Not really. I'm not generally partial to organs, but that looks like a pretty tasty piece of meat.
Yes, the combat is less refined that ME2's, and the inventory just plain sucks, but it's not as bad as you make it out to be. It's simply that the combat functions on role-playing mechanics, so if you want a character to hit and do damage with a gun, you need to use skill-points on it. Using a gun you have no skill for has little effect. The inventory does have a fairly simple comparision feature which allows you to see whether the weapon in your inventory is more or less effective than the one in your hand. After awhile you get the hang of the relatively small handful of names, and the
Feros bummed me out for a bit in the start too. The game is also an RPG in the sense that it doesn't limit too much where to go at the start, and does allow you to go to places that are over your head. If you are having too much trouble, then the best thing to do is to fly around and do some sidequests. What can seem impossible at start will be a cakewalk after a few levels. Though I did manage to pass Feros eventually the first time round without settling on that solution. The Thorian Creepers are stupid and clumsy, and you can hold them off by picking a standpoint where only a couple can get at you at a time, and take them out one by one, punching those that get too close (they fly like ragdolls), and keeping the others in check with biotics.
It requires a bit more active tactical thinking than ME2 I think, though the less than stellar cover mechanics and the fact that you don't always hit where the reticule shows without enough skill points can make it frustrating at times.
The problem is that you are still wrong. Mass Effect took influence from a wide variety of works of scifi, many of the same that Babylon 5 did.
The quarians' plight? Battlestar Galactica. The Spectres? Lensmen. The Rachni? Starship Troopers crossed with Ender's Game. The turian society is heavily inspired by Starship Troopers, too. The Reapers? Very much like the Inhibitors from Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space, though those are hardly the only civilization-destroying sentient machines, either.
And you are way off mark if you imagine that the Keepers of all things were inspired by the Shadows. Apart from being insectoid, there's absolutely nothing similar about them, and scifi is filled with insectoid races. The Keepers are slaves, the Shadows are their own masters. The Keepers are nearly mindless automatons, the Shadows are hyperintelligent, self-styled guides of cosmic evolution. The Keepers are green and soft-angled, the Shadows are black (when visible at all) and filled with jagged edges.
Now the Collector General's distinct head shape does have some vague resemblance to the Shadow design, but the Collectors are extremely different from the Shadows in motivation, origin and nature.
The core plotline has little in common with Babylon 5, in any case. Ancient evil awakes, an interstellar alliance must be formed to stop it. That's just about it, and I can assure you that B5 didn't invent the formula. The nature of this evil is totally different from B5, where the whole thing was revealed to be just a smokescreen for an ideological zero-sum game between two ancient races, and there was never any intent to destroy civilizations, just to demonstrate that fear and conflict make them stronger. The relentless Reaper invasion out to destroy all galactic civilizations as a part of their reproduction cycle is a completely different ball-game.
In a nutshell, you are wrong. Mass Effect took influence from a wide variety of sources, as did Babylon 5, and you imagine that Mass Effect swiped its plot from B5 because both took influence from the same sources.
Star Wars hardly changed culture; it picked pieces of existing culture and showed them to people in a new light. Mass Effect does pretty much the same thing in video game form, but unlike Star Wars, is a genuine scifi work, if still at fairly light scale, whereas Star Wars was proudly a modern fairy tale set in outer space.
Sorry to say, but you are pretty far off with your assessment. Babylon 5 owed much to earlier works of scifi as well, and wasn't ashamed of it. Much of the elements which you claim lifted from that series are decades older. Mass Effect likewise is a deliberate homage to a large number of different works of scifi. That's how it manages to have such a compelling and diverse universe; it has taken the best bits of well-loved stories and refined them together.
Also, removing lapels and neckties is the next obvious step in the evolution of formalwear; compare late 19th century fashion, 1950's fashion and today's fashion and see the trend. Though in Mass Effect universe the graphical designers didn't leave things to that, and added plenty of orginal touches to the future fashions. Just look at Anderson's Councillor's suit in ME2 and tell that you ever saw anything like it in Babylon 5.
Why didn't you? Storywise it's clearly superior compared to ME2.
