Re: Sound and Fury

Sorry, I'm going to delay your regularly scheduled post in order to respond to !Blogger's comments.

1) Per my belief that the ending is not happy

I think it’s a bit harsh saying that there was no way the Synthesis ending was “happy”. Yeah, the Quarians get totally screwed, as do all the other survivors now stuck without Mass Relays, but the fact that the cycle of organic destruction gets broken via everyone becoming half and half synthetic/organic is a happy ending, isn’t it? I mean, it’s a fresh new start for the ENTIRE galaxy. That should be exciting!

I simply don't buy it. I too chose Synthesis in my game, and I see the ending as being just as unhappy as I initially said. The relays are gone, and as such so is the supply chain of the galaxy. Everyone left in the Sol System will now be fighting for scraps, with the same occurring in every other system.

To be honest, I was happier when I was under the impression everyone would die when the relays blew. I thought "that sucks, but it's sacrificing everyone so the cycle can finally end once and for all". That seemed like the best choice. I was much more disappointed with it when I realized the horrible truth of the situation: I had just caused the inevitable, painful death of everyone as they slowly ran out of food and supplies. But hey, at least Joker and EDI will have robo-babies, right?

2) Per the Extended Cut

Additionally to be clear – the Extended Cut DLC isn’t re-writing the ending; in fact BioWare said specifically that it’s not. The purpose is to create a bit of closure and answer a lot of the questions people had when the game finished up. The way they described it in their blog post actually has me very excited; I feel like they’re really trying to make people happy.

Yes, in my ranting haste I didn't handle the Extended Cut DLC paragraph well. The offending line is:

Now I don’t follow the crowd with their “rewrite the ending” gusto, as you can’t just change the ending to make fans happy; that’s one of the worst ideas out there.

Basically, that line needs to be moved/removed. It was not my intention to imply that BioWare was changing the ending. This line was my response to those fans who believe BioWare should change the ending. In other words, I think they're idiots.

3) Per the PA Report

Also, unrelated to your post specifically, you should check out the PAReport’s editorial on the ME3 panel at PAX; apparently everybody seemed to come away happy. That should mean something, right?
http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/mass-effect-retaken-bioware-described-extra-ending-content-at-surprisingly-

What I notice most in that:

The panel pointed out that this content wasn’t in the game because they didn’t know fans wanted it. “The dev team stands by what was released in the core product, and we’re very proud of it. It was important though for us to listen to the community, and a lot of that feedback didn’t come until the game came out. Once we were listening we decided to include the extended cut. It wasn’t in the game because we didn’t know there was such a huge demand for it, to be honest with you.”

What content did they not realize the fans wanted?

“We want to give more closure about some of the questions you have,” Gamble explained, “and in general we wanted to give the players a sense of personalization with the endings. Many people mentioned that some of the choices they made in the game are not necessarily reflected in the ending scenes. We’re definitely going to focus on things like that. We want to make sure that when you see the ending of Mass Effect, you now have the information and context to be satisfied.”

So, the content they didn't know fans would want was specifically the content which showed the audience how their choices mattered. In addition, more information and context as to what exactly is going on at the end. I'm sorry BioWare, I don't buy it. You want me to believe that you created a game where personal choice is at the core of gameplay and story, and then decide the fans don't want to know how their choices are reflected in the ending scenes? That load of bullshit would dwarf anything you'd come across in Pamplona.

What I hear from that: BioWare didn't want to delay the game to deliver a solid ending. So instead they delivered an incomplete game initially, planning on adding the ending the audience wants (or even needs) a few months later. That makes me mildly sick, simply because I didn't think BioWare would pull such nonsense. Oh wait, that's right, EA's the publisher. Suddenly the world makes a little more sense.

Sound and Fury

Avast, ye mateys! Thar be SPOILERS ahead!

Mass Effect 3 is a great game. Or so I keep telling myself.

Why wouldn't it be great? It's improved the combat system again. Equippable weapon upgrades returned, but without the inventory nightmare of Mass Effect. The AI was intelligent and challenging; I'd just breezed through the last two on Veteran and this one, on Normal, was at least an order of magnitude more difficult.

I enjoyed the game, really I did. Right?

