Whenever Harbinger made his announcement, I amused myself by mentally tacking on something else.

“ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL [of dat ass]”

“ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL [of the dance floor]”

“ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL [of this Hot Pocket]”

On the other hand, ME1 has something, that makes it a much better game – epic plot. ME2 is a great game, but in comparison it looks just like an unusual shooter.

Just reread his ME3 review. Mentioning the ending kinda sucks without whining about it or treating as too big a deal?

Nice to see. Liked the review more on beating the game than before, and it was a good review from the get-go.

It’s a pity that they didn’t have the time or resources to make sure my Shepherd (a male version of yours) was servced as well, with better reunions and a story that made more sense. A pity.

Worst: I’m just before the trip through the Omega 4 relay, and what’s killing me is (as a completist) the continued trips to every planet in every system to find all the extra missions, and there don’t seem to be that many. So my biggest ‘worst’ would be too many planets, or too few missions. It’s a chore to find all the missions, when that’s usually the part I like most. There’s either got to be more missions to make all this scanning worthwhile, or less planets, to make sure I find the missions quicker.

Another worst: the problem you had with reputation, I only just realised what you’re talking about and it’s too late in the game for me to get any of my reputations stats up. I have so little on either wing that I can’t access most of the conversation options. Time to reassign stats I guess, but I doubt I now have the time to boost any of them up to a high enough level.

Best: Pretty much everything you’ve said, but especially the characters. Jack, love her, but apparently had sex too soon with her, so now we can’t develop a relationship! I also adore the Yeoman, Garrus, Mordin, Thane, Legion… even Jacob since his personal mission was solid. Although I like Grunt since his shields are awesome, I would prefer Wrex, same with the asari, same with Miranda/Ashley. Give me my old flame back and keep Miranda.

That was always going to be a problem, so it’s strange that they put them on the periphery. You’re always going to be more attached to the old characters, and there’s no reason why Wrex couldn’t have fought in a big arena, or the asari/Ashely could have tracked their daughter/sister.

Only… three months until we find out how it all ends. Can’t wait. (Although given how underpowered this PC is, might have to wait…)

It would be wonderfully, very gently belittling. It’d drive him mental.

Seeing characters call new-Shepard an old friend just felt wrong.

No, Wrex. This jerk isn’t your friend. Your friend is Commander Shepard, Space Badass, not some mealy mouthed Batarian apologist.

I entirely agree about my Shep now becoming MY Shep. Then again, I use a MaleShep, so I must be insane or evil or something.

I have dabbled in Femshep, but could never top this: http://i52.tinypic.com/2z5m64w.jpg
This. This is my Shep.

Hell. Everyone decks the reporter. It’s the right thing to do.

I like Legion. They’re nice guys.

Having played Mass Effect and 2 in a week for the first time recently, I can safely say I agree with everything. Especially not being able to call Crapbag out for Akuze. Or airlock Miranda for Akuze.

What I’m saying is that my Shepard is not forgiving enough to let high ranking Cerberus operatives live, and probably not patient enough to let that slide.

Well, that and Mordin being the best. Hell, I feel I can safely say that if he was in an episode of Deep Space 9 or Next Generation or suchlike, it would be one of the best ones.

It’s all because of Tali. Tali was so fantastic that i chose her over legion in their argument (didnt even TRY to calm them both down.) and then picked legion to go into the vents, to keep Tali safe. Course, this meant legion was killed.

I actually really genuinely hope that this has big ramifications. Politically, i imagine that the death of a get representative might be big and nasty. I bloody hope so, nothing i did in ME1 was at all controvertial. Never even punched the reporter.

You get a few nice dialog bits, including one very much like your Noveria entrance except more personally and politically complicated.

I also just get nothing from this arrangement of ‘Ooh, you’ve got to work with X, but is X really trustworthy?’ – whatever you call X. Because I’m not being given the option to trust them or not: I’m not allowed to do anything about having two of their officers aboard, or about acting on their guidance even after it transpires they’re lying to me. So there’s no tension or uncertainty: the game is forcing me to do these things, if they backfire it’s on the game.

I’m not suggesting they try a branching plot, I’m just saying don’t base your plot on a tension that needs one if you can’t afford to do one.

