So I'm still stuck playing Mass Effect over and over in some sort of drug loop and I've a few questions about it.

Just in general I think it's best if people finish the first game at least once before reading on in this thread because my intention is to have this be a free for all on ME1 stuff but clean from ANYTHING in regards to 2.

So, yeah, first of all, I'm on Novaria right now and I'm up in that Turian's office to grab the data from his computer and the security team is there looking for the same thing.

When I get there I enter the convo with the security lady and I've enough points on charm and on intimidate to scare/reason with her to leave. She APPEARS to leave, but then they still draw guns and I have to kill everybody. Is this a glitch? Can anyone confirm that they've been able to avoid this fight?

You can hack the "security system for Synthetic Something or Other (whatever the place is called)" but that didn't make an ounce of difference either as far as I could tell.

It's kinda disappointing that you can't avoid that fight, because it shouldn't really impact the rest of your choices in regards to the evidence and whatnot. I kinda made a mess after aswell this time though because I told Anoleias about the internal affairs lass posing as his secretary and they shot eachother dead in his office. :D

So yeah, I guess in the larger scope, the mercenary killing spree in Synthetic Something or Other is a fairly minor incident. :)

I played as a squeaky clean hero before when I went through it with my dude, mr "Seven Shepard", and I made this lady, "Neve Shepard", to be a no-nonsense space bitch so.. bit of renegading comes with the territory.

I'm fairly sure I managed to intimidate her to go away and I only had to fight coming back out. However, Mass Effect Wikia says the fight isn't avoidable, you can just get the woman to leave.

Ah, right, pretty overwhelming evidence then.

I dunno, I suppose once bullets start flying, every woman in that game transforms into "III WILLLL DESSSTROOOOYY YUUUU!!!", but there is a lady merc still up there when you fight, and looking into her little helmet hole she does appear to be the very woman who says she's leaving.

Ah well, I guess the way to avoid that entire thing is to just expose secretary undercover lady and have them shoot eachother. I went for the evidence AND exposed her and I guess that just ended badly for everyone involved. :D

It's weird, I was really gritting my teeth, going for the renegadin', but when my "ALRIGHT INSECT THING, NOW YOUR RACE IS DEAD AND STUFF!" was questioned with a "The insect made a mistake and is like, really sorry!" and the insect itself was all "The song of the singing isn't listening to the music of the singer which is the mother of the singing children." I had to take it all back because I'm such a feeble willed flower of a man.

I should order my posse to never question me because I'm bloody fickle!!

And once more Ashley was all "I'm dismayed at the lack of insect murder." and I'm pretty sure I blew my chances at some sexy lesbian sexyness. There's always blue lady who honestly appears to pity sex you up no matter how inconsistent you are of a scatterbrained loser. I've done some pre-emptive being-an-asshole-to-her strikes just to keep her off me, but I dunno now that my other lesbo-liason reckons I'm not enough of a cross-species racist for engaging in same sex business I might have to salvage what I can.

Sometimes this game is too much like god damn life.

Finished it again just now. God dammit I love this game. It's weird, it's kinda rough in a lot of places, flawed in others, but I'll be damned if I don't love it regardless.

Got a WHOLE different tone this time because of how I played it, and ended up with a total night to my other save file's day. I'm constantly surprised by how you can adjust your decisions to ring true to what you meant.

For instance.. and this is a spoiler for the end of the game obviously.. I chose to "concentrate on Sovereign" effectively sacrificing the council. Afterwards, Udina was like "I could kiss you! You're an asshole like me!!" and I could actually choose to explain my position there, that it wasn't some evil plan to put humanity in charge.

The end result is that they're creating a one race council, but I felt fully aknowledged in my reasoning at the end anyway, which is fucking amazing really. My problem with good and evil in games is usually that being evil is just total assholery, but this allows you to actually just be a NO NONSENSE SPACE BITCH!

Awesomeness. Man this game is great. Now I finally feel like I can move on with my life and play some other exciting games.

There are things changed in ME2 that initially I was disappointed with but the more I play it, the less I'm bothered. That my renegade status carries over from ME1 and I've a leg up in to unlocking early intimidate options was awesome. I was able to bowl around the first major story location taking absolutely no shit what-so-ever like a Season 5 esque Jack Bauer. Nothing got things done quite like a gun in the face!

Yeah, thing is, everything about ME1 that I think is broken in some capacity seems to be addressed in ME2. The only thing I actually do fancy a bit is the Mako stuff and especially as an Infiltrator class being able to approach a geth outpost or something however I want. Driving to the top of a cliff, getting out and sniping the lot and things like that.

I fully expect the sequel to reel that stuff in. But man, getting rid of this rediculous inventory system where I find absolutely fucking tons of bullshit ALL THE DAMN TIME and then have to effectively vacuum clean that space regularly to not fill up with garbage is so annoying. All you ever do is look for the latest "all yellow" thing, and then just flush the rest. Omni-gelling on the spot would be a breeze if the crappy stuff didn't sort itself to the bottom and every time you delete something the marker snaps back to the top. GRAH.

The things of real value to me is the way it seamlessly blends an adventure game with a shooter, and concentrates on letting you role play the character the way you want. The RPG elements in 1 got a bit carried away with being RPG elements (sooo many points that do nothing) when in actuality all they did that was desireable was set the classes apart and effectively also enforce a sense of you getting to be the type of character you want.

We'll see of course, I might have gotten the wrong impression entirely.

Your impressions are pretty close in my opinion.

Having played two thirds of ME2, I do feel it could certainly borrow a trick or two from Borderlands. Now there's a game that very much ties "RPG Elements" (god I hate that phrase) with shooting, very successfully IMO.

Specifically, Borderlands has a pretty straightforward skill tree but in ME2 all of your tech upgrades are essentially in a list making it very hard to see what's what. They could certainly benefit from a tree style layout even if if the concept is much better than ME1's list of "stuff".

Levelling in ME2 is over-simplified and redundant. They might as give you an ability point for completing each mission and leave it at that.

Borderlands is also a game that has infinity weapons yet never feels overwhelming. Now, I'm not suggesting Bioware stick such an obvious loot system in ME3 but there's a way in which they can have a greater variety of weapons / pick ups and the implementing it in a non-broken way if they want.

Combine that with the bits that Mass Effect does that Borderlands doesn't, i.e. actual role-playing and we're on to a happy winner.