Social Hooper McFinney's RPF Bar & Grille 7.0 - "Keeping blind people away from Priuses one step at a time"

Saintheart - I think your story about your child is answer enough if you should change your name or not. Glad to hear he is safe. 2 yr old boys are such trouble...

 

Final assignment of my degree.

 

Nice!!



*parties hard with preferred drink!*

 

Double nice.

Update for ToF is done at last...

 

YIPPIE!!!!

 

"Are you dancin'?"
"Are you askin'?"
"I'm askin'!"
"I'm dancin'."

 

Cutting in on the partying and dancing here

So even though I have pretty much written off anymore interest in ME3 - specifically anymore DLC -, I have to admit...



...that looks pretty cool

 

Wow, it does. I had considered replaying the trilogy, I might just do that.

And hello everyone.

 

I'm seeing some real questionable reviews of this DLC. It looks cool because I like Aria, but I think I'll wait for an Xbox LIVE sale down the road, because Leviathan was recently half-price.

 

Well yeah it looks cool but I haven't bought it - mostly due to my Christmas shopping. Nonetheless, the trailer looks freakin' sweet I'll give it that. It's like back in the old days where ME was known to be completely 100% awesomeness with no tiny 2% to ruin the whole experience

I'll probably get it eventually though because it really looks legitimately awesome. Well, that's depending on reviews of course. Until then, however, the only thing I'm purchasing with Microsoft Points is the Halo 4 Map Pass for all the map packs that'll be coming out soon

For other gaming news though, recently I decided to purchase a game known as Chivalry: Medieval Warfare. Having once been just a mod for Half-Life 2 known as Age of Chivalry, this title is the successor and developed by the same people who made the mod in the first place. From what videos I saw, it looked cool and it was on Steam Sale yesterday for like half off (full price is $25) so I decided to purchase it with a bunch of my friends.

If there are any medieval (specifically medieval combat) fans out there that want a good hack-and-slash, sword-swinging action against other players, I'd give this one a go. Its certainly entertaining but even I still have a bit more to learn to be an accomplished duelist myself



Course, if you want to have some good laughs while you're playing, that works too (Warning: Beware the language thrown around by your stereotypical gamers for there is much )

 

Still haven't played ME3.

 

Well in the case of ME3, you are fortunate

 

^ That

 

Play the first two installments and just pretend it ends at that.

 

Well nah. To be fair, if I had gotten the extended endings instead of the original endings, I probably wouldn't have been so butt hurt about it

 

Actually...the EE doesn't add all that much...they still suck...

Not the least of which being the 'Refuse' ending.

 

Well that's because Refuse was just a slap in the face from Bioware

The EE doesn't add that much but it adds a helluva lot more then the originals did. I mean most of my real complaints with the originals were that they didn't say anything after what happened. One moment, awesome battle and warfare against the Reapers! Then all of a sudden.......

Deus Ex Machina...literally..., Star God Child Person StupidPieceofCrap, Shepard disintegrated/not really dead, Reapers destroyed/fly away, Mass Relays blow up, Normandy Crash Lands On Random Planet, THE END!

I mean.........wut!? My reaction to that was just to sit in front of my TV screen while the credits roll, dumbfounded, trying to figure out what the **** just happened!

The EEs added little but at least it was more then.....THAT!

Though to be fair, my appreciation to the EEs could be partly due to the fact that the originals were so horrible

 

Yeah...that's why I refuse (get it? ) to play ME3 through to the end again. I'll stick with the first two thank you.

Though Bioware didn't help matters with the screeching of 'ARTISTIC INTEGRITY!!! HOW DARE YOU CRITICIZE US!!!'

 

(Before I get to ME 3 issues...I've just finished the first hundred pages of Dramatica: a New Theory of Story, which is basically the crunch book that comes with the program. Mind. Blown. I think I understand, in a literary and storytelling context, how Ramza feels when he's deep in the pits of Wittengensteinian numberwang.)

But Dramatica, without getting into a massive side post outlining the theory, seems to have something of a grip on why ME 3's ending gets it wrong, not that they address it specifically, of course.

If I'm understanding the theory right, at its fundamental, a complete story is an author's argument about how a specific problem is solved. The author's argument amounts to his weighing up of the relative values of all the considerations that go into solving that problem. An author, writing a full story, invariably is saying "Here is problem X, and here is how I say it must be solved after weighing up all the approaches possible to resolve the problem." It's the argument that gives the story its meaning.

The book says, "To make his case, an author must examine all significant approaches to resolving the story's specific problem. If a part of the argument is left out, the story will have holes. If the argument is not made in an even-handed fashion, the story will have inconsistencies." Plot documents the problem solving methods employed in the story (Dramatica talks about the Story Mind -- and a hell of a lot more besides -- but let's leave that aside.) The characters represent the various motivations at play in the story (archetypes in stuff like Star Wars), which are often at cross-purposes and come into conflict.

