For years now, some of the best, wildest, most moving or revealing stories we've been telling ourselves have come not from books, movies or TV, but from video games. So we're running an occasional series, Reading The Game, in which we take a look at some of these games from a literary perspective. In the beginning, it was the Normandy that I fell for, not Mass Effect. If it hadn't been for the Normandy (gorgeous, sleek, the most advanced ship in the Alliance fleet and personal ride of Commander Shepard, star of the series), I might've just quit the newly remastered Legendary edition of the beloved trilogy after the first few hours. See, I did not like Mass Effect at all when I started playing.

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.

March is already a jam-packed month in video games, between the arrivals of epics like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Nier: Automata, and players still prowling the hit open-world adventure Horizon: Zero Dawn. Andromeda follows up the popular Mass Effect trilogy, where players served as Commander Shepard, tasked with saving the galaxy from a purge of organic life from an advanced race of machines called Reapers. Players were drawn to the trilogy by an incredibly robust story with an encyclopedia-like Codex and the ability to make decisions through dialogue changing the course of the game's events. It also allowed players to explore countless planets and galaxies, discovering various races such as the Krogan and Quarians. Now, we've arrived at Andromeda, which takes place 600 years after the original Mass Effect trilogy.

Horizon: Zero Dawn, a massive open-world game set in a lush, post-apocalyptic jungle inhabited by robot dinosaurs, is one of the most anticipated games of 2017. Players take the role of Aloy, a young hunter in a far-flung future, well after most of human society has disappeared in a long-forgotten disaster. Nature has reclaimed the land, with overgrown city ruins giving way to lush forests and plains. But there are still roving bands of robotic dinosaurs of unknown origin to contend with. The last few years have seen a rise in female leads, such as Emily Kaldwin (Dishonored 2) and Evie Frye (Assassin's Creed: Syndicate). That doesn't mean the medium has always been a complete dudefest.