Mass Effect Memories: Part 1

Me and a couple of my friends went to a games store back in 2008 to get a latest, graphically satisfying shooter. This visit was planned in order to check out the graphical capabilities of my newly acquired graphics card. I don't exactly remember the model I had back then, but it was either a new generation Radeon or an Nvidia Geforce. 

We mistook Mass Effect for a third person shooter, and I started playing the game with a trigger happy mentality. I quickly made a female character; mostly using default stats and customization options. I didn't understand any of the options/choices given to me, and I just kept on clicking buttons to get things done. 

After this distracting and impeding experience, I managed to start the game. When the game actually started, things still didn't improve much. I had to listen through a long brief, and none of the speech presented to me made any sense. 

Even after my character was dropped in a somewhat lonely planted to check out some suspicious alien activities, I was being barraged with conversations, interruptions and FMVs. I thought all of these were taking away immersion value from my experience. 

All I wanted was to kill some bad guys and to save the earth. Instead, I kept on getting updates on some Shepard dude and random people kept on saying random stuff to me. 

The setting was breathtaking, though. I could see a huge towering structure ahead of me, and two moons were visible in the sky. 

My friends were watching me play. They also got impatient. We agreed that this is the finest looking shooter that we've ever seen, but it is also the slowest and most irritating shooter we've encountered. 

They left soon, and I spent almost an hour trying to figure out how things work in the game. I got bored and overwhelmed with the different options; I was totally unaware how I could utilize the inventory system, and I was angered at the developers for not setting 0-9 as weapon swap hotkeys. 

I was coming from a Quake 3/Unreal Tournament background. I've never ever played an RPG before and I hated the very thought of those games. 

To be continued....