"I was mildly inconvenienced! Therefore this is as bad as a kitten crush video!" Five spite stars.

What?

You never played Neverwinter Nights? Worst story ever. You're literally rooting for the bad guys by halfway through.

And that lame Baldur's Gate series. They had the worst graphics!

Bioware hasn't been on that list for a year now, ever since they crapped out the half-completed mess that was Dragon Age II.

ME2 sealed it for me. The success of ME1 changed them, you could taste it a bit in Dragon Age. And the further success of DA polluted them beyond repair.

I enjoyed ME2 well enough, but I did miss some things about 1. I was pretty happy to see things like weapon mods make an appearance in 3.

The worst part about Dragon Age 2 for me, and the part where really I started to get worried, was Bioware's 'apology' over Dragon Age 2, basically saying it wasn't their fault, but EA's for making them make it, and that they really were focused on ME3, so you should go buy that day 1 and not let DA2 cloud your judgement.

Say what you will about Bungie, Halo was not a bad product and did what it was designed to do very well. Despite being their most profitable and most expensive series, it wasn't their best. Halo is literally Bungie's weakest series if you are talking about quality and not popularity. Marathon? Blew doom out of the water. Myth? No other RTS has even come close, not even BFMEII or Company of Heroes or SC2 or any of that shit. It's sad to think that the mainstream's first taste of Bungie's greatness was this awful watered-down microsoft-ized version of their original halo idea that turned into an FPS only. I was really looking forward to planet sized worlds that loaded each square zone independantly and you could either control the entire army or control a single unit.

But instead they released a rushed shooter for the xbox launch. Bungie left their mark of quality on it, but in the end it's just so fucking sad to see how everyone's opinion about Bungie is 100% formulated around Halo.

Literally everything they made except for weekend warrior, abuse, Gnop, operation desert storm and minotaur were better than halo, and the games I just mentioned were basically them still learning how to code.

Sad to see the industry I had so much hope for turn into another soulless deadline-driven version of hollywood. Imagine what Bungie would have been capable of if they hadn't been transformed by microsoft's ideology into the console-centered, fruit-stripe gum method of making games.

Mass Effect is Bioware's Halo: a once great company's worst product that is also their most commercially successful, ensuring they'll be pumping out nothing else for the next decade.

Their are MUCH better action games, much better designed RPGs, and the writing is so bad I can't imagine how anyone under 15 isn't embarrassed to sit through it. It's Twilight for the space marine crowd.

It was actually very innovative when ME1 came out, but 2 and 3 suffered from 'don't try anything new because we got it right the first time' thinking.

Odd thing is that ME 2 and 3 were each dumbed down in some unique way in relation to the first, so it got worse in many ways.

It's been 5 years since the first one came out (6 to 8 if you count when the game started development), and pretty much nothing changed in the game, so of course it's dated now compared to new games from developers that learned from ME1 and moved on.

Looking back, having played all 3, I would definately buy 1 over again, and 2 to a lesser extent.

3 is only if you really like the story and want to see its conclusion. The gameplay is identical to 2, with minor tweaks to how health works and weapon upgrades came back. it IS a bunch of fanwank, and if you dont care for the story, the gameplay is stale at this point.



In conclusion, the mass effect franchise is a case study of how clueless management will turn an original idea back into generic shooter fodder over time.

I thought it was great, personally.

It's a fun game with some good jokes. Didn't care for the similar endings myself, but everyone is blowing it way out of proportion.

I'll admit though, hearing nerds whine about the endings is a lot more tolarable than hearing 'the fans' go on about their favorite romance, or the intolerable nicknames like 'femshep'.

there is no femshep, only some chick that got lost and got on the Normandy somehow.

FemShep is the TrueShep. Jennifer Hale >>> Mark Meer.

I should clarify, I thought the Blasto thing was great. The game was surprisingly impressive, but the series-negating ending was one of the laziest things I've ever seen. I'm not one of those beardos who thinks BioWare owes me a better ending or any of that crap, I just think it was a lazy to end the entire series on really stupid note.
The multiplayer is kind of fun since it's a teams-vs.-enemies kind of thing which means all the dipshit, Call Of Duty types dont' want to play it.

I think I wasn't phased because I've always been under the impression that if you play a game for the ending alone, you'll always be let down. My reaction at the end of the game was "huh, that was kind of weak." before turning off the console and grabbing the book I've been trying to get through, instead of "This is total betrayal Bioware owes me a new ending etc etc."

godot, that is exactly the kind of crap I was referring to in my post. Go outside!

Badness fully.