If you’re missing Spoiler Warning this week, then allow me to hook you up with some auxiliary Chris. His take on violence in videogames is really interesting and he even touches on the Football: Total War concept I enjoy so much. (A post I wrote when this site was less than three months old.)
Link (YouTube) |
 |
Now that I’ve tossed a few stones through the windows of Mass Effect and BioWare, I need to get back inside my glass house and get back to work on my sci-fi story. I have no doubt that all of my shoot-from-the-hip literary criticisms will probably come back to bite me in the ass someday. My only comfort is that the ass-biting day isn’t today.
Any author who hopes to write a story about interstellar space travel must eventually deal with the fact that interstellar space travel is impossible. Or if not impossible, then so shockingly impractical that it’s probably not worth the trouble. We can’t go to the stars in real life, but we hunger to see them and discover what secrets are hidden behind all of those shimmering white dots. So we write stories about outer space. However, in our stories we can’t travel through space for all the same reasons we can’t travel through space in the real world. The only saving grace of fiction is that we can cheat.
I suppose you can write a story about a guy who decides to find out how a remote planet colony is doing, and so he spends most of his adult life travelling there. Then his daughter spends her life bringing back the reply, “We’re mostly okay here, but we’re fresh out of that orange cheese dust they put on chips and cheese doodles, and we don’t know how to synthesize it ourselves.” Then the man’s grandson takes them a shipment of cheese dust and his great-granddaughter brings back their reply of, “Thanks!” I’m not saying it can’t be done, but there are certain limits on what kind of story you can tell if it takes decades to go somewhere and your characters keep dropping dead of old age. It’s going to be murder on pacing.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Science Fiction… in SPACE!”
Link (YouTube) |
And so we have come to the end of Human Revolution. So naturally, Adobe Premiere threw a fit and I had to re-encode the video and upload it super late. Because nothing can go off without a hitch when Reginald Cuftbert’s at the helm!
It does really seem strange when I look back at this season. As I mentioned in the video, most of the time, when we’re approaching the end of a season, I just can’t wait until it’s over. There’s always a palpable urge in the back of my mind to just get on with it, because we’ve all worn ourselves out by fixating on the same flaws ad nauseum. It’s easy to stay level headed while talking about a game’s flaws for an hour or two; Try analyzing a game for twenty hours and you’ll probably want to hit someone before the end. Do that all while recording yourself on camera and you might just become marginally famous on the internet for being a massive meta-troll that shoves lit dynamite down people’s pants.
But that didn’t really happen in Human Revolution. Not just the pants dynamite, but also that we never really got to the point where the game had worn out its welcome with us. Well, except at the very end when everything went completely insane. Maybe it’s because the game was short enough that we didn’t end up spending as much time on it as with other games; this season is a good 25% shorter than our Fallout: New Vegas run. But, at least for me, I think there’s something more to it.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Deus Ex Human Revolution EP41: Did We Ask For This?”
 |
This week I give a breakdown of why the Mass Effect 3 ending just didn’t work as a piece of fiction (as opposed to why it didn’t work logically, which we’ve been talking about for a few days now) and why I don’t think “new ending” can really fix things. The shame of it is, it’s clear that BioWare is badly missing the point. They seem to be stuck on the “fans wanted a happy ending” idea, which is going to lead them to making a different set of mistakes.
In the article, I named three elements: Affirmation, Explanation, and Closure. My point was that an ending needs to have at least one of these elements to be an “ending” and not just “a place where the story stopped being told”. These elements are the payoff at the end of the story.
Following the discussion and watching the ending again, I’ve come to the conclusion that the writers decided to leave out affirmation and closure in favor of an explanation-only ending. Okay, it’s dark, the good guys didn’t win so much as mutually annihilate the bad guys, and we don’t get to find out how things turned out for everyone else, but now we get to hear the answers to our questions. It seems like that was the plan.
An explanation ending CAN work. Heck, the murder mystery is an entire genre dedicated to explanation-based payoffs. Of course, if explanation is going to be the ONLY payoff, then it needs to be a really good explanation. A kind of, “Oh! NOW I get it!” epiphany. The Usual Suspects is a great example of this, where the final reveal brings new meaning to what the audience has already seen.
