I could make you care!

Care.

Game developers want to make you care.

They want you to feel a connection with the world and the characters in it, so that you’ll feel that you are part of the world they have created.

They suck at this.

Whether it is because of laziness or just gross incompetence can be debated, but what is evident is that developers tend to display an impressive lack of knowledge of what makes us care. As is my way, I shall be tearing down a game that perfectly exemplifies this. My victim tonight? Fallout 4!

Mind you, I regard Fallout 4 as one of the best games in the world. This is not a (conscious) attempt at trashing the game, it’s just a case of it having the most egregious example of this nonsense I could think of.

They use a baby. It’s that cheap. At the start, you tickle the baby, your spouse dies when the baby is kidnapped, and you spend most of the game looking for the baby. But there is no reason whatsoever to care. I understand what Bethesda are trying to do here; they can’t be bothered to get into what makes people tick, so they intend to hitch a ride on the human instinct to protect infants. It doesn’t work, and here’s why.

Firstly, the so called “baby” looks like a creepy loaf of play-dough. What you have to realize about the automatic human affection for infants is that it actually requires an infant, and that abomination certainly isn’t it. There’s always the issue of the uncanny valley when depicting humans in media, and infants aren’t easier in this regard, they are more difficult! We regard them as more adorable and lovely, but that only makes it worse when they’re all wrong. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that movies and games that want to scare you always tend to contain demonic or zombified children. Letting us see that useless piece of clay won’t endear us to it in any way.

Secondly, they let the next step rely completely on the first one. In it, your spouse, a person you’ve interacted with for all of 58 seconds, is shot and your play-dough “baby” is stolen. It’s inevitable; since nr. 1 fails, nr. 2 goes down the drain, as it well might. We walk through the game with the character constantly whining about how he/she is searching for their child. But you don’t actually do much to find him. Fallout 4 is just a terrible environment for this particular type of story. “Woe is me, my son is lost, I need to find him! But first, I’m off to find some paint for the inside wall of Diamond city.”. In open-world games, the developers tend to tailor the game to that setting; you might run around gathering allies for a war or trying to find clues to ancient mysteries. These stories allow for you to go around doing various tasks, meeting people, uncovering secrets. But it doesn’t allow for hurriedly searching for your infant son!

But number 3 is the one that shows up to completely kneecap the whole thing. It’s when you get to the Institute and find out that your son was actually abducted some 60 years ago, and is now an aging man. Add to that the fact that said aging man is dying from cancer and wants you to succeed him as the head of the organization that kidnapped him from the beginning. There’s a lot to unpack here. You’re suddenly face to face with someone who is your son but is a complete stranger who has no actual connection to the infant you were looking for. How is a human being supposed to feel an emotional bond with this old man you’ve never met before? Fact of the matter is, the Shaun you were looking for, the infant who was kidnapped and needed to be saved, hasn’t existed for many years. Instead you’re faced with the leader of the faction that has clear as day been presented as the bad guys thus far in the game.

Bethesda are just so comically bad at this. First they try to pluck your heart strings with the cheap trick of using a “baby”, then they drop that in favour of ordering you to care about an old man in charge of the evil faction! You’ve been trying to find and rescue him from his kidnappers, all the while he was sitting pretty in the Institute, grateful to his kidnappers for having “rescued” him, as he puts it. Okay, so the main character was robbed of experiencing their only child’s whole lifetime, but the Institute were nice to his son, so there’s no need for the main character to be upset.

“Ah”, you comment, forgetting that I’ve told you to shut up numerous times, “I see you’re upset, doesn’t that mean you care?”

I’m not upset at the Institute, or Shaun for that matter. I’m pissed at Bethesda for creating a story that is absolute bullshit, especially in this type of game. It’s like it’s carefully tailored to make us give no shit whatsoever about the main story. Heck, the Institute, their methods, and their goals are nuanced and interesting. The dynamics between the different factions and what they want to achieve is complex and doesn’t just make it a clear-cut “good or bad” plot.