There was so much good to it. It starts off a lot darker than the other two. Don't get me wrong, none of them have been happy games. But this time the beginning is impressively powerful simply in how quickly everything goes to hell. You start fighting for Earth almost immediately, being overrun by abominations created by the Reapers. Not to mention that cheap shot of a scene, when you're watching the kid get rescued, only for his shuttle to get blown to smithereens as it tries to escape.

Then in the first mission you find out that Cerberus, the people you spent the entirety of Mass Effect 2 helping, have gone off the deep end and are now abominations of their own. And again what a cheap shot, having you reconnect with Ashley (or Kaiden if you kept him alive instead), only to "kill" her at the end of the first mission. Of course, she wasn't killed, but I actually thought the developers did her in. Toying with us: uncool, but it worked to pull me straight into the game.

Again, I liked it. So why do I feel like I have to convince myself of that?

I mean the entire game you come across someone new fighting off the Reapers (and normally losing). Yet you spend the majority of your own time bringing people and species together. You come across each and every one of your old teammates from the first two games and help them out. Those who survive the meeting will join you directly or help you indirectly. Even if they die though, each one does so honorably and without regret (unless you've been Renegading it up, tsk tsk tsk).

Mass Effect 3  manages to effectively tie up each storyline and give an ending to each character's subplot across the three games; that's a lot more than you normally get from a standard JRPG, whose subplots often meander to a random and unimportant end.

Working your way through, you finally cure the Krogan and bring peace between them, the Turians, and the Salarians. And hell, if you play your cards right, you not only stop the war between the Quarians and Geth, but even unite them with a common goal. You can even give the Quarians their homeworld back after spending 300 years in exile. Sure the galaxy's being destroyed, but for once in these games things seem to be going your way! You're bringing all the races of the galaxy together to fight as a united whole! This is a word I try not to use, but this time it fits: Mass Effect 3 is simply epic.

[caption id="attachment_1046" align="alignnone" width="560" caption="Legion! NOOOOOOO!"][/caption]

So seriously, what's not to like? Oh yeah... that's right...

Remember how I mentioned that Mass Effect's biggest trick to being immersive was that you weren't just playing as Shepard, but rather Shepard was an extension of yourself? And Mass Effect 2 continued it by having clear ramifications for the choices you made in Mass Effect? That's something Mass Effect 3 tended to stumble over.

Remember choosing between Anderson and Udina for who'd serve on the Council? Doesn't matter, Mass Effect 3 has Udina on the Council. To be fair, Mass Effect 2 more-or-less ignores the possible-destruction of the Council in Mass Effect; however even then at least your Anderson/Udina choice stuck.

And remember saving the Rachni Queen? Well too bad, no matter your decision you'll still have to fight your way her again as she's been enslaved by the Reapers. The difference: in one case she's real and will help you when you save her; in the other case she's a fake Queen that'll turn on you. Of course, you could just kill her either way. Not a real big payoff for that choice, is there?

Oh yeah, and the Geth Heretics? Did you rewrite them in Mass Effect 2? Too bad, the Quarians and Geth go to war anyways, and the Geth accept the Reapers help.

Seriously, is there any major difference from any choice you made in the previous games? The majority of decisions only affected how many "points" you get to put toward the endgame. Everything comes down to a number, and it feels like game-changers were little more than a number to add up. Karma's a bitch, especially when she doesn't seem to exist.

The worst offender of this was the ending of the game. Not even the choices you made in the current game seemed to matter. It came down to a single decision between 2, possibly 3, choices. Now, I wasn't surprised Shepard would die; it was pretty obvious from the beginning. But having everything you did come down to this one choice? That's just lame.

Another reason not to like it? The dialogue of the ending was a huge problem; it was clunky and did an awful job of explaining what was happening.

For instance, Mass Effect 2: Arrival taught us that destroying a Mass Relay wipes the star system that contains it. In fact, that's exactly why Shepard was imprisoned in the beginning: his decision to destroy the Mass Relay had killed 300,000 Batarians. And then the "Catalyst" tells you that each choice has the added bonus of destroying all the Mass Relays? I took that to mean the galaxy's screwed no matter what I do; Earth and all the other major systems will be wiped out in the explosion. Apparently, that's not what it meant. But wait, in that case why was the Normandy running away from the blast? It's mind boggling.

