The first time I met Mass Effect’s Shepard, I watched him die.

Before fully getting into BioWare’s space opera circa 2013, a year after the original trilogy had already wrapped, I downloaded a demo. I wanted to get my feet wet before purchasing the games and make sure they’d be for me. (Mind you, at this point most of my hours spent gaming were with Call of Duty and Madden, like a lot of 18-year-olds.)

Either because the Mass Effect 2 demo was the only one of the trilogy available on the Xbox Live Marketplace or because I was just lazy and that was the first one I saw, I downloaded the opening moments of Commander Shepard’s second outing to see what all the buzz was about. And, my, what an introduction.

Mass Effect 2’s opening moments didn’t waste time. Without knowing what was going on or who anyone was — is that Seth Green from Austin Powers I hear? — I was thrown into the middle of an attack. The Normandy (cool name, cool ship) was searching for Geth (whatever that........

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