-Man, that brings back memories. Both positive and negative. The positiv side of it: being able to revisit that atmosphere of a well-done game. The negative side of it: those fucking check points man. I'm all rusty so i forget to save... And WHUP! there you go! now i have to redo that whole frikkin' planet! whup-di-fucking-do! Any ways what is the best/worst side to Mass Effect, you remember, or in my case; experience once more.
The first ME was largely overrated and not as much an upgrade from the KOTOR games as I expected of Bioware.
The Mako was by far the best fucking thing that ever happened in the ME series. Screw the story, screw the awesome visuals, screw the gameplay, the Mako was just awesome. I loved screwing around with the Mako in ME1 on uninhabitable planets. Shooting Thresher Maws, defying gravity and seemingly fly across the fucking planet one hill at a time, all that good shit. Oh... This inspires me to go put my Mass Effect into the ol' Xbox and play... at 1:00 AM. (EST) wait... w-what? B... b-b-b...but Mako, man!
As I noted in another thread, the open-area parts of the planetary missions were noteworthy, but as I will reiterate of the post that you have quoted from me, the game was overall a disappointment. The Mako itself was pretty good and a pretty sound military vehicle for its use. A light-medium APC with a machine gun turret and an average [for the universe] cannon that was useful against heavy targets when used long enough. It included jump jets that enabled it to move through the terrain and the ability to shoot around corners as well as climb steep elevations at increasing speed and cling to their sides. As a recon vehicle, it wasn't too shabby. The problem with the Mako missions were that they were overdone in number and underdone in quality. Entrance to planet cutscenes were little more than different skins. The environments were mostly either open plains or rocky mountains that got really annoying after a while. Besides this, as I recall, there are not many environmental factors considered in the game. There is that one planet that poisens you occationally if you are not in the Mako or a building, but that is pretty much it. The blizzards on the ice planets are just annoying, not dangerous, and the lava on the volcanic planets are easily avoided if you are even close to a competent driver. With the exception of the Thresher Maws, opponents were sadly weak. Infantry fell easily since the cannon [which is supposed to be used against other vehicle-class opponents] had almost no cool-down time and could be used as a primary weapon without ever using the machine gun at all. Other vehicles were limited mostly to the walkers that the Geth used. This makes plot sense, as most mercenaries probably could not afford any better. But the problem was that a sufficiently savvy player would quickly realize their weakness: their legs. Apart from the obvious weakness that their legs take more damage [though someone will have to check for me on that], Geth walkers also will fall if you ram them with the Mako. While you might lose some shield or take hull damage doing this, it takes 10-20 seconds for the walker to get back up, which gives you time to take it down. If it doesn't work the first time, ram, shoot, repeat. This works for both the smaller and larger walkers. It pretty much makes them helpless any really overpowers the player. That brings up the last enemy: turrets. While turrets certainly pack enough punch to make up for their stationary nature, the truth is that it doesn't account for much. If I recall correctly, all turrets use missiles. The problem with this is simple enough: They are all dumb-fire missiles and dodging them is a simple enough matter at range. Add the scope on the Mako in and you will never really find yourself wanting. The only drawback is that the scope messes with your depth and distance perception, so you might have to compensate by exiting scope every once in a while to check how close the latest missile is and adjust your position accordingly. Really, the machine-guns on the walkers were more dangerous than the power-shots that they fired, especially at higher levels. I am pretty sure that I like the Mako missions primarily because they are a breath of fresh air. Competing video games are either fantasies that have only fantasies or sci-fi games with much more limited movement. As annoying as the terrain got sometimes, it was still better than most others. Even though infantry fell easily, the process to take them down one by one at least made the game a little challenging. Turrets were usually placed in locations that limited the players' ability to use a distance tactic, especially on top of mountains or tall hills. One thing that I never really like though was that the planets tended not to have much to do on them. Essentially, there was a main objective and maybe 4-5 smaller, quickly achieved objectives, but not much more after that. It made it a necessity to travel unnecessarily to many systems just to milk the most out of the game. Not to mention that every world was essentially a stand-alone mission and didn't tie into the larger game. The missions on the planets didn't have any major affects within the first game [they may have later on in the other games] and the collection of artifacts, marking resources, etc, usually yeilded no more than credits which, due to the replay option of the game, you didn't really need to get. But that is a complaint of most rpgs - you never really see much affect from major contributions you make to the game world.
I love playing it over and over again. I play only a few games these days and Mass Effect is one of them.
That's what I didn't like about it, the concept was there, but it wasn't too heavily supported. Some main story missions incorporated both, and they were well done in terms of how the Mako was used, but the other missions where you are to land and travel across the surface of a planet to find some dull, meaningless object relevant to only one person is a little bit rediculous, not entirely because of the story, but because of how easy it was to absolutely slaughter anything that opposes you. This is somewhat correct for the Mako missions. There were, however, structures, lights and background objects, like falling meteors, that you see often on some of the missions. There are multiple missions which have that. As I remember, you can check the details of the planet/planetoid's mass, orbit, environment and a few other things. They tell you whether or not a planet has a hazard (Extreme cold, heat, radiation, etc.) at the bottom of the planet description. I always loled with doing that to Armatures and that other thing which is larger than an Armature. It was so funny, it's like a giant, weakling spider that can't do shit to you. Not really, all small arms fire in the game, against the Mako, atleast, were equal to a child chucking pebbles at a brick wall. Bioware expanded on that in ME2, but took away things we all loved from ME1, and added in plain dull features. Which was a little bit of a huge dissapointment for me, as not only did I care little for that particular problem, but I also questioned why they couldn't incorporate more without taking out so much.
True, now that you mention it. I stopped playing a long time ago [my Xbox 360 went kaput and I didn't replace it... yet] so some of the stuff it really fuzzy. Again, true, now that you mention it. The problem for me is that the missions didn't really make a big deal out of it and it never had a major impact. Not enough to take great note of it, anyways. It was severly underrepresented. So did I. But while it is fun the first time, you quickly realize that this particular weakness really takes away from the game. Even at the highest difficulty [I forget what it was called], vehicle battles really are dumbed down. I meant in comparison to the power shot that they fire. All you have to do is wait for them to fire and then ram them while they are reloading. The shot itself it pretty easy to dodge. Did they add an active economy? Settlements and colonies that you could expand?
