Video Games: France not a WWI Nation

[Fez]

1 hour ago, KiDisaster said:

I ended up starting at rank 45 in Overwatch and have been hovering around there consistently. Falling as low as 42 and climbing as high as 47. I feel like I lose way more than I win, and most of the losses are crushing while the wins are all close. I feel like I'm constantly playing against people who should be ranked way higher than me. I'm glad to hear you're not experiencing much toxicity, but I had the opposite experience. Ranked was awful, nothing but cry babies and ragers. I've just gone back to quick play cause I got sick of it. 

---

In other news, stolen from the WoW Reddit, the Cataclysm zones are now as old as the vanilla zones were when Cataclysm updated them. And now I feel old

There was one game where something was going on with the other team, they spent the entire match swearing and insulting each other in the match chat. They ignored us though. And I'm not even sure what was going on, it was a fairly close match that we only barely won. There have also been a couple kinda not great people, but its been more the incredulously insulting type rather than the straight up toxic asshole.

Part of it I think is just that I've won most of my games since placement (which was worse, but still not too bad), and winning keeps most people from getting too bad. I think I went 9-3 in competitive last night (had a bunch of free time), and only one of the losses was a curbstomping. The other two losses and maybe two or three of wins were all really close. The others were all either curbstomps or just apparent that we were the better team.

There's definitely some players who are way better than me, I assume they had similar bad luck in the placement matches and will eventually rank far higher than I ever will. But the rest either feel on the same level as me or quite a bit worse, with more being the later I think. I suspect I'll probably top out in the 50-52 range; which is pretty good for using a controller on PC. I know I'll never be great, my aiming just lacks too much, but I've felt for a long time now that I have better situational awareness and understanding of the character counters than a lot of players (though it doesn't always help; I know Genji beats Bastion, but I can't get the deflect to work right).

[briantw]

8 hours ago, DunderMifflin said:

Im not claiming the ending wasn't bad.

I'm saying I respected the effort.

They gambled big by not having a happy ending and they lost big. 

Theres a big chunk of fanbase that still today has zero forgiveness for that ending. I have to believe they were well aware of that risk.

I just don't believe for a second that had Shep defeated the baddies and survived, no matter how poorly it was written it would not have received such a furiously negative reaction. That's just my opinion.

I just don't think an unhappy ending is some sort of big risk.  Lots of games have unhappy, or at least bittersweet, endings.  My personal favorite video game ending of all time (MGS3: Snake Eater) has an outright sad ending, and it was brilliant.  However, no one called it ballsy or bold or anything.  It was just a great ending that fit the theme/tone of the game.

Again, the problem with Mass Effect 3 is that the ending is bad, but also that it is tonally inconsistent with the rest of the game.  Mass Effect 3 is a big, bombastic action game.  The entire game was building up to an epic final battle that...just kind of didn't happen.  You spend the entire game recruiting allies and collecting war assets that never visually matter.  Instead, you have a five minute chat with deus ex machina and the game ends.  It was a terrible and misguided ending that didn't seem to understand what the rest of the game was about.

As far as a big action ending where Shepherd defeated the baddies and survived, well, that would have been a lot more tonally consistent with the rest of the game, so it obviously wouldn't have been as poorly received.  It wasn't about Shepherd living or dying.  It was about the game building up to an epic fight that you don't even participate in, and then a sudden shift in theme and tone when you meet Star Child.

9 hours ago, DunderMifflin said:

But what do I know, I thought Lumberjack Dexter ending was perfect.

Maybe you just have bad taste? 

[Jace, Extat]

6 minutes ago, briantw said:

I just don't think an unhappy ending is some sort of big risk.  Lots of games have unhappy, or at least bittersweet, endings.  My personal favorite video game ending of all time (MGS3: Snake Eater) has an outright sad ending, and it was brilliant.  However, no one called it ballsy or bold or anything.  It was just a great ending that fit the theme/tone of the game.