Oh, you think it works as a sort of depressing revelation? Come on, this is Fallout; the series where there’s a vault entirely populated by clones of a guy named Gary, all capable only of attacking you and screaming “GAAAAAARRRRYYYY!”. This isn’t some Greek tragedy, it’s too silly for that. There’s a time and place for such a story. Fallout ain’t it.

In the end, there just isn’t a single reason to give half a fuck about the Shaun-angle. It’s pointless. The game could not only make do without it, the game would actually be a lot better without it.

Don’t try to fuck up my favourite game, Bethesda.

In New Vegas!

Lately, I have spent a lot of time playing New Vegas.

Wait, not quite right; what I’ve spent the most time doing is caring about New Vegas. What do I mean by that? Well, what the hell do you think the point of this post is?!

*breathes deeply*

Anyway, I tend to get stuck on games; playing them as much as I possibly can until I’m done with them. In general, that means either until the game is finished or, in case of Bethesda Games, I grow bored with them. Point is, I have a very easy time engaging in games. But New Vegas doesn’t just engage me, it makes me care. It makes me care about the decisions I make, about the characters I meet, about the enemies I mow down.

I’ve tried to deconstruct exactly why that is. The method I’ve employed for that is to make a comparison to other games.

In Skyrim, for instance, I can massacre the stormcloaks if I side with the empire or vice versa, but I don’t care. Those soldiers are little more than groups of pixels to be demolished. And that goes for really any enemy; bandits, beasts, even dragons. Perhaps it has to do with said interchangeability; if you side with either faction, you’ll be butchering the others in the same forts, in the exact same way. One side doesn’t have distinct locales or methods.

Meanwhile, in New Vegas, the fiends, for instance, are situated in a vault, and have a very identifiable aesthetic. They’ve got vulgar texts scribbled on walls, mutilated bodies lying around, all the lovely stuff. You know what kind of people you are dealing with just by looking at their camps. Caesar’s Legion tend to have large camps with lots of tents, while the NCR have barracks and bunk beds. As opposed to everyone and their dog, their dog’s uncle, and their dog’s uncle’s bollocks, live in the same early middle-age houses.

For my next trick, say a character from Skyrim whose history and fate you really care about.

None? Thought so.

Now, let’s do the same for New Vegas. The list is pretty darn long. For a start, you’ve got all the companion characters. The are superbly characterized, not just in terms of personality, but in terms of their life experiences. Cass came to be sitting at the bar at the NCR’s Mojave Outpost drinking herself half-blind after her caravan was burned to a crisp by unknown assailants. If you can convince her to come with you, you’ll end up trying to find out who was responsible, and bring them to justice. Along the way, you might pick up bits and pieces of her past, such as the story behind her full name.

Note that I’m very much including the player character in this. They are part of the world. All we know is that they are a courier who was shot in the head. Who knows what adventures they were up to in the past. Sure, the whole vault-dweller fish-out-of-water thingy was fun. The first time. Maybe even the second. But it’s gotten really stale. What was the history of this character? Oh, they just had a boring life in a vault. The end. The vault dwellers are a known quantity, and they don’t belong in the world they are kicked into. That makes immersion hard.

As an example of this point, I’d like to use the Elder Scrolls games. Again. There, you always wake up a prisoner of some fashion. It’s always the same deal in every game. But you are a part of the world. You had a life in Tamriel before you were imprisoned, a life the player is free to imagine. You could imagine you having a past that will come and haunt you one day, as actually happens in one of the DLCs to New Vegas.

Another thing that might contribute is the fact that New Vegas is rather…uncompromising. The moment I’m thinking of is when an officer is worried about the mental wellbeing of one of his rangers, because while in captivity with a group of raiders, she was raped. And you’re not in charge of fixing her, just finding a way to convince her to seek treatment. It might be hypocritical to be shocked by this when it’s a game where you kill a ridiculous number of people, but the fact of the matter is that war is run-of-the-mill in gaming. It’s what we’re expecting. The psychological consequences of someone being raped isn’t.

