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nine-gear crow posted:Also gently caress all of you, Rannoch is the pinnacle of the third game's plot. Leigon's death hit me harder than Mordin's ever did. "There was a hole" 
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Jan 15, 2018 05:02
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Turning the geth into pinnochio robots was the worst thing they could have done. They completely squander the Geth ideology from ME2.
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Jan 15, 2018 05:04
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nine-gear crow posted:
I loved Legion as a character, but ME3 did things with the Geth that I wasn't a fan of so my feels were muted with disappointment.
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Jan 15, 2018 05:06
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If you can overlook EDI's loving atrocious character model and Joker's creepiness (which is a huge ask, I admit) you're left with a pretty good character. She has some interesting dialog about her existence and her newfound freedom, and it ties in well to the overarching themes of the seriesArcsquad12 posted:Turning the geth into pinnochio robots was the worst thing they could have done. They completely squander the Geth ideology from ME2. It's like they didn't understand why Legion was called Legion. Doctor Spaceman fucked around with this message at 06:06 on Jan 15, 2018 |
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Jan 15, 2018 05:34
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endolithic posted:I loved Legion as a character, but ME3 did things with the Geth that I wasn't a fan of so my feels were muted with disappointment.
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Jan 15, 2018 05:34
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Doctor Spaceman posted:If you can overlook EDI's loving atrocious character model and Joker's creepiness (which is a huge ask, I admit) you're left with a pretty interesting character. She has some interesting dialog about her existence and her newfound freedom, and it ties in well to the overarching themes of the series Yeah that's what makes EDI's whole fembot shtick really suck, it was a neat idea but marred by the execution. (ME3.txt)
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Jan 15, 2018 06:01
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business hammocks posted:It’s basically a vindication of passive consumption, as the unlikeable main character is rewarded for simply liking video games and comic books. The wild thing is that even the book can't decide if Parzival is a gunter (  ) because he happens to be good at it and the potential payoff is literally billions of dollars and control of the world's sole outlet for media, or if he's actually really into this stuff.
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Jan 15, 2018 10:18
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Ready Player One is terrible, which makes it average genre fiction. It's just too obvious about being terrible for a lot of people.
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Jan 15, 2018 11:18
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A Gunter?...a German porn star?
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Jan 15, 2018 11:23
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I think most of the decisions in ME3 that are stupid (at least in terms of the story) come from a well-intentioned place are are a victim of EA giving them only 11 months to make the game personally. Like, Kai Leng Space Ninja is stupid, but the IDEA of the character is clearly to be a kind of Anti-Shepherd. He's supposed to be a personification of Cerberus' ironic enslavement to indoctrination because their inherent amorality and arrogance and philosophy of achieving their goals through any means necessary exposed them to the Reaper tech, so because he is obsessed with stepping into the vacuum Shepherd left in the organization and proving he's superior, which parallels the Illusive Man's decision to... blah blah blah, you get it... Anyway, the way he killed Thane was pretty effective in establishing him as a threat, and a lot of the pieces of his role made sense on paper, but he was a quarter baked at most. Same thing about Edi's sexbot body. Edi was a great character so making her a party member makes sense, her chemistry with Joker is great so I can see how using the opportunity of putting her in a body to do a love story makes sense. But because they wrote it on a legal pad in one draft George Lucas style to meet their deadlines, its like Season 1 Next Generation Data C-Plot tier "WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE HUGH-MAN," bullshit we've seen a million times. These are just the immediate examples people are talking about as the obvious stupid poo poo. More or less the whole game is that way. Where as ME2's writing tends to be either brilliant or terrible with no real middle ground, ME3's seems to be mostly good in theory but utterly botched in execution because of their time constraints.