Again, the problem with Mass Effect 3 is that the ending is bad, but also that it is tonally inconsistent with the rest of the game.  Mass Effect 3 is a big, bombastic action game.  The entire game was building up to an epic final battle that...just kind of didn't happen.  You spend the entire game recruiting allies and collecting war assets that never visually matter.  Instead, you have a five minute chat with deus ex machina and the game ends.  It was a terrible and misguided ending that didn't seem to understand what the rest of the game was about.

As far as a big action ending where Shepherd defeated the baddies and survived, well, that would have been a lot more tonally consistent with the rest of the game, so it obviously wouldn't have been as poorly received.  It wasn't about Shepherd living or dying.  It was about the game building up to an epic fight that you don't even participate in, and then a sudden shift in theme and tone when you meet Star Child.

Maybe you just have bad taste? 

I he fact that none of it mattered was the point. The theme throughout is not that you have to win, but fight to survive against impossible odds. And in the end the odds are indeed impossible. The ending was terribly botched but outside starched exposition face, I didn't thinkle it was necessarily  out of place.

[briantw]

Just now, Pony Queen Jace said:

I he fact that none of it mattered was the point. The theme throughout is not that you have to win, but fight to survive against impossible odds. And in the end the odds are indeed impossible. The ending was terribly botched but outside starched exposition face, I didn't thinkle it was necessarily  out of place.

Eh...I think Mass Effect 3 was the video game equivalent of a big, dumb action movie.  Big, dumb action movies need an awesome fight at the end.  If the point of it was that you had to survive against impossible odds, then Shepherd should have sacrificed himself in an epic end-game fight to save as many people as possible.  

Contrast the endings of Mass Effect 2 and 3.  Mass Effect 2 was a game about recruiting allies and gaining their trust.  In the end, that all mattered, as you needed your teammates in the final battle and their trust in you dictated their fate.  Sure, the end boss fight was a little silly, but the entire end action sequence was great and fit the game perfectly.  Mass Effect 3, on the other hand, had no real end battle to speak of.  Recruiting all those war assets was ultimately pretty meaningless, as it was just filling up a gauge to see how happy an ending you got.  It really felt like the game was rushed out the door, and so the developers had to tack on an ending that made no sense instead of going with the original battle plans.

[MerenthaClone]

1 hour ago, Pony Queen Jace said:

I he fact that none of it mattered was the point. The theme throughout is not that you have to win, but fight to survive against impossible odds. And in the end the odds are indeed impossible. The ending was terribly botched but outside starched exposition face, I didn't thinkle it was necessarily  out of place.

Anyone who expected the heroic self-sacrificing character named Shepard to survive the series in all endings was a bit of an optimist, but that isn't why the ending sucked.  The ending sucked for a whole host of reasons that I've ranted about for whole threads and I won't repeat them here, but the feeling of it being rushed is part of it.   

Its a big, dumb, action movie.  You've been told all series that the odds are impossible, but that's fine, because Shepard does the impossible anyway.  Hell, your backstory has you being more badass than most people.  Is it a little weird that with all of this, you have a stupid ghostchild basically "lolno, you lost utterly and nothing mattered but here, you get to press a button and maybe get an ending that's really totally out of left field" (except destroy).  Honestly, the "Destroy" ending is the only one that really makes sense with the rest of the series: remove an existential threat but at the same time, sacrifice the basis of society to do it (and the Geth because fuckyouthatswhy).  And then, in the third of a series about games that's largely about bringing people together and surviving because of it, instead of trying by teaming up and building on the sacrifices of those that came before you, you build a big dumb deus ex machina that is literally a machine with literally a god inside it.  That's stupid.  

[Werthead]

Bethesda "borrowed" a storyline and quest idea from a New Vegas fan mod for a Fallout 4: Far Harbor quest and didn't credit any of the original creators.

Fuck's sake, Bethesda.

[Jasta11]

6 hours ago, briantw said:

I just don't think an unhappy ending is some sort of big risk.  Lots of games have unhappy, or at least bittersweet, endings.  My personal favorite video game ending of all time (MGS3: Snake Eater) has an outright sad ending, and it was brilliant.  However, no one called it ballsy or bold or anything.  It was just a great ending that fit the theme/tone of the game.

