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[NOTE: If you plan to play the Mass Effect series, know that this post contains massive spoilers.  And if you haven’t played any of the Mass Effect games and don’t plan to, this post will probably make no sense whatsoever.]

I think I got the “control/bad ending”, although it’s hard to tell for sure.  Personally, I didn’t hate it as much as most people did, but I do think the ME3 endings should forever exonerate the vastly-superior Knights of the Old Republic II from charges of having an “incomplete” or “unsatisfying” ending.

So… where to begin… I guess first of all I should say that I don’t know what to make of the “Renegade” or Paragon” interrupt options.  The first time it really struck me as odd was when Kai Leng (who I kept wanting to ask “did you escape from Jade Empire or what?”) was sneaking up behind Shepard with his sword drawn, and you have a renegade interrupt button. I pressed it, on the logic that doing something is better than doing nothing.  I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t.

Then, during the climactic end scene with Shepard and the Illusive Man pointing their pistols at each other, I got another Renegade interrupt.  Again, I took it; figuring that the sooner I could end the Illusive Man’s career, the better.  I read later that if you don’t do this, Illusive Man will shoot Shepard, and the game will end.  If this is true, it’s kind of a weird game mechanic.

So, having done this, I proceeded to the controversial endgame sequence, where Shepard meets the Catalyst.  The Catalyst is an artificial (I think, as opposed to “virtual”) intelligence that governs pretty much everything, including the Reapers.  It presents Shepard with three choices to end the game, none of them very pleasant.  This parody video sums them up fairly well:

I can’t imagine that others haven’t pointed this out, but the Catalyst is literally “God from the machine”, or, as they say, deus ex machina. Deus ex machina is, as Wikipedia describes:

a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability, or object.

All fit the Catalyst, except for the part about solving things.  The Catalyst solves nothing, but it does end things.

Having said that, it’s not such a bad ending.  You could argue that all Shepard’s thousands of choices amounting to only a minor difference makes a grand philosophical point about the Universe.  Or you could argue that the writers were lazy.  Your choice.

Looking back, the Mass Effect series is surprisingly uneven.  The mechanics of the first one feel very different from the sequels.  It kind of morphed from an action, sci-fi RPG into a third-person FPS with dialogue.  Which is okay with me, although the fighting did grow tiresome after a time.

The characters and plot likewise are uneven.  There are some deep philosophical concepts in the story–the Prothean V.I’s dialogue with Shepard on  Thessia reminded me a little of Oswald Spengler’s writings–but there are also quite a few space-cowboy movie cliches.

The characters are sometimes believable and emotionally compelling.  I liked the scene where Shepard and Garrus go to the top of the Presidium, for instance.  The Illusive Man himself is a fairly complex and interesting character.  But then again, you have Shepard and Ashley’s messed up relationship, which felt like artificially-created drama, especially in ME2. And don’t get me started on the forced relationship with Liara.  I liked both Ashley and Miranda better.

The voice acting was all pretty good, though much of the dialogue was corny.  I lost track of how many times people said “This is it,” during the final hour or so.  Most of the Big Inspirational Speeches in all three games were pretty hackneyed, I thought.  But the actors did their part; and frankly, I’d listen to Jennifer Hale or Yvonne Strahovski read the phonebook.  Or Codex, as it were.

Mass Effect is not a great series, it’s just a good one. I think it got a little too “franchisified” too early, and tried to be all things to all players, and of course it could not be.  But it’s still a very enjoyable sci-fi adventure series.  It’s not the best series of games ever, but I’m still glad I got to play it.

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Finally got it this Christmas, and have been playing it this weekend.  It’s good, but the missions are kind of repetitive: go to base held by Geth/Cerberus forces, choose who you want to either activate or deactivate the Anti-Aircraft gun, defend them, wash, rinse, repeat.  Anti-Aircraft guns are the new rogue V.I.s, it seems.

Also, the whole idea that “well, yes, the Reapers are destroying the Galaxy, but we refuse to ally with [whatever other species of alien] because we’ve been at war with them forever” is a little unbelievable. I think intelligent beings could put aside their differences long enough to fight the attack of the Metal Cthulhus. As Ronald Reagan–yes, that Ronald Reagan–once said:

“In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. “

Same principle here, except it would be all the members of the galaxy uniting to stop the threat from outside the galaxy, not just the planet.  It seems kind of unbelievable they could be so petty.

