edit: I don't get what all the fuss over ME3 is all about. I loved it. 1 through 3. Just to see everything come together was great. To each his own though I suppose. Almost brought a tear to my eye. <3
edit: I don't get what all the fuss over ME3 is all about. I loved it. 1 through 3. Just to see everything come together was great. To each his own though I suppose. Almost brought a tear to my eye. <3
now that they can use cbs stuff they should change the bombcast page picture so each guy represents a classic cbs show like star trek, twin peaks, taxi, happy days, i love lucy, hawaii 5-o
On Mass Effect 3 (minor ending spoilers): I actually had a lot of fun with the game and didn't really see why Jeff gave it a 4 in his review (though I didn't actually read it because I tried to go in blind). Then I finished it this Sunday. It felt like someone held me down and made me pick from three different flavours of shit. I wasn't really angry about it being too negative or whatever, I just felt it was too vague, didn't take into account ANY part of my journey up to that point and pulled a lot of last minute curveballs out of it's ass.
Of course I've read about there being an "Indoctrination theory" since and started piecing some of it together on my own without actually reading much of it. It definitely started to make more sense and I didn't feel quite as bad about it BUT the brevity and vagueness still ruined my view of the game as a whole. So I'm totally on board with them not necessarily changing the ending so much as clarifying some things, not so much for me but for people who haven't played it yet.
I HAVE ONE QUESTION THOUGH:
Why do you see flashes of Joker, Anderson and Liara before dying? What's the significance of those three characters there?
Edit: Also, I love that Ending music. No, not the crap that plays during the credits, the slow piano piece.
On Mass Effect 3 (minor ending spoilers): I actually had a lot of fun with the game and didn't really see why Jeff gave it a 4 in his review (though I didn't actually read it because I tried to go in blind). Then I finished it this Sunday. It felt like someone held me down and made me pick from three different flavours of shit. I wasn't really angry about it being too negative or whatever, I just felt it was too vague, didn't take into account ANY part of my journey up to that point and pulled a lot of last minute curveballs out of it's ass.
Of course I've read about there being an "Indoctrination theory" since and started piecing some of it together on my own without actually reading much of it. It definitely started to make more sense and I didn't feel quite as bad about it BUT the brevity and vagueness still ruined my view of the game as a whole. So I'm totally on board with them not necessarily changing the ending so much as clarifying some things, not so much for me but for people who haven't played it yet.
I HAVE ONE QUESTION THOUGH:
Why do you see flashes of Joker, Anderson and Liara before dying? What's the significance of those three characters there?
Edit: Also, I love that Ending music. No, not the crap that plays during the credits, the slow piano piece.
( very Minor ending Spoilers)
I came out of the ending kind of in the middle, it did not make me all super angry but it was not that fulfilling ending of A) i did everything right, we might just all make it out of this B) made some hard choices and let some good people die i wonder how this roller coaster is going to end, or C) i want to see how bad it gets. Which is disappointing when you let the ending sit with you a few days.
Its does feel like your choices did not factor a great deal into it, but hearing the indoctrination theory makes a lot of sense and i hope that it is the direction bioware is going because i would have to give them a hand for doing something so bold. The only question that would leave is having a paid ending may seem a little dirty if this charily ending DLC is not free. I still think the journey to the end was a wild ride and i have faith bioware will live up to clearing up this ending hate. The made good on the whole Liara romance in ME2.
gb crew still doesnt get the mass effect 3 ending cuz of their own folly
saying that ur choices dont matter is ridiculous, every thing you do during the game has consequences that you see play out almost immediately, which is better and cooler than the consequences only coming at the end of the game. the entire game felt like an ending and a beautiful one at that and you see the potential of the galaxy's future and how it will turned out based on your final decision.
the ending was ULTIMATE and was the beginning of the true singularity of organics and synthetics which shows a very possible future for humanity as we know it now which is also beautiful as heck
screw the haters
PS haters who dont like the ending also have no feelings cuz i cried like 3 times
gb crew still doesnt get the mass effect 3 ending cuz of their own folly
saying that ur choices dont matter is ridiculous, every thing you do during the game has consequences that you see play out almost immediately, which is better and cooler than the consequences only coming at the end of the game. the entire game felt like an ending and a beautiful one at that and you see the potential of the galaxy's future and how it will turned out based on your final decision.
the ending was ULTIMATE and was the beginning of the true singularity of organics and synthetics which shows a very possible future for humanity as we know it now which is also beautiful as heck
screw the haters
PS haters who dont like the ending also have no feelings cuz i cried like 3 times
That running game sounds like a really neat idea. It's too bad I don't have an Iphone or I would buy it for sure. I guess I'll stick with my regularly scheduled Bombcast for such needs.
Great episode, guys. Hope this launches an even crazier new era of Giant Bomb.
I laughed because I didn't hear the podcast until 6am on Friday morning on my way to work. All the jokes about a "morning radio DJ" fit perfectly for me on my morning commute. :)
Would you guys consider doing a Mass Effect 3 "Spoiler cast" and maybe talk about some of the indoctrination theories? I'd be very interested in your guys opinions.
On Mass Effect 3 (minor ending spoilers): I actually had a lot of fun with the game and didn't really see why Jeff gave it a 4 in his review (though I didn't actually read it because I tried to go in blind). Then I finished it this Sunday. It felt like someone held me down and made me pick from three different flavours of shit. I wasn't really angry about it being too negative or whatever, I just felt it was too vague, didn't take into account ANY part of my journey up to that point and pulled a lot of last minute curveballs out of it's ass.
