As I had listed on the post below, I think that the vocal work for the characters was impressive and the actors they got to do so is equally as impressive.  I only regret that I didn't get to hear more of "Matriarch Benezia" and "Fai Dan" (Marina Sirtis and Armin Shimmerman, respectively).

My problems with Mass Effect:

1.  Item management
1. When accessing a vendor all items are listed individually in a flat list.  You must scroll through this list one item at a time in a downward direction only. (I would prefer a list that stacks similiar items and allows you to skip through multiple items with a left or right trigger pull).
   
2. Items are listed by "rank", "type" and "name".  Which takes some getting used to before you can find items efficiently.
3. When you pass the max capacity of 150 items, you have to destroy some of the items that you are receiving before you can collect the remainder.  (You should be able to go through your on-hand inventory and eliminate items from there as well.)
2. Enemy encounters
1. Enemies scale to a percentage of your level based upon what difficulty you select for the game.  This is supposed to keep the game challenging throughout its duration.  The problem is that the in some encounters the developers over-loaded the number of enemies and thus they make it, effectively, a much higher difficulty.  (aka.  Rogue VI)
2. Other encounters have so few enemies that you can waltz through it without any difficulty at all.

Other than this, see the bottom link of the previous post for other thoughts that echo my own but a written better.

A couple of business things to note:

1). With the exception of HTML Tidy and Java, the rest of my script seems to be usable on Ubuntu Linux (specifically Edubuntu). If you attempt to use "Tidy" or "Jar" it will prompt you with the commands necessary to download their related packages.

2). Landon Fuller has ported Java 6 over to OS X 10.4 and 10.5 (64-bit). You can get it as source code or as a compiled application. Unfortunately, the hooks that link Java to OS X's Cocoa interface are not extant (i.e. no OS X GUI).

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Mass Effect -- My Thoughts

My "review" of Mass Effect starts before I even purchased the game, which is noticably odd. Shortly after Mass Effect went "gold", I made the sojourn to my local video game trader to trade in Viva Piñata for a "pre-book" on Mass Effect. Given that I have been keeping up on Mass Effect related news, I knew that they were making a limited edition of it available and so I told the clerk to put my money on that. He gave me a completely nonplussed look, spent the next 3 minutes searching his system, and finally said that he had no idea what I was talking about. I made certian to confirm that my money was transferable to the Limited Edition if it became available (it was) and put my money down.

The day of the release, I called that game store and they still had no idea what I was talking about. I visited just about every retailer of video games in my area to find the limited edition and most of them were just as dumbfounded. Oddly enough, the only store that had any clue about the Limited Edtion was Best Buy but they only had it available as a web order. (Just a shout out to Bioware on their outstanding efforts to completely piss off a fan by so restricting the Limited Edition as to make it impossible to find.) Having been completely stymied in my efforts to acquire the Mass Effect: Limited Edition, I went back to the company that held my pre-book and picked up the game.

Ok, scrap all of that... This blog post on "Magical Wasteland" mostly sums up what I didn't take the time to write and does it with much more panache and I could muster.