The Mass Effect series is on sale, if there's anyone besides me who hasn't played them yet. <.<
Heh, I could never get far into the first one. The combat was fun but I got bored to tears wandering around the cities talking to everyone.
Yeah, I got really tired of the "planet searching" part of the game after about the third system I went to. Every single planet had stuff that didn't show up on the map. This wouldn't be a big deal if there weren't like 20+ planets to search. I get that discovery can be fun, but what's the point of adding content if almost no one is going to experience it?
Ranting aside, I've just started playing ME2 a bit ago, and can say that they removed a decent amount of exploration compared to the first. That might sound like a bad thing, but really all they did was cut out the majority of time-sinks. There's still a bit of "exploration" in some of the towns, but it's considerably more streamlined than the first. If you enjoyed parts of the first but couldn't get far because of lack of interest, the second one may work out a lot better for you. I think planet searching has been replaced with a sort of mini-game type thing, which might still be a time-sink but I haven't gotten around to doing that yet. I found that I'm enjoying the combat a lot more as well. They expanded the mechanics to the point where choosing your weapon type, good aim, conserving ammo, and using abilities actually matter.