Worse than that, think of how screwed all the fleets around Earth are. When it dawned on me that my character destroyed the Mass Relays, thus cutting off a huge portion of the Quarians from the homeworld they just reclaimed, I was damned near heartbroken. That is not a happy ending in any sense of the word.

On that note: there'll supposedly be a free "Extended Cut" DLC to explain this better. Now I don't follow the crowd with their "rewrite the ending" gusto, as you can't just change the ending to make fans happy; that's one of the worst ideas out there. However, I also don't see how this extension will help. I see it doing one of two things; it will either add confusion to an already insane ending, or it will oversimplify the ending and prove that it is just as stupid as the audience has assumed. Neither of these will improve the situation. It's like nervously explaining a bad joke; they should just move on and act like it never happened, we'd all be better off.

Unfortunately, I'm not nearly done. I was also disappointed at the number of missed opportunities that felt foreshadowed. The Keepers could've easily have been important again; hell, there's that one that keeps getting in your way at the docking bay. The writers completely dropped all the dark matter foreshadowing in Mass Effect 2. There's the matter of Shepard's dreams which could've had a lot more done with them. And even a bit of foreshadowing about how dead Shepard actually was between Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2. All of these could've really easily been taken advantage of, but none were. Instead, we were given a random ending. I had seen nothing in any of the games leading to that point which fell in line with the Catalyst's nature or reasoning. As such, since they ignored their own foreshadowing, they left it with an ending that felt completely out of place and painfully absurd. Sure, that's an easy way to have a twist, but it'll also immediately alienate those following the story.

[caption id="attachment_1056" align="alignleft" width="288" caption="The writers told me I had to let you win. But I'll make sure you don't like it!"][/caption]

And to top it off, here's a quandary for you: the entire point of Mass Effect is to prevent Sovereign from activating the Citadel as a Mass Relay from dark space. So, if the Catalyst controls the Reapers, and it was in the Citadel the entire time, why couldn't it have just activated the Mass Relay when Sovereign attacked the Citadel?

It's insane to think there was this super-intelligent older-than-dirt AI living in the Citadel and yet it somehow didn't win? This is almost a subversion of the Gambit Roulette, as the apparent trilogy Bigger Bad implies it's so intelligent to be damn near omniscient, and yet it can't stop a single human. If it's really done this for millions (perhaps billions) of years, why does it let Shepard stop it? Everything that happened should've been playing directly into the Catalyst's hands (so-to-speak), and yet it seemed to have no control over anything. At the very least, it's decision to simply give up when Shepard reaches it makes zero sense. Can we say "boss fight"?

Speaking of which, and this is more of a non-storyline gripe, but where was the freaking final boss fight? Why didn't the Catalyst fight me? It should've at least tried to stop me, right? Hell, I took down a Reaper earlier, but I don't even get to do that again? We all know Harbinger deserves it! Even Mass Effect 2 had the shitty Human Reaper fight. Did they just forget about it? And no, shooting the Illusive Man after 15 painstaking minutes of TRYING TO WALK 5 FEET is not a "boss fight". Though I will admit it was nice to make Martin Sheen shut up.

So this was an epic game that fell apart amazingly at the end. Up to that point, I was loving the game. It had everything. Sure, it didn't play nice with the decisions I'd previously made, but I didn't care, I was saving the universe!

And then came the end, after which I only had one thought:

...it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing

But I'll still tell myself it was an awesome game as maybe, with the right amount of willpower, I can forget everything else and simply remember the following: I honestly enjoyed the game.

The Weight of the Galaxy

The third and final installment of the Mass Effect trilogy came out  last month. If you're anything like me, you've known this for quite some time; any mention of it had you salivating like Pavlov's dog. But it wouldn't be enough for you to just play it. No, you'd need to once again fully immerse yourself in this universe.

The best way to do that? Start a new character and play through the first two, in order, back to back. And that's exactly what I did.

Mass Effect itself is one of the best games I've ever played. To get it out of the way, let's first talk about its problems: the battles are clunky, the AI is stupid, and the equipment system is tedious. Ok, done, let's talk about the rest of it now.

I should note: a lot of this was influenced by a stellar post over at popbioethics. I don't fully agree with the post, but it makes a lot of good points.