I’m sure there will be more plot developments, of course, and maybe it will be explained.  It’s still a fun adventure game.  I’m sure I’ll post a lot more when I finish it.

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As long-time readers may know, I love the video games made by Obsidian Entertainment.  They are exceptionally well-written, and feature very deep, thought-provoking stories.  Their works are what have convinced me that games are just as legitimate an art form as movies, books etc.

Their latest project is an isometric fantasy RPG, tentatively called “Project Eternity“.  I was quite disappointed when I heard that, simply because I usually hate isometric fantasy RPGs.  The faux-medieval fantasy settings bore me; I prefer a modern or futuristic setting.  The isometric view annoys me to no end. It feels more like I’m playing a board game.

Of course, that won’t stop me from playing it.  Chris Avellone and J.E. Sawyer are making it; and such is my faith in their abilities that I’ll still have to play the thing.  Avellone’s Planescape: Torment was an isometric fantasy RPG, and one of my favorite games. So, naturally, I have high hopes for “Project Eternity”.

I guess you could call this “brand loyalty“, but in my mind it’s not the same.  I’m loyal to the Obsidian “brand”, I guess, but only as long as they still employ the same guys who made the games I enjoyed in the past.  “Brand loyalty” is a term I always take literally, as meaning “loyalty to the symbol”. I’m not loyal to symbols per se, I’m loyal to the people who make what I consider high-quality products.

I think that for the most part, the idea of cultivating brand loyalty is companies fooling themselves and putting the cart before the horse.  They advertise to try to persuade people to like their products for various nebulous reasons.  In my opinion, the only way to get loyalty is by making good products.

A lot of this goes back to my belief that most advertising is a waste of money.  I don’t think celebrity endorsements or clever marketing or whatever will do anything to help out a lousy product.  The recently-concluded Presidential election is an example of this; all the Romney-supporting Super-PACs and their multi-million dollar ad purchases couldn’t make up for a rotten candidate.  And as for the loyal Republicans who voted for Romney, they probably didn’t care about the ads; they just voted for him because in their minds anyone who wasn’t Obama was automatically the better candidate.  Their loyalty, I suspect, is based in their own beliefs and ideas and prejudices, not in anything some ad told them.

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The N64 game Turok 2: Seeds of Evil is not a great game.  It may not even be a good game; it’s hard to say.  The graphics were awesome in 1998, but they are somewhat laughable now.  The combat is repetitive.  And the levels are long and confusing, with only one or two checkpoint save areas spread throughout them.  And then there is the whole question of “why is the hero dressed like an 18th century Native American while battling mutant robo-dinosaurs with a machine gun?”  Never could work that out.

But Turok 2 had one very interesting feature: in every level there were these little chambers that would grant Turok special abilities.  But there was also an identical chamber which contained extremely creepy, cyclops-like monsters that would utter threats of cosmic annihilation  in an otherworldly, screeching voice before attacking Turok.

There was, as far as I know, no way of knowing if the portal was a good one or a bad one before entering.  The first time it happened, it freaked me out pretty good.  The resultant uncertainty and trepidation about whether or not to enter a portal was a very nice touch.

But the best thing about this was that these monsters were very different from the game’s normal enemies.  In Turok 3, it’s explained that they are the servants of a somewhat Azathoth-like entity called “Oblivion” that’s out to destroy the Universe for some reason.  But in Turok 2 you don’t know that.  Even Turok’s guide Adon–or, as I called her, “Lost Land 4-1-1”– didn’t really know who they were or what they were doing.  She knew pretty much everything else a dinosaur hunter would care to know in the game, but not that.  That made it even scarier.

In most genres, this wouldn’t work.  To put in unexplained characters out of the blue is usually verboten.  But in the horror genre it’s alright because, well, the idea of monsters showing up out of nowhere is pretty scary.   So it was pretty effective at scaring the player.

People knock video game writing fairly often.  It’s a little unfair, because as I have said time and again, there are some excellent writers in the gaming industry.  But they are exceptions, and most games are definitely not trying to be literary masterpieces.  Certainly, Turok 2 was not looking to win any awards for its script.  (Adon and the cyclops-monsters may be the only speaking characters; I can’t remember for sure.)

But I think that for that reason, games in the horror-genre can succeed even without “good” writing, because what would be considered bad writing outside of horror is actually quite effective in the genre.  The good characters, Turok and Adon, are less interesting because they don’t really have any in-game backstory to make the player care about them.  But by the same token, the fact that the writers don’t give the player the lowdown on the servants of Oblivion just makes them that much scarier.