Examples: Jack’s backstory and quest could be pretty much left alone; Jacob’s quest could have Cerberus intentionally bringing down his father’s ship on that planet; Tali’s quest could have Cerberus intentionally sabotaging the Migrant Fleet after their botched run-in that’s referred to but never mentioned. Their involvement wouldn’t ever have to be confirmed, but maybe an artifact or bit of information found could cast a little bit of doubt.

They could also have you keep a balance between your Cerberus crewmates’ trust and your other allies’. It would make keeping everyone’s loyalty a bit more challenging and the game (and achievement) more satisfying if you managed to complete it with everyone alive.

The Illusive Man is still around, but now he’s and agent of the Shadow Broker (with the subtle implication that he may be the broker himself) and is feeding you information.

In fact most of the plot works much better if you simply replace ‘Cerberus’ with ‘The Shadow Broker’. It gives the same unsavoury reputation, but works much better as a necessary evil, and you don’t have a personal hatred of them. It could also have interesting implications with your reunion with Liara.

Things like that annoy me slightly, I wish Bioware would make a well made gay character, if anyone is going to do it, it’ll be them. You still have to applaud them for moving towards it, I guess.

I think they got Jacks character design about right really, she was a surprisingly good character (well, from our views of her from the initial videos anyway).

I didn’t like it at all at first, her tiny size and delicate bone structure didn’t seem to fit with the whole badass convict attitude, but when you get her whole backstory you realise that that’s the point. You can see that she was once a small, pretty, scared little girl, all this tough criminal stuff has been layered on top of it, but that’s still there underneath.

On Bioware and homosexuality:

They may be a bit awkward about it, but seeing as no-one else will touch it with a barge pole you have to give them some sort of credit.

The really odd thing is that I’ve yet to meet anyone in a Bioware game who is actually gay. Straight or Bi are the only options (except for possibly the PC in Dragon Age, with the right dialogue choices).

The problem is that a “handwave” that works for some characters won’t work for a player character who has a lot of agency. It’s not a problem for Garrus to leave C-Sec for reasons we never directly see. Same goes for Jacob leaving the Alliance, Miranda leaving her father, and so on. We wouldn’t expect to see all this stuff ourselves, so the handwave works. But you can’t do the same trick with the player character.

First of all, Shep’s a Spectre, so “red tape” doesn’t even fit the fiction. They’re only accountable for results, and the first game goes to great lengths to establish this. Second, Shep’s obstacles should be the player’s obstacles. Have the fleet brass say they’ll only take you back if you remove all aliens from your crew, give up the new Normandy, and leave active duty for a period of monitoring to make sure you’re not an impostor, and suddenly it’s perfectly understandable that the game doesn’t make that an option. Without that kind of visible problem with the plan, just not offering the option feels like an artificial constraint.

Rasmus & Plumberduck: While I liked to see Dragon Age offer some broader romantic options, I’ve got to say that Zevram felt like a one step forward, two steps back situation. He was so aggressive about his interest that it got a little creepy at times. My character had better chemistry with Shale.

I don’t agree with your reasons to like/trust/work with Cerberus, though. If this was a game about a US pilot nearly killed when his plane was shot down in Iraq, and an Al-Queda operative gave him CPR, it’s still hard to see him signing up to work with them. Even if they gave him a fancy new plane and swore they wanted Saddam captured too. In particular, it would feel completely bizarre to have free roam and open communications but no option to report to your military – just the ability to swing by Brussels to be told NATO is now powerless.

Forgive me if I’m retreading ground already covered in this comment thread I dare not yet read.

Minimal interaction with the Alliance and the Council matches the theme of the game- a change from (as I like to put it) the “high” sci-fi of ME1 to “low” sci-fi, shifting focus away from the polished utopia of the first game in a number of ways. The reasons you’re (initially) given for them not taking sufficient action (red-tape inefficiency and non-interference policies in matters that only concern one species) are decent, even if they’re done as handwaves.

Agreed about Jack’s model – I think she has one of the best human faces in the game, outside of a good custom Shepard. If she wore her unlockable tank top as the default getup, instead of dungaree-bra, she’d look cool.

