Expat Problem

If you've read this blog for any significant period of time, you know I love me some video games. One of my favorite video game series is Mass Effect. Mass Effect is a space opera, much like Star Wars or Star Trek. It has a really great science fiction story, stellar voice acting, and a very detailed and complete universe that it feels like you could jump into. As a game, it goes a little bit further. Each Mass Effect game is truly whatever you make it to be. The progression of the story is decided by you as much as it was by the developers. For example in the first game, there's a member of your party that appears to be a threat to your entire team. You can choose whether or not to keep him around, or to put a bullet in his thick skull. There's another scene in which you have to decide which of your teammates to save, and of course there's only enough time to save one. The whole idea is that the characters are introduced in such a way that you care about them and these choices are difficult, and you know what, they are difficult.

So what does that all matter, you might ask? Well, when you start Mass Effect 2, it imports your game information from the first game. Characters that didn't survive the first game don't appear in the second game. People you pissed off in the first game hold a grudge, and so on and so forth. Each game took me roughly 20 hours to complete. I played them on the XBox 360, because they weren't available for the PS3 at the time. Then we moved to Korea. I brought the PS3 along, but not the Xbox, and I thought that resisting the siren call of wanting to see how this whole space saga plays out wouldn't be too hard to resist. Cue the release of Mass Effect 3.

The game released a couple of days ago. It would cost about $70 to ship the U.S. version of the game in from Hong Kong, not too bad, really. The problem is my game saves are on my Xbox, so I'd really need to play through Mass Effect 2 on PS3 before starting Mass Effect 3. I can download it for $20 from the Playstation Network or I could feasibly order it with ME3 from play-asia.com. I don't know if I'm up for the challenge. It would take a good 20 hours minimum to complete ME2 again, and by the time I put in that much gaming time it could be close to time to move home, and how on Earth can I avoid finding out what the hell happens in ME3 when I read Kotaku every day?

This is the dilemma, do I get cranking on getting back through the Mass Effect saga on PS3, or try to wait until I get home, settled in enough to play it on an Xbox that could die at any moment some time in mid to late 2013 while simultaneously starting up a new life in New York with a wife, high rent payment, maybe two jobs, and so much other cool stuff to do than play video games?

I might have answered my own question by writing this.