I have been playing Mass Effect 2 as well. Great game! I am about 7 hours in so far and loving every minute of it.

I'm with you, driving the Mako was my least favorite part of the game followed closely by the inventory system. Other than that, I really enjoyed the game. Looking forward to the second one!

I actually didn't mind the driving... or maybe I just forgot the trauma.

So far the inventory system seems painless unless I’m don’t something wrong. I probably should get around to RTFM. It seems you just select the upgrade in the armory and that class of weapon is upgraded. The ammo upgrades actually seem to be in the form of powers which are colour coded for effectiveness against your enemy when you pull up the “power wheel” with the RB.

Everything seem geared to making the game more seamless so you don’t get yanked out of the story as often.

Playing “Mass Effect 2” again. Still loving this game even more than the first but a couple of peeves so far.

“Logging in to the Cerberus Network.” Ok when I want to play a game by myself I don’t want to deal with that crap. Made worse because when I play a game I usually reset all my downloads to use up all my bandwidth so the login goes slow.

Minigames: I don’t think I’ve ever met a “mini-game” I liked.

Mining - by far the worst. What were they thinking? FTL travel and can’t automate the orbital survey of a planet?

Hacking/circuit bypassing - annoying but doesn’t take to long.

Dog Tags - easy enough to find but why make a mission out of it?

Space Travel - just let me pick a destination and let the auto pilot fly it there!

Pluses:

Cut scenes - one of the few games where the cut scenes are as interesting as the gameplay.

Inventory/upgrades - soooo much better than the first game.

Squad AI - huge improvement over the first game. No member of my teem had been incapacitated yet. Lets not talk about me.

Audio - great use of surround speakers and LFE channel. Lots below 40Hz since I can feel my Buttkicker “kicking in” often.

Music - love the chest pounding of the club music and the ambient stuff in the galaxy map.

Light levels - ok I’ve got a great projector for shadow detail but I love a game that actually had mostly bright scenes and nice colours.

Have been playing “Fallout 3” IMO this game beats the snot out of it on every level but one - openness.

Good points on the minuses. I should hate the mining, but for some reason I kind of like it. It's tedious and stupid, but I like seeing the levels go up on the different elements. I think I'm more annoyed by the hacking/circuit bypassing. But yeah, the space travel should really be automated unless you're going to be doing dogfighting.

Would a mod like this improve Fallout 3 for you at all?

That looks like a cool mod and would definitely make wandering around more pleasant. Looks like PC only and I don’t plan on buying another version of the game. I pretty much only buy strategy games for the PC and action games for the console in both cases I prefer the interfaces more that way.

Ahh, okay. I must have missed what version you were playing. I have the Xbox 360 version of Fallout 3, but the PC version of Mass Effect 2. I'll probably be buying more PC versions of games with the aging of the 360 and PS3, as well as the cheaper pricing and potential for mods.

I'm using the wired Xbox 360 controller to play Mass Effect 2 on the PC thanks to Xpadder. Handy. I still do some stuff with the mouse and keyboard, but for combat, I do like using the 360 controller.

There is an abundance of iridium. I have over 350000 units of iridium and can't even upgrade anything with it (wish I could sell it for credits). Same with platinum and palladium . Element zero on ther other hand I am finding is very scarce. Once I upgraded my scanner I can complete a planet in 5-7 minutes.