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On Freshly Pressed yesterday, there was a good post from Game Over, You Suck with Chris Kodoku about player character death in video games.  It’s about the paradox of how, since the player can always come back after failing, s/he’s not really that great.  It’s a great critique, and something most gamers don’t often think about.  Give it a read.

This is part of what makes the game Planescape: Torment so awesome.  It messes with this mechanic in a really ingenious way, to make the game very unique, and also a commentary on the way player character death is handled in so many games.

I used to joke about how, if they really wanted to make a game “realistic”, you’d get one chance to play it, and when your character died, that would be it–you could never play again.  Wouldn’t be too popular with players, though.

The other alternative, I guess, is the Deus Ex approach, where just because you failed at one thing doesn’t mean the game ends; you can still get chances to recover.  (Your character still could die in Deus Ex, though.)

There was a great article in the satirical online paper The Onion about this years ago.  It involved Solid Snake, the hero of the Metal Gear Solid games, wondering why he is always forced to “continue”.  It’s pretty funny, but again, it also points out how immersion-wrecking this mechanic is when you really think about it.

It’s funny; I never feel any guilt starting over from a save in a game like Doom 3 after Doomguy has met an untimely end.  I never seriously thought about this issue before in those kinds of games.  But I do feel some guilt for starting over in sports video games when I lose a play-off game or something.  That feels like cheating to me, whereas the restart in action games feels natural.

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So, a teenager collapsed from dehydration after playing Modern Warfare 3 on his Xbox for four days straight.  He’s going to be okay, fortunately, and apparently his mom isn’t going to let him play anymore.

I am an avid gamer.  I could not play any game for four days straight.  Once, on a Saturday, years ago,  I played my favorite game, Knights of the Old Republic II for almost four hours straight.  That was definitely my limit,  and frankly a bit much for me.  In general, I can’t play more than two hours without feeling sick.

How did this guy manage to play for four days?  I strongly suspect he was playing online multiplayer, because (a) I hear that’s more addictive, (b) it takes longer to play because of the logistics involved, (c) I can’t imagine MW3 off-line holds four days worth of entertainment and (d) once you are playing, it’s harder to stop if you’ve got a bunch of other players involved.  This is yet another reason why I don’t like online gaming one bit–it seems to be the type of gaming that destroys people’s lives by making them addicted to it, much more so than off-line.

I like playing video games a lot, but you know the saying: “moderation in all things”.

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There’s an article in the New York Times about the prevalence of trolls in online gaming.  The article focuses particularly on their attacks on female gamers, but it also speaks to a larger point about trolls in general.  The key line is: “For trolls, offensive language — sexist, racist, homophobic comments — are interchangeable weapons that vary with the target.”

This is absolutely true, and the core of understanding troll behavior.  Trolls are not deeply committed to racist, sexist, or homophobic ideologies.  They are simply interested in causing as much trouble as they possibly can, and see such insults as a means of doing this.

The difficulty with online gaming–and this is another reason I avoid it–is that seems to have been inadvertently designed as an almost perfect platform for trolls.   Frankly, the primary purpose of online gaming seems to me to be to encourage trash-talking, and trolling is but a mutated form of trash-talking.

Everything I have seen indicates that the online experience delivers, on average, no better of an experience than playing the A.I.  For every highly-skilled player, there are ten unskilled players whose performance is below that of a competent A.I.  The only advantage online offers over offline is the ability to compete with some stranger, and beat him or her at the game.  And then, of course, the trash-talking.  Trash-talking a machine is simply not as satisfying.

To me personally, trash-talking in any venue is a pointless and stupid activity.  I hate it when athletes do it, I hate it when people on internet forums do it, and I hate it when gamers do it.  The difficulty, as highlighted in the NYT article, is how to manage it so it stays within decent bounds.  But the online gaming services won’t eliminate it outright, however, because they would be destroying their own market.  A blogger named Ferrerman wrote some posts about a related phenomenon on internet forums. (Be warned: he uses a lot of strong language to make his point.)

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Since I posted about it a week ago, it’s become by far my most viewed post.  Tons of people are getting here searching on variations of “I don’t get the NCAA 13 commercials”.

