Wut.
Unless Obsidian dissolved (I have no idea. Is Obsidian still around?) and those guys met up with and joined Bioware, that's not true. (EDIT: Were you actually responding to Osterbaum? I'm not too sure anymore.)

In any case, Osterbaum: Yes. As I understand it, you'll ALWAYS get quizzed about your past.
If you don't have a save*, you'll be able to establish a past.
If you DO have a save, you'll be corrected if you answer a question wrong about what you did in Mass Effect 1.

* On the Xbox, if you've finished a game, you'll always have a save, unless you wiped the hard-drive. Apparently, the games makes an invisible save upon the end-credits.
I don't know if you've played it on the 360 or PC, though. On the PC, I have no idea if it's the same situation.

Yeah, my bad. I keep forgetting Bioware was like "We don't feel like doing another Star Wars game. Make Obsidian do it."

EDIT: They're making Fallout: New Vegas, too.

I'm a PC-man all the way. And while most games tend to keep saves stored even if you uninstall the game, I some times go out of my way to delete those save files.

But if there's a quiz, then I must ask what exactly is the point of the whole "saves carried on from Mass Effect 1" then?

I don't know why they'd bother quizzing you when you already have a save file, because they'll apparently correct you if you make a mistake. Maybe it's just to remind you that this was how it happened, so you don't end up getting confused when, say, Samesh Bhatri thanks you for getting his wife's body back, when you were sure you had donated it to military research?

BTW that's within the first hour or so of Mass Effect 1 so I don't think it counts as a spoiler.

As a total unrelated note to this post of yours, I wanted to extend my thanks for partially recommending the second ME book. It's actually not horrible (though not great either). That beats the first one though! I'm too lazy to find the post where it was brought up.

So I have this game now. Only played it for a bit, but it's awesome so far. Only notes:

a) Codex description for Eezo: current does not work that way.
b) Ammo D:
c) Pretty pretty pretty!
d) I'm not sure whether I should rush through ME1 to get story options the way I want (Default choice for the major ending choice is let the council die and I'm not really cool with that).

Starts off pretty damn awesome though :D

IIRC the quiz affects nothing, whether it's a new character or an imported one, and is just there to remind people what they did or bring new players up to speed on your previous adventures.

Aww man.
I only have enough room on my computer's hard drive for this or for Dragon Age: Origins, and I have no idea which would be the better purchase. (Be sure to offer me your recommendations once you've played both.)

I'm definitely going through a bit of a Bioware withdrawal, through.

You know, back in my day we had these things called uninstall features and it let us clear off space if we had, say, two or more games we wanted to play.

I'll be getting this for the 360, I think.

It saddens me to do so, but it would sadden me more to repurchase the original game on the computer and play through it all over again, and more yet to give up my old characters.

If the PC version of the original had been released alongside the 360 version this wouldn't be an issue... or even announced alongside it.