Just over a year ago, we wrote up a list of 15 things we wanted from the third and final Mass Effect game. When I visited BioWare to preview the game last year, project lead Casey Hudson mentioned he'd read the list and that they were doing 'pretty much' everything on it.

Now it's out, it's brilliant, but how does it compare to our wishlist? Let's give it a score card, point by point.

1. A little faith

Fulfilled: yes!

We were frustrated, then incredulous, then just kind of bored of people not believing the Reapers were real. For a long time, BioWare said Mass Effect 3 would start with you on trial for killing thousands of Batarians to stop the Reaper's arrival, because people were still sceptical the Reapers were coming. They changed that, thank God. You've been discharged for "the shit you've done," as Anderson puts it - which to be honest is fair enough.

The Reapers are everywhere. No-one doubts it. And as a result, working with the various races to rally them together is a much less frustrating process.

2. More varied combat


Fulfilled: yes!

They went to town on this one. The relationships between enemies like Cannibals and Marauders are particularly interesting and fun to deal with. Brutes, Banshees, Ravagers and Harvesters all change how you have to play to survive. It's excellent enemy design.



3. Free run of the galaxy


Fulfilled: yes!

We worried ME3 might be too Earth-centric to feel like a galaxy-trotting adventure. It's not. In fact, people keep giving Shepard a hard time for leaving Earth behind so quickly.

4. Broader choice of weapons


Fulfilled: yes!

Each category of weapon has lots of meaningfully different types, now, and they're all viable throughout. One shotgun is like a cluster nailgun whose charge you can vary. One pistol fires delayed-detonation explosives instead of regular bullets. One assault rifle is virtually a sniper rifle.



5. More convincing romances


Fulfilled: remains to be seen.

I can't comment on this one yet, because I stayed faithful to Liara. Four crew members made it pretty obvious they were interested, but I don't know how convincingly that unfolds if you pursue it.



6. No coolant clips


Fulfilled: no.

They've changed the system a little, but only so that it makes even less sense. These supposedly universal clips only give you a set amount of ammo for each weapon, so that taking more weapons into battle gives you more ammo total. It's still unclear to me how I can run out of Sniper Rifle ammo but still have hundreds of Assault Rifle shots spare, if they both use the same clips.


7. A mix of the personal and epic

Fulfilled: yes!

I thought this was handled beautifully. The scale of your mission is bigger than ever, but the characters from your past are each vital to it, and your relationships with them come to a head in moments that decide both your friends and the galaxy's fate.

8. A less fiddly cover system


Fulfilled: god no

This has got worse. They key I was already mocking for doing so many functions taht it became fatally unpredictable in certain situations now does even more. Space bar now loves to make you do forward rolls at inopportune times mid-combat.

9. No Cerberus


Fulfilled: yes, in spirit

Cerberus are still in, but my complaint was having to work for them. This time, you don't.



10. A closer knit squad


Fulfilled: yes

It's certainly a smaller squad, and it's mostly characters you know well. Most of your squadmates don't have as much of a role in the plot as the other returning characters, but before the final fight, there are some lovely quiet character moments with each.

11. Better class abilities


Fulfilled: mostly

I still didn't find Soldier or Sentinel very interesting, but Adept, Vanguard, Infiltrator and Engineer all feel upgraded and devastating.


12. Old friends


Fulfilled: yes

Absolutely. The only major characters who didn't return in my game were the ones I got killed at the end of ME2, or only met in DLC with a different savegame.

13. An Elcor team mate


Fulfilled: no

Intense disappointment: not much Elcor love at all, though what little interaction you have with them is delightful as ever.



14. Female Shepard on the box


Fulfilled: yes!

Holy shit, they actually did this. Female Shepard features alongside her male counterpart on the N7 edition, and on other editions the cover is reversible to feature her.


15. Tali’s face


Fulfilled: no.

Colleague Andy Kelly redid a major decision to see if there was any way to get her unmasked on camera, but it doesn't look like it.


That's 11 of our 15 wishes fulfilled - pretty impressive, given that all of them were things Mass Effect 1 or 2 failed at. It does mean, however, that my review score of 93% was incorrect. Mathematically, we can see that the game is really only worth 73%.

