30 Days of Mass Effect: Day 16 & 17
Jun. 13th, 2013 10:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccatoriaHELLLOOOOO.
So this was on hiatus for longer than planned. Basically Vidukon happened and then stuff got busy *waves hands* but hopefully I'll be back to regular, if not daily, updates on this thing until I finish it, because I have actually been enjoying doing it. Hooray for all the Mass Effects.
16. Favourite DLC
I'm going to shock no one and pick the Citadel DLC for ME3. It's just a beautiful, wonderful love-letter to the game and the fandom in the best possible tradition. After Omega was released, I was feeling leary of the price-tag (and I like Omega fine, because ARIA, but it was overpriced), but this was genuinely worth the cost. It's huge, the party is so replayable, it's great to get all the extra scenes with your squadmates, old and new, and even though it's not large, the combat simulator is much more fun than Pinnacle Station ever was, especially since it allows you a chance to play with the ME2 crowd + Wrex.
Plus it brings back Wrex!
And that's without going into the plot itself. Which I thought was fantastic because I had genuinely wondered why the hell the Illusive Man didn't have a couple of Shepard clones on ice for spare parts (or, well, really I just wondered why he didn't just clone Shepard; the whole "we need YOU and your MAGICAL LEADERSHIP" always felt a bit cheesy to me; I never got why they didn't go back to the Prothean beacon in your brain; either as the reason why a control chip wouldn't work, or the reason why he was scared of screwing with your brain/straight-up cloning you, but whatever, we're not here to talk about how I'd rewrite it...)
But on top of that I liked how Brooks managed to lantern the "You're LEGENDS!" vibe that they wanted to indulge in - and we wanted to bask in - by ultimately using that as a way to trick you, and the tone of the adventure really make me less inclined to over-examine Brooks' presentation.
Plus it's got great diversity of gameplay and it's hysterically funny.
Which in the end, just adds to the poignancy of the final party.
I just basically love everything it chooses to be.
Honourable Mention: Lair of the Shadow Broker. Again, my choices aren't shocking but this is one place fandom has it absolutely right. Shadow Broker does awesome stuff for Liara's character, has an interesting storyline, diverse gameplay and genuine heart.
17. Worst Mission/Loyalty Quest/Side-Mission
Urgh, I've been struggling to think of how to answer this for a while. Because the thing is, I've realised, I've come to enjoy the mechanical gameplay, the shooty-shooty bits for what they are, but they'll never be my first love. I have no pride that means I won't just play it on casual until I know what I'm doing, and because of that, I rarely have enormous difficulty. Sure I think individual encounters are boring, unbalanced, or plain unenjoyable. But to use the Kai Leng boss fights as an example - and one I'll talk about later - I think they're terrible and annoying, but they are tiny segments of wider missions that I enjoy and I don't want to blacklist those missions because I think those boss fights are shoddy.
And while there are obviously missions I enjoy more than others, and even missions I find sort of bland or vaguely irritating (lol, that ME2 quest in the fog where I ALWAYS get lost, or how bloody frustrating it is to save every colonist on Feros), calling any of them the Worst Mission seems kinda hyperbolic, and like I'm just picking one for the sake of picking one.
So I'm going to sort of steer the question a bit and treat Diana Allers as a game-long mini side-quest in ME3 and talk about that. Which I feel sort of qualifies as a side-quest. If talking to Conrad Verner three times in ME1 can count as a side-quest, so can three interviews with her.
Also I like talking about this as a side-quest rather than her as a character because I think that the failings here are broader than her character, and also, much like Miranda, I think she gets a lot of gendered crap thrown at her because people are either assholes, or can't articulate what they're actually thinking and so fall back on...asshole stuff because it's easier.
So like, basically it comes down to the fact that she breaks the fourth wall because IGN.com have an embedded reporter on the Normandy. And an embedded reporter on the Normandy is a fucking FANTASTIC idea, but even if I didn't recognise her face (because Yvonne Strahovski doesn't bother me), the problem is, it's the apocalypse and I have someone reporting on it as if they're reporting on a Games Expo.
Like, that's it, that's the persona. There are a few bland attempts to make it seem edgy or relevant, or...something, when she references phrasing reports correctly so as not to destroy the stock market or something, but it feels like a half-baked attempt to be slick in the face of an apocalypse, like...some sort of ill-conceived attempt to reference the fact that our media is increasingly youtubified and hashtagged. But I'm reaching so far my arms hurt and this style doesn't fit with what we've seen of the ME universe's reporters so far, and we do know two of them, and either of them would have been a better fit for the onboard reporter role than Allers.