Of course, I won’t pretend like it’s not pertinent that it is a setting that appeals much more to me than the Viking stuff that makes up Skyrim. I feel that the developers did a stellar job with integrating the setting of the old west with that of the post-apocalyptic world. Contrary to Fallout 3, the world in New Vegas is one where the people aren’t just walking around in rubble, they are trying to rebuild civilization, and have reached that to a degree. Heck, they’ve gotten so far that they’ve got trouble with currencies. The NCR have their own dollar bills, but they’re worth very little as people don’t have confidence in it. The Legion denarius, however, are worth much more because they are gold coins that are backed up by an actual valuable good.

All in all, it’s an impressive game, especially given what they had to work with; the least stable engine in the history of gaming, and character models that look like stroke victims.

Now if only they could not remake it.

New Year's Eve!

I thought we should end this year on a positive note, so I'd like to talk for a small bit about one of my favorite game series; the Anno-series. It consists of a number of games with the name "Anno" followed by a year whose numbers add up to 9. That is, Anno 1701, Anno 1404, and so forth.

The games in the series are as follows in order of release:

Anno 1602
Anno 1503
Anno 1701
Anno 1404
Anno 2070
Anno 2205
Anno 1800

I'd say start no earlier than 1701, because the two older games are starting to look their age.

The latest game in the series is Anno 1800, and I haven't played that yet. Looking forward to that in the new year!

All of the games are in the style of real time strategy mixed with a large portion of city-building. You build and manage your settlements on different islands, while also conducting trade, diplomacy, and war with other factions. A lot of the concept is based on the fact that a single island can't possibly produce all the wares needed to feed, clothe, and satisfy the whims of, the population. Thusly, you have to branch out from your starting island and establish trade routes between them.

If I were to describe the feel of the games in general it would be...serene and stressful. Yeah, that's contradictory enough! Thing is, the music, the ambient sounds, the look of the waves, it's all just so soothing. It makes it the kind of games you can just sit and chill with for ages, picking away at the various things necessary to build your own little nation.

But it's also stressful, because you'll have about nine thousand different things to keep track of at any one time, and a whole lot can do straight to shit if you neglect even one of them. Additionally, it's not the kind of games where you can just take things as they come, you better think ahead. If an enemy manages to land an army on your island, you've actually got a big problem, as they can cock up a whole lot of things for you. If it gets that far, you've failed, because you should have stopped that from ever happening. When you start delivering luxury goods to your populace, you've better be damn sure that supply line is solid and has enough supply of that goods right from the start, or your economy can be fucked.

Anno 1404 is so far my absolute favourite. 2070 is more modern, but some of the changes have made it less interesting. 2205 is the most futuristic one, but that has crammed so many mechanics into it that the whole idea of spreading out over islands and trading is gone in favour of having isolated regions where you simply build one settlement each. The whole aesthetic of 1404 is wonderful, from the way the towns look to the sound design, to the interface.

I do wholeheartedly recommend anyone to try out this series, 1404 in particular. It's intellectually challenging, but fair, and thinking things through in advance allows you to avoid a whole lot of pitfalls.

To sum up; buy Anno 1404, and have a happy new year!

This is not a Fable!

To entertain myself, I have now been playing the remastered edition of Fable. Yes, that Fable; the one from 2004.

For those not in the know about these things, the game was perhaps most famous for the job Peter Molyneux, the head of Lionhead Studios, did in hyping it to the stars. He claimed that it would be the most beautiful, revolutionary, immersive gaming experience ever. A game that would allow you to experience a living world where you are free to interact with other characters however you want.

The game that was actually released was…not a good game. In fact, it was shit.

Now, I don’t think it would be fair to judge the game by the lunacy of Mr. Molyneux, and so I prefer to judge it on its own merits. That said, it was a curiously unfortunate thing for Molyneux to focus on hyping up the immersion factor in particular. See, there is none.

