Mass Effect is Awesome

If you're a fan of science fiction, you really have to play Mass Effect. And when you play it, you really should read all of the codexes you get. From a pure fiction and universe-building perspective, Mass Effect is some of the best hard science fiction I've encountered in any medium. Handily better than any other sci-fi videogame or movie, and in the top-tier of science-fiction novels. The game devotes probably 20 pages of text to the tactical details of plausible, hard science-fiction descriptions of FTL and mass-effect-generating ship-to-ship combat, and as far as I've seen, the game doesn't even have any ship-to-ship combat. It's amazing.