Mass Effect Legendary Edition: Tests, thoughts, and a 10 am EDT Twitch stream

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  This is a familiar text crawl. [credit: BioWare / EA ]

Roughly 60 hours ago, EA and BioWare dumped all 103GB of the upcoming Mass Effect Legendary Edition into my inbox. Then, they told me the embargo would lift today. I proceeded to chug a concentrated energy drink cocktail of Bawls, Red Bull, and lukewarm coffee grounds while taping my eyelids open so I could bring you a full review of all three touched-up Mass Effect games. Every romance option, every side quest, every unnecessarily rude conversation-wheel option: Sure, let’s shotgun the whole thing like an M-11 Wraith in ME3.

…or, uh, maybe not.

Clearly, that was not enough turnaround time for a “full” review. And a full review is arguably unnecessary anyway, since you don’t need us to tell you that the source games in question are very, very good. Yet EA is otherwise letting us run wild with MELE coverage starting right now, ahead of the remastered trilogy’s retail launch tomorrow. So I’ve found enough time to go through Ars-caliber tests of the package’s technical makeup, putting everything through the paces on multiple PCs and Xbox consoles.