Welcome to Margo Monday!

MSPIXEL ON A MONDAY?! WHAT FRESH HELL IS THIS

Look, we can't get out of discussing Mass Effect 3 without discussing multiplayer. Bioware won't let us, we won't have the war assets!

Enough of me being shitty. Who wants a Bioware history lesson? You do! You do!

Mass Effect Team Assault was to be a downloadable stand-alone multiplayer game outside of the trilogy, developed by Bioware Montreal. Think Mario Kart or Mario Party in addition to Mario 1, 2 and 3. Instead of a kart racer or minigame collection (how amazing would a mass effect kart racer or mini game collection be BY THE WAY), Team Assault was meant to be a first person co op thing.

Then, EA, Mass Effect 3's publisher, demanded that all its games (to include ME3) have multiplayer.

Fuck, said Bioware. The Montreal team then had to send their assets to the main team in Edmonton, and Team Assault got rolled into Mass Effect 3.

Fast forward to Valentine's Day, 2012, when Bioware kindly promised us all a Mass Effect demo. Millions of nerds were then asked the age old question: sex or video games?

...

Yeah, okay, so after a dinner at White Castle (you shut your ass it's a thing), husbando~ and I drove home at about 90 MPH to get to a demo brought to us by someone who would rather us say 145 KPH.

And here's the thing: single player was fine, fun in fact, but multiplayer?

The entire Internet reacted in exactly this manner:

Look, I love Mass Effect, it's in my Top 5 All Time Games Ever if not my Top 3. But it's a game you have to love in spite of its weirdness, its plot holes, and the fact that charge doesn't always fire when I press Y.

But the multiplayer? The multiplayer, children. It's, like, an actually good and cogent game. It's the same reaction you'd have if Square Enix made something that was more than teenage bullshit and belts. I mean, historically, they only pull that shit off like once a decade.

Huh, the last multiplayer game Bioware made was Neverwinter Nights, I guess they were overdue? I secretly hope Dragon Age 3 has multiplayer. I mean, I hate Dragon Age, but if the multiplayer's half as good as Mass Effect 3's, y'all Dragon Age fans are going to be in a good place.

One of the rad as hell features of Mass Effect 3: Not Team Assault is that you can play nearly any race in the Mass Effect universe. Sadly, they left out hanar and elcor, but everything else is fair game. Even the volus. I thought about it for thirty whole seconds and made my character Margo an adept. I made a neat little back story for Margo, making her Shepard's older sister who was interested in helping out the war effort, since it was a family thing for her and all.

Anyway, Shepard's sister Margo:

What? That's Shepard's sister, Margo T'Shepard.

I fucking love Margo, she's like a litmus test for Mass Effect nerds:

• Wait, Margo's an asari! She can't be Shepard's sister!: Ey yo, there's this game called Mass Effect, you really ought to play it.
• Bean, that is fucking hilarious.: We could totally party.
• Bean, that's not possible, Shepard's an only child! Also, the First Contact war happened after Shepard was born, ergo ... My fingers are in my ears and I have a serious case of no1curr.

That's what Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer looks like: a bunch of alien bros beatin' up on baddies.

You, meanwhile, get extra MSPixel, because our new buddy Margo is going to bringing you a short comic every Monday to help me show off multiplayer. Hooray!

If you'd like to suggest an idea/tell me a multiplayer story for Margo Monday, please feel free in the comments!

We have to play multiplayer to raise our EMS score for the MSPixel playthough of Mass Effect 3. If you'd like to play with either husbando~ or I, we share an XBox Live account, friend us at Jean Sibelius. Be warned: I'm fairly awful (and I really only like playing Margo!), so I'm going to be useless on gold or platinum. Husbando~ plays multiplayer like he's gettin' paid, so he's pretty good. Our N7 score is like ten billion because of him.