In this case, our specific problem is the big-ass set of machines presently daisycutting the earth and which no other galactic civilisation has managed to defeat. So do we have parts of the argument left out, parts of the argument that "X is the only way to resolve this problem?"

Well, here's my reasoning. When the Starchild shows up, it is a literal deus ex machina. It comes out of nowhere and magically deals with the Reapers. But that's not actually the big problem with it. The real issue is that it's a gatekeeper to the climax: before EC, you simply could not refuse the Catakid's influence on the story. After EC, it's still the same result in storytelling terms because Refusal or shooting the kid results in an aborted end to Shephard's story - an unresolved end, to be precise, since we don't know, only assume, that he was killed by the Reapers. Shephard does not get the opportunity to think over or consider the existence of an outside force to defeat the Reapers, it's imposed on him. If you cannot meaningfully consider his argument, for example at least having Garrus radio in and yell "Don't listen to the little bastard, Shephard!", then a hole results not because he denies you choice, but because the author has not presented a meaningful argument for why he exists and why you must contend with him in context.

I will even go out on a limb and propose that the introduction of the Catakid, even five minutes before the end, would not have been a problem -- IF the story had gone into the topic of intervention by a deity or outside force to defeat the Reapers, or, more simply, if the kid had been meaningfully foreshadowed ahead of time. Then the argument would be complete; you would have that means of defeating the Reapers considered by the characters.

As it is, neither topic gets addressed, considered, or evaluated by any major character: Shephard's dreams, whilst containing the magic kid back on Earth, don't actually lead to any narrative significance. No choices flow from his dreams; no character development as such unless you squint really hard at Shephard. They seem to be there solely to hint at the Catakid's existence, not suggest that intervention by an outside force to defeat the Reapers is an approach to resolving the problem and needs full consideration by the characters. (The Leviathan DLC also falls into the same hole -- that's an appeal to the Reapers' creators themselves, but that line of argument or reasoning is more or less shut down in the last five minutes without argument or influence by the protagonist. The Leviathan won't help you in battle against the Reapers, and that's that.)

I actually have a radical thought, based on what I admit is an exploratory read of Dramatica: if the developers had insisted the Catakid remain, ME 3 would have been narratively improved and better received by removing that final choice of CTRL/ALT/DEL at all. Your selected red/green/blue ending now depends solely on all the other decisions in the game. Had the makers done that, what would have resulted would have actually been closer to a full, satisfying story because you had written it throughout. You had been the author who considered the approaches throughout the game by means of the Paragon/Renegade dynamic. Synthesis could have gone to a Paragrade outcome, perhaps. In the pre-EC and EC, you are left with the illusion of choice, and that's the entire problem with that scene - the Catakid gives you a choice when narratively there should be none. Your decision to control, destroy, or plug in the Matrix on galactic civilisation should have already been made in the thousands of other decisions you made during the game. As a character, you should have either grown to embrace the opposite of what you were (from neutral to Paragon, or neutral to Renegade) or you should have stayed steadfast - played Paragon and stayed that way, or played Renegade and always stayed that way. I would posit people would have accepted that a lot more than they accept the current mess: not only do you have the problem of a deus ex machina which is kept away from your consideration, but you are actually left with the opportunity to completely turn your back on all of your character's previous decisions and select something against their nature. The choice thereby becomes solely a time-saving measure so you don't have to go back and play through the whole game again to get a different outcome.

How do I know this would work, aside from the fact Dramatica is powering much of my theorising?
Because this is how ME 2 worked in the suicide mission. You weren't really given much of a choice in ME 2 as such: you were still going to go on the suicide mission and still fight Lil' Reaper no matter what - but your choices both during the runup to the suicide mission, logistically and characterwise, meaningfully dictated the survival rate. Even your final choice of whether to destroy the base or neutralise it is largely illusory (pardon the pun) in narrative terms because the specific problem of the story was to stop the Collectors, and whether you destroy or neutralise that problem is solved.

The death rate was incredibly significant since ME 2 was a character-based story, where the characters represent approaches. And it works better as a story than ME 3 because it's closer to a full story argument that the player is allowed to make for himself. And if you want a significantly different outcome, you're going to be investing at least a lot more time mining if not doing all those loyalty missions.

 

After almost 40 hours without real, quality sleep, it is time for bed.

No more assignments left in my undergraduate degree.

Two exams, and then I've got it!

 

Uh oh, he's using the phrase "undergraduate." HE'S GOT THE BUG!

 

... so anyway, the Omega DLC is good fun! Badassery, Aria, Omega, and more badassery - unfortunately the thing is one giant railroad, but one can't have everything, I suppose.

 

To be fair, when isn't it a railroad?

 

Too true.

 

When it's an airplane.