What do you think about when I say the word “immersion” in a gaming context? A living world with different people going about their lives? Being able to interact and converse with NPCs? Good voice acting?

The developers of Fable clearly put a lot of work and effort into making sure the game has absolutely none of those.

The NPCs are all the same, and every single one speaks in ridiculous phony british accents. They can have different facial hair, or a different hat, but they don’t have personalities to begin with, let alone different ones. The extent of your interactions with them is using stupid emotes, like flexing, laughing, or belching. You can’t talk to them, you can’t hold conversations with them. You don’t even have a voice. And I’m not talking in the way most player characters in RPGs don’t speak but you still choose lines of dialogue. You simply just stand there gormlessly. You can marry them, but why the hell would you ever want to?!

I suppose we have to get to the combat, but I don’t want to. It is atrocious.

It’s a pretty standard affair; you lock onto enemies one by one, and you attack. If you want to experience the joy of “Whack, whack, whack, bigger whack”, you can use melee. If you want to shoot slowly from afar, you can use a bow. If you want to die, you can use magic. Seriously, magic sucks in this game! It does less damage than whanking things with a sword, but you have a limited mana pool.

The targeting mechanic is a topic all of its own. It’s not good. Not good at all. It’s absolutely terrible. It’s a pretty standard affair; you pull the left trigger to lock onto an enemy, and you proceed to turn him into mulch. Putting a spanner in the works of this is the fact that whether or not you hit your enemy is not so much dependent on your relative position and direction to your target, than whether or not you prayed to the correct gods this morning. When the time has come and your enemy lies dead, if you don’t release the trigger you will automatically target the next being in the vicinity, without any regard whatsoever for their attitude to you. Yes, I’ve killed quite a few peasants in my day because the targeting system decided that they were the greatest threat and not the huge demonic beast slightly behind them.

I suppose that should be enough. It should, but it isn’t.

When you knock down an enemy with a strong blow, you just have to wait for them to slowly stand up again before you’ve even able to damage them.

On top of it all, your melee attacks have a wind-up time; it takes a moment to swing your sword before it connects. Naturally the enemies have no such limitation; they can attack instantly with no delay. Because if there is one thing that aids your immersion more than anything it is the feeling that the enemies play by different rules than you do.

The story is barely worth talking about, because it’s so bog standard. Your village is burned down when you’re a child, and you grow up to be a great hero who defeats the great evil and saves the day. During this journey you find that your mother and sister actually survived. I’m not leaving things out for comic effect, that is actually all that the story is about.

And the game world? There’s even less to say about it; tiny little areas that you can “roam” around for 2 minutes. It’s linear. The line goes back and forth, but there is no open world to explore.

I purchased this game not that long ago, and this is my very first playthrough. Have no doubt; there won’t be another. I actually had fairly high expectations. The game had gotten rather good reviews from all the review sites I frequent, and I was perfectly aware that the hype over it was nonsensical. Add to that the fact that Fable 2 was an excellent game, and it was all around a dour experience.

I’ll be back with a review of Fable 2 once I’m done with that. Maybe it’ll turn out to be shit too.

Toodles.

End of the Trilogy!

After I finished the last post, I realized that I had just about enough rage pent up to squeeze out one more issue, making this a trilogy.

The story makes no damn sense whatsoever.

At the end of Mass Effect 1, the council was saved, they understood the threat of the reapers, and Shepard was about to go out into the galaxy to find a way to stop said reapers.

Then, at the start of Mass Effect 2, the Normandy was just out hunting spare geth for no reason whatsoever, and the council had "dismissed that claim" about the reapers.

Now we get to the start off Mass Effect 3, and Shepard has just spent the last few months in house arrest, doing shit all to stop the reapers, even though he knows from the DLC Arrival in Mess Affect 2 that they would be arriving in a matter of months.