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Jan 15, 2018 11:27
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Sanguinia posted:I think most of the decisions in ME3 that are stupid (at least in terms of the story) come from a well-intentioned place are are a victim of EA giving them only 11 months to make the game personally. Like, Kai Leng Space Ninja is stupid, but the IDEA of the character is clearly to be a kind of Anti-Shepherd. He's supposed to be a personification of Cerberus' ironic enslavement to indoctrination because their inherent amorality and arrogance and philosophy of achieving their goals through any means necessary exposed them to the Reaper tech, so because he is obsessed with stepping into the vacuum Shepherd left in the organization and proving he's superior, which parallels the Illusive Man's decision to... blah blah blah, you get it... Anyway, the way he killed Thane was pretty effective in establishing him as a threat, and a lot of the pieces of his role made sense on paper, but he was a quarter baked at most. No, Kai Leng exists because he's one of the writer's darling anti-hero awesome OC who is a cool sickass ninja and Do Not Steal, thankyou  . And offing Thane "to be a threat" is a hilariously bad writing crutch for when they can't think of anything decent to define the character.Sexbot Edi exists because they wanted Sexbot Edi. There's no dressing that one up either considering all the rear end-shots in past games. Neddy Seagoon fucked around with this message at 12:10 on Jan 15, 2018 |
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Jan 15, 2018 12:08
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Neddy Seagoon posted:No, Kai Leng exists because he's one of the writer's darling anti-hero awesome OC who is a cool sickass ninja and Do Not Steal, thankyou Mass Effect was always intended to evoke pulp scifi. They designed the graphic engine to include grain on the screen like old TV shows. That never stopped them from having aspirations and reasons for stuff they'd done before. Are you going to sit there and argue that the entire Asari race and all their lore was an exercise in obfuscating that the writers wanted Space Babes Who Will Sleep With The Hero because of the many rear end-shots as well? Was Garrus nothing but a writer's darling anti-hero OC who is a cool sickass sniper rogue cop Do Not Steal? Assuming bad faith or completely puerile origins for writing decisions in Mass Effect 3 is nonsense unless you think the entire series was like that.
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Jan 15, 2018 12:27
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Sanguinia posted:Mass Effect was always intended to evoke pulp scifi. They designed the graphic engine to include grain on the screen like old TV shows. That never stopped them from having aspirations and reasons for stuff they'd done before. Are you going to sit there and argue that the entire Asari race and all their lore was an exercise in obfuscating that the writers wanted Space Babes Who Will Sleep With The Hero because of the many rear end-shots as well? Was Garrus nothing but a writer's darling anti-hero OC who is a cool sickass sniper rogue cop Do Not Steal? Assuming bad faith or completely puerile origins for writing decisions in Mass Effect 3 is nonsense unless you think the entire series was like that. Why does it have to be all-or-nothing? Especially when Mass Effect is the sum effort of multiple sources of input from different writers rather than the work of one person. As for your two specific examples, difference in both cases is they had effort and more than a handwank of thought put into developing them as characters. Neddy Seagoon fucked around with this message at 12:33 on Jan 15, 2018 |
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Jan 15, 2018 12:31
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I think that by the time ME3 came out I had already played too many Japanese games to be at all bothered by the presence of ninjas or sexy robots. Call it building up an immunity, I guess. Heck, I’d rank the Xenosaga games among my favorite RPGs of all time and they had a sexy robot as a main character throughout the series. But anyway, for all the things wrong with the Mass Effect I still think it did a great job of world-building, and the character writing that worked, worked really well. Having solid gameplay (most of the time) and top-tier production values also helped prop up the weak points in the script, although getting the mod that changes the third game’s ending is a must for anyone playing it nowadays. Bakeneko fucked around with this message at 14:56 on Jan 15, 2018 |
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Jan 15, 2018 14:54
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lornekates posted:Here's a hint: My jaw literally dropped. You know, I bet he wouldn’t actually like a woman smarter than him.
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Jan 15, 2018 15:18
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FoldableHuman posted:The wild thing is that even the book can't decide if Parzival is a gunter ( His only skills are rote memorization and mastery through repetition. “The 80s” are reduced to a weird smattering of things male nerds would like if they were in high school in the 90s. The actual 80s are immaterial to the narrative, as are culture and politics generally in exactly the same way that white boys from the suburbs get away with living like politics don’t exist.
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Jan 15, 2018 15:28
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the strangest thing about Ready Player One is the obsession with Family Ties, imo
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Jan 15, 2018 15:29
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"Gunter" sounds like some kind of Aussie insult.
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Jan 15, 2018 17:01
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Bakeneko posted:I think that by the time ME3 came out I had already played too many Japanese games to be at all bothered by the presence of ninjas or sexy robots. Call it building up an immunity, I guess. Heck, I’d rank the Xenosaga games among my favorite RPGs of all time and they had a sexy robot as a main character throughout the series. KOS-MOS from Xenosaga at least remains a stone-cold murder machine throughout.