To begin, Mass Effect is one of the most true role-playing games out there. They did a great job of supplying a system where you always have multiple choices, and depending on what you do has definitive ramifications down the line. And it's not just whether or not you complete a task, but often how you complete a task. Which gets me into the reputation system: are you a just, lawful hero, or a ruthless, chaotic anti-hero? Your decisions affect what's available and how you're treated. This allows it to be extremely immersive; you're no longer watching a movie with some interaction, you are instead crafting the main character to such an extent that they become an extension of yourself.

Next, the environment: instead of a universe where humanity is the status quo, Mass Effect throws you into one where humanity is brand new on the scene. Humanity's viewed as a second-class race, not important and still too focused on its own insignificant problems compared to the issues affecting the galaxy. It's not dystopian: there's a galactic government which oversees most of the "civilized" areas of the galaxy. But it's far from utopian, as the highest power of the government, the Council, is shared by three races, the rest of which are vying for inclusion in that elite club.

Not only that, but as popbioethics pointed out, this is a universe where things have gone horribly wrong. One race, the savage Krogan, is on the brink of extinction thanks to two of the Council races, the scientific Salarians and the militaristic Turians. That happened after the Krogan extinguished the bug-like Rachni on the Council's behalf. Meanwhile the technological Quarians have been evicted from their homeworld by the Geth, an AI race and the Quarians' former servant cyborgs. Then there's the Batarians, a race which still thrives on a caste system and slaving.

Among all this, the most advanced technology in the galaxy is the Mass Relay: a mass transit device which has allowed space-faring races to traverse the galaxy instantaneously. Without these, colonization and expansion would be slow-going and extremely difficult. Unfortunately this technology has only been co-opted by each race, as it was seemingly left over by the Protheans, an extremely advanced race that went extinct for unknown reasons 50,000 years earlier. So it's also a galaxy where all races have come to depend on a crucial piece of technology of fully foreign design.

And yet there you are, you little human, with your human problems, trying to understand the chaos which is the Milky Way.

Of course, the game doesn't tell you all of this at once, it's introduced to you as you work your way through the main plot. You start with a simple mission: examine and retrieve a Prothean artifact found on a human colony. Of course what seems simple is anything but (like every other RPG out there). Instead by the end you're in a battle for the survival of all civilized life in the galaxy.

Your villain? Saren, a rogue "Spectre" (special agent for the Council, think Trevelyan from Goldeneye), who is for some reason working with the Geth and travels in a giant dreadnought of unknown design called Sovereign. As you work through the game you realize Saren is controlling people with Indoctrination and wants to learn as much as he can about the Protheans.

[caption id="attachment_1059" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="That's no ship. It's a Reaper!"][/caption]

But wait! Sovereign's not a ship, it's a Reaper! And the Mass Relays weren't left by the Protheans! They were left by the Reapers to control the technological paths each race would take when they were discovered! The galaxy is a giant trap, and the Reapers want to kill us all! OMG! THE CITADEL IS OUR DOOM!

Yes, that's pretty much how quickly everything spirals out of control: The Citadel, the center of galactic civilization and also thought to be left behind by the Protheans, is actually Reaper technology as well. In fact, it's a Mass Relay itself; it opens to the space between galaxies, where the Reapers are waiting to begin their assault on the civilizations of the Milky Way. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, don't let the Reapers invade the galaxy and kill everyone!

Trust me, it's a powerful storyline, with betrayal, intrigue, and action. Plus tons of sideplots to fill out the fictional universe. Overall, this is a decidedly one of my favorite games.

Then came Mass Effect 2, a game which you start by dying. That's right, Bioware wasn't pulling any punches; they kill you off within 5 minutes. Of course you don't stay dead, but it gives the plot a reason to take your character somewhere he'd never be otherwise: in the hands of a terrorist organization called Cerberus. There were a few missions involving their inhumane operations in Mass Effect, but this makes you one of them. Your goal: stop the Reapers' plans, again. And that's exactly why Cerberus brought you back. Overall though, this is a pretty nice twist for the second game, as it puts your character in a place they shouldn't be, yet the events make it believable he would be there.

The second game improves on all those things that made the first one annoying: Fighting is much simpler and more streamlined. They tossed the crappy inventory altogether. And the AI really improved a lot.

