Well, I got it for the 360, and I say it does. Great gameplay, good story, everything's good for me.

the first three hours of Mass Effect were incredibly awful to me

since I'm lazy, I'll uproot my ongoing reviews of it from another forum:

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me:
one hour and fifteen minutes into mass effect

thinkin' to myself "wait this is just KOTOR"

spectres? selected and governed by the galactic council? come on man.

basically it is just KOTOR but with a few name swaps here and there

come to think of it, all of bioware's xbox games have been this way. kotor 1/2/jade empire have all been basically the exact same game (with seemingly the exact same engine) but with setting changes and it looks like mass effect is no different

hurf

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AHH!:
but jambell the graphics are pretty and there's that one blue lady with gigantic boobs

--

me:
the graphics aren't even that pretty though!

the framerate is pretty awful most of the time (most things you do cause a huge dip in fps for some reason), there are really weird unnatural animation choices, and half of the faces look like absolute [FLYIN' DUNG PIECES](granted the other half look awesome)

basically overall I'm pretty underwhelmed

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Jim:
WHY IS MASS EFFECT SO [darn] BUGGY

AND WHY ARE MY TEAM MATES SO RETARDED

I AM SO ANGRY RIGHT NOW

this game is literally kotor 2 but with more bugs and a horrible inventory system

[darn]ing hell I am so pissed

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Jim:
dude I know

sometimes my teamates just:

-die, for about 15 minutes
-run away from combat
-take my cover AND GET MY HEAD BLOWN OFF
-ignore orders
-do not use any of their skills, ever
-constantly run in front of my gun, which stops me from shooting, which makes combat 10x as long

it kind of sucks that developers assume everybody has their console hooked up to the internet

maybe if they didn't games would be just a little bit polished before they were released

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me:
AI is really super dumb too, yeah

my guys stood on a ramp, shooting at the ramp itself (there were guys around the corner, down a very very long alleyway) for like ten minutes

lollin'

game of the year :rolleyes:

--

Rans:
i'm really liking mass effect except for the fact that all of the text is teeny tiny on my SDTV

minor other complaints here and there but overall i'm having fun

(jim, i set my teammates abilities as "active" and my one dude is throwing up barriers all the goddamn time)

--

me:
the game would look good if it weren't ridden with horrifying errors. in the conversation scenes, sometimes the good textures on faces/bodies/other objects in the environment just flat out don't load until like five seconds into the conversation. not to mention weird shading [crap] that pops up on my character all the time.

oh, sup, huge ominous black blobs on my face where it doesn't make sense. how you doin'?

I mean, I get that it's done to keep fps steady but the fps isn't even steady by any means anyway!

the biggest similarity to me for kotor is the fact that you have a little bit of awesome fun combat and adventuring like that, but then you find yourself in a city and you have to walk around and get lost for two or three hours, doing stupid little quests that you have no idea where anything is because the city design is so incoherent

in the citadel, when those two assassins were sent after me outside the strip club, it was the most exciting thing in the world because it was a break from the monotony of just talking to boring people over and over.

I'm probably just jaded by half-life 2, though, to be honest. the storyline in mass effect (and kotor/2/jade empire) is told through essentialy static conversation. you're basically spending two hours in the cities getting told what has just happened (good thing the voice acting is good) and then you're spending half that time doing the fun [crap]. in hl2, you're actually experiencing the story as it progresses, which is basically a dream compared to this.

sadly enough I just can't be bothered to play mass effect :\

that said, I did play it for a few hours last night and found myself actually enjoying it, but more out of necessity since I spent money on it rather than actually desiring to play it.

--

I spent a lot of time making that not look like crap and still failed, but read it anyway.

anyway, that was all written before I got very far into the game, and right now I'm about two or three hours after getting your own ship and I'm enjoying it much more.

this was your overly extensive awful game review brought to you by jambell and pals

I was the same until I got out of the Citadel, then things got interesting. I really enjoy exploring the planets in the Mako.

I think a lot of the 'this is just KotOR III' stuff comes from the fact that Sci-Fi in general is very cliche. There's always a council, a Shepard, a girl. Coupled with the extremely familiar interface it's easy to draw lines between KotOR instead of just enjoying it as a game.
It's much more adult than KotOR. Not just because of the 'adult content' but the story and world. The choices don't just come down to light/dark options.

The response selection is a lot better. You get a better idea of what sort of response you're going to give while avoiding the boring 'read three responses, select one, then read/listen to it again' problem KotOR suffered from.

A lot of the menus and junk could be (and hopefully will be) improved on. I hate how you can't view the journal entries based on the area it's taking place in. Sorting through the items is a nightmare.