**this will contain spoilers**

i sat off to do something "epic" with these blog posts, but found myself way in over my head. the game just isn't that great. also, i suck. because i just don't have the stomach to crap out pretentious post after pretentious post about every encounter in mass effect, that somehow affected my experience.

the game fell short with what it sat out to do, and as a result i tried to defend the game against myself, as i was becoming more and more critical of the game. the previous post is true, and i actually felt that way when playing the game. but, to write that kind of stuff made me feel like a douche.

and well, i was a total douchebag and killed everyone i could kill. i wiped out colonists, i killed traitors who tried to repent themselves, and i actually let out the rachni out (god did i regret it after reading the codex). i didn't shoot wrex though, but that moment in the game also fell short because it never culminated to anything. could have been one of the greatest moments i've experienced in a videogame but it didn't deliver past that initial face off between you and him. great scene, awesome twist, beautifully executed, up to that point. i simply used my intimidate skills and said one line to wrex and he took the gun away. i stood there with my jaw resting on top of my pistol (that i was apparently using, although i wasn't trained at it, and had only used the shotgun throughout the entire game).

lets be clear, its a roleplaying game and as such i expected more of an impact on the stuff i did. the thing turned into the grinding when you started doing the sidequests and it all looked the same and ended up the same. so, as much as i love mass effect, it fell pretty short. it fell very short.

the inventory screen is prett broken too. with the amount of loot all over the place in crates and from fallen enemies that inventory got filled up pretty quickly. and its just a tree for each category that only shows the 7 or so next items. when you have around 50 or so different assault rifles gather up during the course of a level, you'll be spending a hell of a lot a time cleansing that inventory screen. i can see where they were going with the "user-friendliness" for the consoles, but the solution wasn't much of a solution. more of a pain in the ass.

and lets make another thing clear, i'm a man of emotion. if something strikes a chord in my heart i fucking love that shit like my life depended on it. the atmosphere in mass effect is absolutely beautiful, despite its two thousand tons of cheese loaded into it because of pressures from the microsoft PR department (much as the case of bioshock. moral choice? i make more moral choices choosing between mcdonalds or burger king for dinner). that last scene when i (i.e. sheppard) came up from the debris of metal and the music kicked in like it thought i was master chief. even despite those moments, the music touched me like no other game. bioshock got served on that point as well, because no game has nailed my personal preference in musical style or melodies like that before.

but lets back up just for a few seconds there. the saren boss battle. now, when you have the verbal fight with him and you can see his conscious hanging on for dear life, helplessly overrun by sovreign, the real saren finally gets the upper hand and puts his own gun to his head and falls dead to the ground. that should have ended the game. because the following battle between you and the resurrected saren/sovreign is one of the most broken pieces of gaming engineering i have ever experienced. my squad was helpless. because, no one moves very quickly. and i had wrex and liara with me, so wrex was too slow and liara was to weak and couldn't stand on her feet for more than one second just because she's specialized in biotic powers. i tried my powers as well in vein, and finally found the wall that saren apparently didn't want to check behind, for my convenience, so i could just stand there and deliver shotgun blasts and keep charging my shields. now that was actually worse than bioshocks boss battle, which worked aside from this one (although it was completely out of place).


glad to get that off my chest. i've been trying to play it again with one female renegade sentinel and one male paragon adapt. everyone should play as the female renegade one, because she has the absolute best voice over. such great lines you won't hear from any other videogame in a long time. anyway, i havn't gotten far with either one because i just don't want to play it again anytime soon. as beautiful and utterly amazing as it was, mass effect hurt my feelings when playing such a cheap and unfinished game.