Mass Effect was manifestly unqualified for an ending based entirely on explanation. The lore is a tangled mess of conflicts and contrivances, and the only thing the central villain had going for it was “mystery”. Most people played this game because they loved the characters and the setting, not because they just couldn’t wait for the next dose of incomprehensible balderdash from The Illusive Man.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Experienced Points:
Mass Effect 3 Ending Controversy”
 |
And so our protagonist, Oda Nobunaga, finds himself in a precarious position. Completely untested in battle, he now faces off against two of the most skilled and renowned generals in all of Japan, and the strongest single army in the country.
 |
There’s a certain irony â€" or perhaps, poetry â€" to how all of these elements have managed to fall into just the right place.
In real life, Nobunaga’s first decisive battle was the Battle of Okehazama. Imagawa Yoshimoto, who you may remember as one of the first opponents we had in this campaign, was leading an absolutely massive army (allegedly some 25,000 to 40,000 men) towards Kyoto to “lend aid” to the Ashikaga Shogunate. Winning a string of victories as he marched his forces east towards Kyoto, Yoshimoto entered Nobunaga’s Owari Province and took several border forts without much difficulty. Nobunaga, on the other hand, only had some 2,500 to 3,000 men to stand against the Imagawa army â€" impossible odds, or so his retainers thought.
Other samurai might have tried to fortify the remaining forts in the province and wait out the aggressors, or charged the Imagawa center in a suicidal attack to satisfy their honor, or â€" indeed â€" simply surrender, as many of Nobunaga’s retainers urged him to do. But Nobunaga was nothing if not shrewd and ambitious, and he viewed this as an opportunity to become the greatest warlord in all of Japan practically overnight.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Josh Plays Shogun 2 Part 17: The Battle of Okehazama”
Link (YouTube) |
Here we are, on the threshold. The next episode will wrap up Human Revolution, and I have to say I’m sorry to see it go.
Next week we’ll be doing a special one-off episode. The week after that is right after PAX, so we’re not going to have any Spoiler Warning. Josh and I will both be at PAX, so if you want us to say mean things about video games you’ll have to catch up with us there. I’ll be posting my PAX itinerary next week.
It should be obvious, but this post is going to be complete and total spoilers for Mass Effect 3. Also, most of what I say here is just a re-hash of points that have been made elsewhere. The problems with the ending are very obvious, and I don’t think it takes a keen analysis or a deep understanding of the Mass Effect lore to uncover these issues.
The truth is, my nitpicking skills are wasted on this, and I don’t have a lot to add to the conversation. I’m writing this mostly to get it off my chest.
And to deflect the likely objections: Yes, the rest of the game is often quite good, and there were many “fanservice” moments where players got things they had been hoping / waiting for since the original game. But right now we’re talking about the ending to Mass Effect 3, which I rank as the worst ending I’ve ever personally played. Worse than KOTOR 2. Worse than Neverwinter Nights 2. It fails thematically, it fails logically, it fails at basic coherence, and it fails to be consistent with what has come before.
I know it’s childish and melodramatic when fans say, “This new thing has RUINED this series FOREVER!” I don’t want to go that far, but I will say it’s done a lot of damage. I just finished a re-play of Mass Effect 1, and it’s shocking just how many things seem stupid, contrived, inconsistent, or pointless now that I know how they turn out.
And no, I’m not a believer in the “indoctrination theory“. I think that would be better than the ending we got, but I don’t think it it was ever intended by the writers. This theory involves an incredible level of subtle symbolism, which goes against just how ham-fisted the rest of the story is. To wit: If these writers thought Shepard was indoctrinated in the last stage of the game, we would know it.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect 3 Ending Deconstruction”
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
Back in 1999, I rode the dot-com bubble. Got rich. Worked hard. Went crazy. Turned poor. It was fun.
Did you anticipate the big plot twist of Batman: Arkham City? Here's all the ways the game hid that secret from you while also rubbing your nose in it.
Crunch-mode game development isn't good, but sometimes it happens for good reasons.
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
A big chunk of the internet went down in October of 2016. What happened? Was it a hack?
A look at the main Borderlands games. What works, what doesn't, and where the series can go from here.
A wild game filled with wild ideas that features fun puzzles and mind-blowing environments. It has a great atmosphere, and one REALLY annoying flaw with its gameplay.
Deus Ex Mankind Divided was a clumsy, tone-deaf allegory that thought it was clever, and it managed to annoy people of all political stripes.
Here is how I'd conquer the game-publishing business. (Hint: NOT by copying EA, 2K, Activision, Take-Two, or Ubisoft.)
T w e n t y S i d e d