It's not a question of patience, but the fact that new mediums offer new ways to tell stories. A book could never tell a story like the Mass Effect trilogy. Both because of the wide variety of choices, and because in non-visual medium it's seriously difficult to present non-human characters in an interesting way; it's possible, but requires a very good author, or you quickly forget that the characters aren't humans in metaphorical rubber masks. A visual medium that doesn't have to remind you all the time what the characters actually are has an advantage in that respect.
The purpose of a demo is to show off gameplay and avoid spoilers. I'll be extremely surprised if the amount of dialogue or the number of choices was significantly reduced. Especially since we've been explicitly promised more decisions and a wide range of different endings to contrast the relatively minor differences of ME2.
There was some comedy show that mixed footage from the films with original stuff that used the joke. I'm sure you can find it on YouTube. It's only mildly NSFW, but it's pretty funny.
Around the same time they want to paint big targets over the soldier's heads and hearts, I suppose.
Mass Effect 3 will take in decisions made both in ME1 and ME2. Things like who survived on Virmire, and whether you spared the Rachni Queen come from ME1. Naturally you can't transfer the saves the other way round; it's strictly ME1-->ME2-->ME3. There is no game of the year edition to my knowledge, but the only worthwhile DLC for ME1 was totally free anyway.
ME1 has, in my opinion, better paced plot than ME2, which was essentially a long collection of loosely related sidequests, albeit very high quality ones. There's a very clear act structure, and a straightforward goal always ahead of you. I seriously recommend playing the game just to get a full experience.
I'm saying that when the film gets made, it should have no Shepard whatsoever. All we players have put ourselves into the character and made him or her our own, and we should accept some bland, balanced parody who is Commander Shepard in name only? No thanks.
They should go for the prequel route like this fan group has done. I think that the humanity's ascent would make an excellent theatrical story, though it would work even better as a high-budget miniseries; a movie would probably have to be focused on the First Contact War alone, while a miniseries could track every important moment from the discovery of the Mars cache to finding of the human embassy on the Citadel.
A sociologist who would perceive the presidency as a large scale experiment might be an excellent candidate for the job, as might an economist with a good vision. Presidents as they are tend to be far too dependent on their assistants to know what's going on. Ofcourse not all fields of science are equally useful for a president; a nuclear physicist wouldn't be exactly at home in such a position.
Ofcourse you'd first have to find a scientist interested in running into office anyway. For most that would be a pointless distraction from doing actual science.
I've played it. The story payoff is tiny compared to the playing hours. Yes, it's the most polished and balanced of the bunch gameplaywise, but as far as the story goes, it's a drag. ACII is still the best game of the franchise.
Not really. Just watch the endings on YouTube.
Your arguments are going pretty abstract, and quite far from my original statements. "Meaning" is a concept of human psychology, and it doesn't have a place in the universe outside it; calling the universe "meaningful" or "meaningless" is missing the point.
Existence is complex and we're always finding more layers to peel in it, but what it all has in common is that force has effect even when it's not directly visible. Hence why I'm not accepting that there could be a higher order of universe impossible to trace. If it's there, then its forces influence the universe as we know it, and we can extrapolate information from them.
If you thought that I'd be arguing for a universe with a clear beginning, end, meaning or purpose, you are mistaken. Again, those concepts tell more about how humans perceive the world than what the universe is actually like.
Study of stars, study of molecules, study of minds, they're all part of the same basic goal of understanding our surroundings a little better. I'm a transhumanist, and hope that the study of minds will illuminate ways to improve our own to make better sense of the rest of it, but it's just one worthy goal among many. Focusing on it too much may lead to narcissism or solipsism.
Yep, but resourcewise it makes way more sense to just destroy humanity's fighting capabilities, and then settle down to wait until people walk into the melting vats under their own volition.
I'm sure, but I'm less how much Burroughs was familiar with the element at all, or if he just used a mythologically significant name for its own sake.
I haven't read the John Carter novels, but are you sure that the city isn't in fact named after the sun god Helios?
The Reapers don't want to kill any more people than they need to. They destroy infrastructure and spaceships, and then wait as everybody slowly becomes Indoctrinated. Then the harvest can begin.
