Commander Shepard and her crew(no one should play as male Shep imho), have done plenty of galaxy saving, and stirring up, under my control. They fought, robots, clones, politicians, and reporters. They made love to aliens, hate to aliens, and even saved a race from going compleatly extinct! We laughed, cried, got wasted, and most importantly fought beside one another through thick and thin.

They're my friends.

OK, they're not really my friends; claiming to be buddies with imaginary characters is a little too geeky even for me. The Mass Effect series is not without its flaws, and some are truly Reaper-sized. But it has gripped me like nothing else in the history of video games, and video games and I go back a pretty long way (but I'll never be too old for video games)!

The Mass Effect universe is that rare thing—a fully-realized science fiction game setting that stands up to the likes of Star Trek or Star Wars. The universe in which the games take place has a rich and complex backstory, and even better, it's not a rich and complex back story that the player has to have info-dumped into his head. This isn't The Old Republic, where you have to read thousands of awful Kevin J. Anderson "Extended Universe" novels and have a working knowledge of the seven prime forms of lightsaber combat to get the most out of the game.

There's depth in the backstory, but it's not the kind of depth that ever compelled me to memorize the game's codex entries. (Do you really need to know that the "First Contact War" between humans and Turians started because humans activated a mass relay in violation of council law and that the war culminated in the siege of Shanxi? No. It's wonderful flavor, but it's not mandatory knowledge.) The world is alive and compellingly real just through dialogue and character actions, without needing endless narration. The first game's opening title crawl essentially says, "This is the future and aliens are real and you are a space soldier. Go." That's enough.

Instead of a galactic civics lesson, Mass Effect focuses on a human, the forever-first-nameless Commander Shepard, and her fight against the ancient Reapers, an enemy that aims to rid the galaxy of advanced sentient life for a whole bunch of really complicated reasons. That fight is the central focus of all three games, though Shepard's path from soldier to savior twists and turns and doubles back on itself like a demented snake.