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Five years on from its original release on the Xbox 360, developer BioWare has at last picked its moment to adapt the very first Mass Effect for PS3. This comes available as either a single PSN download or as part of the Mass Effect Trilogy collection - helpfully packaged alongside all relevant DLC, plus a patch to enable character imports in the later games. It's a great move for series completists, but much has come and gone since the game's first run on Microsoft's console in 2007. It's a product of its time, suffering as it does from severe frame-rate dips and texture pop-in, and with a lack of technical refinement that could seem out of place for a modern release.This late showing on PS3 raises a big question, then; has this port been better optimised, or visually tweaked in line with the studio's stronger understanding of console hardware? Hopes in this vein are warranted, having already seen Mass Effect 2's delayed PS3 release introduce an overhauled approach to its lighting, thanks to the title running on what we were told was the previously-unseen Mass Effect 3 engine. A big effort was made there; though performance remained slightly behind on PS3 where transparent alpha filled the screen, the extra time investment paid off in a very handsome port indeed.
So let's get to the comparison, and see if the original game has been lavished with a similar degree of attention. Turning our analytical eyes to image quality matters first, we have an 80-strong Mass Effect comparison gallery and also our traditional head-to-head movie below.
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