Even better, they didn't lose much at all. I won't go into plot details on this one, mainly because this post is huge already and touching the awesomeness in chapter 2 *cough*Legion, Thane, Grunt, Samara, Garrus, Tali, Zaeed, Kasumi*cough* would make this post be 3 times longer.  The missions are still great though, the plot has just as many twists and turns, and overall it's still a great game. My one problem with Mass Effect 2 when compared to Mass Effect: the enemy Harbinger (another Reaper) just isn't as cool as Saren. Plus the final battle with a "Human Reaper" was just lame (someone had a bad trip when they came up with that idea).

Again though, Bioware delivered what they'd set out to deliver, a game which was more fun and more engrossing than Mass Effect: and lost none of the charm.

Oh look, it's the end of the post and I didn't get to talk about Mass Effect 3. Darn. I'll have to get at it another time, I guess.

Shiny

You may have noticed some updates to this site. That's because I spent the time digging through Suffusion's settings and found some I liked. I also took the time to give myself a nice image up top, because I figured you'd all like that. So, you're welcome.

If you have qualms or comments on the update, let me know and I promise I'll give at least 30 seconds of thought to whatever your issue is. I normally charge ridiculous amounts of money for such a thing, and you're getting it out of the goodness of my heart. So, again, you're welcome.

Admittedly this is to point out I haven't forgotten about you all again. Yes, I have posts coming. I unfortunately found myself stuck on what exactly I want to say in my next post (and how to say it without paragraphs and paragraphs of exposition). It's a difficult task I've set for myself. But I'll do it for you people. So, if you haven't figured it out yet, you're welcome.

If what I'm working on isn't out by Friday, I'll have some other real post in its place. And not just a stupid little status update thingamajig. Because honestly, I don't want to write this and you don't want to read it. So, to end this off, you're welcome.

The Return

Yes, that's right. The Return. The Return of me. As in posting. On this blog. Like this one. Only with more content. And less incomplete sentences. And likely more run-on sentences instead.

"But Zous," you say, "you never left!"

Of course you didn't actually say that, because the lack of activity the past 5 months speaks for itself. But I digress.

If you haven't figured it out yet because you never were one for lacking subtlety: I'm going to try to get back into this again. Why? Because I've gone much too long without a proper rant. So many things constantly beg me to mock them, and I've failed them thus far. Also, I forgot how many posts I had in the works but simply never finished. If I can manage it, I might even get a few weeks buffer in there.

Not that you haven't heard this before, but maybe, just maybe I'll keep it going this time. Of course, being me, there's a certain joy I get out of disappointing others. So we have that working against us, don't we?

Side note: it's also possible a certain someone out there continually pesters me to blog. At the very least, they deserve a stern finger wagging. I can't be bothered to post just because someone wants me to! I have to have the right level of grumpiness to reach that specific activation energy required for posting. Sure, you think it's all just sitting down and typing, having these words magically appear from the launching point that is my imagination (or lack thereof). But the diamonds that are my posts simply don't occur without the proper conditions! And trust me, you simply don't want to know where that pressure comes from.

In other words, good job raising my grumpiness to its old levels.

Batman The Animated Series, The Game

 The post last Friday was supposed to be on this topic, but to really show you why this game spoke to me, I had to first explain what it was about the show that made me love it. Now that we've gotten that out of the way, we can move on to the topic of the hour.

Batman: Arkham Asylum came out 2 years ago, and it encapsulated the Batman world extremely well. It was a perfect match to the world of The Animated Series. They had writers from the show, the same voice actors, kept it just as dark and foreboding as any game set in Gotham should be. Nothing was better than walking down the halls of Arkham, occasionally being taunted by Mark Hamill's Joker, never knowing what villain would take a run at you next.

I'll admit, the game wasn't perfect. The story was great, and so were the characters. And I loved the sneaking gameplay, which is exactly what Batman should do (there was little better than watching your antics freak out the enemies). But the gameplay also had a major flaw: the combat system. It was slow and tedious, and as multiple major boss fights were just "fight a lot of enemies at once", this could make it really drag on. I only remember Poison Ivy and Scarecrow being different, but they still weren't anything special. It can make you question continuing to play, when you have to fight 20 enemies using a system that feels unresponsive. Of course, the rest of the game was way too awesome for it's own good, so there was no way I'd stop.