Mass Effect 3 is about a war with the Reapers, and as you play the single player game, the people and armies whose help you earn count as War Assets. The game's still story-driven, and it doesn't end until you've completed the main series of missions. But when you do, what happens in the final cut-scene depends on how many War Assets you have accumulated.

That part is kind of cool. But the balance is incredibly harsh: I did every proper quest I could find in Mass Effect 3, made sensible decisions that didn't conflict with my choices in the previous games, and brought people together. But I still got a gallingly bleak ending.

That's because I'd never played the multiplayer. It's a co-op mode where you and up to three other players have to survive waves of AI enemies and complete objectives. If you succeed, you get an increase to your Readiness rating - a percentage by which your single player War Assets are multiplied by. These are specific to each sector fo the galaxy, so if you have a lot of War Assets in the Terminus Systems, you'll gain more by playing on a multiplayer map set in the Terminus Systems.

It's all rather... dirty. Presumably they're trying to encourage you to try the multiplayer because to do well in it, you have to buy or earn unlockable items, and you can get these for real money. But they're doing it by hurting your single player game, slapping a good playthrough with a bad ending as a penalty for not playing co-op. Even if you like co-op, it's not unreasonable to want to play through the single player first.



It is possible to get the best ending in single player without playing multiplayer, but it's twice as hard. All your War Assets only count for 50% of their potential value. The biggest gains in War Assets come from a culmination of your decisions in the previous games and your decisions in this one: if you've helped a race before, and you help them here, it's often possible to get their full support and resolve their conflict to get someone else on your side too.

In other situations, a wrong call somewhere along the line, or a Paragon or Renegade score too low to pick the right thing to say, can mean a character dies, a race is demoralised, and if they fight for you at all they're worth much less to the war effort.

I said I did all the 'proper' quests I could find - if you want to maximise your War Assets without playing multiplayer, you'll have to do the others. The only quests I had left were ones to scour certain systems for planets that aren't marked on your map, scan them, then fire a probe and return to the Citadel. Even compared to Mass Effect 2's resource-scanning, these are dull.

Here's what I recommend: don't. Don't do any quests that are boring, don't play multiplayer if you don't want to, and don't go through old save games trying to optimise your decisions for the most War Assets. Don't let BioWare's seedy design decision manipulate you into playing in a way you don't want to.

If they've made a game that's brutal, harsh and dark if you don't play multiplayer, they've made a game that's brutal, harsh and dark. That's how I reviewed it, and it's still phenomenal.

Roccat's mysterious viral marketing campaign has run its full duration, with the announcement of Power-Grid, a new mobile application that puts PC game controls onto your phone screen.

Power-Grid is a customisable interface which will be launched first on iPhone, with Android devices to follow, that puts macro keys and chat functions into a customisable layout for quick access while playing. The best way to think of it is as an interactive version of Logitech's G-series keyboard displays, combined with the LCD screen buttons of an Art Lebedev keyboard.

In the default app, there are three predefined layouts for compatible games, system stats and media controls. Each element – whether it's volume controls, macros or chat information – can be configured into a custom layout for your preferences. System information like CPU load and temperature can also be displayed: you'll need to pair it via WiFi with a background application on you desktop as well, but both pieces of software are free to download.

At release there's integrated controls for volume and chat with Skype, Teamspeak and Facebook.



The payoff for Roccat will come later in the year when it launches a keyboard range with iPhone, Android and Bluetooth docks that let you sit a smartphone in the space usually reserved for the number pad. There will also be a range of standalone USB docks, currently codenamed Apuri. Once docked, your PC should be able to act as a speakerphone extension for your mobile, so you can take incoming calls on your gaming headset without leaving a dungeon.

As a concept, I have to say I quite like it – although its success or failure will largely hang on whether or not the macro keys trigger actions as quickly as using a wired keyboard. It's very similar to some of Razer's concept designs, but has a certain flexibility that I prefer. Making use of an extra screen that you already own seems sensible – certain useful for MMOs or RTS gaming.

Mass Effect was a space RPG about killing a flying robot god - a Reaper. Mass Effect 2 was about stopping one from being built. In Mass Effect 3, they've warped in from darkspace in their hundreds.

And that's all I'll say about the plot. This review will be spoiler-free even for those of you who've avoided the trailers and the demo.