So already I'm left wondering why it's her I'm getting and not Kalisah Al Jilani or Emily Wong, but I probably would have been fine with it, except her tone and style don't match the rest of the game either. I mean - and I know how this sounds after talking about how funny the Citadel DLC is, but even that had a lot of pathos - this game is rough. It's quiet and sad and hard, emotionally. It's serious and it's sober, and even if it was entirely intentional - even if it was successful - I think a cynical commentary on news-entertainment would have been jarring.
The ambient dialogue-based stories we hear as we roam the Citadel are heartbreaking and sad and brutally honest. And I contrast that with the reporting-style we get from Allers, and the only conclusion I can come to is that they wrote her to deliberately evoke Jessica Chobot reporting for IGN, so you like, literally had Jessica Chobot in her cargo bay reporting on the apocalypse as if it were E3 and that's just weird and distracting.
And because it's distracting, it becomes more and more difficult to ignore the fact that she's there because IGN have industry pull and we probably lost out on more material for Wong or Al Jilani, both women of colour, or the fact that the clothes they chose to put her in are almost certainly a reflection of the even-more-problematic-than-usual sexualisation of women in the games industry.
And just...blah. Imagine if she'd been on board, exactly the same, but doing, like, short, simple, painful frontline reports, really driving home the fact that the Normandy was going into places that otherwise were totally incommunicado. Imagine if her reports of devastated cities weren't punctuated by "Is anyone safe? Find out next..." in the same tones as a TV promo voice desperately trying to hold viewers across a commercial break, but were instead death tolls, survivor figures and extranet links for confirmed survivors? What if "Where will they hit next?" wasn't presented with some sort of half-time glee, but was a serious list of worlds thought to be at risk and transport companies still willing to ship people out of them along with evacuation notices?
I dunno, man. I think that would have been pretty sad, even if the person reading the lines wasn't a great actor. It certainly would have been more tonally apt.
IDK. I'm mostly super mad about this, even though it's a really minor part of the game, just because I wanted to love it so bad. (And because I was actually kind of moved by Emily Wong's twitter death; I'm good with it, it was a good, painful, death - it had integrity. But I'm pretty broke up about the fact it's not referenced in the game at all that I can see. Would it have killed them to give us like, one news bulletin? If I'm gonna get Allers instead of Wong, AT LEAST GIVE ME A NEWS BULLETIN!)
But yeah. Okay. This has been a meme that will apparently include my thoughts on ~all~ the reporters in the ME Universe. And this one, I didn't like. :(
So this was on hiatus for longer than planned. Basically Vidukon happened and then stuff got busy *waves hands* but hopefully I'll be back to regular, if not daily, updates on this thing until I finish it, because I have actually been enjoying doing it. Hooray for all the Mass Effects.
16. Favourite DLC
I'm going to shock no one and pick the Citadel DLC for ME3. It's just a beautiful, wonderful love-letter to the game and the fandom in the best possible tradition. After Omega was released, I was feeling leary of the price-tag (and I like Omega fine, because ARIA, but it was overpriced), but this was genuinely worth the cost. It's huge, the party is so replayable, it's great to get all the extra scenes with your squadmates, old and new, and even though it's not large, the combat simulator is much more fun than Pinnacle Station ever was, especially since it allows you a chance to play with the ME2 crowd + Wrex.
Plus it brings back Wrex!
And that's without going into the plot itself. Which I thought was fantastic because I had genuinely wondered why the hell the Illusive Man didn't have a couple of Shepard clones on ice for spare parts (or, well, really I just wondered why he didn't just clone Shepard; the whole "we need YOU and your MAGICAL LEADERSHIP" always felt a bit cheesy to me; I never got why they didn't go back to the Prothean beacon in your brain; either as the reason why a control chip wouldn't work, or the reason why he was scared of screwing with your brain/straight-up cloning you, but whatever, we're not here to talk about how I'd rewrite it...)
But on top of that I liked how Brooks managed to lantern the "You're LEGENDS!" vibe that they wanted to indulge in - and we wanted to bask in - by ultimately using that as a way to trick you, and the tone of the adventure really make me less inclined to over-examine Brooks' presentation.
Plus it's got great diversity of gameplay and it's hysterically funny.
Which in the end, just adds to the poignancy of the final party.
I just basically love everything it chooses to be.
Honourable Mention: Lair of the Shadow Broker. Again, my choices aren't shocking but this is one place fandom has it absolutely right. Shadow Broker does awesome stuff for Liara's character, has an interesting storyline, diverse gameplay and genuine heart.
