Topic: Rate The Last Game You Played

[KDR_11k]

IMO it makes sense to put achievements at the end of every difficult side goal chain, they're supposed to tell others what goals you have reached in the game. Would be much worse to have some kind of giant side goal that doesn't even tag you with an achievement for getting it. Imagine if Braid's stars had an achievement, the OCD crowd would complain but those who fought tooth and nail to get those stars would be proud of being able to show others that they did the impossible.

I'm not as OCD as you so I don't grind and don't feel the game is tedious and most of the bonus battles felt quite tactical to me.

[broodwars]

IMO it makes sense to put achievements at the end of every difficult side goal chain, they're supposed to tell others what goals you have reached in the game. Would be much worse to have some kind of giant side goal that doesn't even tag you with an achievement for getting it. Imagine if Braid's stars had an achievement, the OCD crowd would complain but those who fought tooth and nail to get those stars would be proud of being able to show others that they did the impossible.

I'm not as OCD as you so I don't grind and don't feel the game is tedious and most of the bonus battles felt quite tactical to me.

IMO, Achievement systems should reward those who truly invest into the game's mechanics and learn to look at situations in a brand new light.  An example I love to bring up all the time is Bioshock's trophy for completing the game on the hardest difficulty with the vita-chambers turned off.  This is a game where ordinarily you can die as much as you want with little consequence, so it accomodates a wide variety of playing styles.  When you remove the vita-chambers and crank the difficulty up, however, the game becomes about survival, understanding the complexity of the level design, how to conserve supplies, and how to use the environment as your weapon in the most efficient way possible so engaging a target directly is a last resort.  I had to come up with strategies against Big Daddies I never would have thought to use otherwise, such as when I had to take one down and all I had was a clip of electric buckshot and a hacked rocket turret.  When you get that Achievement, you've shown a higher level of play and you feel like you've accomplished something.  What I see with JRPGs, though, is this trend towards not rewarding skill but time investment.  Instead of encouraging players to truly understand the game they're playing; play with aspects of the game they might otherwise ignore; and to think outside the box, they encourage players to simply dump mountains of time into a task and grind their way to victory.  It's dull and lazy, and it's getting old.

And as I said, while the monotony of the sidequests really drove me insane, the killer for this game was the cluster**** that is the story.  It goes nowhere in the most pretentious of fashions, eager to dump speech upon speech all about nothing just to eat up the clock.  I was actually pretty ok with the whole "slice of life" angle the first half of the game takes, but then in the second half it just meanders around while muttering pretentiously.  Playing through it a second time, I was reminded of Linkara's joke about the Monitors in Countdown, how all their dialogue could be summed up as follows: "Should we do something?  We should do something!  Should we do something?  We should DO something!"  Story is everything in an RPG, especially JRPGs, and this one was total FAIL.

[broodwars]

Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands (PS3) - 7.5/10 - If you've played a Prince of Persia game before, especially one of the Sands of Time games, you've already played this game.  Sure, the platforming is as competent as ever; the story is adequate for the experience; the visuals look nice and crisp; the game is just as long as it needs to be; and the voice acting is very well done (with some particularly amusing lines from the Prince), but in the end the game doesn't do much to ratchet up the thrill of the platforming; there's little original here; and there are some truly horrendous bugs.  In fact, I'd say this game supplants Warrior Within as the buggiest Prince of Persia game I've ever played, from hand-holds the Prince will randomly just not grab when you jump at them, to music that just randomly cuts in and out, to a truly head-scratching bug at the end of the game where I beat the Final Boss without killing one of his spawned minions.  The final in-game cutscene just played on with the minion standing there swinging at the Prince until he hit the camera, spawning the game to load my last checkpoint and make me fight the Final Boss again.

