There’s things to do back on the ship. The Galactic Council want an angry word with me over my sparing the last of a race of the hideous bug things that sorta-kinda tried to wipe out all life over a thousand years ago. After arguing with them I wander the ship for a bit, checking in (re: trying to sleep with) with the rag-tag crew I’ve assembled to help me bring down Saren, a rogue Specter with a thus far unexplained plan of arch-villainy in the works. Kaiden’s interested, but not giving anything up till after the mission, while Ashley’s clearly jealous of the Lieutenant’s feelings toward me. Tali, meanwhile, won’t stop going on in her adorable alien-by-way-of-Russian accent about how hard life is for her people since being run off their homeworld by a bunch of sentient toasters. Muttering something about how Kirk never having to deal with this high school nonsense, I make my way back to the bridge to plot out next course.

As I pull up the map of the Milky Way, however, a distress signal comes in from one of the human alliance’s military bases. It seems the virtual intelligence in charge of one of their training facilities has started thinking for itself, taking over the base’s defenses and killing the soldiers it was supposed to be working for. It’s a tender situation, to say the least, and one just perfect for my particular skill set in the fine art of shooting things until they don’t move any more. Would I mind putting off my mission to save all life as we know it from a rogue Spectre and his unstoppable army of sentient techno-organics to straighten it out for them? I’m about to hang up (or even better, say something suitably cool and then hang up) when I note the base’s location – Luna, Earth’s moon. Well, that changes everything, now doesn’t it? I plug the coordinates into the computer and send the ship tearing through space at faster-than-light speeds. We’re going home.

Dropping out of FTL speed, my ship, the Normandy, buzzes a crater near the troubled base and chucks my team and I in the Mako, our tank-like vehicle used for outdoors missions, at the surface. Not only do I get to visit the moon, I get my own heavily armed lunar rover? This mission just gets better and better. I waste time trundling around the crater, fishtailing the Mako to see how big a gravel spray I can create. After a while I stumble upon a long-lost Soviet probe, crashed these long centuries and almost entirely buried under the still gray sand. The crater is surrounded on all sides by jagged hills, peaks thrown up by some long ago collision with an asteroid. I point the Mako at them and am delighted to find that, rather some pretty backdrop, they’re just as solid as the rest of it. Parking at the summit of a particularly tall hill, my team and I leave the Mako to explore. The Earth hangs silently overhead, as blue and beautiful as any NASA photo you’ve ever seen. Sliding down the hillside with my team, each of us secure in our space-suits, it hits me: I’ve never been here before. All the videogames I’ve played, and this is my first trip to the moon.

It’s not really surprising – videogames pride themselves on transporting players to fantastic locales, and compared to a city under the sea, the Mushroom Kingdom, or the mind of a giant, mutated lungfish, a cold and lonely bit of space rock we can see any night there aren’t clouds out hardly rates as anything special. Only that’s exactly why it is so special – unlike all those wonderful made up places, the moon is real – it’s right there, right now as I’m writing this. It’s a place I’ve wanted to visit since I was old enough to point at it, and now Mass Effect, this game with so much already going for it, is letting me run around on the surface as one of its less-important side quests. And that’s just wonderful.

Eventually I get back to the matter at hand, finally wiping out the V.I.’s security drones and shutting it down for good. As it’s erased, a burst of binary overrides my suit’s communication relay, broadcasting four lines of seemingly random 0’s and 1’s at full volume. Typing the sequence into a binary translator reveals a single word: HELP. Another nice touch. Before getting back to the main plot of the game, I take a moment to sweep the Normandy’s sensors over the rest of the Sol system. Humanity has grown in the last several hundred years, with colonies clinging to nearly every solid rock around. After years of sci-fi games wanting to get as far away from dullsville Earth and its moon, it’s surprisingly refreshing to see one not just include it but give a reason for visiting. The new course set, the ship’s FTL kicks in with a bang and we’re off.