More than 10% of a century has passed. Forgot how good ME1 is.

Over 10% of a century has passed. All the promises of youth have faded. I wake up, ask myself what's missing? I dust off the old steam download. I've tried to pick up these old relics again and again, but it could never take. For the longest time, I spun off their essence and just contemplated the nostalgia in my mind - while driving, sometimes, when passing something that reminded me. Like a distant memory. But at last, after marathoning every last Star Trek episode (TOS, TNG, VOY, DS9) over the past decade, reading the "Three Body" trilogy, following Elon Musk on Twitter and watching all the SpaceX videos, Buzz Aldrin flat-out tells the White House he's disappointed.... I felt a solid sci fi mood come upon me.

And the need to play a completionist Mass Effect 1 run on veteran.

Procrastinating on work to do it just right. Rewinding and making all the right choices. Scanning every last keeper - actually, it was the first time I had found all 21. 

Discovering quests and pieces that I hadn't realized in the first dozen playthroughs all those years ago.

I cried driving to work.  For so long I kept telling everyone it was the greatest game, and not just game, but one of the greatest pieces of media out there, and I started to doubt what I said. But I verified it.

What I love most? The beautiful brutalist architecture of the Han Shan port at Noveria (with a recent resurgence of the midcentury aesthetic, it's extremely attractive now). The clanking of the magnetic boots as they go out onto the maintenance shafts of the Citadel at the end, the spectacle and presentation of all those geth, turrets, and spaceships battling above. Captain Kirahe. The ACTUAL politics (Udina and Anderson and how they approach the council). The voice of Virgil! The way the audio of the first virgil recording in the Ilos ruins had a slice of old-timey 40's-type speech to invoke that feeling of listening to early 20th-century wartime radio speech! The haunted Han Olar volus at the Rift Station: "God am I sane."

Guess I gotta go back to work now.