Mass Market Effect II

It’s been a while since I’ve felt like I had anything worthwhile to say about video games, but here we are again. Thanks for reading.

When talking about Mass Effect 3 I think it’s important to first address the elephant in the room – the ending. In case you haven’t heard, it is apparently very unpopular, and a movement has sprung up to convince BioWare to change it.

Without spoiling it for anyone I can safely say this: the real problem with the ending of Mass Effect 3 is not that it is narratively poor – it logically follows the story. It is that it is inherently unsatisfying. The Great Gatsby is one of my favorite books, but I dislike the ending. I can appreciate the novel on its artistic merit, even agree with the way the story went, without enjoying it.

I think the real, compelling question that Mass Effect 3 and the subsequent fan frenzy over the ending ask is, “is it enough for the ending of a video game to stand on artistic merit?” Novels and movies represent a few hours of investment and require no real effort to reach the ending.

By the time you close up shop in Mass Effect 3, you’ve probably logged 150 or so hours of active playtime into the game’s universe, and that only accounts for a single complete playthrough. That is more than six full days, or almost four 40-hour work weeks. Is it worth investing that kind of time in a story that ends on a gut punch?

I can’t answer that question for anyone else, but for my part, I will think hard before getting invested in another of BioWare’s game franchises, or, at the very least, I will enter into the next devil’s contract with a better understanding of what to expect from the designers.

These are not men with an interest in amusing you – these are men with an unexpectedly grim philosophy regarding the sanctity of narrative. As a writer I can respect that, but when I spend the kind of time and energy I’ve spent on Mass Effect I expect a pat on the back. I like happy endings – so sue me. Or, you know, donate to Child’s Play with a note attached saying I should change my attitude. It could work.

As for the complaint that the ending does not reflect the choices you have made throughout the story, I think that is a more difficult judgment call. BioWare could have limited the ending options for anyone who hadn’t played the original Mass Effect or Mass Effect 2, but doing so would have offended my sensibilities – I believe that when you pay for a thing you should get the whole thing.

It’s part and parcel to why I am opposed to EULAs, “online activation codes,” and to a lesser extent DLC on the whole. Not supporting BioWare in this would be hypocritical.

In the end, Mass Effect 3 does involve the choices you made in the first and second games to a great degree, and it engages them in a quantitative way that does ultimately influence how the end of the game plays out. I did successfully complete the game, but my understanding is that it is absolutely possible to fail, and for that reason I have to dismiss this particular grievance as spurious.

Your choices from all three games do affect the ending of Mass Effect 3 – just not the actual events of the successful ending, which one could argue have been narratively set in stone since long before the main character was even born.

With the matter of the ending dealt with, I have to say that overall, Mass Effect 3 kind of disappointed me. The game has none of the elegance of its immediate predecessor, replaced by rampant sentiment and unrepentant gut punches so frequent that they almost (almost, mind you) become ineffective.

On top of this, the game engine itself is a disaster, with a quest log that's almost as unusable as the inventory system from the original Mass Effect, and frequent freezes (and one legitimate crash to the main menu!) on the Xbox. I’ve never seen that happen before, and installing doesn’t seem to help. I’m told these things are less of an issue in the PC version of the game.

Ultimately, Mass Effect is another great trilogy that will go down in history with a second chapter that is the best out of three. But Mass Effect 3 is still playable and fun and engaging, and worth some bucks, particularly for the multiplayer, which almost feels like the main purpose of the software, it's so well implemented. It's just not a five-star game like Mass Effect 2.

My biggest complaints are that while missions in Mass Effect 2 ended at the perfect length, just as they were getting obnoxious, Mass Effect 3 throws this design concept right out the window in favor of Deep Meaningful Combat – long, confusing battles against powerful foes and challenging environments, meant to evoke hopelessness in the face of overwhelming odds but that are ultimately just frustrating.

The game also uses slow-motion to turn pivotal and dramatic combat moments into thinly veiled reflex minigames. Coupled with get-up-and-make-a-sandwich load times when you fail, the game’s overall approach to combat makes for an annoying disappointment.

Note: I am not “into” Mass Effect’s combat engine – it is possible that these sort of things might entertain more tactically minded players. As a casual gamer who generally plays this trilogy on Normal difficulty, I found it very difficult to stomach.

The narrative of Mass Effect 3 is ultimately its greatest strength, as it has been throughout the trilogy – while it suffers from some of the same opening cognitive dissonance present in the beginning of Mass Effect 2, this is forgivable considering the interactive nature of the story. The writers undertook a tremendous challenge in bringing the variable events in the games to life, and overall I think they did a quality job. The game’s story, while excessively sentimental, is a worthwhile capstone to a living universe.