Again, the problem with Mass Effect 3 is that the ending is bad, but also that it is tonally inconsistent with the rest of the game.  Mass Effect 3 is a big, bombastic action game.  The entire game was building up to an epic final battle that...just kind of didn't happen.  You spend the entire game recruiting allies and collecting war assets that never visually matter.  Instead, you have a five minute chat with deus ex machina and the game ends.  It was a terrible and misguided ending that didn't seem to understand what the rest of the game was about.

As far as a big action ending where Shepherd defeated the baddies and survived, well, that would have been a lot more tonally consistent with the rest of the game, so it obviously wouldn't have been as poorly received.  It wasn't about Shepherd living or dying.  It was about the game building up to an epic fight that you don't even participate in, and then a sudden shift in theme and tone when you meet Star Child.

Maybe you just have bad taste? 

 

On that, I disagree. ME3 makes it very clear, repeatedly, that you can't win conventionally. That much was clear from ME1 onwards anyway, since Sovereign alone basically required an entire Alliance fleet to take down. At best, you're gathering allies for one surgical strike that allows you to get the MacGuffin rolling. It's the last ditch effort, the galaxy's final hurrah. The epic fight where you punch Harbinger on the nose was not going to happen, not with how overwhelmingly superior the Reapers are presented.

Of course, Bioware wrote themselves in that corner by making the Reapers so superior in the first place, so that the only way to beat them is via a plot device. But the fact remains that, as the facts are presented in the game, a conventional victory is impossible. The Turians are far and away the galaxy's best military, and they still can barely hold on to their homeworld.

Plus, I don't think ME3 was a dumb action movie. The consequences of the war are made clear on the Citadel an on missions like Thessia, and whatever victories you achieve are temporary at the very best.

[RumHam]

I'm curious, those of you playing on the Overwatch test servers is it an issue that everyone wants to try out the new character?  I'd imagine a team of six Anas wouldn't do too well. 

[Jace, Extat]

24 minutes ago, Jasta11 said:

 

On that, I disagree. ME3 makes it very clear, repeatedly, that you can't win conventionally. That much was clear from ME1 onwards anyway, since Sovereign alone basically required an entire Alliance fleet to take down. At best, you're gathering allies for one surgical strike that allows you to get the MacGuffin rolling. It's the last ditch effort, the galaxy's final hurrah. The epic fight where you punch Harbinger on the nose was not going to happen, not with how overwhelmingly superior the Reapers are presented.

Of course, Bioware wrote themselves in that corner by making the Reapers so superior in the first place, so that the only way to beat them is via a plot device. But the fact remains that, as the facts are presented in the game, a conventional victory is impossible. The Turians are far and away the galaxy's best military, and they still can barely hold on to their homeworld.

Plus, I don't think ME3 was a dumb action movie. The consequences of the war are made clear on the Citadel an on missions like Thessia, and whatever victories you achieve are temporary at the very best.

Yeah, I think calling it a dumb action movie is pretty clueless. It's about fighting the inevitable because there's nothing else you can do, not beating the bad guys 'cause 'Merica!

[briantw]

18 minutes ago, Pony Queen Jace said:

Yeah, I think calling it a dumb action movie is pretty clueless. It's about fighting the inevitable because there's nothing else you can do, not beating the bad guys 'cause 'Merica!

Eh...I thought the series moved from sci-fi to bombastic action over the course of the three games.  The third game was basically a relatively simple cover-based shooter, whereas the first game was a pretty typical western RPG.  The second game was the bridge...half-RPG, half chest-high walls shooter.  

And dumb action movies can still show the consequences of war, and even be emotional at times.  The Rock is one of my favorite dumb action movies, but it still has a great bad guy with a believable (and even understandable) motivation.  Dumb action movies don't have to be inherently bad, but it's not as if Mass Effect 3 is some fucking work of art.  It's a dumb, ridiculous action game.  There's nothing wrong with that.  It just had a shitty ending that didn't seem to work with the first 90% of the game.

