After opting to get Dragon Age: Origins instead of Mass Effect 2 last winter, I’ve been waiting for Mass Effect 2 to come down in price before getting it, since I knew it eventually would drop. That finally happened recently as Mass Effect 2 fell from $59.99 to $39.99. So I finally grabbed it.

Sure, I could have waited fro ME2 to become a Platinum Hit before snatching it up; that would have saved me an extra ten dollars. However, while I have to be frugal with my gaming dollar these days, my wife and I had waited long enough to obtain the sequel to the best SF RPG on the 360 or any current system. Yes, that includes Star Ocean.

Playing videogames like Mass Effect 2 almost qualifies as one of those crash diets that work, since it hooks you in so effectively, to tend to forget about other priorities in your life, like sleep or, you know, eating. Not that I recommend that.

Also, by buying Mass Effect 2 now, I got the Cerebus Network for free with the included card, rather than having to pay for it on Xbox Live, which is what will likely be the case once the game becomes a Platinum Hit.

That brings up one of my big gripes; I still dislike Xbox Live’s point-system for buying game add-ons and the like; I wholly prefer the real-money system found on the PlayStation Network; it’s a system most Apple’s iTunes in that respect. It also eliminates the need to over-buy; if you have game add-ons that require 560 points to purchase on Xbox Live, it’s not like you can just purchase 560 points — you have to buy 800 points and then have a balance sitting there for a while. Ugly.

Anyway, I never finished Mass Effect when I reached the final mission because I’d just purchased an add-on and was hoping to find a way to go back and play it; now, if I want to start Mass Effect 2 and keep my original character of Shepherd, I’ll have to finish off the original first.

So I haven’t dug into ME2 just yet; I want to complete the original ME and bring my Shepherd over. Sure, I could start a new Shepherd, but what’s the fun in that, when the game was designed to allow you to import the character you started with?