17. Worst Mission/Loyalty Quest/Side-Mission
Urgh, I've been struggling to think of how to answer this for a while. Because the thing is, I've realised, I've come to enjoy the mechanical gameplay, the shooty-shooty bits for what they are, but they'll never be my first love. I have no pride that means I won't just play it on casual until I know what I'm doing, and because of that, I rarely have enormous difficulty. Sure I think individual encounters are boring, unbalanced, or plain unenjoyable. But to use the Kai Leng boss fights as an example - and one I'll talk about later - I think they're terrible and annoying, but they are tiny segments of wider missions that I enjoy and I don't want to blacklist those missions because I think those boss fights are shoddy.
And while there are obviously missions I enjoy more than others, and even missions I find sort of bland or vaguely irritating (lol, that ME2 quest in the fog where I ALWAYS get lost, or how bloody frustrating it is to save every colonist on Feros), calling any of them the Worst Mission seems kinda hyperbolic, and like I'm just picking one for the sake of picking one.
So I'm going to sort of steer the question a bit and treat Diana Allers as a game-long mini side-quest in ME3 and talk about that. Which I feel sort of qualifies as a side-quest. If talking to Conrad Verner three times in ME1 can count as a side-quest, so can three interviews with her.
Also I like talking about this as a side-quest rather than her as a character because I think that the failings here are broader than her character, and also, much like Miranda, I think she gets a lot of gendered crap thrown at her because people are either assholes, or can't articulate what they're actually thinking and so fall back on...asshole stuff because it's easier.
So like, basically it comes down to the fact that she breaks the fourth wall because IGN.com have an embedded reporter on the Normandy. And an embedded reporter on the Normandy is a fucking FANTASTIC idea, but even if I didn't recognise her face (because Yvonne Strahovski doesn't bother me), the problem is, it's the apocalypse and I have someone reporting on it as if they're reporting on a Games Expo.
Like, that's it, that's the persona. There are a few bland attempts to make it seem edgy or relevant, or...something, when she references phrasing reports correctly so as not to destroy the stock market or something, but it feels like a half-baked attempt to be slick in the face of an apocalypse, like...some sort of ill-conceived attempt to reference the fact that our media is increasingly youtubified and hashtagged. But I'm reaching so far my arms hurt and this style doesn't fit with what we've seen of the ME universe's reporters so far, and we do know two of them, and either of them would have been a better fit for the onboard reporter role than Allers.
So already I'm left wondering why it's her I'm getting and not Kalisah Al Jilani or Emily Wong, but I probably would have been fine with it, except her tone and style don't match the rest of the game either. I mean - and I know how this sounds after talking about how funny the Citadel DLC is, but even that had a lot of pathos - this game is rough. It's quiet and sad and hard, emotionally. It's serious and it's sober, and even if it was entirely intentional - even if it was successful - I think a cynical commentary on news-entertainment would have been jarring.
The ambient dialogue-based stories we hear as we roam the Citadel are heartbreaking and sad and brutally honest. And I contrast that with the reporting-style we get from Allers, and the only conclusion I can come to is that they wrote her to deliberately evoke Jessica Chobot reporting for IGN, so you like, literally had Jessica Chobot in her cargo bay reporting on the apocalypse as if it were E3 and that's just weird and distracting.
And because it's distracting, it becomes more and more difficult to ignore the fact that she's there because IGN have industry pull and we probably lost out on more material for Wong or Al Jilani, both women of colour, or the fact that the clothes they chose to put her in are almost certainly a reflection of the even-more-problematic-than-usual sexualisation of women in the games industry.
And just...blah. Imagine if she'd been on board, exactly the same, but doing, like, short, simple, painful frontline reports, really driving home the fact that the Normandy was going into places that otherwise were totally incommunicado. Imagine if her reports of devastated cities weren't punctuated by "Is anyone safe? Find out next..." in the same tones as a TV promo voice desperately trying to hold viewers across a commercial break, but were instead death tolls, survivor figures and extranet links for confirmed survivors? What if "Where will they hit next?" wasn't presented with some sort of half-time glee, but was a serious list of worlds thought to be at risk and transport companies still willing to ship people out of them along with evacuation notices?
I dunno, man. I think that would have been pretty sad, even if the person reading the lines wasn't a great actor. It certainly would have been more tonally apt.
IDK. I'm mostly super mad about this, even though it's a really minor part of the game, just because I wanted to love it so bad. (And because I was actually kind of moved by Emily Wong's twitter death; I'm good with it, it was a good, painful, death - it had integrity. But I'm pretty broke up about the fact it's not referenced in the game at all that I can see. Would it have killed them to give us like, one news bulletin? If I'm gonna get Allers instead of Wong, AT LEAST GIVE ME A NEWS BULLETIN!)
But yeah. Okay. This has been a meme that will apparently include my thoughts on ~all~ the reporters in the ME Universe. And this one, I didn't like. :(
