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November 18 2010

The Spike Video Game Awards are coming on Saturday, December 11, and as in previous years, we can expect big reveals at the awards show.  We’ve already been told that we’ll get a new Batman: Arkham City trailer, which I am very much looking forward to.

We were also told that there’d be a big Bioware reveal, in terms of their next game.  No mention was made of a new IP, just game.  People started speculating whether it would be a brand new IP, however with Dragon Age II and Star Wars: The Old Republic, odds favored Mass Effect 3… and after a very brief clip which was dissected frame per frame (damn near), it looks like we are in fact going to get some information regarding Mass Effect 3.

The Joystiq community had fun analyzing this video:

Update: The sharp eyes of commenter Arth Vader picked up that the gun in the pic is either the M-29 Incisor Sniper Rifle from the Mass Effect 2 Aegis Pack DLC or a reused asset. If it is the M-29, it would imply the game will be Mass Effect related.

Update 2: Recall that EA said last February that something “far-reaching” was coming to Mass Effect during the fourth quarter of the publisher’s current fiscal year—or in layman’s terms: January 1 – March 31, 2011.

Update 3: Okay, now things are just getting nerdy. BioWare blasted out the adjacent QR code on Twitter which, when decoded, spits out a string of 1s and 0s. When you convert this binary code (we told you: nerdy), it reads: 55.845. Of course, as everyone knows, 55.845 is the atomic mass of iron. Maybe the presence of the word “mass” in our findings isn’t quite enough to go on, but we’re sure you’ll agree that the presence of the word “mass” coupled with a piece of fan fiction titled Mass Effect: Iron Rebirth is practically a smoking M-29 Incisor Sniper Rifle.

Update 4: And another QR code has been loosed upon the unsuspecting people of Twitter. This one is again some binary that translates into: -128.5°F. Converted to Celsius, that becomes -89.16666666666667°C. “The coldest temperature ever recorded on earth is -89.2 degrees Celsius (-128.5 degrees Fahrenheit) at Vostok, Antarctica on July 21, 1983,” says Wikipedia; and this Mass Effect wiki page describes the Vostok solar system as “a medium system with four planets and an asteroid belt,” itself named after the Soviet “Vostok Program” that resulted in the first manned space flight. Oh, and that asteroid belt that was mentioned? The wiki page calls it a “metal-rich asteroid.” You know what else is metal? That’s right, iron!

Update 5: A few folks have also written in about the planet Aequitas, which is also from the Mass Effect universe. Logic train: 1st QR code = 55.845, the atomic mass of Iron. 2nd QR code = 128.5. -128.5 deg F = Vostok, Antarctica record-breaking temperature. -128.5 deg F ~= -89 deg C = surface temperature of Aequitas, a planet known for its “famous Iron Canyons.”

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