Other notable problems I blame you for...yes, YOU, anonymous person on the internet who whined about the last Prince of Persia actually being new and different.  Gone is the delightful technicolor color palette and style of Prince of Persia 2008, replaced by the same dull color palette of the Sands of Time games.  Gone also is the interesting strategic combat that required you to react to visual cues, replaced by a half-assed button-mashing ripoff of God of War with lame elemental powers.  Also gone is the last game's view on player death.  Yes, when you run out of sand and die, you have to load your last checkpoint, which could be 5-8 of lost progress and forcing the player to rewatch or skip all the cutscenes and re-obtain any lost power-ups.  All this because people complained that being sent back to your last solid ground upon "dying" (as opposed to getting a "you died" screen and getting sent back to that ground as a checkpoint anyway)  made the game too easy.  Well, the joke's on them because this game make the 2008 Prince of Persia look like Ninja Gaiden by comparison in terms of difficulty, only really ramping up in the final 2 areas where the developers decided to go nuts with the traversal powers.  When I died most of the time it was because I couldn't see what I was trying to reach, especially towards the end when the restoration power is introduced and combined in platforming with water freezing.  When you're using the freezing power, the frozen water and restor-able objects look exactly the same, causing screw-ups just because you can't tell what you're jumping at.
 
The game also has a real controls problem: the game uses every button on the controller, and towards the end of the game Ubisoft really ups the ante on the complexity of the platforming.  Just to give you an idea, L1 (toggle) is used for making broken objects whole; L2 (holding) for freezing water into interactable objects; R1 (hold) for rewind; and R2 (hold) for your general climbing action.  Towards the end of the game, you might have a scenario like this: freeze two waterfalls, wall jump between them, then jump off one wall, unfreeze the water long enough to pass through the waterfalls, quickly freeze again so a spout of water becomes a pole you grab on your way down, swing off the pole, let go of the freeze so you pass through another wall of water, hit the restore button to materializea hand-hold, etc.  The controls for this game work fine on their own, but when you start to combine powers it becomes apparent that these controls were made for people with 3 hands.  Just to be fair to Ubisoft, though, they really milk that water power for all it's worth, even this level design is probably the most contrived Prince of Persia has been in 3D.  Seriously, who builds palaces like this?
 
Overall, a good Prince of Persia game, but one definitely released before it was ready and one that not even the plot can justify should actually exist (seriously, absolutely nothing happens with the Prince's character as a result of this story).  Hopefully, now that Ubisoft has satiated the Sands of Time fans, they'll return to the 2008 Prince and release a new game that fixes a lot of the issues that game had ala what they did with Assassin's Creed.

[KDR_11k]

What I didn't like about '08 was how the platforming felt more like simon says, more difficulty in remembering which button corresponds to the given obstacle than anything else.

[Halbred]

Dementium 2: Read my review.

[broodwars]

What I didn't like about '08 was how the platforming felt more like simon says, more difficulty in remembering which button corresponds to the given obstacle than anything else.

This game's not much better in that regard, really.  It's pretty textbook Prince of Persia, and doesn't really (outside a few brief moments) embrace the fantastic despite the Prince's fantastical abilities.  The thing about the 2008 Prince of Persia is that what problems it had could easily have been fixed and refined for another installment, yet apparently it wasn't worthy of the treatment Assassin's Creed (a far worse game) got.

[broodwars]

Split/Second - 9/10 - I hate racing games.  I try to give the genre a try every once in a while because once upon a time I really enjoyed Mario Kart, but that series has become so ridiculously cheap over the years with its AI and by-the-books in its formula that I just don't enjoy it anymore.  "Realistic" racing games bore me to tears, as if I really wanted a life-like driving experience I'd just get in my car and go somewhere. 

