What pushed your buttons in Mass Effect?

[Grigori361]

OH and yeah, that game pownes, just about any rpg I've seen since, and a few before too I think.

 

[Megacherv]

I...erm...I did...I was kinda holding the controller...

 

[LWS666]

the fact the camera stays at the hieght you give it and adjusts when over land.

makes sense on paper, but when you're walking over rubble it just spazes out.

or (in one of the first three missions) when you're in this parking lot or something and there's a 1 metre jump down, and ashlee says "careful, that looks like a one way drop".
or (same level) when i drop off of a three metre ledge with small, prefectly cube shaped rocks, each about 25cm high, piled like a stair case up to where i just jumped down from and tali says "how will we get back up?" also you can't climb the rocks.

 

[Alarien]

Having almost impassable mountains but being required to drive the Mako through them.

 

[DustyDrB]

... I mean REALLY lit your fuse. Specific events, please.

I will not use the name ME1. There are two games; Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2. There exists no such thing as "Mass Effect 1", deal with it!
... and Mass Effect Galaxy doesn't count!

Is this even an issue for anyone?

For me it was a combination of system crashes and Mako-driving. Nothing made me more frustrated than the "UNC: Dead Scientists"-mission.

Kepler Verge, Newton system, planet Ontarom.

You land in the opposite corner of the map and have to drive the Mako across the unreal landscape, which consists of mountaintops and valleys but no hills. You spend more time driving laterally than you do horizontally. After you get to the bunker you have to fight your way in through the Cerberus operatives to get to the innermost room where you will have an encounter. Decide who to save and who to kill and then you will get the end-button; "Exit the bunker".

For me, this was when the game froze. After exiting the bunker autosave would have kicked in. The last autosave I had was when I landed on the planet.

Fine, it was only a 10-15min playthrough BUT it was 10-15min that I had just completed! I had to go through that awful drivingsequence again simply to get to where I should have been!

So...

What is your "Dead Scientists"-experience?

I just replayed ME1 and I still love it. A couple things bother me but don't really ruin anything for me. One (and this only happened once on my last character) is when Shepard gets stuck in an environment, usually a railing. This happened on the Presidium and I hadn't saved in a while because I knew there would be no fighting. So I had to backtrack quite a bit.
Second is the Thresher Maw's ability to come up from RIGHT UNDER YOU and kill you instantly in the Mako. Grr. But I always save a lot on planets and definitely save when I see the ground is level in a large area (often means there is a Thresher Maw in the area).

I still don't have a problem with the inventory system in ME1. You should be able to learn which items are better and sell what you don't need, so clutter shouldn't even be a problem. Applying upgrades is as easy as pressing 2 buttons (X to go to upgrades, A to pick one) on the inventory screen. I actually miss this system in the second game. I'd rather be able to switch armor on the field rather than only in the Normandy (wait - I'd rather be able to switch armor at all for squadmates and be able to take off my helmet in the field if I want).

The thing that bugs me about both games is the text. I know it's a new era where I guess game designers expect everyone to have huge TVs with HD, but text should be more readable on a 36 inch SDTV. This is made even worse when the white/yellow if highlighted text is over a light colored background. Just a minor quibble, mostly.

.. oh and, as someone else mentioned, that stupid boss Krogan after rescuing Liara. I hated that fight with the burning of 1000 suns.

The bad thing about that fight was that if you die, you have to go through that cutscene. Much of the cutscene is going up an elevator and a big slot Krogan walking, so you can't skip most of it.