In all three games, your time is split evenly between persuading people to help you and shooting people who won't. The original's strength was its main quest: a chase that felt both personally motivated and galactically important. Mass Effect 2's plot was muddled and brief, but livened up by an exotic cast of new characters with interesting side stories.

Mass Effect 3 tries for the best of both worlds: an urgent and galaxy-critical plot that directly involves the entire crowd of oddball personalities the series has built up. And it works.

Inside of 20 minutes, you have a crucial goal and a clear route to achieving it. And unlike the previous games, every sidequest and adventure along the way is connected to that. The war gives everyone a reason to need your help, and everyone you help has reason to join the war.



That brings you into contact with just about every familiar face from the previous games, each of whom gets at least one fan-pleasing moment of bravado or violence. But the most remarkable thing about them is what makes Mass Effect 3 unique: they could all be dead.

By the end of Mass Effect 2, only one of your 13 former squadmates is certain to be alive. Those who are each play a leading role in a subplot of Mass Effect 3. Those who aren't have their stories invisibly trimmed out or rewritten with new characters.

These newbies are not just bland stand-ins, either. In some cases, a friend's absence is filled by someone with a radically different motivation, and new relationships with the rest of the cast. A Turian squadmate summed up his feelings for one of these replacement characters mid fight:

"I don't like him!"

It's an extraordinarily complex, reactive and futuristic bit of storytelling, and it makes Mass Effect 3 personal and unique for anyone who has a history with the series. If you're starting fresh, the game assumes the death of a few characters whose stories make less sense to new players, and leaves the rest alive.



Other than the colourful, beautifully designed characters, one of the main treats of a Mass Effect game is the colourful, beautifully designed planets. The large-scale problems you're facing in this third outing make your mission a whistle-stop tour of the key races' home worlds, their glowing sci-fi dreamscapes in the process of being stomped on by mountain-sized robot lobsters. It's spectacular, and it feels like exploring the heart of the gorgeous galaxy you've been skirting all this time.

Each away-mission to these places is a substantial, satisfying fight against one of several different factions. The combat feels another notch more impactful than that of Mass Effect 2. The classes are stronger and more distinct: the Infiltrator bursts heads with every sniper rifle shot, the Vanguard can slam herself into enemies over almost any distance or obstacle, and the Adept flings crowds of enemies into the air and rips them apart with biotic combos.

You fine-tune these powers as you level up, deciding between, say, a longer cloak duration or the ability to use one power without revealing yourself. And the weapons you find and buy give you interestingly different compromises between fire rate and stopping force - tweaked further with mods.

But the most radical and effective change to the RPG side of combat is the ability to choose your own balance between weapons and abilities. Any class can now take one of each weapon type into a fight, but the more you carry, the slower your powers recharge.

I gave my Infiltrator a heavy shotgun, meaning she could use Cloak less often but deal a chunkier slam of damage when she struck. Trying an Adept, I shelved everything but a featherweight sub-machinegun, letting her wub out Singularities and Warp Fields every second. It finally feels like the class system has lost the last of its arbitrary restrictions, and you can create your own play style.



It all mixes well with your squadmate's powers. I liked to stealth behind enemy lines, hack their turrets, then let my biotic friend lift people out of cover to float them into range of their own subverted weapon. Once, a lifted soldier was pelted over to us by his own turret's fire, and my Cryo ammo power caused one of our shots to freeze him solid. He dropped to the ground and shattered. I felt like applauding.

The fights have also become more complex and less repetitive, thanks to a lot of smart interplay between enemy types. Some give each other armour or shielding, or feed on each other's corpses, or burst out of each other when you shoot the wrong sac. Huge, fast, melee-only Brutes force an alarming change of pace from cautious cover shooting. And the Banshee, a tall, spindly horror that teleports towards you as it shakes with rage, is properly traumatic to fight.

The best way to deal with all of this varies with the arena it's found in - something Mass Effect 2 never managed. It's the difference between dreading the next prolonged combat sequence and relishing it.

The low points of the combat are the bigger boss fights, which too often involve one- or two-shot kills that hit you almost instantly and seemingly at random. If you have no pride, and lord knows I don't, you can always jam the difficulty level down to its new 'Narrative' mode for a moment: it's designed for non-gamers who just want the story, so it makes you virtually invincible.

