Mass Effect

Eurogamer 10/10
Gametrailers 9.7/10
Gamesradar 10/10
Gamespy 5/5
Destructoid 10/10
Gamepro 4.5/5
Team Xbox 10/10
1Up: A-

christ.

psyched

I was so excited abt this that i had a 2nd playthrough as a purely evil biotic character last week. Now i don't know which save to use.

Ah come on, you know you'll play ME2 more than once, so you'll get to try both.

yeah I have to buy this today even though I am still not through assassin's creed 2 ARGH

So this game basically starts out just like KOTR2

ass effect
http://i75.photobucket.com/albums/i298/drbo/Unff.png

no one playing this then or are you all too busy playing to post and if so how is it

Got this today and it's v good.

its pretty great. main criticism: classes/abilities too similar.

I played up to the first save point, I think. My friend beat it within three days of buying it, but he still has to play through it several more times before he will loan it to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQCf4303lKo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00YwSI2nF0k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwzoedQ_ZQ8

I got the scientist character to sing gilbert and sullivan last night, so I got that going for me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bj0iJtgHOCI

Ah yes here it is

okay, maybe i need to retry the first one.

kind of want to put Miranda on the ws of shame thread purely because of Yvonne Strahovski

I bought Mass Effect Part One the other day. Really digging it despite the shortcomings. One major gripe: I was forced to kill off one of the best characters in my team cuz my Charm and Intimidate skills were too low. Kinda makes me not want to import my character/storyline into the new one.

I am starting my second game of this =(

Upping the difficulty tho. Regular difficulty was a goddamn cakewalk.

kind of want to put Miranda on the ws of shame thread purely because of Yvonne Strahovski
― PIES! PIES! PIES! PIES! PIES! (HI DERE), Monday, February 1, 2010 5:49 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

http://i75.photobucket.com/albums/i298/drbo/Unff.png

I just mentioned this over on the xbox thread but I'll say it again here because it's so fucking annoying - the tiny text! I'm seriously sitting about 3 feet away from the TV screen and I still can't read it! I don't have a HDTVUltraLtdClariView TV or anything like that, but it's a pretty big screen and I've never had problems reading any text in a game before on it. Weird.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/bioware-unable-to-address-me2-text-issue

(as it happen I bought myself a new telly this week, otherwise this would've been making me really angry too)

Yeah, just saw this too:

http://www.kotaku.com.au/2010/02/mass-effect-2-and-the-curse-of-the-tiny-text/

sigh.

http://i45.tinypic.com/1z65dgo.jpg

It's a little bit harder for me to read than this screenshot, but it's a pretty good example:

yeah, this is a big problem (RARE even patched in a big-text mode to banjo kazooie following complaints iirc); no fix for it other than jumping on the HD bandwagon : /

nitpicks: need more random/small encounters, I have found like 2 planets out of 50ish that have them. why does Bioware hate wandering monsters :( also would like more random objects/npcs thrown around in general.

I have an HDTV and still have a hard time reading it because my xbox is ONLY on component and doesn't have an HDMI port. Fucking tiny ass text!

Also I am not a fan of a lot of things in this game (more or less spoiler-less, but if you're really a stickler you might wanna skip it):

1. I liked the Mako, I will admit it. Getting rid of it I guess makes sense for all the whiners who hated it.), but replacing it with that mining shit? FUCK YOU BIOWARE. Seriously. You took a timesink that nonetheless brought me a little joy and replaced it with something that fills me with sorrow. Gone is that sense of isolation and wonder and floaty, lonely magic that was driving around on an insane future planet-- instead there is nothing now except a shitty animated Make Your Own Joy Division Album Cover mini"game".

2. I have to admit, even though the last game had a pretty terrible inventory system, I do miss actually getting new weapons and armor all of the time and trying them on and putting different armor on each of my dudes. Customizing my armor to look like Master Chief colors and have 1-2 outfits per teammate? Not my cup of tea. Where's my Heavy Armor - Turian, etc?

3. Why is it that the choices I don't actually give a SHIT about from the first game are the ones that are apparently the ones that do the most in the game, versus the "big" choices? Where's my Asari love child? Actually the whole romance subplot from the last game is pretty absent in any but the most superficial ways (so far as I can see, one awkward peck upon remeeting, and a tiny photo in the cabin of the ship). I guess I shouldn't care considering how stupid the romance subplot was in the last game anyway, but still. The whole choice-consequence thing feels almost as empty as it did in FABLE II, for fuck's sake (my least favourite game of this console generation).

4. Can we just call this game Star Ocean's Eleven? I don't know how I feel about this "make a crack team" as a central plot point thing. I think that building a team in any game is the part that's most awkward and irritating and appreciated that in the first game you had basically your WHOLE TEAM by the time you left the Citadel (one of the worst missions was the one where you got Liara). WELL NOW I GET THE LIARA MISSION TEN TIMES! TIMES TWO IF YOU COUNT THE "HELP" MISSIONS! I mean, shit.

5. I shouldn't have played an adept again.

Gonna stop now before this gets too "I just played Mass Effect 2 for over an HOUR" and earn my own best-of thread.

I didn't play the first Mass Effect, so although I'm annoyed by tiny text (although I've sorta adapted to it by sitting 2 inches away from the screen and losing my mind), I'm reaaaaally enjoying this on the whole. Particularly enjoyed the Omega/Afterlife missions, with the nice Bladerunner vibes.

agree with will m's critiques but still dig the game. glad I didn't play an adept again either, because the abilities could really use more creativity and diversity to them. Also if you could script your npc partners like dragon age and if their abilities worked especially well in combination

ZS - sympathy for your issue but having a 360 and no hd tv is almost pointless.

agree with x's critiques but still dig the game.

u people r basically why a.hitler happened

and why empire state of mind won pazz and jop

Pretty sure Modern Warfare 2 is why A. Hitler happened.

hes just venting b/c this is the only place he can talk to people over 14 years old U_U

I agree w/ur critiques but I still dig myself

http://imgur.com/krp7L.jpg
"conezy and I pwned bitchez for 4 hours saturday night! then my stupid mom made me go to bed"

Anyone still playing this like I am? It's the only game I own, so I'm drawing it out as long as possible by doing all the "loyalty" team member missions, even though Miranda and Thane are pretty much my default crew.

Overall I'm having a good time, although I wish it was a little heavier on the RPG side. Or, if it was a little more fun on the action side, if that's the emphasis. But good lord, hands down the worst thing is the mining. I don't want to think about how much time I've spent moving the little reticule around the planets, waiting for the controller to buzz. Worst of all was the tease that came with the mining enhancement upgrade. When I saw it, I figured that it would add some sort of radar so you could move straight toward the minerals (similar to the radar that's used when there's a detected anomaly), or at least that the reticule would move more quickly. Turns out that it makes the reticule move more quickly when you're NOT SCANNING for minerals. So...it's totally useless, since the seemingly random distribution of minerals makes it necessary to tediously scan everywhere anyway. uuuuuuuuugh...

I have considered putting out a Craig's List ad to pay some little kid to do the mining stuff for me while I read the paper, but I figured "Will pay $10/hr for someone to help me out with probes" would be crepey

I am liking it v. much. Quite happy with a lot of the rpg stripping down, the level of inventory management was v. much overblown in the 1st one where i'd end up with 30 different types of ammo that were pretty much the same. Not so happy with the stripping down of character customisation wrt to powers but a lot of the biotic and tech stuff in ME1 was pretty useless and nothing at all seems useless in this.

The mining is absolutely dreadful. The Mako exploration in ME1 was awful too, spend ten minutes exploring a planet to pick up some random medal or something and only abt 1 in 15 planets had an actual sidequest. Suppose the mining aspect is to do away with all the mindless exploration, now every planet you can land on has an actual sidequest but don't know why they thought a better alternative was to spend five minutes running yr cursor over a planet (don't know about xbox version but in the pc version you have to hover yr mouse ultra slow or you can miss the rich deposits which adds to the frustartion) and hitting a button just to upgrade yr equipment.

Putting together a crack team is a pretty poor storyline compared to ME1 as an overarching plot but i still think the story is better written and some of the characters are v. good, loving mordins hypersped, hyperaware conversational style and Jack / Subject 0 isn't half as bad a Joss Whedon badass Faith ripoff as i thought she'd be.

Also the squad based shooting is far superior to ME1.

It moves faster when you're not scanning. Once I got the upgrade I found the mining a lot less painful, combined with the 60 probes. Just push the reticule all the way to the right, on the equator, and push both sticks right. Get all the way around the equator, do the same thing around the tropic of cancer and tropic of capricorn, get a buttload of stuff, hit the next planet. Aside from eezo (check it out I am hip with the in-game jargon) I was able to get pretty much whatever I needed for whatever upgrades I needed in under 20 minutes.

It moves faster when you're not scanning.

heh, that's the thing - it's useless because you always need to scan! I definitely do the reticule on the right/both sticks to the right speed up trick, but it's just painfully slow. <20 minutes for whatever upgrades you need, sure, but you'll need to do it several times throughout the game because there's always new stuff opening up, and before you know it you've spent 4+ hours scanning planets.

bnw u can call me pwnezy

really want to play this btw ;_; I want to believe

cozen....I see you...

I see you.

i finished a few days ago :( my char didn't die (not even sure where that decision was made). after the final battle there is a scene where cozen puts on his robe and wizard hat, if you know what i mean.

Hmm...last thing I'll say about mining, but gamefaqs had a useful tip:

To speed up mining, I highly recommend buying the Advanced Mineral Scanner
as soon as possible. You can unlock this upgrade by speaking to Miranda
after recruiting Mordin. This will allow the scanning reticle to move over
the surface of the planet much faster. However, it's still slow when holding
the left trigger to scan. How can we get around this problem? Simply TAP the
left trigger very quickly as you move the scanning reticle, this will allow
you to detect resources while moving the reticle quickly.

Haven't tried it yet, but hopefully it'll speed up things.

I have an HDTV and still have a hard time reading it because my xbox is ONLY on component and doesn't have an HDMI port. Fucking tiny ass text!

you have an HDTV but your xbox is going on SD?!?!

You don't need HDMI to get HD output.

actually, component should be rendering HDMI so i dont know what the problem is here? are you using COMPOSITE maybe?

No no, component is full HD but it's analog HD, so it's a slightly woolier than HDMI, which is digital HD. Haven't picked up my ME2 yet, but the text would have to be VERY tiny for that to make a difference? Hoping it isn't, cos my 360 is a non-HDMI one too.