T w e n t y S i d e d

This episode marks the return of the ever popular “episode long shooting sequence interspersed by tiny segments of largely irrelevant dialogue set against long, narrow corridors” segment.

To be honest, this is something that’s grated on me a little bit. For large portions of the game, I often find myself thinking of the game more as a plain old shooter rather than a “RPG Shooter.” It certainly feels like there’s more combat in this game than in the first one – and I don’t know if it’s just because I’m playing this game right now and haven’t played Mass Effect in over a year or if there is actually less “RPG stuff” and more “shooter stuff” – but it’s been bugging me all the same as we’ve progressed through the game.

Josh Viel is the primary editor and producer of the Spoiler Warning video series. You can support the show by backing the Patreon.

Shamus went to bed early (or late, or something – he shifts his waking hours so often I’m not even sure he can keep track of it) so Uncle Josh is here again to post the episode this morning.

Despite the implication I make with the title and description of this episode, I actually don’t think Samara’s a bad character. She’s certainly more interesting than… well, basically anyone who works for Cerberus at the very least. And she has the second- or third-best loyalty mission in the game.

The real problem I have with her is that her “code” really is, quite literally, Lawful Stupidity codified. “My code does not allow me to be detained, so if you attempt to hold me for longer than 24 hours I’ll kill you. Even though you’re a cop. And trying to stop me from killing all of your suspects in this investigation. And you don’t actually want to hold me anyway.”

I don’t care what hoops the BioWare writers jump through to try to justify this attitude as “good” or “noble” or, and this is the kicker, “just.” I just can’t get over this point – the writers are asking us to respect someone who follows a strict moral code to the letter when that moral code says to kill everyone that acts contrary to your moral code. How can that possibly be considered a good thing? It just doesn’t work in any universe that is actually trying to make sense.

Which apparently isn’t Mass Effect 2 so I guess that’s perfectly fine.

Josh Viel is the primary editor and producer of the Spoiler Warning video series. You can support the show by backing the Patreon.

True story: The entire batch of episodes we recorded last Sunday had to be trashed because the voice recording file was somehow corrupted. I’m still wrenching my brain for an explanation as to how it happened. We record using ventrilo’s record feature (we’re all in agreement that the benefits of skype are far outweighed by the lack of a bind-able push-to-talk key). Ventrilo also makes it very easy to separate each individual’s voice into a separate channel for re-composition later because that’s how they’re saved natively, and all you have to do is export them to .wav files (rather than having everyone record their own voice and then send each recording to me). Right now the only explanation I can think of is that I may have killed the program before ending the recording, but that doesn’t quite mesh with what I remember – I’m fairly certain I recall ending the recording long before I left the server, so I really have no idea.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Spoiler Warning S4E22: It’s a Small World After All”

Josh Viel is the primary editor and producer of the Spoiler Warning video series. You can support the show by backing the Patreon.