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Jan 15, 2018 17:06
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business hammocks posted:My jaw literally dropped. You know, I bet he wouldn’t actually like a woman smarter than him. The real shocker? He met his wife at a poetry slam. It may or may not have involved this poem. I had a couple of friends message me after I made that tweet about either knowing or having met Ernest Cline's wife (one of whom actually went to NYU with her in the late 90's). Both of these unrelated accounts praised her as a really cool person and expressed bewilderment in her staying interested in him since they met twenty years ago. Given not only this but that she is also a successful nonfiction author in her own right, it would seem that he does indeed like a woman that is way smarter than him. Cline's also a bit older than your typical gater, so I think there is definitely a strain of that "validation in nerd consumption" that ran rampant in the early Bush years that had not yet metastasized into the pathological rage at women and minorities we see today. I want to think that most people who would buy into the sort of mindset that produces slam poetry like that would not necessarily progress to "get feminism out of video games", though obviously it sometimes does after one rejection too many by one's cool, nerdy, Battlestar Galactica-watching fetish object. It's uncomfortably revealing, sure, but not any more harmful than your average Big Bang Theory episode. It would be naive to think that the two mindsets are not related, though.
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Jan 15, 2018 17:08
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Bakeneko posted:But anyway, for all the things wrong with the Mass Effect I still think it did a great job of world-building, and the character writing that worked, worked really well. Having solid gameplay (most of the time) and top-tier production values also helped prop up the weak points in the script, although getting the mod that changes the third game’s ending is a must for anyone playing it nowadays.  And then we used the thing and the reapers blew up! Also oops some stuff broke time to rebuild some cool gethbro's.That mod you linked seems to do just that so ill take it.
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Jan 15, 2018 17:46
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Pirate Jenny posted:The real shocker? He met his wife at a poetry slam. It may or may not have involved this poem. Yeah, I guess he comes from the tail end of a generation for whom white male nerd hegemony was unquestioned and invisible, so bad and wrong ideas could just coexist with better ones and people like him could just leave them unexamined and never meet an uncomfortable question. Certainly plenty of other men his age jumped to the left when confronted with gamergate and the internet culture war. The internet reactionary turn seems tied up in economic insecurity and the decline of white supremacy and a white majority, neither of which were there for Cline in his formative years when he was just having a good time reading Sandman and reciting Monty Python with that one girl who was cool and not like other girls. I guess what I originally saw as a kind of reactionary politics in Ready Player One is actually a sort of contented obliviousness and genuine disinterest in political or cultural questions that is more typical of being a teen between 1985 and 1995, even though it's set in a world where capitalism seems to have collapsed and there is literal slavery.
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Jan 15, 2018 18:59
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Sanguinia posted:Mass Effect was always intended to evoke pulp scifi. They designed the graphic engine to include grain on the screen like old TV shows. That never stopped them from having aspirations and reasons for stuff they'd done before. Are you going to sit there and argue that the entire Asari race and all their lore was an exercise in obfuscating that the writers wanted Space Babes Who Will Sleep With The Hero because of the many rear end-shots as well? Was Garrus nothing but a writer's darling anti-hero OC who is a cool sickass sniper rogue cop Do Not Steal? Assuming bad faith or completely puerile origins for writing decisions in Mass Effect 3 is nonsense unless you think the entire series was like that. just fyi, most of the writing staff from me1 was gone by the time me3 was being written, so this doesn't work as a defense at all.
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Jan 15, 2018 19:35
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Puppy Time posted:I know little about Mass Effect but I enjoyed MrBTongue's videos on the ME3 ending: Is he actually done making videos, or is he just on another long, indefinite hiatus? I really enjoy that guy's videos and was pleasantly surprised when he uploaded a couple in early 2017.
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Jan 15, 2018 19:36
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I replayed Mass Effect 2 last year and noticed that every single loyalty mission being about the characters daddy issues or their child having daddy issues.
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Jan 15, 2018 19:47
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Sanguinia posted:Mass Effect was always intended to evoke pulp scifi. They designed the graphic engine to include grain on the screen like old TV shows. That never stopped them from having aspirations and reasons for stuff they'd done before. Are you going to sit there and argue that the entire Asari race and all their lore was an exercise in obfuscating that the writers wanted Space Babes Who Will Sleep With The Hero because of the many rear end-shots as well? Was Garrus nothing but a writer's darling anti-hero OC who is a cool sickass sniper rogue cop Do Not Steal? Assuming bad faith or completely puerile origins for writing decisions in Mass Effect 3 is nonsense unless you think the entire series was like that. also, with regards to the asari, yes, i will argue that. me1 is my favorite game of the last console generation and even then, there being an entire race of curvy, promiscuous women is extremely loving dumb nerd masturbation material, sorry.