This is the first thing that bothers me; did Shepard just sit in house arrest and do nothing for these months? Is that the Shepard that we came to know from Mass Effect 1? No, it isn't. The Shepard we knew would've broken out of the building, stolen a ship, and went off to pursue whatever leads he could find.

But he just didn't.

Then the reapers attack earth, and Shepard has to flee to...do what exactly? I understand that he has to leave earth; he won't do much good if he's dead, but what's the plan?

Well, if they had just said that there was no plan, that he was going to try to link up with Hackett and go from there, that would've made sense. But that's not what he does. He starts down a path that makes no sense; that he'll gather a fleet and come back to liberate earth. That's the plan that he sticks with for the rest of the game.

That plan makes is stupid.

Earth has no actual strategic importance when it comes to stopping the reapers. Even if they could conjure up a fleet large enough to defeat the reapers on and around earth, which they naturally can't, they would've gained exactly piddly squat regarding a final solution to the reaper problem. They bang on about how force of arms alone has no chance whatsoever of beating them, but then completely ignore that.

Prepare now to have Shepard fly all over the galaxy to gather a fleet to return to earth. Yup, that's what he spends 90% of the game doing. It's not critical to beating the reapers, and it's not going to be possible anyway, but that's what he spends the majority of the time doing. For no fucking reason.

Anyway, a few seconds after leaving earth Shepard is contacted by Hackett, the bigshot high-admiral of basically all the remaining human fleets, and told to go to Mars. On Mars they find plans for a macguffin that will defeat the reapers.

That's right; we're not 20 minutes into the game yet, and we already have the solution we need. Nevermind the fact that nobody knows what it does, how it works, or how to build it, it'll solve everything somehow.

But prepare to forget about it, because it will be built entirely off screen, in an unspecified location, with no direct input from you. Now and then Hackett will phone you up and go "Well, we're still building that thing. Hackett out.".

So, explain to me how, during an ongoing reaper invasion, they are able to funnel enormous amounts of personnel and materials to an unspecified location without the reapers finding out about it. Remember, the reapers are so good at finding info about the civilizations they destroy that they are able to basically wipe out all but the smallest traces of them from the galaxy. Yet somehow they can't find the macguffin.

Back to Shepard; after leaving Mars he leaves the solar system using a mass relay. A what? Of, right; those devices that allow interstellar travel that are the very first thing the reapers shut down when they take the Citadel, in order to isolate enemy forces and prevent them from gathering.

"B-b-but..." you stammer, "...the reapers didn't capture the Citadel...".

Case in fucking point. Why the flying shitstain didn't they do that? Oh sure, their little gambit with Sovereign failed, but they could just head to the Citadel and capture it. But instead they go straight for all the homeworlds of the major races for...some reason. There is literally nothing stopping them from simply taking the Citadel and shutting down the mass relays, which would completely stop everything that Shepard and co. do throughout the game!

*sigh*

You know what, I fucking give up. I had other points to make about how the story is nonsensical, but it can't get dumber than this. The villains can just do this one thing that will guarantee their victory and prevent and attempts at thwarting them, which would instantly fail the entire quest of the main character, and the reason they don't do that is...they don't feel like it?

The writers didn't even pretend to think up a reason for it, they just completely ignored it. It's like a stormtrooper caught Leia at the start of A New Hope, before she had the time to input the plans into R2-D2, but just stood there and did nothing to stop her, for no reason.

Screw this game. They took a promising new IP and pissed all over it.

Bioware, screw you.

It's the reapers!

Quoting my last post: "They are lovecraftian horrors as written by a 10-year old."

Basically the one concept that the whole Mass Effect trilogy centers around, they are the main villains, they are the underlying threat of the whole game. Most of the game, your main character stands there shouting "We need to fucking do something about those cockslapping reapers you morons!" at everyone who doesn't really want to pretend they exist.

First we should probably talk for a little bit about what lovecraftian horrors actually are.

