<\/div>MJ sneaks through a massive complex of Sable guards. Once she’s reached the tent where Standish is being held, she greets him.<\/p>\n
Standish knows what Demon guys look like because they tried to kill him earlier this same evening. But for whatever reason, he assumes this young unarmed woman who openly greeted him is a Demon assassinYou could excuse this by assuming he knows that Martin can mind-control anyone, although that doesn’t fit with him lowering his guard because she’s got a press pass.<\/span>. He then grabs a gun and points it at her. She shows him her press credentials and he realizes she’s a famous journalist. However, he doesn’t stop pointing his gun at her. Instead he lowers it so he’s pointing at her belly rather than center-torso. Outside, Spider-Man sees the outline of someone pointing a gun at MJ. He swings in and enters through the top of the tentWhat? Is there a skylight in this tent? Whatever.<\/span>. Standish is terrified of Spider-Man for some reason, even though Spider-Man saved his life a couple of hours ago and they even had a nervous laugh together. Standish then backs away in sheer panic, trips over his own feet, falls down, and knocks himself out.<\/p>\n The noise of Standish’s antics alerts the guards outside. They rush in. Spider-Man grabs MJ and jumps out of the tent with her before the two of them get shot. MJ protests because she’s still trying to ask Standish questions even though he’s out cold.<\/p>\n There’s a time-cut here where Spider-Man swings home with MJ, and the story hints that she spends the trip berating him for this terrible screwup. That’s hilarious if you try to picture it, like a couple bickering while riding a roller coaster.<\/p>\n Once home she storms off, then calls Spider-Man on the phone so she can bitch at him some more. She’s angry that he made a small joke after Standish knocked himself out and she’s apparently offended by the idea of using humor to break the tension. “IS EVERYTHING A JOKE TO YOU?” she demands of the stammering and apologetic Peter.<\/p>\n This situation is supposed to be the moment where Peter screws everything up because that’s kind of his thing. But as presented, he did absolutely nothing wrong. He acted reasonably based on the information available to him at the time. Standish was an incompetent dingbat and he’s guilty of multiple counts of willful stupidity. MJ misplaced her blame onto Spider-Man, was nasty to him, and unreasonably expected to be able to continue to interview an unconscious man while dozens of bloodthirsty armed paramilitary thugs converged on her position. Her outrage in the face of Peter’s profuse apologizing makes her seem like a vindictive bully.<\/p>\n This is a disaster of a scene. Elsewhere in the story we have sequences where Peter blames himself for things that aren’t really his fault. That’s fine, inasmuch as guilt and self-blame are his brand, but here the writer had an opportunity to have our hero make an actual mistake that was both serious and yet understandable based on his particular hangups. I’d even say that Peter needs<\/strong> to make this mistake in order for later scenes to work. Instead the scene depicts him as blameless. As a result, MJ comes off as foolish, emotional, unobservant, and verbally cruel. None of those attributes fit her character.<\/p>\n This is important because MJ is one of our heroes, and this scene makes her less heroic. She’s a reporter and she’s supposed to be good at gathering information and reading a situation. When her interpretation of the scene is so at odds with what we’ve been shown, it makes her seem like she’s failing in the area where she should be strongest.<\/p>\n As for her complaints about Spider-Man making jokes? Shit lady, did you date this guy or not? According to the story he’s saved your life countless times in the past, so you ought to have a pretty good understanding at how this guy works. If you’re ideologically opposed to quips in tense situation then you’ve got no business dating Peter Parker and you <\/i>definitely<\/i><\/b> have no business partnering up with Spider-Man.<\/i><\/p>\n The thing is, this scene is pretty much an anomaly. It’s not like this writer has been struggling with characterization or mangling their scenes. They’ve been hitting their story beats and doing proper character-building so farEh. Not so much with Martin Li and Silver Sable, but those two will get their own sections later in the series and I wouldn’t blame either of these flawed characters on writer incompetence.<\/span>, which means this broken scene sort of comes out of nowhere.<\/p>\n I wonder if the script originally called for Spider-Man to directly knock Standish out? There’s nothing in the recorded dialog that conflicts with this. He even says “Oops! Sorry Charlie”, when Standish falls over, which doesn’t really make sense. Why is Spider-Man apologizing to someone who tripped over their own feet?<\/i> Spider-Man disarms Standish and lands right in front of him, and I could easily imagine this was originally followed up by a punch.<\/p>\n Perhaps playtesters didn’t like the original version of the scene? I can empathize with a player that’s getting sick and tired of the writer grabbing the controls and turning Spider-Man into a dumbass. The problem of “win in gameplay, lose in cutscene” is pervasive in this game.<\/p>\n If this is the case and they re-designed the cutscene so that Standish fell over instead of getting knocked out by Spider-Man, then they didn’t really fix the scene. They just moved the problem around. (And made it much worse.)\u00a0 \u00a0Having Standish knock himself out with a pratfall allows Spider-Man to emerge from the cutscene blameless, but it does so at the cost of passing the idiot ball off to Standish and turning MJ into a shrill and unreasonable antagonist.<\/p>\n I think a better solution is for the designer to stop using cutscenes as a blunt tool for creating gameplay setbacks. Stop teaching players that cutscenes are always screwups. Save the screwups for moments like this one where it really matters to the story. The player will probably be more accepting of cutscene incompetence if these events are rare and they tie into moments of character growth rather than using them to un-do your progress during boss fights and chase scenes.<\/p>\n Or maybe I’m totally wrong about why this scene is such a mess. In any case, it really is best if you can ignore the nonsense presentation of the scene and just imagine that the mishap was somehow all Spider-Man’s fault. This moment is an anomaly in the story and the relationship between Peter and MJ will get a lot betterBetter as in “more interesting”, not necessarily “more amicable”.<\/span> from here.<\/p>\n To take the edge off of all that complaining, I should point out that this is a ridiculously<\/i> polished game.<\/p>\n First is the obvious stuff: There’s an enormous variety in the detail spread around the city. The cars, pedestrians, buildings, and infrastructure are different enough that you don’t find yourself looking at something and saying, “Oh, there’s another copy of that thing.” Yes, Rockstar pulls this off all the time in their Grand Theft Auto series, but it’s still really hard to do<\/i>.<\/p>\n The animations are fantastic. I realize you come here for text and not video, but if you’ve got 7 minutes you’re willing to spend on a video, then I highly recommend this one<\/a>:<\/p>\nIncompetent Cutscene<\/h3>\n
<\/div>How Did This Happen?<\/h3>\n
<\/div>A Polished Experience<\/h3>\n