You may notice in my posts that I like to use the phrase "embrace the fantastic" a lot in reference to games and animation, pushing an idea to an extreme that could only be conveyed in these mediums and wallowing in it.  Split/Second is a game that embraces the fantastic, playing on the idea of "what if Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay got together and made a badass car racing game?"  It's loud, it's fast, it's gorgeous, and it's filled to the brim with explosions; destruction; mayhem; and pure arcade-y fun.  I tried the demo for this game out one day on a whim, having heard the game was good but not knowing what kind of game it was (I actually mixed it up with a similarly-named FPS game) but falling in love with it when I did.  The very next day, I bought the game and after introducing my best friend to it, now he's going to buy a copy of it.  See what happens when you make a good demo and put it out there for free, companies?  That's TWO New Game sales you got from two people who don't like racing games.

But I digress.  Split/Second is made by the Disney-owned Black Rock studios, who made another racing game called Pure a few years back.  The basic idea is that you are racing in the latest "season" of a hit reality TV show of the same name that apparently has an unlimited budget and total legal immunity.  It's a simple story framework that basically just shows up at the beginning and end of each episode as teaser trailers to hype the coming carnage.  Each episode, You and 7 other racers compete in a variety of events on a man-made "set" composed of all sorts of delightful traps, from minor things like exploding cars and helicopters that drop explosive barrels to course-changing mass destruction like exploding buildings; crashing jet liners; collapsing bridges; and derailing trains.  The environment is your weapon.  Every course has a variety of these scripted "Power Plays", and you trigger them by filling a meter fueled by drifting, drafting, and jumping as you roar down the course.  You may trigger them on any racer in front of you who can potentially be harmed by the scripted event, though unlike Mario Kart your targets aren't instantly screwed just because you used the play.  Depending on the level of the Power Play; the target car's location on the course; and the target driver's driving skill, these death traps are perfectly avoidable so timing is everything.  You also have to be careful you don't kill yourself with your own Power Play, a costly mistake that is all too easy to make.  The "season" is composed of 12 "episodes" and is general well-composed and well-paced with plenty of exciting moments as you race through what often feels like barely-controlled chaos.  You can also use a Power Play to open up shortcuts, leading to a high level of risk-vs.-reward that reminds me a lot of the N64 Beetle Adventure Racing.

I should reiterate just how great this game looks.  The developers went with a very realistic look, but they didn't fall into the common trap (as I saw today when my best friend brought over his copy of Modern Warfare 2) where the visuals are "so realistic" that everything blends together and it's difficult to distinguish important information.  Despite much of the game taking place either mid-day or sunset with explosions constantly happening around you, the colors are vibrant and it's very easy even at high speeds to distinguish opposing cars and the environment from one another.  The game also features a decent musical score that serves the action well, though to be honest only the "Split/Second Theme" and this cool choral theme that plays at the end of Elite Races really stood out to me.  There is really good sound design, though, including lots of little touches like the music just briefly fading out for a moment during major power plays to emphasize the sheer power of the moment.

Where this game runs into trouble is in two key areas: first, there are way too few tracks in this game at only 12, and honestly those 12 tracks are really just 5 central locations (the airport, the harbor, the city, the power plant, and the airport graveyard/canyon) using different routes with different Power Play opportunities.  I really enjoyed the tracks here, but repetition in Season mode kicks in really quickly as you repeatedly compete in various events on each track.  This is a game that could really benefit from more courses introduced via DLC.  The other problem is a major one, and that's that this game has the most blatantly cheating AI this side of Mario Kart.  It is impossible to get and keep a lead in this game for very long, as I've seen everything from wrecked cars respawning less than a second after I wreck them to cars coming out of nowhere to steal the lead at the last minute of a race where no one was near me.  There's an extreme amount of rubber-banding, and it's incredibly frustrating though I can see how it may be necessary.  After all, this game thrives on keeping the pack together so the Power Plays can inflict maximum carnage, but unfortunately the rubber-banding only works one way: when you're in front.  When you're behind, the AI is more than happy to simply out-race you and the AI almost always has better cars than you.  Unlike Mario Kart, I don't think this rubber-banding breaks the game because the outcome of the race still depends greatly on your skill level and your intelligence with using power plays, but it can make the game very frustrating.  Playing Online is a different story: Black Rock had the "brilliant" idea of having Day 1 DLC out there you can buy that instantly unlocks all the best cars and tracks, which you can take into Online multiplayer.  This completely breaks the game (and ruins Online, IMO) and brings us back to the flaw I just mentioned: if you don't have a race where the racers are relatively close to each other, there's very little you can do if you're lagging behind to catch up because drafting behind another racer is the best way to fill the Power Play meter and slow the other racers down with crashes.

