know that while there's nothing here you wouldn't see in a fashion mag (or Alien Mercenary's Digest), there's still a lot of skin on display, so if you're at the office you may want to wait until you get home.

[MadSpike @ DeviantArt, via geekfill]

As you thumb through dialogue trees in Mass Effect, trying to find the best lines to seduce slinky space-warrior Ashley, you're engaging in what the developers hope is an advanced form of simulated human interaction.

Throughout the game, Ashley slowly warms to your own personal Commander Shepard, even reeling off some flirtatious lines of her own.

If you've pressed ‘A' effectively enough your efforts are rewarded with a short sex scene.

And then, nothing.

Spoiler warning: This article mentions a late-game plot event in Red Dead Redemption.

As the technology behind video games advances, ambitious developers have begun to toy with the idea of creating realistic romantic relationships. But the end goal of these love side-quests is often just sex - as if that's the zenith of any proper human courtship. A romantic tryst between two people features hundreds of intimate moments, of which sex is only one. Video games allow for a substantial link between the player and the character they control. Seeing that character share subtle romantic connections can be immensely fulfilling, while the attainment of intercourse usually feels like nothing more than a successfully completed mission.

Sex is undoubtedly an important facet of any romantic partnership. At a base level, it's the activity that furthers the race, one we're evolutionarily programmed to seek out and enjoy. Featuring sex in video game relationships is definitely worthwhile and prudishness should not stand in the way of an engaging narrative. Abolishing sex from mainstream story-driven games would be a disaster, forcing it to retreat into the next Leisure Suit Larry cacophony. Having sex appear as a product of romantic engagement has been an important step forward, but the industry shows signs of stagnating; wallowing in its own maturity.

Sex is an alluring experience from a game development standpoint. It's a tangible target, a moment of accomplishment that clearly indicates to the player that they've been successful. Bioware's Dragon Age goes so far as to award Achievements each time you successfully enact coitus with a new member of your party. Games need goals and, if you're in the business of portraying romance, making sex your bulls-eye is an easy option.

Escaping this trap won't be easy, it may even require abandoning a goal centric model for in-game relationships. Moments of intimacy are typically not forced, they flow naturally from the interactions between people. Often, the most striking and meaningful moments in real life relationships occur when nothing much is going on. Video games don't like downtime. There's a constant need to make every action serve a purpose. Moving away from the inexorable charge towards sex will take either a developer brave enough to discard functionalism for moments of simple storytelling or exceptional writing and design that seamlessly blend the two together.

A well rounded portrayal of an adult romantic relationship is likely to include sex, but there are examples of games eschewing on-screen copulation without betraying their depiction of love. Persona 4 - by Atlus - is a lengthy game, one that dedicates a large portion of its play-time to budding romances between the player-character and his rag-tag band of acquaintances. In the climax to one of these narrative threads, a great emotional intensity is expressed through little more than a declaration of affection and some light snuggling on a bedroom couch. Out of context it's not nearly as bombastic as sex, but it tugs at the heartstrings far more effectively than a 30-second montage of grinding and moaning.

Persona 4 is also an excellent example of how to connect narrative relationship advancement and productive game mechanics. When you choose to spend time with one of your friends there's very little in the way of gameplay, but each time you sit through one of these vignettes, you're rewarded with an increase in your Social Link, which boosts the power of your created monsters.

As its characters are high school teenagers, Persona avoids sex in its relationships out of a well-intentioned reticence. Rockstar, on the other hand, could never be accused of shying away from the gratuitous. From Grand Theft Auto to Bully, they have shown a willingness to indulge in the unseemly as well as a dedication to strong stories. In Red Dead Redemption they have perhaps their best excuse yet to fill our TV screens with high-definition thrusting.

After repeatedly spurning the advances of lascivious ladies on the grounds of marital faithfulness, John Marston returns home to the arms of his feisty wife Abigail. Marston has spent so much time aching to be reunited with his belle that just seeing them together is a rewarding moment. The couple's good-natured jibes and snatched cuddles are depictions of a romantic relationship fully formed, the kind rarely seen in games. You wouldn't begrudge the writers a sex scene or two at this stage, but it's difficult to see what the player would gain, beyond mild titillation. As it is, their subtle interactions form a heartwarming payoff to hours of gameplay.

If games want to compete with other narrative media, they need to do a better job of creating immersive human relationships. The inclusion of sex in these couplings is an important step towards maturity and realism, but it's also a barrier beyond which the industry has struggled to progress. A select group of games have broken the mould, showing us that sex is not a necessary feature of rewarding in-game romance, just one entry in the rich encyclopedia of intimate personal behaviour.

Joseph Ewens is a freelance video game, film, and poker journalist from London. You can keep track of his various writings at his blog Joyous Film Review or hurl abuse at him on Twitter @JoeOE18.

[Dragon Age achievements pic]

I'm a guy, and I seldom play games as anything but a guy. I play Mass Effect as a female character, though, for some reason. Very few of my fellow Mass Effect gamers do. Fewer than one of five.

What to make of this? It's hard to say without knowing the percentage of Mass Effect players who are male and the percentage of gamers who usually gender-bend and play against their real gender.

We can, however combine that official stat with others in this information card sent to Kotaku by the Mass Effect creators at BioWare and see that almost two-thirds of Mass Effect players play as soldiers. That's the character class that specializes in guns, not stealth, not special sci-fi powers... just shootin'.

A lot of you are also fans of Garrus. Do we have nothing in common?