Y'all seen that new Mass Effect thang?

[Great Rumbler]

I hear tell it's gawl-dang awesome, that's what I hear. Ya'll are all filthy lib'ruls from Yankee-town iff'in you ain't played it yet. Tarnation.

[Weltall]

No!

[Great Rumbler]

Weltall, of all the people here that I thought were filthy liberals, I thought for sure that you weren't one of them. *slowly shakes head*

[Weltall]

I got infected with bacillus socialisticus after sleeping with Obamagirl.



Note: This didn't really happen, but I wish it did.

[Great Rumbler]

It's like I don't even know you anymore.

[Weltall]

THAT'S BECAUSE I AM THE GREAT UNKNOWN

[Great Rumbler]

So I guess I'm the only who's played the best game of the past year? That's pretty sad.

[A Black Falcon]

I have the first Mass Effect for the PC, it's one of the games I got for $5 during Steam's sale late last year, but I've only played like a half hour of it so far... so many dozens of games to play, no time for most of them... it does look good though, so I mean to play it for sure.

Still, what I really want is Dragon Age.

(Also, I got Jade Empire online last year for $5 too, and haven't played that one yet at all either. But which to play first?)

[Great Rumbler]

Jade Empire has some neat locations, but the combat is awful and it's really short.

Dragon Age is really good and is about 25-30 hours long, plays a lot like the old PC RPGs from the 90's.

Mass Effect 1 is really awesome, but held back by some questionable design choices.

Mass Effect 2 blows all of them out of the water, but you really need to play the ME1 first.

[A Black Falcon]

The problem is I have even mroe games to play than ever... literall yhundreds lying around now begging for my time...

As far as PC RPGs go, for instance, there's Drakensang, which I got mid last year and is pretty good... and I got Arcanum last year and haven't played much of it, and the same for Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir... to mention only recent ones...

Oh right, for action-RPGs I did start Sudeki on the Xbox, but I haven't played that in a few weeks... it was actually decent though, mostly, so I should get back to it sometime.

[Great Rumbler]

The two Mass Effects provide what is easily one of the most satisfying scifi universes ever seen in a videogame. It's really something that you owe to yourself to experience.

[A Black Falcon]

I think my favorite is Star Wars...

[Great Rumbler]

Knights of the Old Republic was pretty good, but that looks like nothing more than practice for ME1 and ME2 these days. I'm being serious here, the world of Mass Effect is really detailed and rich and there's just not much in the scifi videogames that can even come close.

[A Black Falcon]

My favorite Star Wars games are the X-Wing/TIE Fighter series and Jedi Knight 1, I can't get past all of my problems with KotOR that I know I talked about at great length back when I was playing it enough to consider it great... B-quality game, sure, but very disappointing and flawed.

Given that Mass Effect has even simpler and even more actioney combat, like Jade Empire, it doesn't exactly make me want to care as much gameplay-wise... so see aforementioned comments about being more interested in getting back to Drakensang, NWN2's other addons, etc -- games with actual deeper combat systems.

World design wise, though, your high praise is interesting... maybe I should play ME sooner, I'm not sure. :)

(... And Guild Wars. Can't forget that one. I really need to go back to that and spend another 100 hours or something finishing the Nightfall campaign... :))

[Great Rumbler]

Jade Empire's combat was horrible, the combat in ME2 is far and away better.

ME1's combat isn't so hot though. It's stuck in this weird spot between wanting to be like and RPG and a shooter, to the point where it just doesn't work.