Defiantly play the 1st game 1st. While you would likely still enjoy the 2nd game if played out of sequence, you would lose a lot of the impact.
But the constraints of time mean we cannot play everything. I want to play ME2 but haven't bought ME1 yet, and I'll be damned if I'm paying £14.98 for the both of them in one fell swoop. To my outsiders eyes it looks like some clever trickery from Bioware to get you to buy more games. After all, I don't remember Mass Effect 1 getting so many accolades, but here we have a lot of people saying to buy it!
You need to do it in order. Mass Effect is still one of my favorite games of all time and I've spent a damned bit of time on both ME and ME2.It's a story based game, one that needs to be read in order for it to be understood properly.
91% on metacritic, no.1 on one of IGN's top 25 xbox 360 games for a couple of years, best RPG at E3 when it was first shown. and a couple of game of the year awards....yeah apart from that not much.
Two pretty damn big (and good) games for fifteen quid and you complain!? Live a little, it's Christmas.
A question for all of you who have played Mass Effect 2 before: Can I start the game on the highest difficulty setting if I import a character from Mass Effect 1 that has been started as such? It was super annoying that you had to finish the game not once but twice to unlock the highest difficulty setting. Don't get me wrong, the game is worth a replay, but I'd have preferred to play on veteran or whatever from the start, not 22 hours into the game. I could live without that boredom in Mass Effect 2.