Bottom line: I give Mass Effect 3.5 stars – the game is worth playing, but it requires a lot of patience with both the technology and the game balance. It just doesn’t quite deserve that fourth star.

Mirror's Edge: Holding On By Its Fingertips

Two-and-a-half stars out of five.

Mirror’s Edge, from EA DICE, is as far as I know video gaming’s first foray into the world of parkour. It executes the subject admirably. The innovative engine it uses to simulate running along rooftops and jumping from foothold to handhold to foothold is excellent; neither so difficult that it quickly becomes frustrating nor so forgiving that the player does not feel like he is working hard for every meter of ground. I frequently found myself holding my breath during particularly challenging leaps. The parkour portion of Mirror’s Edge could be a game in itself. In fact, it probably should have been.

I bought Mirror’s Edge despite warnings that it contained SWAT teams because I assumed that, as one friend described it, the enemies would be there to discourage slowing down. An important part of parkour is the speed with which one travels from point A to point B, and in a game with a plot that has nothing to do with the sport of parkour, there should be something in place to create a sense of urgency. I do not have a thematic objection to the presence of enemies in the game. Indeed, there are many ways that the police in Mirror’s Edge could have been utilized well to encourage constant movement, and on rare occasion the game does hit on one or two of them. Unfortunately, the developers do not seem to have recognized their value, and instead incorporate enemies as an unpredictable and frustrating element of their puzzle construction.

In fact, despite the game’s early warnings that hostiles should be avoided rather than fought, Mirror’s Edge is constantly putting the player in situations where direct confrontration, if not conflict, is required by the environment. The player’s radio contact repeatedly warns her to “be ready for a fight” from about the third chapter on. Police appear directly in the path of the player without explanation, even when that path involves overcoming considerable inaccessibility. And these are not the blue-uniformed pistol-bearing cops of the downloadable free demo. These are armored men carrying assault shotguns and rifles, and in some cases 50-caliber machine guns. If there is one message I want to express clearly in this review, it is this: the police are everywhere in this game. Expect the majority of this game to be parkour, but parkour under automatic weapons fire.

Even this could be forgiven, despite the fact that they are armed in this fashion to deal with the threat of a single woman armed only with her speed, if the police had good code governing them. But they do not. There is no stealth system in Mirror’s Edge. Enemies become aware of the player when they are activated, regardless of the player’s actions or concealment. And once they are aware of the player, they never lose track of her, no matter how insane or hidden her movements. The player will never step out of cover in Mirror’s Edge and not be greeted by a hail of bullets. The police can and do track the player around corners and through solid objects.

In many cases, the police do not spawn until the player has wasted too much time in a single area, but this is not universally the case, and there are a few locations in the game that contain enemies from the start and require the player to perform a time-consuming task while there, outside of cover and essentially stationary. The game never explicitly requires combat, but when climbing a pipe or opening a hatch takes two or three seconds, and the pipe or hatch are not protected, failing to deal with the armed men beforehand has predictable results.

In the end, what makes the combat in Mirror’s Edge a failure is not its inclusion but its execution. It would have been a simple matter to always have the police in a pursuit role, or if that became too contrived or difficult, to make the player significantly more vulnerable to gunfire while stationary and significantly less vulnerable while moving. Instead, the enemies are often directly in the players’ path, and gunfire is extremely erratic, to the extent that the player can make a run under fire without taking a single bullet that on a previous attempt resulted in her being gunned down instantly – and vice versa. If a designer is going to use gunfire in puzzle design, their algorithms for accuracy simply have to be more reliable than that. The demo could be beaten without taking a single bullet by making no more than two well-aimed slide kicks. If the whole game had played like that, this would have been a very different review.

The only thing keeping Mirror’s Edge from being a two-star game, despite the excellent parkour engine, is the time trial mode. These are genuinely fun rehashes of the parkour in the game’s story mode, often with some changes to the required route to keep things interesting. Unfortunately, in order to unlock these, you have to first beat the story mode of the game. The speedrun mode of the game is just the story mode with a timer attached, and adds no real value. Hopefully, if DICE produces a sequel, they will make the time trials available from the start and will also do something to eliminate or at least reduce the ubiquitous combat content from the original. Mirror’s Edge is not the game it should have been.

The final encounter of Mirror’s Edge is a short, entertaining boss fight that does not involve combat (only about half the “boss fights” in the game don’t), but rather quick and skillful use of parkour abilities. I successfully executed the required maneuver first try and happily watched the villain receive his comeuppance, only to then immediately succumb to the numerous high-powered gunshot wounds to my back. The experience defines Mirror’s Edge pretty well, in my mind – a good game ruined by poorly designed content that was irrelevant to begin with.

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