All that said, I loved this game and would highly recommend it to anyone who loves the spirit of pure arcade racing, even if they don't usually enjoy racing games.  And explosions.  LOTS of explosions.  It's a very simple arcade racer, but it knows exactly what it does well and executes it with perfection.  Both HD platforms have an excellent demo for the Airport track up on their respective download services, so check it out if you're curious.

[KDR_11k]

Grokion (iPhone): It's kinda like Metroid (even has a similar music style) but the damage balance seems wonky as ****, you need to shoot enemies like 10 times to kill them while you die if an enemy explodes so much as on the same screen as you (yes, enemies have death explosions and they are extremely damaging).

[broodwars]

Alan Wake - 9/10 - As it turns out, Alan Wake had the honor of being the last game I completed at my old residence, as I write this on the eve of my Moving out of this apartment.  Thankfully, it looks like my gaming career at this apartment will end on a high note because Alan Wake is fantastic.  It is everything I've wanted Silent Hill to be for many years: extremely atmospheric, great music and sound design, great production values (aside from the human character models), and exciting combat that really immersed me in the experience.  It also features the indisputable best "forest" environments ever made in gaming, which never feel like "levels" or "tree boxes" trap like many games (especially Zelda) fall into.  When the wind kicks up and the trees start swaying as the fog rolls in, you really feel like you're up against a force of nature.  The game also features an interesting "TV episode"-style presentation that's generally executed well with climaxes and cliffhangers that keep you wanting to keep playing till you've seen the whole story. 

I really only have a few complaints with the game:  first, the human character models are abysmal up-close and have really poor facial animation, an unfortunate consequence of Remedy farming out their development to China years ago as this project went through development hell.  Second, while this game's forests are amazing, the game spends way too much time in them, with only a brief period of one of the last episodes giving you somewhere new to fight.  Third, while I was always invested in the game, towards the end of the 5th Episode (of 6) I really felt like this game started running out of steam and the game just started getting a little too repetitive.  The game had long since run out of new enemy and weapon types, and the game's only real plan to keep the game going was just to throw wave after wave of Taken at me.  The game's clever-er bits with the excellent radio segments and occasionally-amusing "Night Springs" segments started feeling decreasingly interesting.  Finally, the ending is just...aggravating.  It's yet another example of a development team installing a "hook" at the end to leave plenty of room for sequels when the fate of the first game is still very much in doubt.  While I hope very much that we'll see an Alan Wake sequel, I wanted this story tied up by the end and it's very much not.  Maybe the 3 upcoming DLC packs will address this.

Overall, Alan Wake is one of the best survival horror games I've played in recent years, and feels like the true successor to Silent Hill as that series continues to flounder for identity.  Highly recommended for 360 owners.

[KDR_11k]

I probably played some iPhone game afterwards but I'll just ignore that:

Necrovision: It's pretty much a mindless shooting FPS with some nice influences from splatter flicks, just strange that the first chapters of the game decide to be all serious about the horrors of WW1 until your dude starts dual-wielding heavy machineguns and spouting one-liners taken straight out of Evil Dead. Physics are wonky (especially jumping to places that are uneven like rubble) and the enemy chatter is weird (why the hell do the German soldiers give orders in badly accented English while other shouts are purely in German?), loadtimes are long, etc but the game is just plain fun so far. Combat has a good combination of close and ranged attacks and combining them together makes the game bill your attacks as combos and give you temporary bonuses like bullet time for a second or two for landing a headshot. Since it's based on WW1 proper melee weapons aren't rare or misplaced (you can fight with a detached bayonet, a shovel (commonly sharpened and used as a weapon in WW1) and stuff like the bayonets attached to your rifles) and it just gives way more variety than running backwards and spraying bullets.