Did her loyalty mission on my second playthrough, but haven’t pursued a romance. The revelation that she didn’t have it as bad as the other kids was an interesting one.

+1 to all the Mordin love. He’s great in every way.

Plumberduck, I agree that on the choices that are a little more vague, I’d like to see the wheel scrambled. I do have to say that when some options will continue the conversation and others will explore this part in more detail, the left/right divide is essential. But once or twice, presenting you with a binary decision and placing the P/R choices at left and right worked fairly well.

Rasmus, I actually had the opposite problem with Jack. Her performance aspects — the modeling, animations, and voice acting — were so well done that I thought I saw a nuanced character below the “boo hoo I was abused as a jedi youngling; feel sorry for me” surface. So I kept at her and eventually cracked past that, only to find myself in “boo hoo I was abused later too; feel sorry for me” land. The fact that all the many layers of “boo hoo I was abused feel sorry for me” stories end with “and then I KILLED THEM ALL” doesn’t help. It’s really bass-ackwards for Bioware to have a character whose writing doesn’t live up to her performance, but there you go.

I loved how during Mordin’s mission when the krogan leader is giving his big long speech about how he is going to rule the galaxy and the entire speech it gave you the option to shoot the gas pipe under him.
It used up all my willpower to resist left clicking.

Re: The Illusive Man, all the characters in the second book which deals with him just refer to him as “the Man”

I loved during my encounter with ashley where she said something along the lines of “I’m no fan of aliens, but Cerberus has a history of being extremists.”

I can just tell some of my actions are going to have repurcussions that make me unhappy in the third game. Letting that criminal racist politician live during Thane’s mission was one. Pissing off Martin Sheen another.

I feel like there are a few situations in ME2 where that’s handled better, where being a Paragon really isn’t the best thing to do in terms of everybody being happy, but it’s still nearly as irritating as the fact that the “skip dialogue” button and the “choose next dialogue option” button are the same button. Are they punishing me for not wanting to listen to every single second of the voice acting? God, that’s irritating.

Mordin is the second greatest character Bioware’s ever made (after HK-47). Relentlessly funny and smart, and his loyalty mission set the bar all the others tried to reach. The Krogan genophage is one of the most interesting parts of the Mass Effect universe, and I don’t think it’s coincidental that both Wrex and Mordin, my favorite ME characters, are so closely linked to it. It’s the sort of thing that would appear on a REALLY good Star Trek episode, and the fact that Bioware has thought through every side of the argument is to their credit.

Also, yes, Mordin singing is the best thing ever.

Ashley on the other hand I had a similar experience to you with, her later dialogue is actually very interesting, but her first lines make her sound like a space Nazi, so most of us told her to shut the hell up.

It was sorta obvious who would be in your squad from ME2 from ME1. No potential love interests, beacuse if you let one in, you’d have to let all into your squal in ME2. So that rules out Ashley, Kaiden and Liara. Wrex could have died on Virmire so he’s a no go, that leaves Garrus and Tali. I was happy with that, I liked Garrus’ ME1 side quest a lot.

I actually liked Kaiden a lot, maybe it’s nostalgia for Carth in KOTOR. Couldn’t stand Ashley though, especially with the poetry.

I hated Kaidan enough from his first few lines that I never gave him the chance to say more than his first few lines, and got him killed as quickly as possible. It’s interesting to hear his reunion conversation is good in ME2, though, cause Ashley’s is awful. My second character is a new man-Shep, and the game assumes Ashley survived. She hates you without asking any relevant questions about your motives, and you’re given no dialogue options to meaningfully explain yourself to her, and she somehow ends up thinking you’re responsible for the abductions she just watched the Collectors commit. Often my issue with the writing in ME2 is not what’s being said to me, but the glaring omissions in my options for response.

I quite liked his whole “Yeah I totally accidentally killed my drill sergeant in biotics training, no biggie”attitude.

Also, Dominate is great as the learnable power, maxed out for the group effect it insta kill husks and is great for sowing confusion amounst the enemy. The often run around the cover and face the dominated people behind them, so I can get a clear shot.

@Pattom The magazine size doesn’t cause me as much trouble as the incredibly low firing speed, but I think it’s an appropriate tactical challenge to make up for the ridiculous damage it does.