H.P. Lovecraft was an early-20th century author who wrote weird horror fiction. His favourite topic was unknowable cosmic monstrosities, which is something that countless writers have completely failed to capture ever since then.

See, these cosmic horrors aren't just big, ugly, and dangerous enemies. They are beings entirely beyond the comprehensions of mere humans. It's not that you don't at the moment know where they came from or what they are, it's that they are beyond those concepts altogether. What are they like? They warp reality by simply existing!

A human being cannot even begin to fathom the nature of these horrors. In fact, even getting a tiny little glimpse at what they are will instantly drive you completely insane.

How old are they? You're not getting the point; they don't fit into the concept of time. The whole idea of "time" might just be a notion in the smallest dreams of one of these entities.

They are not enemies. They are not invaders. They don't come to kill us or turn us into slaves. They don't give half a thimbleful of jizz about us. It's like if the transdimensional omnipotent Q from Star Trek were to be said to be "enemies" with a single bacterium. One is so far beyond the other that the latter couldn't even describe the very simplest qualities of the former.

But writers, especially for video games, just can't seem to grasp that. To them, lovecraftian horrors are just big, dangerous monsters with scary voices.

And the influences from Lovecraft in Mass Effect are really obvious. The reapers are huge metallic monsters, modeled after cuttlefish, tentacles and all, that are so powerful that no ship in the galaxy can even hope to stand up to one. When encountered face to face, they speak with deep, rumbly voices and go on and on about how they are "beyond your comprehension" and shit.

Yet, those morons in the writer's office just didn't get it, because the reapers are in no way "beyond your comprehension".

In fact, they are very much within our comprehension; we know roughly when they were created, who created them, why they were created, why they harvest the galaxy every 50'000 years, how they procreate, and the code for their luggage(it's 12345).

This is bullshit.

Hell, they talk to the regular mortals. They speak to them, mock them, try to scare them, give them hints to their motivations. They communicate with them as equals.

"But" I hear you interject, clearly not understanding what a blog post is, "they don't treat them as equals, they constantly drone on about how they are superior".

Well, what they say isn't the problem, it's how they do it. The reapers intentionally speak in the language of the mortal they're speaking to. They speak, then pause to allow the other party to answer. They never interrupt the other party even when they clearly think they are absolutely wrong. Heck, Sovereign, the first reaper encountered, even makes a point out of saying he's terminating the conversation when he doesn't want to talk anymore, as opposed to just shutting up and terminating the link.

All those things are signs of politeness. They treat humans as equals in conversation, no matter what they pretend to do. I regularly speak to customers at work who show considerably less respect in a conversation than that supposed cosmic horror does!

After all this, the idiots pretending to be writers try to shoehorn in that concept I mentioned about these monstrosities warping reality around them. Except the effect they have is that their mere presence makes people around them gradually agree with them without realizing it.

Yeah...that's not really the same thing, is it? That doesn't make you a transdimensional horror, that makes you a politician.

And here's the killing blow, literally: They can be killed.

Yup, these things claiming to be beyond the understanding of mere mortals and who have neither beginning nor end...can be killed.

But what kind of magnificent device must one use to even hope to injure such a being? Guns. Just lots of big guns. Shoot at it a lot with really big guns and it dies.

Are you fucking shitting me?

"B-b-but" the voices in my head whine, "maybe the writers didn't want to create proper cosmic horrors, and just wanted to take some inspiration from Lovecraft!"

*places head firmly in palms* *where I found palms in this climate is a question for another day*

Let's say you created a superhero. You call him Man-bat, give him a brooding personality, a batcave, and dress him all in black. Then you have him exclusively pick fights with people in the open street in daylight.

At that stage, you might whinge all you like about how you "Wasn't trying to copy Batman...", but we all know damn well that you were, and you completely missed the point of Batman.

The reapers in the first game are presented as basically machine gods, which periodically murdered all civilized species for some unknown reason. Don't fuckin' come to me claiming they weren't trying to copy Lovecraft's monstrosities.

