I've had insomnia for a while now. I simply can’t' go to sleep. 4 am rolls around and I'm still wide awake. Bored. My new favorite show is ‘Poker After Dark’. It starts at 2am and consists of 6 people playing a card game. That’s it. That’s what counts as televised entertainment these days and in my sleepless stupor I can't disagree.

By the time 3am fades into existence, my brain is still refusing to shut down for the night and the last hand of poker has been dealt.  

I can always go back to playing Mass Effect on the Xbox 360. It's an RPG so instead of just blindly killing everything in sight, the game wraps up the killing in a straightforward sci-fi story. Half typical RPG and half first person shooter, Mass Effect wants to give the best of both worlds, and for a while, it works. The cut scenes are nice and the shooting is, well, the shooting sucks. It doesn’t take long before I get tired of choosing the good guy/bad guy responses in stilted conversations. RPG’s are all about the story, but so far, this space opera is treading all too familiar waters to keep me interested. I drop the controller and head down to the gas station/all night deli.  

Mass Effect has driving included in it, too. Seemingly endless sections of the game have you driving a space tank from one destination to the next. Along the way meeting enemies so dumb that all you have to do if back up 20 feet while they blindly shoot over your head while you shoot your space gun at them. It’s a jack of all trades, master of none. Luckily, I don't have to drive twenty minutes to get something to eat at 4 am. There are enough 24 hour convenience stores and fast food joints within a 3 block radius to keep me fat and complacent. But I take the drive anyway. Party because I have nothing else to do but mostly because I want to see the cute girl behind the counter who makes the sandwiches.  

She has sad, beautiful eyes and her long brown hair is tied into a ponytail. My sleep deprived mind races to find a decent conversation starter as she builds whatever it is I randomly choose off the menu. If this were Mass Effect, four phrases would pop up on my chest. There'd be the 'good' statement. "You really make a terrific sandwich". The 'neutral' statement, "Thank you for the sandwich, goodbye'. There'd be a 'more information' choice. 'Tell me more about the different sandwiches available'. And then there's the evil, get to the point message 'Forget the sandwich, I'd rather take a bite out of you.' The only difference is that in Mass Effect, all of the choices pretty much lead to the same conclusion. And you can't come up with your own responses. The old text adventures from Infocom that fit on a single floppy disk had more conversational freedom than this 4 gigabyte opus. I decide to go the old school route and fashion my own response, and it leads to a 10 minute talk about sleep, work, fun and the lack of all three. Next week I'll see if any of my conversation choices include an option to ask for her number. 5/10

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