Very quick hits on Mass Effect 2:
- It looks very pretty. For the 1st time I've been able to take a newly released game on my PC and juice up all the settings to the max (1920x1200 resolution, 16x anti-aliasing), and it is wonderful.
- I'm a little upset I wasn't able to find the save of my playthrough of ME1, as some of the decisions since the game defaults to some decisions that I didn't like (I saved Ashley in the first game, not Kaiden god dammit).
- For whatever reason managing your squad seems to be very chaotic. Then again, my squad mates don't seem so stupid as they did in ME1. They instinctively find cover without me even asking now. Though I'm sure they'll lose their brain cells at some point. Of course I could just be spoiled by the party management of Dragon Age. Mass Effect doesn't let you directly control other squad mates and that part of it is really getting difficult to get used to.
- I'm not sure how much I like addition of the concept of ammo in the game. It feels like I'm just walking around playing Quake or Doom hunting for ammo clips after battles.
- Speaking of ammo clips, it seems like Bioware couldn't decide if they wanted this to be an FPS with RPG elements or a RPG with FPS elements, the latter being what the first game was. There's even mission summary screens that pop up every now and then. Yuck.
- Inventory management is utterly fucking confusing, but maybe it's somewhat more realistic that way, I mean it was kind of silly in the first game that you had access to dozens of armor and guns when you couldn't really realistically lug them all around.
- I'm unsure what to think about the quicktime events for paragon and renegade actions. It is a "different" way of doing the whole good/evil thing but it seems unnecessary, dialogue options woudl have seemed to suffice, honestly. I guess it just seems a way to make the actions a little more dramatic i guess.
- Don't fuck with Aria.
- The paranoia about PC piracy has really reached true lunacy. The hoops I needed to jump through just to install the game was ridiculous. Also the online mechanism for authorizing the DLC that came with the game was done for about an hour, which means that I couldn't access it. Wonderful. And there's indications some gaming companies want to make the whole process even worse. Argh.
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