Half of my blu-ray collection is dumb action movies, by the way.  They're not bad movies.  They just know what they are and work with it.  Mass Effect 3 pretends to be an action movie for the first 90% and then one of the writers decided to rip off the Architect scene from The Matrix for the finale.  It didn't work in the second Matrix movie and it didn't work in ME3.

[briantw]

Finished two games this week, so here are some mini-reviews...

Inside - If you liked Limbo, it's from the same developers and has a lot in common.  Personally, I found it to be a bit too easy.  Limbo had some really tricky puzzles and some unforgiving (but fair) platforming.  Inside has like three tricky puzzles and the platforming never really rises above easy.  Still, the game is absolutely gorgeous and is just dripping atmosphere.  I think it's overpriced at twenty bucks, though.  Wait until it drops to ten or fifteen before you pick it up.  It's only about three hours long and, since it's so easy, there's not a lot of replay value outside of finding the dozen or so secrets (you'll probably miss over half of them on the first play-through).

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter - Underwhelming would be the word I used to describe this.  I played the Redux version.  The best thing I can say about the game is that it was pretty and had some nice atmosphere at times.  The story, though, never rises above mediocre, the voice acting is bad, the game is very obtuse and poorly-designed, and there's just not enough meat there.  It's a glorified walking simulator, but I could have forgiven that if the story was really good.  I like murder mysteries, so it had a legit chance to pull me in.  It just never did.  The game starts out by telling you it doesn't hold your hand, but what that really means is that it just suffers from shitty design that the developers were too lazy to fix.  Inside is a game that never holds your hand.  There are literally no tutorials or button prompts in Inside, and yet I easily figured out how the various game mechanics worked.  Ethan Carter, on the other hand, just sucks from a design standpoint and disguises it by pretending to be "hardcore," which is kind of hilarious for a fucking walking simulator.  Do not recommend.

[Fez]

Nintendo's announced that this Fall they're releasing a mini-NES. It will have 30 built-in NES games (no word on if more can be added; but it looks like not), an HDMI port to connect to modern TVs, an original NES gamepad, and a second controller port that can accept another original NES gamepad or a Wii remote. And it'll only be $60. The game list is:

Quote

Balloon Fight
Bubble Bobble
Castlevania
Castlevania II: Simon's Quest
Donkey Kong
Donkey Kong Jr.
Double Dragon II: The Revenge
Dr. Mario
Excitebike
Final Fantasy
Galaga
Ghosts'N Goblins
Gradius
Ice Climber
Kid Icarus
Kirby's Adventure
Mario Bros.
Mega Man 2
Metroid
Ninja Gaiden
Pac-Man
Punch-Out!! Featuring Mr. Dream
StarTropics
Super C
Super Mario Bros.
Super Mario Bros. 2
Super Mario Bros. 3
Tecmo Bowl
The Legend of Zelda
Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

There's a couple odd choices, but that's a pretty all-star list of games. I'm absolutely gonna buy one; it'd be great to play a lot of those games again. I know most are available through the Wii store, but that'd require spending more on other Nintendo products, and they're usually $5 per game. This is $2 per game, plus I get to use the original controller.

Hopefully this also means that a SNES version is in the works.

[Ded As Ned]

42 minutes ago, Fez said:

Nintendo's announced that this Fall they're releasing a mini-NES. It will have 30 built-in NES games (no word on if more can be added; but it looks like not), an HDMI port to connect to modern TVs, an original NES gamepad, and a second controller port that can accept another original NES gamepad or a Wii remote. And it'll only be $60. The game list is:

There's a couple odd choices, but that's a pretty all-star list of games. I'm absolutely gonna buy one; it'd be great to play a lot of those games again. I know most are available through the Wii store, but that'd require spending more on other Nintendo products, and they're usually $5 per game. This is $2 per game, plus I get to use the original controller.

Hopefully this also means that a SNES version is in the works.