[Halbred]

Muramasa: The Demon Blade: One-trick pony/10

Here's the basic gameplay flow: Run around a series of backdrops with very few warp points (which cost money to use), being interrupted occasionally to fight a band of ninjas or trolls or giant frogs. Kill everybody using button mashing and special attacks. Gain a level, forge new weapons, equip your new swords, repeat. Endlessly.

The plot of boring, but told exactly how it was in Odin Sphere (here's a "talk to people" area!). On the plus side, the boss fights are spectacular, the art direction is amazing, the animations are incredible, and a LOT of female NPC's (friends and enemies) have enormous, heaving breasts. Despite the game's extremely repetitious nature, I'm still enjoying it and may yet beat it, with Momohime, at least.

Games I Just Bought for a Song: Dark Void (PS3), The Conduit (Wii). Still haven't touched either one.

[KDR_11k]

Yeah, I see Dark Void for dirt cheap in many places.

Last game I played was Uplink, it's fun though kinda repetitive while you grind for the money to get the tools for better jobs and the font is so small I get eyestrain from playing it.

[King of Twitch]

Pikmin 2 - 0/10

Bombs.

---EPILOGUE---

OK, maybe a score of 0 is unfair. It's been so long since I've played this that I forgot everything! I approached this game with totally fresh eyes after playing through P1, and it is definitely more challenging. The caves are brutal; I have never been happier while killing animals/insects than I have since... probably the last time I played this game. There's a cave with bombs, bomb spiders, floating things that drop bombs, bombs falling from the ceiling out of nowhere... They should've named it Pikmin 2: Al-Qaeda Planet to at least give a warning at what lies ahead. Seeing a squadron of Pikmin get blown up is more enraging than heartbreaking this time around.

But once I got over that, the game is loads of fun. The lack of time limit is liberating, yet... it somehow devalues the life of a Pikmin if you can just spend your time freely growing more...

The additional helper helps to speed things along, but can sometimes make it even more stressful when you start to notice the day running out of time and you've got Pikmin divided into 4 different tasks.

The new purple and white Pikmin are not that exciting, and it's a hassle keeping track of which cave they spawn from since you have to go back into specific caves to get more (sometimes only 15 at a time ). As a result, the player will want to leave them in a safe place anytime a battle is approaching, bringing them out only once the area is secure.   

The graphics are even better than the first, with forest leaves constantly falling and sunrays shining through, and it looks like someone installed some stepping stones along the way. Several areas are recycled, but are given a sense of the passage of   time, which is a nice touch.

Jonny's review has an epic first paragraph, i lol'd. I'd bump it down to 8.8 or 8.9 for having too many cheap enemies and the Pikmin are constantly singing 'mow mow meowmeow mow mow' which is a great way to drive players crazy. I'm surprised it hasn't been used in more games since then; annoying, repetitive, babyish cat-taunt calls are what modern console games are missing. Maybe the 3DS can breathe new life into this tortuous sound design if Pikmin 3 is ever released.
 
But you probably won't play this rare game anyway.

[broodwars]

A couple Xbox LIVE Arcade titles today:
 
Banjo-Kazooie (360) - 7.5/10 - A decent game that's been much improved from its original N64 outing with better textures and some much-needed improvements from Banjo-Tooie.  With the game performing an auto-save every time you grab a noteworthy item, collecting is so much more tolerable now.  I just wish the game would save when you've made major changes in an environment (extending a bridge, killing special enemies, etc.).  In the end, tedium still sets in as the grating character noises really get unbearable and the stages start showing a distinct lack of creativity in gameplay variety (thankfully, Banjo-Tooie would fix the latter).  And even though I got all the Jiggies, the final confrontation with Grunty was surprisingly brutal.  A fun day's play, but I don't think I'll ever play it again.
 
