A new month is almost upon us, which means Sony is about to refresh the lineup of games that all PlayStation Plus members can claim and keep in their collection as long as they maintain their subscription. Between March 4 and March 31, you'll be able to snag Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Sonic Colors: Ultimate and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection. Dragon Age: The Veilguard (PS5) is the clear headliner this time around. Fans had to wait a decade between new installments in BioWare's series, partly because the studio rebooted its work on the latest title several times. Veilguard, an action RPG, is a direct sequel to 2014's Dragon Age Inquisition.

Mass Effect is some of the best science fiction ever made. That may sound like a grandiose comment, but it's true. As a trilogy, the original games from 2007-2013 effortlessly plucked the most cerebral ideas from the sci-fi genre and slotted them into a memorable military role-playing game that had players invested from beginning to controversial end. Whether you prefer the hopeful, optimistic outlook of Asimov, the dark and reflective commentary of Shelley, the accessible thought experiments of Star Trek, or the arch melodrama of Battlestar Galactica, Mass Effect has it all. The trilogy is as happy grazing on the western-inspired tropes of Star Wars as the "hard" sci-fi of Iain M Banks, blending all its moods and micro-stories into a compelling, believable galaxy that somehow walks a line between breathless optimism and suffocating bleakness.

Back in 2013, having bought the series from Eidos, Square Enix released a reboot of the hit 1990s action game Tomb Raider starring a significantly less objectified Lara Croft. I loved that game, despite a quasi-assault scene near the beginning that I would later come to view as a bit icky, and I wasn't the only one – it was extremely well received, selling 3.4m copies in its first month alone. Then Square Enix came out and called it a disappointment. Sales did not meet the publisher's expectations, apparently, which raises the question: what were the expectations? Was it supposed to sell 5m in one month?

Baldur's Gate 3 is a game about making choices. Encounter an imposing, demonic creature in the depths of a cavernous underground temple and, depending on how the player has created their character, the monster may be convinced to kill off its hellish accompanying soldiers and even banish itself back to the inferno. The enemy might also be defeated more conventionally, with slashes from a sword and blasts of electricity, knocking over barrels of grease and setting the battlefield on fire. Find the player character tasked with retrieving an important item locked away in a well-guarded room and it's possible to sneak in to retrieve it, perhaps lie effectively enough to be granted entry, or, once again, simply turn everything surrounding that protected room into a bloodbath. The Baldur's Gate series began in 1998, created by BioWare, the studio that would go on to make popular role-playing series Mass Effect and Dragon Age.

"A scripter was convinced that it would make the scene complete if you could be turned into a wheel of cheese," Larian Studios' lead systems designer Nick Pechenin tells me. The main story of Baldur's Gate 3 is about an invasion of tentacle-mouthed creatures that wouldn't look out of place in one of HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu horror stories, so a sidequest where a disgruntled wizard transforms you into cheese may seem out of place. But moments like this encapsulate why Larian is the game developer that comes closest to capturing the anarchic freedom of real-world sessions of Dungeons & Dragons. More than 20 years ago, before Mass Effect and Dragon Age, before even Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, much-loved developer BioWare made its name with Baldur's Gate and its sequel. "When the original games came out, they were the bleeding edge of what was possible technologically, visually, and story-wise," says Pechenin.

Bioware's quality assurance testers working on Dragon Age: Dreadwolf have voted to form the first unionized workplace for the video game industry in Canada. The United Food and Commercial Workers Local 401 applied to become the certified bargaining agent for Keywords Studios, the contracting company through which the testers are employed, back in April. Now, Kotaku says the election has resulted in a 16-0 vote in favor of unionization. Before working on the fourth major game in the Dragon Age franchise, they also supported the development of Mass Effect: Legendary Edition and Legacy of the Sith, an expansion for Star Wars: The Old Republic. The testers, who work out of BioWare's Edmonton office, started organizing after Keywords Studios announced that they'll be required to return to office, whereas direct BioWare employees were give more options.

He has been involved in many areas that make use of AI and ML at EA, particularly AI for games development and verification. He started out with game development, but is now with the AI support team, which supports all of the company's teams.

TMMI, high resolution video technology pioneer, expands into artificial intelligence with co-development agreement. TMMI President, Michael Kozole made the announcement stating, "TMMI has always focused on high quality, cutting-edge, video technology since its beginning in 1990. Over the recent months, TMMI has assembled this opportunity to bring together an association of top-level talent and shared technology development with CodeBaby, that will create emotionally intelligent avatars that deliver all-new experiences in artificial intelligence with greater access to a broad base of businesses and consumers". The CodeBaby teams come with over 20 years of experience in animation, gaming and artificial intelligence. Founded in 2001, CodeBaby attracted the attention of two doctors in Alberta, Canada, who had co-founded a video game company (Bioware) in 1995.

When a video game is remastered, the expectation is that it will look better, perform better, and generally fix the mistakes of its original incarnation. BioWare's Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, released last week, is no exception to the rule--the compilation features remasters of the entire Mass Effect trilogy, and by all accounts, the changes made to the science-fiction action role-playing games are improvements. But let's be honest--for anyone who's played the games before, the appeal of returning to the series doesn't lie in shinier graphics or faster loading times. Rather, the point of going back is to revisit your old crush. Or, if we're being really honest, crushes, plural.

Now that Mass Effect Legendary Edition, the remaster of BioWare's groundbreaking space trilogy, is out, the video game series likely to reach a whole lot of first-time players--especially considering the current drought in new game releases. You're in for an incredible RPG experience packed with adventure, gunfights, telekinesis, ethical quandaries, space politics, and romanceable aliens. In Mass Effect, your choices have real consequences on the story, and you should feel free to experiment accordingly. But here's one choice you absolutely shouldn't make: Do not, under any circumstances, play the protagonist as a guy. Look, there's nothing wrong with men. It's totally okay to be a man, and in most circumstances, it's perfectly okay to choose to play a male character in a video game when given multiple gender options.