Fausk played Planescape: Torment

While suffering with an epic migraine and nausea, I tried to think of a game that would take my mind off it, but not be so super fast paced and action packed so as to frustrate and annoy me. This one came to mind, so I played for an hour and a half or so.

Most of it was spent wandering around and talking to people, trying to figure out where I am, what's going on, and of course, most importantly, who I am. I really must praise the developers, even though they're now defunct and split into various other companies, for being able to present a world with all sorts of various races and such without having to bore me about their backstories.

It works well, of course, because you're playing as an observer that doesn't understand the things they're seeing. An 'adult' that has just been born, in some respects. Lost to the world around them and trying to figure out what is happening. Perhaps it's just me, but if you're making a game that is so foreign to the player, this is the way to do it. Even Final Fantasy X used this perspective with Tidus being an interloper into the new world to explain things to the people. Final Fantasy XII did it as well with Vaan leaving his home and traveling across the globe, but XII left things unanswered.

Final Fantasy XIII uses a different method, which works fairly well, but it usually ends up with people monologuing now and then about what's going on. Which, works fairly well, in my opinion.

Mass Effect, however, does not do this well, in the slightest. Shepherd is already well acquainted with all the various oddities around him, so there's no need for him to ask about it, and it's left up to the player to do their homework on the various creatures. I do plan on giving Mass Effect a fair try again at some point, if only because I'd find it rather hypocritical of myself to religiously read all of the datalogs in Final Fantasy XIII, but ignore the ones in Mass Effect, and then blame my poor experience with the game as being, in part, due to the codex entries that I didn't want to read.

In any case, I've got so many games to play at the moment that I don't know when I'll get back into Planescape: Torment or Mass Effect.