Perfect Dark (360) - 8.5/10 - Now here's a game that improved in nearly all the right ways in the conversion to 360.  The graphics aren't astounding, but they do serve the purpose of looking like how you remember Perfect Dark looking on the N64 if not in reality.  The framerate is also very fluid and consistent, which is a monumental improvement from the original title, and the controls have just the right additions (such as mapping alternate fire to the right bumper instead of holding down the "reload" button).  The game also has online play if you are about that sort of thing (I'm not).  My only big complaint is that the missions still lack checkpoints, even when the flawed Perfect Dark Zero (I'll get back to that mess of a game eventually) had them, and there are some bugs left over from the original N64 release.  There were no improvements made to the AI, either (CPU opponents still roll at the drop of a hat, making them easy targets).  Finally, the game doesn't really get interesting till the final levels of Agent mode, and I'd say it doesn't actually get fun until Secret Agent and Perfect Agent difficulties, but those were flaws in the original game.
 
Looks like Mass Effect 1 will probably be my next entry, followed by perhaps its sequel or Perfect Dark Zero (which I still need to finish...ugh, I'm glad I only paid $5 for that).

[Halbred]

I've been playing through several games simultaneously, but haven't actually beaten any of them yet:
 
1. PixelJunk Shooter
This game is incredibly addictive. My brother-in-law and I have been going through every stage with a fine-toothed comb to find all the diamonds. I think we've opened all of the ice cave levels but can't seem to get beyond that, despite having found well over 100 diamonds. Go figure. Still fun, though. I love the water/lava animation. Two-player is a blast!
 
2. Uncharted 2
I've played and beat his game before, but my brother-in-law wanted to see it. I'd forgotten how damn long the game is, almost irritatingly so, and the firefights are still too numerous. However, I love the story and the characters' interactions. I just can't believe that the bad guy hired what appears to be the entire population of a small country to fight Drake 'n' Co. I'm finding a lot of treasures this time around than I found the first time, which is awesome.
 
3. Tiger Woods 11
Finally got my swing right. Now I can actually start playing for real. That "Club Tuner" is a lifesaver.
 
4. ModNation Racers
Great game, but the load times are atrocious.

[broodwars]

Mass Effect - 8/10 - This one gets the 8 just from the sheer writing and the cinematic feel, because everything else is either mediocre (the combat, the copy & pasted sidequests) or awful (inventory management, constant 2 minute rides in elevators, anything to do with the MAKO till near the end of the game).  I do love the universe that Bioware has created with this game, so much in fact that I've ordered all the Mass Effect CD audiobooks and I already have the second Mass Effect game.  The one real saving grace of this game is just how much control you have over your character's actions.  It's bizarre considering your character is just a blank slate, but by the end of the game I really felt myself attached to my Shepard and his crew.  Unfortunately, aside from a couple crew members, your crew doesn't get much character development and most spent the entire game on the Normandy.  I couldn't even get myself to care about the one I lost due to plot reasons.  This game also has an extremely high difficulty curve early on if you don't pick the exact right class, as I saw when I picked the Sentinel class and spent half the game constantly dying and reloading my save.  By the end of my game, though, my Sentinel was a god so I guess it evens out.
 
For all its many flaws, though, Mass Effect is an excellent game...if not one I see myself ever playing again unless I want to import a female Shepard into Mass Effect 2.  Speaking of which, I have played the first 30 minutes or so of Mass Effect 2, and the combat and inventory management are so much better in the sequel it's incredible.  And the MAKO was apparently removed altogether outside of a couple DLC missions.

[Caliban]

And the MAKO was apparently removed altogether outside of a couple DLC missions.

Nope. Not in DLC either. It exists, but I won't spoil it for you.