Of course, the other reason why this post is today: the sequel, Arkham City, comes out tomorrow. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't planning on buying it.

What? I don't want to miss out on Harley and Joker's taunting. Or Strange's machinations. Or Two-Face's revenge. Or Catwoman's...well, you get the point.

And to end this on a note of awesomeness, I present to you the Batman: TAS theme over Arkham Asylum/City Gameplay:

I am the Bat

When I was a kid, I watched my fair share of after-school cartoons. We had the Disney greats like Duck Tales, Tale Spin, and of course, Darkwing Duck. There were the standard Nick Toons of Doug and Rugrats. And the new Warner Brothers hits like Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain.

But none of the others could hold a candle to my favorite: the World's Greatest Detective, the Caped Crusader, the Dark Knight, the Batman.

Batman: The Animated Series was what cemented a lifelong love of Batman. He is simply the coolest hero. Whereas other superheroes have powers reaching even invulnerability (it's easy to win when you can do anything, Superman), Batman has three things: ingenuity to defeat those much more powerful than him, a mission to prevent crimes like the one which took his parents from him, and boatloads of money. Sure that last one is a little out of the blue, but he had to have some way to afford all his cool gadgets, right?

Why is he so great?

He's a standard tragic figure, trapped in fighting the good fight, no matter what path that leads him down. This sets him up to make decisions which he knows are right, but might be costly to him. In other words, he gets to be the courageous one, making the sacrifices to save others. He couldn't do all this without a solid moral compass pointing him.

But to top if off, he's not afraid to get his hands dirty. You try to steal a purse? Black eye. You shoot someone? Maybe a broken bone. You try to kill everyone in the city? That'll land you in the hospital for days, maybe weeks. He'd never kill, but has no issues dishing out justice like a fry-cook dishes out grease-covered plates.

So that's why he will always win: he has the will to do what must be done to save the day, and he'll kick ass to make sure it gets done. Of course, when Batman wins, he also tends to lose...

But the show wasn't great just because of the subject matter, there was also the stellar voice acting.

Kevin Conroy is the only voice I will ever associate as Batman or Bruce Wayne, and he does a stellar job separating the two (without the need of extra computer-generated gruffiness like some current actor playing Batman in movies).

Mark Hamill, the farm boy who took down an empire, takes a turn as the menacing Joker, one who keeps you unsure of if you just sat on a standard whoopee cushion, or somehow just set off a bomb (and that laugh is killer).

And the guest actors, though we didn't know it as kids, were well known to our parents: John Vernon, Michael York, Kenneth Mars, Roddy McDowall, Richard Moll, Melissa Gilbert, Rene Auberjonois, John Glover, Thomas F. Wilson, Tim Matheson, Ed Begley Jr., Ron Perlman, Tim Curry, David Warner, and Ed Asner. (look them up, you'll probably recognize more than you'd think)

And then there was the writing.

The show was so good that parts of it worked their way back into the comics. The villainess Harley Quinn, was immediately accepted into canon, and is really the only character that could ever be Joker's second-in-command.

Also, the Emmy award-winning episode "Heart of Ice" retconned the origin of Mr. Freeze, something which has stayed as canon to this day.

The show was even ranked the #2 in two separate top 100 lists for cartoon series (IGN and Wizard Magazine), both times coming in second only to The Simpsons.

And then there was the music.

I can't embed the video (the user disabled embeds), but here's a link to the opening theme. As you can see/hear, they chose a theme close to the standard set by Danny Elfman in Tim Burton's Batman. This dark theme, plus the intro cartoon, set this up as what it was, a dark and "mature" cartoon. Sure, it was still a cartoon, so it couldn't be that mature, but it matched and maintained the tone set by Tim Burton: a horribly corrupt Gotham City with one lone avenger trying to help redeem the people and save the city.

From the tragic lost love of Dr. Freeze to the drug-addict Clayface, this series gave us new characters with real stories, not just a villain-of-the-week superhero cartoon. The music and voice acting were above and beyond what was expected from cartoons at that point. And it was a new approach, to have a series for kids which wasn't always happy, and even if the good guy won it didn't mean everything turned out fine. All in all, this show was, and forever will be, the best animated series, period.

Lastly, because I couldn't resist, this should be everyone's best outfit: