Slashdot

Had to play it through twice for it. 2x by the consort on Citadel then once each by Ashley and Liara. Doing the blue chick made me feel cool like Captain Kirk.

I just hope they make more sex scenes, and make them more detailed, vivid, and kinky. I'll show a video of the scenes to Kevin McCollough and Jack Thompson, and tell them that I let my 5 yr old son play the game.

The paraphrases were opportunities to replace a well-written, well-crafted sentence with something that makes the player chuckle -- but also tells them exactly what will happen if they make that choice.

I found that there were a significant number of times where my expectation of what Shepard would say didn't quite match what he/she ended up saying. And even more annoying, sometimes I would agonize over a choice, only to later find out that the resulting dialogue was the same for either choice. Why are we given the ability to decide what's going through Shepard's head if it doesn't make a difference?

Anyway, I'm really looking forward to seeing how the engine evolves for the next game. Any improvement is going to seem really significant if most of the engine is the same.

I'm actually in the process of writing my review for Mass Effect right now, I've found it's one of the hardest reviews to write in a long time. The game does a lot of things really, really well: story, universe, history, characters, dialogue, graphics. But in pretty much every category I review I can pick out some really big blemishes.

Take the graphics for instance, the game is beautiful and the characters look relatively real, their facial structure is complicated enough to basically do any kind of movement realistically. The environments are large and well textured... when all the textures are there. The game (maybe more Unreal Engine 3) suffers from some really nasty texture draw-in as it layers the textures. Some cutscenes will start and the characters will look nothing like their actual appearance because all the textures and bump/normal mapping hasn't been performed yet. A few seconds in and finally everything will look "right," but that's after some obtrusive pop up was performed that can be quite distracting. I would rather have had a few longer loading screens than that, honestly.

A lot of people complained about the elevators serving as load screens in the game, I never really had a problem with them. In most, your fellow party members will talk amongst themselves or you'll hear a radio report. The problem I had was they put an elevator on your ship that was a mandatory ride! This elevator must only travel about 15 feet but it takes at least a minute to ride. And if you want to buy anything on your ship or talk to most of your crew members, you must ride the elevator (and then of course ride it back up). Annoying, and I really only think it was necessary because of all the particle and graphical effects they were doing in the engine room.

Another complaint I have is with the inventory system. It's not that bad when you're equipping people, usually you only have a few shotguns or sniper rifles to pick from. The problems start when you have a lot of a certain type of item. Like upgrades. You'll usually carry a lot of different upgrades around because you never know if you'll need them. The item are arranged in basically a non-sorted order (I think sorted by when you obtained them...) so you'll find yourself scrolling through scores of items to find the one you need. Scrolling is NOT fast, either. This issue is multiplied when you go to a shop. If you want to buy or sell something, the items are not organized in a way that you can easily buy only pistols or only armor. No, they're ordered in ascending order according to price if you're selling and descending order if you're buying. There's no other way to sort them. It's incredibly obnoxious and makes item management the single worst thing about this game.

My final complaint is about the Mako ground transport vehicle and the subsequent side missions. Well, really my complaint is more about planet/level design than anything. Every planet is riddled with high mountains and usually the items of interest are stuck in these mountains. The Mako vehicle is surprisingly capable of climbing peaks, etc. but it is still really annoying to go from point A to point B. This is a little harder to describe if you haven't played the game but imagine playing Halo and driving the Warthog (a much looser version at that) over all the mountains in your way to get to your next checkpoint.

Okay, even though that was a lot of complaining, Mass Effect was still awesome. Those are my stand out issues with the game and I have some confidence they will fix most of them with its impending sequels. Mass Effect is still a must play game, especially for science fiction fans.