Van Hemlock.com

I'm playing Mass Effect 2, and it's fantastic. The combat's fluid, and more importantly the story's really drawing me in - President Bartlett himself is giving me important missions, the fate of the galaxy hangs in the balance, and I'm gradually assembling a crack team of specialists with fascinating backstories and issues of their own.

But my ship needs new guns, so I have to break off from all of that to go mining. Mining in Mass effect involves very slowly trundling a cursor around a planet until some wibbly lines spike, firing off a probe, then repeating the process fifteen more times. In order to allow you to upgrade your kit as much as you like, bioware have thoughtfully provided hundreds of goddamned planets so that you can repeat this process until you forget that when you're not mining this is a very fine RPG.

And it's not just ME2 - in 28 years, only one franchise (Dig Dug/Mr Driller) has managed to make mining fun. I understand that in real life mining probably isn't fun, especially now the miners don't have canaries for entertainment, but windowcleaning isn't fun either and nobody's trying to build that into every goddamned game. (Except on the Wii).

Anyway, please can we ban mining from future games so I can get back to bickering with that girl from Chuck?

Hmmm, mining in a non-mmo? Seems kind of pointless since it's just a timesink in mmo's to delay you getting the stuff you want, or a way to slowly raise money. Did Mass Effect 1 mave mining in it?

Elro