Mass Effect. What an infuriating game. I know, I'm judging a 2007 game by 2012 standards, but, man, this would've been better as a pure RPG rather than a weird RPG/shooter hybrid.

The 360 version ran like crap. Framerate problems galore. The camera would always flip out at the slightest thing, causing combat to be very confusing. The cover system was poopy pants, but I got used to it.

Wow, the Mako parts I've heard and dreaded about for so long did not disappoint in that regard. I don't know if something was wrong with my controller or not, but I could not get the Mako to simply go STRAIGHT. And whenever it went airborne from one little bump in the road, it would go crazy and suddenly I'd be facing the opposite direction or upside down. And then it would happen again one minute later.

The auto-save system is not very good, so you pretty much have to rely on manual saves unless you want to replay long stretches of gameplay because of a death.

The inventory system is also trash. I was constantly hounded by "you're about to reach your inventory limit" messages, and it was very unintuitive to find out which items I had were worthless and convert them to omnigel to make room for more crap. Scrolling through a long list of items was a chore, and it would often bring you back to the top of the list after dealing with any item in your inventory. The store interface was better, but I was rarely shopping in the game.

A lot of the interface stuff could've been done much better. Using Galaxy Map was difficult to understand at first. I would often accidentally exit the map because for some reason the "zoom out" and "exit" buttons are separate. And, as far as I can tell, there is no way to view your sidequest log in the Galaxy Map, so you have to exit the map and go into your Journal manually while you try and decipher the location of your sidequest.

Because I often read faster than a character voices dialogue, I was hammering on the X-button a lot to skip lines of dialogue. Unfortunately if you hit X too fast, you will also skip dialogue choices. This happened to be way too often, forcing me to restart the conversation, or worse, miss out on it entirely. Why the hell does it even allow you to skip dialogue choices? That's like the whole point of the game, right?

So yeah, I like to whine and complain. But what about the good things about the game? There's gotta be a reason why this game received so many high scores, right? Well, I don't really get that, because I think the "game" part of this game is broken. It seems too complex for its own good. However, I really enjoy the world that the game has created. The different alien races and culture were pretty interesting, and I really enjoy the whole "humanity has to prove itself to 'superior' races" thing going on. The characters seemed alright, though I mainly spent most of my time with Wrex and Tali. Wrex was cool. Tali was interesting, if only 'cause I'm totally into space ladies with mysterious masks. Garrus's face reminds me of a puppy dog, so he's kinda cool, too. Kaiden was a freakin' creeper the whole time (I played as female Shepard). Ashley is a horrible racist. Liara is a blue alien lady. I did not make it with any of these people, so no controversial blue alien butt for me.

Anyways, I'm glad I've finished Mass Effect, because now it's time to move on to the REAL game I wanted to play: Mass Effect 2. I've heard how Mass Effect 2 is a huge improvement over the original, and I'm looking forward to seeing how my choices from the original carry over to the second. Mass Effect 2 is often lauded as one of the greatest games of this generation, and arguably of all time. We'll see about that!

...and then Mass Effect 3 comes after that. I'm interested to see how I feel about all that ending stuff, including the "DLC" extension or whatever.