{"id":17605,"date":"2012-10-23T20:47:16","date_gmt":"2012-10-24T01:47:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=17605"},"modified":"2012-10-23T23:10:23","modified_gmt":"2012-10-24T04:10:23","slug":"mass-effect-3-ep23-dead-civilians-for-breakfast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=17605","title":{"rendered":"Mass Effect 3 EP23: Dead Civilians for Breakfast"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/-q2hAIRPqVA\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=-q2hAIRPqVA'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>Really Hacket? Killing civilians isn&#8217;t the M.O. of Cerberus? This is a preposterous claim that goes against every single thing the game has ever shown us about Cerberus, across all three games. Hackett seemed like the last sane man in the galaxy. Now he too has turned into a Plot Zombie, mindlessly believing things that the writers demand without regard to what the game itself has shown us.<\/p>\n<p>They were shooting civilians on Mars. They fed colonists to a thresher maw to test the scientific effects of feeding colonists to thresher maws. They invaded the Citadel and went out of their way to pointlessly shoot up the mall even though the place had no strategic value. They murdered a bunch of people in Mass Effect 1. They tortured and murdered children to make a better biotic. They dumped a bunch of scientists into a dead reaper and didn&#8217;t bother checking up on them until the whole team had been turned into husks. In Jacob&#8217;s Mass Effect 3 mission (which I think we&#8217;re skipping) they&#8217;re trying to kill a bunch of of scientists and their families because they want to leave Cerberus, and they want to leave Cerberus because Cerberus is the kind of place that would kill you and your whole family for trying to quit.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->The only time they don&#8217;t kill civilians is when their own experiments \/ robots \/ test subjects \/ doomday virus \/ cloned dinosaurs break loose before they get a chance to deploy it, and kills their entire science team. Cerberus is an unintentionally comical mess, the kind you would get if the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Umbrella_Corporation#Umbrella_Corporation\" title=\"Umbrella Corporation\">Umbrella Corporation<\/a> bought out <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Cobra_Command\" title=\"Cobra Command - Wikipedia\">Cobra Command<\/a> and hired <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Wile_E._Coyote_and_Road_Runner\" title=\"Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner \">Wile E. Coyote<\/a> to run it. Cerberus not only kills civilians, <em>they do so for no reason and with spectacular incompetence<\/em>, usually in ways that run directly counter to their goals. <\/p>\n<p>This feels like a giant middle finger from the writers. They know how stupid this sounds, and they don&#8217;t care. Note that this is the <em>opposite<\/em> of <a href=\"http:\/\/tvtropes.org\/pmwiki\/pmwiki.php\/Main\/LampshadeHanging\" title=\"Lampshade Hanging - TV Tropes\">lampshading<\/a>. If this was lampshading, Hackett and Shepard would comment on how confusing or nonsensical their plans seemed. Instead, the game shows us how stupid their plans are and then has the central characters ignore it. <\/p>\n<p>In the show, Chris mentions the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Geoff_Keighley\" title=\"Geoff Keighley - Wikipedia\">Geoff Keighley<\/a> interview. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=sjXSI6O9lUo\" title=\"Pixel Perfect Interviews Geoff Keighley\">You can see it here<\/a>, but this is all you need to know about it: <\/p>\n<p><table   class=\"\" cellpadding='0' cellspacing='0' border='0' align='center'><tr><td><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/journalism.jpg' class='insetimage'   alt='journalism.jpg' title='journalism.jpg'\/><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>Three different product placements. Not subtle, background placements, but in-your-face staged goods framing the person being interviewed. I&#8217;ve seen the image above with the caption of &#8220;VIDEOGAME JOURNALISM&#8221; being passed around. <\/p>\n<p>Moving on:<\/p>\n<p>So The Traynor romance didn&#8217;t work out. I must laugh at the ridiculousness of four dudes failing at lesbian seduction in a space opera videogame. I think justice was done here. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Link (YouTube) Really Hacket? Killing civilians isn&#8217;t the M.O. of Cerberus? This is a preposterous claim that goes against every single thing the game has ever shown us about Cerberus, across all three games. Hackett seemed like the last sane man in the galaxy. Now he too has turned into a Plot Zombie, mindlessly believing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[188],"tags":[250,208],"class_list":["post-17605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spoilerwarning","tag-mass-effect-3","tag-spoiler-warning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17605"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17605\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}