control freak

I played Mass Effect 2 through already and it's a great game. I wanted to play it through again, since there are several different choices you can make during the game that will affect various outcomes. There are also choices you can make BEFORE you start the game, via Mass Effect 1. There's an option to import your old character, but unfortunately I don't have that save game anymore, so tough luck for me.

When you start up ME2 without importing, the game uses a predetermined set of results from the first game. These are static, not randomly generated. So the ONLY way that you can find out what happens if, for example, you chose to save the council in the first game and not let them die (as is assumed by ME2), you have to play through the ENTIRE ME1 game again, and save the council, and then import that character. Seriously, why??

Why don't you let me play the game as I want? It is MY game, right? I buy a copy of a game, and the only way I can play portions of it is to buy ANOTHER game, spend 20-30 hours on it and THEN I can actually play all of my game. Oh wait... there are multiple choices in some parts, so it looks like I'll have to play through ME1 more than once, then import all of those characters into ME2. Why not just let us pick what happened in the previous game? What harm does that do? One of the developers even made a mistake when talking to Penny Arcade, saying you could go through a list and pick various options when creating a new character. He didn't realize that this option didn't make it into the final game, and it was only the pre-release version that he was talking about.

I'm bored as shit lately, and I really would love the opportunity to play through ME2 again, but this time with different starting conditions. Why not let me? Great game, Bioware, but come on... the whole idea of a sandbox type game is that you can replay it over and over, making different choices every time, increasing replay value. Why block out this pregame setup, specifically limiting the way I"ll be able to play? Fuckers.