The only unfixable problem, boss-wise, is a recurring character who's scripted to survive and escape your first few encounters. It's always painful to watch someone fail to shoot the bad guy in a cutscene. When it's my Shepard, a character I love for prematurely ending conversations with a bullet, it's downright agony.



I'll get the other irritations over with now. The spacebar - previously only used for sprinting, ducking, taking cover, using switches, talking to people and vaulting over things - is now also used for diving away from cover too. It makes an already maddeningly imprecise system utterly ridiculous. At least half my deaths were from the spacebar not doing what I expected it to.

We're on PCs. We have 128 keys. We can handle a separate button for taking cover.

The multiplayer is a cooperative survival mode - you and your friends pick a class and fight off waves of enemies. It's not switched on at the time of writing, so I can't tell you how that plays beyond what you can try for yourself in the demo. But the way it affects the main game is needlessly problematic.

In singleplayer, everything you do accumulates 'war assets'. When you finish the game, how many of these you have determines how good an ending you get: how well the final fight goes for your side. Success in co-op multiplies your war assets, up to twice their normal value. That means that if you only play singleplayer, or want to finish singleplayer first, you'll have to grind the living hell out of its most tedious fetch quests to get the best ending.

These quests generally involve scouring the galaxy for a planet someone mentioned, scanning it, then returning to the Citadel. I did every proper quest I could find, but didn't play multiplayer and skipped most of these empty FedEx ones. The ending I got... I won't say how, but it could have gone a lot better.



In general, too, the end of the series is a mixed bag. Satisfying in some ways, nonsensical in others, and ultimately too simple. But the sheer scale of the adventure it's ending - and the music, which is gorgeous throughout - gives it an emotional impact that goes beyond its plot payload.

It left me feeling incredibly sad.

Shepard is the best game character I've ever played. She's been an ongoing improv collaboration between me and BioWare to build a hero that works for their plot, but suits my tastes. Since we composed her first inspiring speech to the crew when she took charge of the Normandy, a commanding, brutally effective woman has emerged through 60 hours of tough decisions. She's killed thousands who got in her way, hung up on the interstellar Council four times, punched the same reporter in three different interviews and shot people mid-sentence. But she has also formed conflicted, quiet, sometimes touching relationships with some of the alien weirdos dragged along on her mission. Relationships that gave her character a gentler side I didn't expect, but which made sense of the person I had in my head.

I'm thinking back through all that as the credits roll. At the end of them a box pops up. It says: "you can continue to build Shepard's legend through further gameplay and downloadable content" then reloads my last save.

So now I'm laughing instead.

Last year we reported on Flash game developer Ryan Creighton's exploits at GDC, where he was accused of cheating in front of a room full of developers. Ryan is also attending GDC 2012, but this time he's doing a talk on Sissy's Magical Ponycorn Adventure; a game he co-created with his five year-old daughter. I think she did most of the art.

Ryan and his daughter Cassandra developed their game at a game jam. Then Ryan put it on a website and slapped a donate button in the corner. It's received $3081.12 to date, which will all go towards Cassandra's college education.

Within two days of release Sissy's Magical Ponycorn Adventure was played by thousands of players. Ryan credits Flash technology with the game's rapid success, saying it's easily discoverable and easy to use. "Grandma isn't going to grab a .exe and install it" he said.



Ryan also highlighted the power of merchandise at the talk. The dev's wife designed t-shirts based on the most popular Ponycorn sayings on Twitter, along with badges and plushies. And people bought that stuff. Ryan has even received an offer to turn Sissy's Magical Ponycorn adventure into a TV series.

The indie dev admits he's taken criticism for introducing his daughter to the industry so young, but takes pride in creating the "world's youngest game developer." Here are his reasons for doing it in bullet-point form to reassure anyone concerned.


"Kids should learn code from a very early age."


"The industry needs more women. The women in the industry today love games and have the ability."


"We haven't had two generations of game developers yet. If you own a hardware store, you expect your kids to work in the store. Why not our kids? Untold Entertainment is the family business."


Ryan spends all his time at his business and the game jam gave him extra time to spend with his daughter

 
"Do something surprising, shocking, dangerous or downright insane because life's too short" concluded Ryan.

Have you played Sissy's Magical Ponycorn Adventure? Was it any good?

