Mass Effect - am I being left out?

Mass Effect 2 was released today and everyone seems to love it. Reviews from sources I trust are uniformly excellent. Gamers whose opinion I trust are equally effusive. It's the first 'big' game of the year and has a lot of marketing support behind it. It's even crossed over into 'proper' media - aka the GTA IV effect. For Christ's sake, I saw it shown on the video advertising billboard on the King's Cross railway station concourse on Tuesday night (with that location, they're obviously trying to corner the wino and crack ho market).

But I'm not sure. Not because of the game itself - I have no doubt that it is a well-crafted videogame. Rather, my apprehension is because of the original game, which I didn't really like. Lord knows, to blaspheme twice within the space of a paragraph, I tried to like it but it left me cold. Shonky combat, dull, empty worlds and interminable interaction with NPCs. It was like KOTOR, on the original Xbox, stripped of the Star Wars mythology, i.e. what made it good. Not fun.

Many of those people that are hot for ME2, showed a lot of love for the first one, which makes me think that I won't necessarily like it. I have been meaning to give the first game a second chance, though. However, I wonder if I'd want to trek through two 40-hour+ games, set in the same universe, back-to-back?

I could just jump straight into ME2 without bothering with the first game, of course. Just because a sequel has been made, there's no requirement to have played the first one - GAME staff don't give you a pop quiz on the original game when you buy sequels. I wouldn't recommend anyone play Assassin's Creed at all, when they could just dive in to the better-in-every-way sequel. However, I've read that ME2 takes data from an ME save file on the same 360. Now, while I think that is a great fan-service, it puts me off going straight for the sequel - what would I be missing if I did that?

I'm coming to the end of Assassin's Creed II and I then intend to move on to Uncharted 2. Heavy Rain, God of War III and Red Dead Redemption all come out over the next few months and I'm avidly looking forward to them all. It's likely that these games, coupled with my finite gaming time, will mean that I'll pass on ME2, at least for now.

But what will I talk about on the Internets?