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Jan 15, 2018 19:52
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Harrow posted:Is he actually done making videos, or is he just on another long, indefinite hiatus? I really enjoy that guy's videos and was pleasantly surprised when he uploaded a couple in early 2017. i know he was posting articles to shamus young's blog, but i stopped checking in there after the spoiler warning crew split so i don't know if he still is not
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Jan 15, 2018 19:55
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financially racist posted:also, with regards to the asari, yes, i will argue that. me1 is my favorite game of the last console generation and even then, there being an entire race of curvy, promiscuous women is extremely loving dumb nerd masturbation material, sorry. Don't forget! The one you get to bang is a shy, virginal, non-threatening scientist lady
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Jan 15, 2018 20:00
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failing forward posted:Don't forget! The one you get to bang is a shy, virginal, non-threatening scientist lady You can also bang that one psychic Asari lady who gives you a couple vague lines about your destiny, oh special player character.
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Jan 15, 2018 20:01
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failing forward posted:Don't forget! The one you get to bang is a shy, virginal, non-threatening scientist lady still less terrible than the tali romance option, at least
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Jan 15, 2018 20:04
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financially racist posted:still less terrible than the tali romance option, at least
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Jan 15, 2018 20:06
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I also think of sci-fi characters as my little sisters.
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Jan 15, 2018 20:24
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business hammocks posted:His only skills are rote memorization and mastery through repetition. “The 80s” are reduced to a weird smattering of things male nerds would like if they were in high school in the 90s. The actual 80s are immaterial to the narrative, as are culture and politics generally in exactly the same way that white boys from the suburbs get away with living like politics don’t exist. He sure was lucky that all the puzzles were just one long trivia night at the pub, and not something that would involve actually digesting the themes or messages of even a single piece of art.
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Jan 15, 2018 20:33
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Monday Jimquistion, and it's not even about loot boxes this time! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33UEg6N7xq8
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Jan 15, 2018 20:43
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Mokinokaro posted:https://twitter.com/thelindsayellis/status/952305872713207808 I know its no literary masterpiece, but considering I'm going through my own mid-life nostalgia fest (building a Commodore 64 SID based synthesizer inside an old Commodore 64 case) I enjoyed listening to Wesley Crusher read it to me on a long road trip and enjoyed all the references.
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Jan 15, 2018 21:10
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fallenturtle posted:I know its no literary masterpiece, but considering I'm going through my own mid-life nostalgia fest (building a Commodore 64 SID based synthesizer inside an old Commodore 64 case) I enjoyed listening to Wesley Crusher read it to me on a long road trip and enjoyed all the references. 
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Jan 15, 2018 21:12
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fallenturtle posted:I know its no literary masterpiece, but considering I'm going through my own mid-life nostalgia fest (building a Commodore 64 SID based synthesizer inside an old Commodore 64 case) I enjoyed listening to Wesley Crusher read it to me on a long road trip and enjoyed all the references. It's cool that people still read books, even if they're silly ones 
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Jan 15, 2018 21:13
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IMO, reading silly, lovely even, books is still > watching reality TV.
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Jan 15, 2018 21:19
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Zedd posted:A poster on a recent-ish LP commented that both Miranda's and Jacob's story would land better if their genders where flipped; and I kind of agree. I mostly remember his role in my playthrough being "guy who brings up the logical problems with the plan so that the unstoppable cowboy protagonist can promptly ignore them". I could see liking him better if he wasn't attached to Cerberus, and also if the rest of the plot wasn't so railroaded and increasingly preposterous so that interacting with him wasn't just a speed bump to getting to the actual mission. Oh, and also if the game didn't make it so easy to accidentally bone your crew members just by talking with them a lot. "Hey Thane, tell me more about your dead wife." --directly followed by--> "I want you, Thane." Cool to hear about all these ME3 mods. My itch to run a full series playthrough keeps growing, but my willingness to buy up all the DLC I'm missing for 2 and 3 is at an all time low...
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Jan 15, 2018 22:02
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fallenturtle posted:IMO, reading silly, lovely even, books is still > watching reality TV. I dunno man, have you seen the Bing Bag Theory? It's a really good show Bazinga Absurd Alhazred posted:Monday Jimquistion, and it's not even about loot boxes this time! That uh... first comment.
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