GamesRadar’s Best of E3 Awards

GamesRadar has also put together some awards for last week’s E3 showings, though Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age: Origins are the only RPGs to make appearances. The former received the “Sequel That Made Us Want to Run Home and Play The Original Immediately” and “Best of Show” awards, while the latter gets the “Slickest Trailer That Overly Exaggerates Gameplay” award. On ME2 taking the top spot:

Amidst all the guns, explosions and bare-chested vampire warriors of E3 2009, the one thing that had us gibbering like five year olds discussing their favorite dinosaurs was the talking in Mass Effect 2. Yes, talking. Developer BioWare is known for its chatty, character-driven games (Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire etc) but this time they’ve actually made the conversations believable.

Rather than continue having two static characters yap at each other while the camera flips back and forth between close-up shots, the dialog unfolds in cinematic, engrossing moments that feel like interactive cutscenes. Characters walk around and behave like living beings in a conversation instead of blankly staring at each other, all while the camera hops from angle to angle, providing an intense personal connection to the story . The effect is so powerful we’re confident it will be ripped off from here on out, and any game that doesn’t step up is going to look outdated and archaic by comparison even the original Mass Effect.

On top of this, multiple other tweaks have been made to the already-exceptional first title. Your squad of three can now accept individual commands (before they could only accept orders together), the inventory is getting a complete overhaul and the visuals destroy 95% of the competition’s offerings. They touted Mass Effect 2 as the darker (Empire Strikes Back) of the series, and even though we’ve only seen a raindrop of the game’s oceanic depth, we’re already more energized about this universe than anything going on in a galaxy far, far away.