I arrived several hours early last night to my Halo 2/3 waiting spot, the Issaquah, Washington Gamestop. I knew they were doing a midnight release (it was a joint release for Mass Effect and Rock Band, I think I made the right choice), but I was very disappointed at the turnout. For the game that promises to be better than Halo 3 and even game of the year, there was no line. Rather, a few dozen of us just kind of stuck it out in our cars in the parking lot. LAME! Anyway, got it at midnight, played for a few minutes, then passed out. 

I've been really sick over the past week, so it was little issue calling into work today and telling them I needed a personal. Unfortunately, I'm going to miss an important lecture in my astronomy ****today because I didn't do my homework! Anyway, I woke up early today and got to work on the Effect, and here's what I'm gotten out of it so far:

It's KOTOR! lol. Seriously, it's extremely similar to Knights of the Old Republic, which was also a BioWare action/rpg. However, minus the Star Wars elements, Mass Effect seems to be better in every way that was improvable. The fps (well, over the shoulder, anyway) ****gameplay in an rpg it awesome, very enjoyable, since rpg and fps are my two favorite gaming ****. Also, there are a lot more attributes to increase with each level, even different ones for different ****s. And the presentation is incredible: top knotch voice acting, great artistic and technical detailing, and very cinematic camera interactions.

The only negative I've noticed so far is that it seems to be a bit too much for the 360. I would compare it to each time I used to try to play Half-Life 2 with my old GeForce 5200 graphics card and 1.3ghz processor. Unsuccessful. The load times, surprisingly, are not bad, but the cgi scenes can be very choppy, with framerates sometimes hitting down to, or even below 1 fps. Yeah, kinda scary. Other downside: I was pretty close to finishing Twilight Princess (highly recommended, btw), but now I must take a break, and taking breaks is very bad for the future of a game in my history.

Well, you've wasted enough of my time, I'm headed back to space.

Current gamerscore stands at: 31,582
Current world gamerscore rank: 9,259