Anyone playing Mass Effect or Dragon Age should know immediately what I am talking about. As I was playing Dragon Agerigins I sat there for awhile, listing off influences in my head. And the list kept growing. Tolkien and Martin were perhaps the most obvious, but in discussion forums others kept coming into play as well.

Mass Effect as a series is pretty much the same way. One moment you feel like you are right smack dab in an episode of Battlestar Galactica, the next, you've walked onto the set of Star Trek. Throw in the voice acting and before long it is pretty obvious that this was a game made by geeks who went out to find all the icons they could.

Normally, when I can directly trace a story line, I write it off as a rip-off and move on. Not so with Bioware's games, which have an atmosphere uniquely their own that works not in spite of their borrowing, but because of it.

Just a for instance. In the Mass Effect Universe, AI is bad. It is understood that they will always, always, always go rogue. Suddenly, your ship has a Shipboard AI. And when they get Tricia Helfer (Number 6 from Battlestar Galactica) to voice it? Mood set, loud and clear.

Bioware is run by a bunch of geeks, and that is a very, very good thing. They know exactly how their chosen Genre (either medieval fantasy or Science Fiction) can best set the scene, and sure enough, the scene gets set. There is this whole genre shorthand that is used expertly, and at the same time does not assume familiarity with the genre itself.

Having long been a fantasy/Sci-fi fan, I cannot say conclusively that either DragonAge or Mass Effect could sell people who are not already high on their genre's. Neither am I positive that they could sell RPG's to the non-believer.

But as IP's made by fans for fans? This is top notch work.