I'm pretty excited about this too.  I started my kids on the emulators of the base systems and moved them up to now the PS3 (I don't have any latest-gen consoles yet).  The emulators never translated well to today's HDTV's, so I'll definitely pick it up just for that and playing on original controllers.  Would have liked a second Mega Man game, but given the state of that franchise these days I'm happy to get the one.

In other news, my 7 year old has decided to take on Shadow of the Colossus after watching me play through it a few weeks ago.  It's his first "big boy" game.  He just picked it up and started playing a new game the other day (erasing my saved one after beating it where I could do the time trials without the travelling... grrr now I have beat the tedious final boss again to get back to that point, not a huge deal... but still grrrr).  Anyway, it was a proud papa moment for me... especially given the amount of patience it takes.  He's made it through 8 or so of the colossi with only minimal input from me. 

[karaddin]

Clearly different people can just get different things out of the game, because ME3 was far from a dumb action flick for me. It was all the emotional beats that were flowing from the story and characters that made it so good for me (until the end), and while the gameplay itself did fit the action game more it was also the most polished and smooth of the 3 games.  

[DunderMifflin]

22 minutes ago, karaddin said:

Clearly different people can just get different things out of the game, because ME3 was far from a dumb action flick for me. It was all the emotional beats that were flowing from the story and characters that made it so good for me (until the end), and while the gameplay itself did fit the action game more it was also the most polished and smooth of the 3 games.  

Same here, I don't know if I should be ashamed that several parts of ME3 had me shedding tears. Blockbuster action movies never do that to me. It was the first game I actually cared about the characters that much.

[Corvinus85]

I still occasionally replay ME2 and 3, but stop short of the ending of ME3. I think minus the botched ending everything else about it is great. I love the characters, I enjoy the writing, and the game mechanics. I think ME3 had a better balance between customization and things being too tedious. It wasn't so tedious as ME1 at weapon/gear customization, but not so overly simplified as ME2. And it got rid of the tedious planet scanning that ME2 had. It was fun being chased around a solar system by Reapers.

[KiDisaster]

The only thing I liked less about 3 than 2 in terms of gameplay is the "floatiness" (for lack of a better word) of the combat. Combat in ME2 had this very satisfying weight to it that I found lacking in 3. Just didn't "feel" the impacts as much. Not even sure if that makes sense to anyone else but oh well

Biotic Charge + Nova + Shotgunnin' fools in 3 is the best though. 

[Jace, Extat]

I'm glad to see some more people felt the same about ME3. I too was moved to tears by it. It was far more an epic than a 'dumb action film'. The grand and blockbuster moments were well spaced between copious moments of companionship and personal tragedy.

To call it dumb, I have to imagine the accuser never shot bottles at the top of the Citadel. Or felt the heartbreak of being with Mordin in that spire and felt the impact of what might have come after. Did they hear the undercurrent of sadness in Garrus' voice when he joked about having wished to be a painter? I can't imagine so.

[KiDisaster]

"I am the very model of a scientist salarian..."

3 was great overall despite being rushed and despite the ending. I really, really wish they'd been given more time to develop it. 

[Jon AS]

1 hour ago, KiDisaster said:

 

The only thing I liked less about 3 than 2 in terms of gameplay is the "floatiness" (for lack of a better word) of the combat. Combat in ME2 had this very satisfying weight to it that I found lacking in 3. Just didn't "feel" the impacts as much. Not even sure if that makes sense to anyone else but oh well

I can't say that makes sense to me, no.

Having recently replayed ME2 and continuing into 3, gameplay in the latter game does everything the ME2 gameplay does, only better. Right down to stuff like getting rid of the annoying time dilation effect when sprinting (and allwoing for more than ~3s of sprint before Shepard is exhausted).

 

I agree that the Mass Effect series delivers a lot of great emoutional moments, including and especially in the third installment. I disagree that the series at any point is about hopelessness and futility. It's always about overcoming impossible odds, with the best results being achieved when people manage to work out their differences and cooperate.

Even the crappy ending isn't nihilistic. It's trying to be hopeful. It's just really, really dumb.