I have played the first 30 minutes or so of Mass Effect 2, and the combat and inventory management are so much better in the sequel it's incredible.

Don't know if it's for the betterment of the game though, but that's just my opinion. I'm going to wait and see what you think of Mass Effect 2 once you write a review for it.

[jrlibrarian]

Super Mario Land: 9.5/10
 
I have been going through a retro game kick, so my reviews will focus around those games for a while. This was Mario's first outing on the Game Boy, and the first apperance of Princess Daisy. You are no longer in the Mushroom Kingdom, but in Sarsaraland, where all the peaceful creatures have been brainwashed to kill Mario.
 
The game is fun with the difficulty spiking once you get to the second half of the game. Since I have never played one of the original Mario games, I was not used to the fact that he drops like a freaking boulder. Once I got used to that, I found a great game which I will come back to in the near future, after I clear out the other games on my list of shame.

[Halbred]

Arkham Asylum (again): Holy Missed Bossfight Opportunity, Batman!/10

My brother-in-law's been staying with us, so I've been replaying some of my favorite PS3 games. Arkham Asylum goes by really quickly the second time, especially if you're not going for all the Riddler stuff (which I did complete the first time through). However, every boss fight in the game is kind of silly because, ultimately, they're all slight variations on "beat up a bunch of random thugs while avoiding the boss itself, who you can't hurt directly."

They need to get Gordon's voice actor from the animated series for the 2nd game. Whoever they got for Gordon here was a terrible choice, and the man looks like body-builder.

Dark Void (PS3): Started this one a few nights ago. It's got some very interesting gameplay mechanics, and it's a great-looking game. I really like the look of the Watcher robots. The main character's voice actor is the same as Nathan Drake, which is funny because that's the game we replayed right before Batman. So I call the game "Uncharted with a Jetpack." The over-the-shoulder shootout areas are surprisingly similar.

[broodwars]

Mass Effect 2 - 9.5/10 - If Split/Second was my most surprisingly awesome game of this year so far, Mass Effect 2 would be my most expectantly awesome game of the year.  Mass Effect 2 is what its predecessor most definitely wasn't: fun.  Sure, the first Mass Effect was intriguing and I enjoyed the story, but the actual game part of that video game was abysmal.  Yeah, the combat can get to be a bit too much at times in ME2 and sometimes I wished I could just talk my way around it like I could in the first game, but when the combat's as well-done and entertaining as it is in this game that doesn't really hurt the game all that much.  The planet scanning can be dull, but I only probably spent maybe an hour the entire game doing it and I had more than enough resources to purchase anything that uses resources.  I don't like how limited credits can be compared to all the upgrades you can purchase, but that just steered me towards only purchasing upgrades I'd actually use rather than just purchase them for completion's sake.  The DLC characters can also be cool and useful in combat, but they have no bearing on the story and have nothing of interest to say or do once you complete their loyalty missions.
 
I've seen numerous complaints about this game from hardcore Mass Effect players complaining about the changes from the first game, and honestly it's hard to see them as anything more than complaints that the game actually dares to shake-up the RPG status quo (something I know signals the End of the World to diehard RPG fans who never want the genre to change, I know).  Inventory management was a disaster in the first game, and ME2 is better for it being gone.  Instead of piles of weapons and armor that exist just to be sold and ground into omnigel, the different classes use specific weapons and armor and you just upgrade them.  It's quick and easy, and there's still an RPG element of exploration and decision finding and purchasing equipment.  Instead of spending hours roaming around generic planets looking for stuff to interact with, you just find planets with missions on them and go down to the area of importance in a shuttle.  If you really missed the MAKO all that much, both the Firewalker and Overlord DLC (more the latter than the former) will make you happy and are probably an indication of what we'll see in Mass Effect 3.  Combat areas are more linear now, but that also allows better scripting and more interesting areas.  Besides, I'm here for the story and I just want to keep moving forward.
 
