My final note on SSB, I have played through a match with 99 stock, extremely tedious.
Played through Mass Effect recently.
A whole lot of fun. It has a pretty entertaining story with a ridiculous amount of exposition that actually hurt it in parts, but not too much. The RPG mechanics are well, slimmed down from the norm, but aren't so minimized that they're non-existent. The inventory system is an absolute joke, and there are way too many fluffy weapons and mods that just bog you down.
The moral exploration in the game is at the very least decent, and pretty solid in parts, an example being when you choose between releasing a dead soldier's corpse to grieving husband or allowing the military to retain her body for experiments concerning a toxin she was exposed to where the research may save many lives.
The world is beautifully realized and easy to slip into, and the characters are mostly superbly realized. However, there is one huge problem with the characters that doesn't exactly break the game, but severely hurts my enjoyment of it. The characters on your crew almost never speak to eachother. For about 97% of the game, they only talk to you. There is WAY too much of a 'just along for the ride' vibe for your party. And the only time they ever talk to eachother is in those silly little elevator ride sequences. This is with the exception of Virmire, which is easily the best part of the game. Where the members of your party (ie other than you) get injected with some actual drama, Wrex being the particular example. The game would've been so much better if it felt like the members of your party were actually collaborating together towards a common goal, as opposed to everyone just following your lead.
Anyway, very fun game, stole a ridiculous amount of stuff from Star Control 2, but that doesn't bother me too much for some reason. Gonna play the sequel fairly soon.