Mass Effect Nitpicking
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In the past, dialog-driven games have offered you a bunch of possible answers and left you to read each and every one of them, looking for what you want to say. This is a lot of pointless skimming if you're just looking for the one that boils down to, (How much will you pay me for killing ten rats?) This breaks the flow of conversation, and all that prose eats up a ton of screen real estate. Mass Effect has a much better system, where you're offered a very short summary of your answers, and the option to select it appears while the other person is still speaking, letting you get your answer ready before it's your turn to talk. When it works right it provides a smooth conversation with lots of options that doesn't require a lot of reading and doesn't obscure the visuals. You choose your intent and tone, and the dialog flows naturally. Wonderful.
But there are places where the summary doesn't match what you actually say, and others where the tone isn't at all clear. When I see the option to say, (What do you want?), I can't be sure if my character is going to say, (Can I help you, sir?), or, (What do YOU want, anus-face?) They're usually arranged in order from (nice) to (jerk), but there are still times where you still can't figure out what's going to come out of your mouth when you hit the button. And there are plenty of rail-roadish moments where all of your possible responses are variants on the same stupid question or offensive remark.
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Combat taunts are repeated with a frequency capable of inciting madness. A firefight against human opponents will provide a chorus of the same two or three (dumb) taunts over and over again, as if the bad guys had a cliché-only version of Tourette's Syndrome. (You must DIE!) Really? Enthralling. Tell me again. (And again.)
The weapons are serviceable, aside from the sniper rifle - which is bad enough to ruin Christmas. The weapon only has two zoom modes: Too Close, and Even Closer. Most of the battles happen in confined spaces where the sniper rifle is useless, or at a distance when you're in a vehicle. If you really want to make enough use of the sniper rifle to justify putting points into it, you're going to have to keep getting in and out of the vehicle (where you could just nuke the bad guy with the main gun) just so you can fiddle around and line them up for a sniper shot. Looking through the scope, your view bobs around like you're shooting from atop a rowboat in a storm. While drunk. And being attacked by angry bees. Maybe in real life I might have this much trouble holding a rifle still, but I'm not a super commando from space using future weapons. I actually found the constant oscillation to be nauseating. All this, and the weapon overheats ridiculously easy. It's actually easier and more expedient to snipe with the pistol. The assault rifle can clear an entire room in the space of time it takes to drop a single foe with the sniper rifle. An unbalanced weapon is one thing, but here they have perpetrated the greater sin of making it not any fun to use.
The rest of the weapons are serviceable enough, although they're a bit homogeneous. Your starting assault rifle looks and sounds pretty much like the ubergun you'll have near the end of the game, it's just (maybe) painted a different color.