Overall, Mass Effect 2 is an outstanding game topped by a particularly emotional and exciting conclusion that probably singlehandedly boosted my score 1/2 a point (all my crew survived, btw).  It's not perfect, but its flaws are vastly outweighed by its strengths.  Your choices, as always, matter (and it's great to see how your choices in the first game has impacted the second); the writing's sharp; and I felt more attached to my crew in this game than I ever did in the first.  The structure of the game has changed from the first game, but the soul of the franchise is still there and it's actually fun to play now.  I'll probably never replay the first game ever again, but I'll probably replay the second in anticipation of the hopefully-thrilling finale sometime in the coming years.  Highly recommended.  It's just a pity that this game is a 360-exclusive, because this is Epic Space Opera at its finest.

[Caliban]

How much of the powers, and your teammates did you use compared to your Mass Effect 1 play-through?

[broodwars]

How much of the powers, and your teammates did you use compared to your Mass Effect 1 play-through?

My character was a Sentinel, so my character was all about the powers since he wasn't really all that skilled with the power weapons (though as my Tech Barrier skill grew, I was able to be part of more extended firefights).  That meant a lot of Cryo Blasting and Warping.  I never used Throw all that much, though. Towards the end of the game, I did lean a bit hard on the Submachine Gun and my inherited Anti-Armor Rounds skills I got from Archangel. 
 
When my teammates weren't using their powers automatically, I was constantly bringing up the wheel to order them to use their skills so that didn't change all that much from the first game.  As for how much I used the various party members, in the first game I pretty much exclusively used Tali and Garras.  In the second game, Miranda; Tali; Archangel; and Kasumi all saw heavy use, with the remaining party members used in specific scenarios or not at all.  That's par for the course, really.  You'll notice that the characters I liked to use were either from the first game or show up early in the game, so they're the ones I got used to using the most.  I found all the party members fairly capable, though, with a good balance of powers.

[Caliban]

Ah I see. I should have gone for the Sentinel then. I chose the Soldier class, and I barely needed to use any powers. It was a straight up shooting fest for me, which was fun, but I liked the constant wheel popping I did in ME1.

One thing that this game left me wanting for is that I want to be allowed to specifically control one of the crew members in missions specific to that character. I really like the crew mates in this game. Grunt, Thane, Mordin, Kasumi, and Legion are my favorites.

I would also have liked to see more armor choices, and I hope that in Mass Effect 3 they allow to take off the helmet from the armors that come with pre-order codes and the collector's edition.

They should have also included more diverse looking weapons. They all looked a bit too much like they were derived from human technology, rather than Salarian, Krogan, or Asari for example.

Overlord was awesome, and I too think that the way the DLC was made is some indication of what ME3 missions might be like, or at least we can hope for.

[Ymeegod]

See what killed the upgrade weapons/armor ect was you needed to find the blueprints and if you missed blueprint level 1 then collecting the rest would be utterpointless.

Yeah I was a soldier class as well which made the game real easy, just used the right ammo type and slow down time and I mowed over them like they were paper--the enemy AI is still rather weak IMO, didn't use cover worth a damn or their ablilites.  I used most of the characters quite evenly minus Legion because you didn't get him until the end. 

[broodwars]

See what killed the upgrade weapons/armor ect was you needed to find the blueprints and if you missed blueprint level 1 then collecting the rest would be utterpointless.

From what I understand of the upgrade system, all the schematics for Upgrades 1-5 for any given weapon can be purchased or found in any order.  There are supplementary upgrades for each weapon that require you to perform a certain number of the main upgrades first.  I'm fine with that.
 
And I really have to ask at this point what you all were expecting combat to be like when you selected Soldier at the beginning of the game, a class that even in the first game was focused on combat-oriented traits like heavier weapons and armor.  If you want to use a bunch of powers, pick a powers-oriented class like Sentinel or Biotic.