For the first time, the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference on Saturday played host to a panel on eSports to discuss what they are, why they are enjoying such a tremendous period of growth, and what the future holds for them. Developer, team owner, caster, and league manager were represented by Blizzard's Mike Morhaime, Evil Geniuses' Alex Garfield, Sean "Day" Plott, and the MLG's Sundance DiGiovanni, respectively. As Plott put it, "The numbers are becoming astoundingly big," and the proliferation of streaming technology alongside the rise of StarCraft 2 promises to change eSports indelibly.

" ten years old," DiGiovanni said. "The people who know our organization, they have a strong attachment to a number of titles that we've run in the past. But we've never been in a position where we had the right title, the right technology, and a global audience base at the same time. Now we do."

2011 was a major year for eSports and perhaps a sign that some things have irrevocably changed. Plott was seeing 30 percent month over month growth in viewership, Twitch.tv launched and quickly hit 14 million unique visitors a month, and Garfield's Evil Geniuses team sold one thousand growth in sales of its team shirts. It's a major change from earlier in eSports history, Garfield said, when sponsorship was the only viable revenue for teams and players.

Livestreaming technology might be the biggest factor in the explosive growth in eSports right now, but the other piece of the puzzle is StarCraft 2. It has some unique features that make it particularly well-suited to this medium and this moment.

"One thing that's unique about StarCraft 2," Garfield said, "both as a sport and as a videogame, is that the observing perspective is very similar, if not identical, to the playing perspective. And there have been various games and developers that have been eSport titles, take for example a game like Counter-Strike...Imagine what it's like to try and spectate that as a casual observer. You have 10 different first-person viewpoints to keep track of, and then an overview of the map, and they're all running around, but the problem is that the entertainment value is actually in seeing those reflex shots. And people tried over and over again to find a way to make that easily enjoyable, and it just wasn't. So when you have a game like SC2, where it's made to be observed and it's easy to understand...that's very very valuable."

Morhaime sees StarCraft's appeal as being very similar to that of poker (an analogy that several panelists drew during the discussion). "You actually, as an observer, get to see all the information," Morhaime said. "Get to see what both players are seeing, and they don't get to see that. And the whole asymmetry of information that you have in poker, where you know a guy is ahead by 80 percent versus this other guy's 20—they don't know that, and they have to sort of make guesses about each other and what strategies they're going to use—creates a lot of tension as the game plays out."

Growing pains lie ahead. Business models and metrics remain fluid and murky, and some aspects of the eSports business are just plain strange.

Plott talked about the incredible sense of ownership that the eSports community has toward its hobby and the people who make it possible. Unlike a traditional media "consumer-provider" relationship, eSports fans tend to act with a strong sense of partnership. For instance, while he asks for a $5 donation fee to Day9 Daily, he is consistently surprised by how his community responds to what amounts to passing the hat. "I say things like, 'Guys, this is a way for the show to remain free. You have no obligation to do it. And I'm going to try and not run that many commercials.' And we're flooded with emails, thousands of emails of people saying, 'You should run more commercials! You should run 15 commercials every hour! 'Cause that way there's more money.' And it's insane, that sort of feedback from the community."

Things are little harder for team owners and tournament organizers, who are dealing in a space that nobody quite understands or can quantify. Garfield explained, "As a team owner, I can't really do basic math about my business. I can't say that for every dollar I spend on salary on this player and sending him to the next tournament, I know that I'm going to get two dollars in re-sellable value back that I can give in exchange for sponsors. And that's kind of how a team is supposed to make money."

Still, these are issues that will likely be solved with more time and more communication among stakeholders. At the moment, eSports is evolving as it becomes more and more successful, and the business models will change to reflect that. Major League Gaming CEO Sundance DiGiovanni says the MLG's Winter Arena experiment was so successful that it is possible they will hold up to six more pay-per-view Arena events over the next twelve months. More importantly, however, he thinks that the MLG is building something that is sustainable.

"Yes it's for the fans and the players for today, but even more so it's for the kids who are 12 years old today," he said. "Because they're going to grow up and...when they're sixteen, for example, they're at a point where they can say, 'Mom, Dad, I want to go to this tournament.' They'll understand the rules. They'll be able to identify the sidelines. They'll know what's in play and what's out of play, and what's a good play. Because they will have grown up with it."

