Quick rant on Mass Effect 2

By BatRastered — February 4, 2010
Tags: mass-effect-2 rrod wildrant xbox-360

WTF is up with this import utility?

First of all, let me say that I loved the first Mass Effect, and so far the sequel is living up to its legacy. Having said that*, I had some issues on the first full day of playing it.

I have a small issue with the load times. I don't mind loading before and after a mission. I don't even mind the elevator load times this time around. The problem is when you die during a mission (usually because that dickwad Shepard won't take cover behind that wall that's RIGHT FUCKING IN FRONT OF HIM!! A. A. I'm pushing A!! FUCK!)... Sorry, anyway, when you die you have to sit through an annoying loading screen. WTF? Why is this the only game that does that? I've played plenty of games with checkpoint/autosave like this that load instantly after a death (e.g. Halo). What is so complicated about this? It's not like it's loading a different level, it should already be in memory. F!

I had a big problem with the import utility. If you don't know, Mass Effect 2 allows you to import your save game from the original Mass Effect. This preserves some of your decisions from the first game and gives you a monetary bonus and a small experience bonus (one level) and either a paragon or renegade boost depending on how you finsished the first one.

When I started the import utility and selected my HDD as the storage device, it said no save games found. WTF? I looked in the xbox menu for the data on the HDD and it's there... In fact I had three different save games from the first game. Hmm... Tried a few more times, no luck. Went on the interwebs and found some forum posts bitching about it... Turns out if you swapped xboxes between beating the first game and running the import utility, it doesn't work. Somehow the save game is tied to the original xbox and there's no way to copy it over. However, the save game still works with the original game... so... I have no fucking idea what's going on at this point... Seems to be a bug, and considering the defect rate on the xbox hardware and the length of time between these two releases, a bug that could affect a great deal of people. I hope they fix this, but for those of you effected by it, here's the workaround: I hope you still have your original Mass Effect disc, because you need to pop that in and load up the last save you made before killing Saren (you do still have that save, right?). Kill his weak ass again, make your decision about who should run the council, or whatever, wait for the credits to roll, and exit. Your new autosave should be importable now. Fucking ridiculous.

To: EA/Bioware. Fix this stupid shit! Thanks, your friends at Gouki.com**.

*Thanks to Lary David, I can no longer say or write that phrase without smiling.

**I'm Commander Shepard and this is my favorite site on the internet.

Mass Effect 2