Fact is, though, that even though the first game treats them with more reverence than the last one, it still fails, because it still communicates with mortals, and is killed in the end by shooting at it.

So, clearly, EA's writers are absolute hacks.

Mass Effect 3

Greetings and salutations, my loyal mini...ehm...readers!

Usually I wouldn't be one to start a post saying sorry for not writing more frequently, and I'm not going to do so this time either, as I rather thought the birth of our daughter was more important than letting you enjoy the most fantastic blogging in history.

I was going to dedicate today's post to dickpunching the reapers of the Mass Effect series, but since I happened upon plenty of other material that's actually presented much more centrally at times than the reapers, in a game that's about a war against the reapers, I decided to dickpunch a bunch of other concepts.

See, there is so much in Mass Effect 3 to love. They've perfected the combat, and really made active abilities a central part of it at last. You also get to experience a much wider range of different locales, and certain story elements that should have been solved ages ago are finally solved. I'll just go head and list some major issues that really frustrate me and make me like the game a whole lot less than I should.

Before I start, maybe I should explain what the reapers are. They are lovecraftian horrors as written by a 10-year old.

#1: Cerberus. They are a pro-human splinter group that wants to control the evil reapers and thus make mankind the supreme rulers.

In the first game, they were cameo opponents at best; you stop a few nasty experiments and there's some flavour text, but that's it.

In the second game, they are the ones who resurrect the dead Shepard and give him the resources to stop the agents of the reapers. They are then portrayed as ruthless and pragmatic, but in the end wanting to do the right thing, at least for humanity.

In the third game, they are pretty much the main antagonists. They are 100% evil, and during large parts of the game they are much more prominent than the reapers themselves.

Why the flying fuck was this necessary?

The reapers are the greatest threat the galaxy has ever faced! They intend to wipe out all civilizations and leave no traces of them. When you have that, why would you ever need another major antagonist?! Apparently the writers of Mass Effect 3 just have no sense of how to write a story at all. There is no focus, clear end goal, nothing whatsoever to stick to, because apparently there are two main enemies, and we don't have a clue what the hell one of them is up to!

Look at Lord of the Rings; there is one primary antagonist, and we know what he wants. Then, there is a secondary antagonist, and we know what he wants as well. He is then defeated so the heroes can focus on the primary badguy.

In Mass Effect 3, the two stories just run parallel to each other, and Cerberus aren't beaten until just a tiny little amount of time before the big showdown.

So, who are we fighting today; the bigtime badguys, or the bigtime badguys?

Now, speaking of Cerberus...

#2: Kai Leng. He's a character that never appeared in either of the previous games. Apparently he came from some animated movie or some comic book or whatever.

You know what, EA? I don't want to keep up to date on three different fucking forms och media in order to know what's happening in the video game I'm playing. Why do you keep doing this; making gaps in the story of the the games that you fill in with other media? You know what, if I play a game I'm kind of expecting to be able to understand what the hell happens in it by...oh, I don't know, playing the damn game?

So, anyway, he's the loyal lapdog of the main antagonist of the game. Okay, one of the main antagonists of the game. Okay, the Illusive Man.

Notice how that paragraph points out both his place in the story AND his name, and an outsider would still not be able to reliable tell which faction he leads? That's not a sign of a good story.

Back to Kai Leng. Apart from being a lapdog and being spawned from a comic, he's also a super-duper-mega-awesome cyborg ninja! And he can do lots of awesome stuff, like be immune to bullets, vanish instantly at will, and jump backward 10 meters from the back of a flying car into the seat of another flying car!

*facepalm*

So, he's essentially a character from a Final Fantasy or Metal Gear Solid game transplanted into Mass Effect. What the everloving fuck? What absolute pathetic moron thought this was a good idea? Of course, we know someone must've loved him, because he shows all the classic signs of a writer's pet; everybody talks a whole lot about how dangerous and awesome he is; he pulls off stunts that are simply not possible in the setting in question; he gets cool oneliners; he's dressed all in black, has black hair, and has his eyes covered by some kind of cybernetics(or really weird glasses).