Edit: At the panel, DiGiovanni said the MLG was looking at doing up to 12 arenas over the next year. He apparently misspoke, and according the MLG meant 6 PPV events over the next twelve months. The text has been changed to reflect what he intended.

Magicka devs Paradox Interactive have just announced three new games. The Showdown Effect, Dungonland and RED Frontier are all on show at GDC. Paradox say "Action-packed and loaded with adventure, all three of these games will fulfill a unique need in gamers’ lives, whether it is their thirst for blood, fame and glory for their teams, or helpful theme-park-survival skills." We'll have our impressions of all three games online soon. Until then, feast your eyes upon the trailers within.

This game doesn’t come with conventional AI. Buy it, and the Croatian devs mail you two giant, powder-filled jiffy-bags, one labelled ‘Ferdinand Fuchs’, the other ‘Boris Bastardov’. Open these, add five gallons of vodka to the Boris bag and five gallons of schnapps to the Ferdinand, then stand back as two super-sly Ost Front generals materialise in front of you.

OK, that isn’t 100% true, but there are times playing this exceptionally ergonomic hex wargame when you do have to remind yourself that you’re not up against a real-life Zhukov or Manstein. When you’re blitzkrieging towards an objective and realise the enemy has just sidestepped your assault, nipped into your rear, and severed your supply line. When a row of pummelled foes pulls back to man more tenable positions. When Ferdinand pickaxes a neat hole in the weakest section of your front, then pumps Grossdeutschland supermen through the breach... at humbling moments like these, the years that have gone into this two-man indie effort really show.

Unity isn’t just smart, it’s also flavoursome. There’s an unmistakable Eastern Front tang to the 18 scenarios that make up the two campaigns. As the CO of Army Group South you’ll have to learn to put up with partisan hassles, air superiority-negating blizzards, and fragile Romanian, Hungarian and Italian allies. Serving Stalin means accepting the innate inferiority of Ivan infantry corps. Whichever side you select, no advance is likely to commence without a long hard look at the supply map.



The barrels that automatically radiate from controlled railways and supply hubs are the lifeblood that keeps Tiger tanks tigerish, Katyushas kataclysmic. Much of the time, generals aren’t looking to smash enemy units in one fell swoop, they’re out to encircle and suffocate them over two or three turns. Unity – like the 1942-43 operations that inspired it – is all about turning bulges into pockets, salients into corpse-strewn kessels.

More in tune with its subjectmatter than recent peer Panzer Corps (PCG 231), the game has a similarly trim interface and old-fashioned approach to campaigning. Because 2x2 have plucked their pleasingly petite battles chronologically from history, early campaign episodes aren’t necessarily easier than later ones. Continuity is provided by a simple victory points mechanism: winning quickly in early outings means more funds for reinforcements later. It works, but you may find yourself picturing the battle engine married to something bolder – a strat-map perhaps.

Wherever this evocative engine heads next, discerning grogs are likely to follow it in droves. Wargames this fresh and friendly, featuring opponents as formidable as Ferdinand and Boris, tend to inspire deep loyalty.

As reported on MCV, Notch is getting a BAFTA! The Swedish creator of Minecraft is "blown away and deeply humbled" by the news.

Notch will be picking up his BAFTA Special Award at the London ceremony on March 16. He got it for his constantly evolving block builder, Minecraft. You should probably check it out.

BAFTA Special Awards honour "those who has made a significant contribution to their sector and may not otherwise have received the recognition they deserve." Previous winners include Tony Hart, Blue Peter, KODAK, Michael Palin, The Chuckle Brothers and The BBC. Those are all awesome things, but are they as awesome as Minecraft? Doubt it.

"I've always considered the BAFTA Awards to be one of the most prestigious awards one can receive, and I was very happy when it expanded to cover video games in 1998,” said the hatted developer.

BAFTA video game committee chair Ray Maguire described Notch as an “Inspiration for all games developers," saying "this award reflects the determination and innovation that he continues to show to both the developer community and to gamers worldwide."

Congratulations Notch! Good luck with the speech.

En garde! The newest team-carrying melee DPS to join the League of Legends roster is Fiora, the French sword swinger. Josh, Lucas, and Hollander Cooper sit down at the Champion Roundtable to decide if this seductive saber-wielder is all she's cracked up to be. If you're still on the fence about this female fencer, you've come to the right place.

You can (and should) download League of Legends for free on the game's official site.