By Dean Takahashi of the San Jose Mercury News
Friday, December 28th, 2007
"I've been a been anticipating Mass Effect ever since I saw the first demo of the game in Amsterdam at the X05 unveiling of the Xbox 360's first slate of games. This was the first next-generation game that I saw with the highest of ambitions: crossing the uncanny valley. The valley is the familiar problem of computer-generated images. The closer they approach reality, the more disturbing the images are, particularly human faces. By trying to do good human facial animation, the developers at BioWare endeavoured to make games as emotionally interesting and visually appealing as movies. As such, this game promised a big leap forward in cinematic storytelling and game play.
It delivered on the first, but not on the second. While the conversational system and facial animation is perhaps the best I've ever seen in a video game, the game play is maddeningly flawed. Call it Mass Defect."