Hell, everytime he shows up is in cutscenes, so the player character just becomes a blithering idiot to show how awesome Kai Leng is!

There might as well be anime girls fawning whenever he shows up.

To remind you, this is in a game where some of your teammembers are; Cortez, a skilled pilot and technician who lost his husband in the invasion of earth; Tali, a member of the nomadic race Quarians, who is a mechanical prodigy; Garrus, member of the militaristic race Turians, who's got a strong sense of justice and likes to play it fast and loose with the rules.

He simply has no damn place in this game. He doesn't belong there. Not that such a minor inconvenience would ever bother the writer, who is clearly masturbating furiously every single time that character comes into view.

By the way, if you want a deeper analysis of the character, I can recommend [this link]. It's just a piece that I found on Google that I think nails it perfectly.

How does all of this translate into gameplay, then? Well, it really doesn't.

All those amazing things the game says he can do? They all happen in cutscenes. The only two times the game actually lets you fight him he has the moveset and abilities of a type of enemy you've faced lots of times through the game. During the first fight, you shoot out his shields three times, then he magically wins in a cutscene, and oh isn't he so fucking awesome? The only things making the last fight difficult are the enormous amounts of health they've given him and the fact that the area you get to fight him in is quite small. Even then, it's not a particularly hard fight.

And that is the perfect segue to...

#3: The cutscenes up the arse. This game is cutscene-tastic. It just doesn't want to hand over the controls to you if it can help it. It's pathetic really, how the game insists on showing off so much of it without any interaction whatsoever.´

But I get it; the devs want to make a movie, not a game, and you're ruining their movie by doing the stuff you do while playing it, man!

Here's the thing: in non-interactive media there is a saying; "Show, don't tell". It's simple; you should demonstrate things rather than just saying them. There's a character who is a skilled strategist? Well then, show him making smart strategic moves, don't just have other characters bang on about what an amazing strategist he is while you never demonstrate it in any way.

Well, in interactive media, there's another: "Do, don't show". Since gaming is a media where we are supposed to actively interact with the work in question, basing your game around the player sitting on its' arse and doing fuck all is a crappy strategy. Oh, this character has the ability to pull off these awesome moves? Then let us experience that in gameplay, don't just show that shit to us in cutscenes and leave the gameplay with regular old shooting mechanics.

Naturally, they insist on turning things into cutscenes when there's no fucking need to. You're holding back attacking enemies so you can evacuate a couple of civilians, and about a minute before everyone is seated and set to leave the game takes the reins and makes it a cutscene. Why the hell does it have to do that?! Was there any part of that last minute that couldn't be portrayed ingame?!

That might sound petty to you, but when that happens all the damn time you tend to get really damn tired of it.

Hell, they can't even do the cutscenes right. You know which single scene is the most common one? Have a guess.

...

...

Okay, did you guess "Prolonged cutscene inside of a shuttle while exciting stuff happens outside"? Then you can pat yourself on the back for being right.

They've decided that "Fuck it, we'll just let the player do as little as possible, we'll show them film sequences instead of all the cool stuff we want in this game!", and they can't even do that properly.

That's not to mention the fact that the last thing the devs would ever want is for their game to be judged as a movie rather than a game. It's got pathetic special effects by movie standards, the story meanders with lots of loose plot points just forgotten about, the pacing is all over the place, and the main character's actions are erratic at best.

Not to mention the worst one...

#4: Human facial animations. They are atrocious. It's like the job of animating the human facial expressions was given to a blind person who had heard descriptions of what human faces look like from another blind person who was also mute so he had to use sign-language.

I don't have much to say about this, other than that they've managed to cock up the facial animations royally in ME3, much more so than in the first game.

Next time, I'll be having a god at those damn silly reapers!