We had a nice, quiet weekend. On Friday we watched (again) Bad Santa, the “Badder Santa” edition. On Saturday, we spent the day in. Mostly watching TV, getting caught up with some TV, the missus did some knitting, and I played some Mass Effect and a few games of Carcassonne (on the 360 with some friends, online). On Sunday, we went bowling with some friends, I played some more Mass Effect, etc. We are finally caught up with Prison Break and I am almost caught up with Battlestar Galactica.
Mass Effect is turning out to be a lot of fun. They have done an incredible job with it. One of the odd thing over other RPG games is you never have to buy health, etc. (potions) and there is no way to sell anything – you can destroy it and get a small amount of “omni-gel” for them, but never any cash (unless I am missing something). Also, you never have to buy ammo, you just have to be careful with weapons “overheating”. Mass Effect is definitely deserving of the 9 and 10 scores it is getting. If you loved or “kind of liked” Star Wars: KOTOR, or didn’t like it because of the battle system (but liked everything else about it) you should really check out Mass Effect. The graphics, story, voice acting, dialog, dialog system, etc. are done perfectly in Mass Effect. My only real complains are (4) occasional control oddities in combat (3) the game is really chatty at the beginning explaining all of the back story, and thus it is slow to get started, and (2) when you have a new character it can be difficult to get past the first few combat sequences. And finally, my number one complaint about Mass Effect is…Â the game hardly ever auto-saves, so if you want to avoid replaying huge amounts of the game you need to manually save (and do it pretty often). But, at about 20 hours into the game I am having a ton of fun.