Flame on 18 May 2012
Without playing the first ME, you won't get the full experience of what makes the game stand out: The Characters. ME characters are by far the best I've interacted with in a game for a while and quite frankly, it's what Bioware does best. Many of the characters grow on you throughout the series because they've been fleshed out so well. You could skip it and go straight to 2 with ME: Genesis giving you a background of what happened in ME1 (Leaves some key elements out of ME1 story though).
Either way, I say you couldn't go wrong jumping into the series at either point. If you want my opinion, I say play the first one as it greatly enhances the experience of ME2 by a large margin.
