Okay, ME1 isn't so bad.

You're going after the achievements? Yikes, good luck with that. It took me forever to get all of the character achievements.

The character ones will take time. I have two of them already... so, yeah. I doubt I'll get the Hardcore/Insanity playthroughs. It's just not fun when I keep dying. Mass Effect's interface isn't good enough at that high level of difficulty.

Insanity isn't that bad. Go Soldier so you've got heavy armor, beef up your sniper skill, then find a really good rifle and give it some heat sinks. You can seriously plug through the whole game with a good sniper rifle, just as long as you're using your teammates for distracting enemies and not actually relying on them to get anything done.

If you do decide to take on Insanity, I might recommend uploading a completed profile rather than starting with a new one. That way your stats and abilities will already be set to go. When I did Insanity, the fight against the two turian assassins in the Citadel at the beginning was literally the toughest fight of the entire game, if only because my party was in such poor shape at that point. Insanity gets easier as you go along.

I haven't got a dedicated soldier file yet, silly me. So it might be worth starting one on hardcore, hopefully beating the game and then doing it again on insanity? Hmm.

Might be worth a try, at least.

Class decision is a bigger choice in the second one, frankly, since combat is more direct and each class is given a unique ability of their own (except for Engineer, which they kinda screwed up on). In ME1, your teammates have all of the abilities you need, so you may as well just go Soldier, take the heavy armor and weapons and turn off squad power usage. They really fixed that imbalance in the second game, and it shows why I went Soldier so many times in the first.