The game itself is, I have to say, pretty fun.  Now, granted, it’s not exactly super-realistic.  I play as Akron in dynasty mode, because they’re one of the worst rated teams, and there was a game against Arkansas with the final score of 91-49. (Arkansas’s favor)  Now, granted it’s a mismatch, but that’s kind of insane nonetheless.  My star receiver had like 2,000 yards and 12 TDs as of week three–and this is on “All-American” difficulty.  And the made-up players you’re supposed to recruit are all rude as heck for some reason.  But it’s still fun, except for a few freezing issues.

The “Heisman Challenge” mode, meanwhile, is way more fun than it should be.  It’s even less realistic.  I play as Andre Ware, and so far he has 32 touchdowns  and 3,000+ yards in four games.  The only competition he could have for the Heisman are his own receivers.  It shouldn’t be fun and yet, weirdly, it is.

(One thing that bothers me: why does Ware have the wrong facemask?  The loading screen clearly shows a picture of him wearing this mask, and yet in the game he has one more like Tom Brady’s.  And while we’re on the subject, what’s that giant faceguard Herschel Walker’s wearing in the above ad?  He never wore that. /end mysterious man facemask rant)

Anyway, it’s a very fun game, but it has more of an “arcade” feeling to it.  Which is cool.  The college game feels looser and more wide-open than pro, so that makes sense.

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Why would that upset the dad?  Who wouldn’t like the idea of stealing one of their arch-rival’s greatest players?  It’d make more sense if the kid had put Archie Griffin on Michigan.

Well, regardless, I think the NCAA game looks cool, although in all the videos I’ve seen, I’ve had a hard time because I get distracted by the ESPN crawl at the bottom.  The thing that says in big red letters “Upset Alert! Danger, Danger!  Warning, Dr. Smith!” or whatever.  That is great in real life, but in the game it’s just a nuisance.  I don’t care if the simulation has Wyoming beating Alabama or something, and it distracts me from the game I’m playing.

Actually, I think presentation in sports games is overrated.  I used to think it was important, but I gradually realized I’d much rather play a good, realistic simulation of football with a stripped-down presentation than a mediocre game with great presentation.  Presentation is just easier to do, so people fixate on it.

I don’t even care about the announcers at all anymore; I think every game I’ve played has them saying the same lines over and over.  And I don’t blame the people who make the games for that; it’s just inevitable.  (If I get Madden, which I doubt very much I will, I will not play the sound.  I can’t stand Phil Simms’s accent. “Well, Jeeem, the Cincinatt-uh Beeengals can’t run buh-cause the Buffalo Beeels are stoppin’ them.”  Sorry, Simms; don’t take it personally.)

Ultimately, I don’t play sports games to feel like I’m watching a game on TV, I play to feel like I’m, you know, playing in the game.

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I was reading about this upcoming sci-fi movie starring Tom Cruise called Oblivion.  The IMDb synopsis says:

A court martial sends a veteran soldier to a distant planet, where he is to destroy the remains of an alien race. The arrival of an unexpected traveler causes him to question what he knows about the planet, his mission, and himself.

Hmm.  That sounds a bit like the plot of what I consider the most overrated movie of all time, Avatar.  Also like Avatar, this thing seems to share a name with another, totally unrelated franchise.

Of course, people say the idea for Avatar was itself stolen from Edgar Rice Burroughs, or some British comic book, or Dances with Wolves.  I wouldn’t say “stolen”, exactly; but it’s an age-old plot.

The plot of Avatar is:

  • Guy is sent by military to deal with exotic natives to help pursue military’s interests.
  • Guy becomes sympathetic to natives.
  • Guy rebels against military, helping natives.

This is, in broad strokes, also the plot of one of my favorite movies, Lawrence of Arabia.  The difference is in how it’s done–compare the character of General Allenby in Lawrence with Colonel Hambone from Avatar.  (Okay, so that’s not his name.  But it should have been.)

This is so often the case with fiction.  Another example:

“A video game about someone who causes tremendous damage to a planet, and must then face the consequences of that action.”

This could be describing either Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords or Tonic Trouble.  The former I consider to be the greatest game ever made; a masterpiece of storytelling and characterization, complete with a philosophical depth more powerful than any other work of fiction I have seen.  The latter is about a purple cartoon alien who fights mutant tomatoes.  “The Devil is in the details”, as they say.

Zaphodb2002 pointed out in a comment on this post that if you just give a synopsis of the most basic points, so many great works don’t sound all that impressive.  It is, as he said, how the story is told.