T w e n t y S i d e d

Sooner or later we get to a bogged-down section of the game where all we can do is repeat previous criticism and watch Josh shoot things and scream over us when he sees a bug. This is perhaps not our show at its finest. When this happens, it comes up now and again in conversation:

Man, you guys don’t seem to be enjoying yourselves. You’re just nitpicking endlessly. Why don’t you quit this game, or skip over the boring parts?

Well.

If we quit whenever we hit a tough spot, we’d never finish anything, since just about all games have a point where they settle into the mechanics and combat for a while. My final take on Human Revolution was that the game “warmed my heart”. I was delighted to see a classic game revived with such care and maturity, and with so much faithfulness to the intent of the original. But even that game had a number of slow spots, rough points, logic holes, and sections where we couldn’t do anything but bitch & moan about the same problems we’d been covering for the last three hours.

As Chris said the other day:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect 3 EP29: The Fall of Shepard”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I don’t really have more to say on this Geth section. Here is the Turd Ferguson skit Chris mentioned. Note that Norm MacDonald left the show in 1997, so that skit is at least fifteen years old. I’m not going anywhere with this. I’m just saying.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Remember that you can give Legion to Cerberus in the last game. Apparently Chris did this in his play-through. And yet Legion shows up here either way. It must be the same platform, since he has the same hole in his chest. The only way this can happen is if Cerberus let him go. I suppose it could also happen if they were incompetent enough to let a damaged deactivated robot escape even though it’s the first intact Geth to be captured in history. Actually, that sounds exactly like Cerberus. Never mind.

The Max Payne video we discussed is this one: A Day in the Life of Max Payne. It’s admirably funny.

We talked about the Saint’s Row 3 segment where you enter virtual reality. You can see that here. Comparing the two directly, I do have to say that once again BioWare’s efforts strike me as uninspired. The SR3 version has broader and more interesting visuals. It also has varied gameplay. In ME3 you just walk through a linear one-note orange and teal world and shoot a gun at passive orange blobs to activate exposition. It’s not that the Mass Effect 3 section was horrible. It wasn’t. It’s just that it could have been so much better. This was a chance to shake up the color palette, play around with the combat mechanics, and explore the big questions about sapience, intelligence, and a sense of self in a communal experience.

The question that keeps nagging me is this: Are the problems we’re seeing a sign that BioWare has well and truly lost their touch, or were they just not given the time to properly realize this game? If EA gave them a little more leash, would we see more of the same, or a return to form? I don’t think we can answer this question from the outside, but that doesn’t stop me from asking it.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.