Mass Effect III: Effect En Masse?

Mass Effect is a SciFi Fantasy trilogy made famous by Xbox and Bioware (which is a Canadian company). The final chapter in this immersive trilogy; Mass Effect III, is set to be released sometime in the last quarter in 2011, and already it is stirring up controversy, much like the 2 titles previous (Mass Effect I and II).

Mass Effect I had a segment on Fox News which erroneously suggested that it was a game that gave the kids the "hit it and quit it" mentality associated with irresponsibly sexual adults as well as random violence in general. In truth, the game featured romances with the female characters, but nothing random and untasteful and the violence was optional depending on how you wanted to mold your character's personality. In the end, Fox News just wanted another thing to blame the eventual downfall of soceity on and so they missed out on one of the best trilogy video games have to offer.

In Mass Effect II, in order to avoid the media frenzy from Mass Effect I, they toned down the sex scenes to the point where for all we know, they could be playing cards in the bedroom. Thank the heavens they didn't tone down the violence. Even so, people still found the game had too much of a focus on sexuality, even at the supremely toned down level. In reality, perhaps 10% of the game is focused on a relationship. It's not even the main focus of the game, you can skip the option all together. In my opinion, this controversy is needless!

For the third and final game, the rating of it is pending. Even so, developers said that this time they were going to answer to nobody but still within the confines of tasteful relationships. I'm not sure if Fox News is going to get grubby with this one again, but I hope not. Still, some mothers find the need to protest the release of this game simply because of it's sexual content. I think that if parents are that concerned about a video game teaching children about sex, they should get off thier butts and do it themselves. That way us gamers can simply enjoy games without being harped about something that shouldn't even be flagged as something sexually inappropriate, especially considering that it is not.

In the end, it is up to parents to be conscious of what thier children do. If they see something sexual and they don't know what it is, instead of keeping this plethora of knowledge from them, why not just teach them yourselves like how a parent should?