The Glade 4.0

So with so many games that came out around mass effect, I picked it up and played it a bit, but it never really grabbed my interest. Put about 10 hours into it before getting pulled to something else. With DA:origins and Mass Effect 2 coming out soon, I figured I needed to finish it before then, and ended up finishing it this morning. What a great story! I feel like the beginning of the game took quite a while to get going, but by the end I was 100% enthralled. Really looking forward to ME:2 now.

Yes, ME was definitely a wonderful gaming experience. I lost interest the first time while doing a bunch of generic side missions, and after a 12 month break (exactly), I picked it up again, started the main story and didn't put it down again until the credits.

Hope ME2 makes the side quests better.

Agreed, I think it was the side quests that made me put it down the first time. They just didn't have a lot of story development meat on their bones.

I loved everything about the game. I seriously went for hours exploring every inch of the worlds trying to find every little resource. One of my all-time favorite games, for sure.

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The Dude abides.

Same. Easily one of the best games released in the past 10 years.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

I love Mass Effect, it's one of the few games I have 100% achievements on... however...

Not even its mother could love the Mako. The Mako is a horrible and foul abomination of taint tainted taintedness.

I never understood the Mako-hate. Did enjoy all of ME, though. It's one of those I play frequently even these days.

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Grenade 3 Sports Drink. It's fire in the hole.. Your hole!

I'd have less Mako-hate if a lot of the side-quest environments weren't so terrible to get around in. It was fine for the main quest planets, but some of side-quest geography was just atrocious.

Thankfully they are supposedly totally redoing that part for ME2.

10 minutes to climb one hill was kind of stupid on ME.

Hopefully they've sped the damned elevators up in ME2. I am nowhere near getting all the achievements, but then again after putting 60 odd hours in it doing all the side quests and such, well, let's just say I got more enjoyment out of 300+ hours screwing around with Fallout 3

The mako, in a nutshell: Hey, let's design a planetary vehicle that moves fast and has jump jets so that players can navigate the huge *** planet areas quickly. Then let's design the planets to be like a hedge-maze, and make the mountains too steep for their rover to get over!

The mako was fine, it's the goddamn side-quest planets that were **** up.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I disliked the gameplay in general. It was a half-assed shooter and half-assed vehicular combat game rolled into one.

The storyline made up for it, and I finished the game pretty quickly despite the gameplay.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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I thought ME was perfect for a Star Wars game. It FELT like they developed the interface and much of it with a KOTOR game in mind only to dump it and rewrite the story (changing as little as possible while making it distinct)

I would love someone to come up with a Dev Tookit to make Star Wars games in this vein.

What? You're never forced to use the Mako in combat. Maybe once? It's stupid to kill enemies with it, because you take a major exp hit. To call it a half-assed shooter doesn't make sense, when it had the same basic system as a game like Gears of War, with an added "magic" element.

The only bad thing about the game was the inventory management.



Changing as little as possible, from the plot, as Star Wars? Please elaborate, and highlight commonalities.

If I had to compare ME to a movie plot, it would certainly be The Matrix, on a galactic scale.

I just mean that that the graphics were very star warsy, the powers nearly all have Star Wars analogues. (force push, lift, healing, etc.) I just felt like they wrote the whole engine including powers with Star Wars in mind, only to have to send it back to change the graphics & the story to make it not-star wars. I think someone could code new models and a dev tool kit to allow some great story telling adventures with a KOTOR style game.

What? You're never forced to use the Mako in combat. Maybe once? It's stupid to kill enemies with it, because you take a major exp hit. To call it a half-assed shooter doesn't make sense, when it had the same basic system as a game like Gears of War, with an added "magic" element.

The only bad thing about the game was the inventory management.
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As a shooter, it was bland. Remove the storyline and RPG elements completely and compare it to any major 1st or 3rd person shooter, and it completely sucks. I included vehicular combat because you could fight in the Mako, but that sucked even worse. The storyline elements are all that disguise it from being a step back two decades. Even ancient action shooters like Dark Forces, Tomb Raider or Doom (the originals from 13-16 years ago) all had far deeper gameplay.

That said, the dialogue system and storyline redeem it and take what would otherwise be a very shallow game and made it hard for me to stop playing until it was done. Then I replayed it, with massive cheating, because I couldn't be bothered to actually play it again.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I actually really enjoyed the tactical biotics use combined with shooting from cover.

You are crazy if you think the gameplay of Mass Effect wasn't as deep as older shooters. It has deeper gameplay elements than most modern day shooters. Plus, it uses the cover mechanic and I hate playing shooters now that don't use it. I realize this wasn't new with Mass Effect, but it was totally awesome. Playing the game on insanity has really made me change my strategies from earlier difficulties. I generally don't find games very fun on the hardest difficulty setting, but I am having a freaking blast playing through on insanity right now.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

The elevators were slow because they were animated load screens

I don't know how you can say that. As I recall, you can't even jump! The level design plays more like a non-action game...they keep you on rails entirely. It has all the movement options of Neverwinter Nights, but is supposed to be an action game!

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

squad control sucked in ME, but Jumping is a rediculous mechanic. Climbing is okay (one day I'd like a game that would allow REALISTIC jump height, climb options and fully movable terrain so I could push tables and climb up to a mezzinine or something.)

If shooters could implement a decent climb mechanic, they could lower the jump distances considerably. As it stands, without jump, a 2 foot tall ridge becomes impassable terrain (ME has lots of that), wheras realisticly, if something's not out of reach of your fingertips, it should be passable for any reasonably fit person.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Oh I know why they were slow, but getting on them made me want to gouge my eyes out. Especially when you got off one, and had to immediately get on another one.

I guess they could just have a "Loading. Please wait..." bar and a static screen instead. *shrug*

Or they could have put it together better, and not had 45 minute elevator trips. The combat was not bad, the quests were good, even the side quests were good, but the elevators were my biggest irritation. Even in your own ship it takes 5 minutes. Shepard could have put on a suit, crawled outside and back in on the next floor down, and still managed to beat the elevator.