CoryHolmes

No, you can't cycle through other characters like you can in KoToR, which is a good thing in my book. Bioware went to so much trouble to allow the player to customise Shephard in any way they please that it would detract from playing as "your" character if you could cycle through the NPCs. Plus, Liara? Pfft! Ash is the only way to go!

The Elite version was the first to have an HDMI port. Once they saw how much slobbering there was for that, they added it to all their other SKUs.

Any ideas on where I can find a spare DDR dance pad? I bought DDR Universe for the 360, which comes with one pad, but I can't find a second one for love or money.

I could either never crawl on the walls, or got so confused as to which way was up that I was totally useless at it. Still, I loved playing as a Facehugger and Chestburster in the second game.

Visionaries theme superior, all others inferior.

Yeah? What about Macross 7, then?

This is Macrossworld. Everything is lame 'round these parts

I thought it went the other way around, that the TV series preceeded the civilian-buyable Viper?

Isn't that the idea they used in Viper?

There's a very easy solution to this problem: BUY MORE STUFF!!!

It's not constantly raining! Sometimes we have sleet and a few fightful days of snow.

Pfft. Vancouver is superior to all.

What about setting up a website that would allow customers to pre-rent their movie before they leave the house, and then have it ready for them to pick up as soon as they show up?

While Mass Effect may not have "atmospere" as you call it (and you're right, it is VERY repititious), the game really hooked me in with how in-depth everything is. Especially the Codex and the world blurbs. It amazed me that each world had it's own little biographical blurb giving it's size, gravity, atmosphereic pressure (if any), orbital period, and even distance from the primary. And the Codex, jeez. How many other games (or movies, or books, or TV shows) that take the time to explain to you how heat is managed on a ship? Or how where you choose to fight in a ship dictates how long you can fight for? Or pointing out that the ships in this universe need to discharge an electrical build-up, either by landing and grounding directly to the planet or by hovering in a planet's magnetic field and dumping the charge into that? Little touches like that, which have NO bearing on the game whatsoever, was enough to make me overlook the recycled level design or those stupid Mako missions.

The only orange boxes I come across are called "Malfunctioning Equipment" and don't need any hacking to open...

We will never tire of Mass Effect! The DLC will see to it that we don't forget about it, and then ME2 and ME3 will be on the horizon and we'll all be slobbering over them.

Suggestion #1: Buy the game. Suggestion #2: Play the game. Suggestion #3: babble endlessly about the game with the rest of us

Angel Cop was cool. Anything that has advanced cyborgs mowing through dozens of squishy humans is a good thing.

I had to go the other way, whack the boss first and then deal with the lackeys. The only part about that fight that irritated me was the position of the auto-save. It should have come after the conversation. Every time I died, I had to go through that tedious (after the nth time, anything is tedius) conversation every time.

I never noticed quiet NPC voices except during the elevator sequences.

I'm glad they kept Ford as Indy. It just wouldn't have worked if they'd re-cast the role.

Man, I keep reading about all these awesome quests that I missed out on the first time. I only did that one mission for the consort and the turian general. Same thing with the Shadow Broker. It's a good thing I just started my second play through, though this time I'm being a renegade. BioWare certainly hit their target of making a "water cooler" game, where people can discuss and swap stories about the experiences they each had. This game just gets better and better in my book (excuse me, codex).

I've been playing Mass Effect on a 46" 1080i LCD from 8-odd feet away and I could cleary read everything. All of the Codex material, all the achievement descriptors, everything. The only time text reading is a problem is when I use my TV for my PC monitor. I've got it set to 1920 resolution and and it makes reading the text on some webpages difficult (thank goodness for the zoom function).

Don't forget that Mass Effect almost certainly will have downloadable content in the form of new planets, missions, side quests, etc. to whet the appetites between the actual games. That should keep people happy during the long winter nights, unlike Halo which left us all flapping in the wind with a giant "to be continued" sign. I'm more interested in figuring how they'll make the Mass Effect 2 story take into account all the possible variations that each player can/did play through in the first game. Knights of the Old Republic II did that with a line of dialog where you could specify which route Lord Revan took in the first game.

He speaketh the trutheth. At least I'm not the only one I even took a few days off of work to get a block of free time One of the places this game falls a bit flat on is the number of different actions that happen due to your responses. As you said, some of them are very obvious, but there should be more results due to choices the player makes. Once again, so true. I've played most of my game through with Ashley and Wrex, and I really like Ash's sense of humour. "Nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live here. Actually, it's not that nice a place to visit now that I think about it." Next time around, I think I'll take Garrius and Wrex to see how they interact (since we all know that Turrians and Krogans just love each other).