Of course I've read about there being an "Indoctrination theory" since and started piecing some of it together on my own without actually reading much of it. It definitely started to make more sense and I didn't feel quite as bad about it BUT the brevity and vagueness still ruined my view of the game as a whole. So I'm totally on board with them not necessarily changing the ending so much as clarifying some things, not so much for me but for people who haven't played it yet.
I HAVE ONE QUESTION THOUGH:
Why do you see flashes of Joker, Anderson and Liara before dying? What's the significance of those three characters there?
Edit: Also, I love that Ending music. No, not the crap that plays during the credits, the slow piano piece.
( very Minor ending Spoilers)
I came out of the ending kind of in the middle, it did not make me all super angry but it was not that fulfilling ending of A) i did everything right, we might just all make it out of this B) made some hard choices and let some good people die i wonder how this roller coaster is going to end, or C) i want to see how bad it gets. Which is disappointing when you let the ending sit with you a few days.
Its does feel like your choices did not factor a great deal into it, but hearing the indoctrination theory makes a lot of sense and i hope that it is the direction bioware is going because i would have to give them a hand for doing something so bold. The only question that would leave is having a paid ending may seem a little dirty if this charily ending DLC is not free. I still think the journey to the end was a wild ride and i have faith bioware will live up to clearing up this ending hate. The made good on the whole Liara romance in ME2.
The Liara romance in 3 was actually really good, there was almost no awkwardness except for a couple of the kissing scenes which I imagine are still hard to animate, the scene when she makes that prothean style record was pretty good. Definitely glad I stuck with her through 2 even though there wasn't much going on there.
Gawd no basketball pleeeeze. I am not invested in it.....I'm really tripping on this excitement of a new larger better more extravagant elaborate place. Not being a negative nancy, just tripping. I'm actually missing a little bit the somewhat lesser microphone system of before..they sounded then more like a group of guys, and not individual guys talking to each other. it's like they are in isolated sound chambers with the result sent to a high end mixer.
Hungarian lanquage maybe resonates with their stylized violin playing. Nonsensical I know but....get the impression Hungary has many influences in it's culture.
EDIT-Ice tea is a pretty intelligent guy if you ever listened to his earliest material, before he did that rock stuff. I'm just now starting to get the mod and upgrade and half/ass mining , not liking that like that as much as in ME2
@thebigJ_A: What was good about ME1? Besides Garrus, Wrex, and Tali? And the promise the whole series had, that's only way I made it through that game. And ME3 is definitely a great game (not 100% perfect in every conceivable aspect at every single nook, cranny, and second of the game, but all games are like that), it is just the ending is a flat, odd blunder. All the other @#!*% is @#!*% awesome though, and the focus on the Citadel again felt ME1-ish I guess.
This. I played through the first game begrudgingly before ME2 came out and didn't get what people liked about it. Then I played 2 and it blew my freaking mind. Still my favorite game this generation easily, other than maybe Super Mario Galaxy. My love for 2 led me to be more forgiving of the piles of flaws and poor design of the original and really dig into the universe more.
And yeah, the ME3 ending totally sucks. The game was awesome otherwise, and I was hoping I wouldn't react like most people did to the ending...but man, what were they thinking?
This. I played through the first game begrudgingly before ME2 came out and didn't get what people liked about it. Then I played 2 and it blew my freaking mind. Still my favorite game this generation easily, other than maybe Super Mario Galaxy. My love for 2 led me to be more forgiving of the piles of flaws and poor design of the original and really dig into the universe more.
And yeah, the ME3 ending totally sucks. The game was awesome otherwise, and I was hoping I wouldn't react like most people did to the ending...but man, what were they thinking?
Gotta remember ME came out back in 2007. In terms of rough edges, they were legion, but in terms of raw ambition? There hadn't been a game quite like that yet. Remember we are talking 2 years before nuTrek here, a sci-fi universe so well realized hadn't come on the scene like this in a decade.
@Tarsier said:
gb crew still doesnt get the mass effect 3 ending cuz of their own folly
saying that ur choices dont matter is ridiculous, every thing you do during the game has consequences that you see play out almost immediately, which is better and cooler than the consequences only coming at the end of the game. the entire game felt like an ending and a beautiful one at that and you see the potential of the galaxy's future and how it will turned out based on your final decision.
the ending was ULTIMATE and was the beginning of the true singularity of organics and synthetics which shows a very possible future for humanity as we know it now which is also beautiful as heck
screw the haters
PS haters who dont like the ending also have no feelings cuz i cried like 3 times
Only one of the endings leads directly to any singularity. More to the point, it doesn't really matter if Superman finally inspires humanity to work towards world peace, only for the sun to blow up during the signing ceremony. IE great you could be an absolute dick or a shining inspiration for your ending, all those blown up Mass Relays mean a whole lotta nova'd planetary systems meaning it doesn't matter one way or another.
I thought the ME3 ending discussion was interesting. If you don't realize what's going on with the ending - and let's be honest, it's not difficult - it really does suck. BioWare made some really interesting decisions, but I think you really have to break down the ending to see it. I've written a pretty lengthy thing about it:
While people are looking into the ending way too much, this "Indoctrination Theory" stuff is actually what's going down with the ending. I know it sounds silly and desperate, and I dismissed it at first too, but after I read about some stuff, I almost felt bad for not noticing it the first time. So bear with me here, I know it's easy to laugh at, but BioWare did something really neat with their ending, but it does need to be broken down and spelled out.
So here's the thing: Remember how the kid vanished in the vent at the beginning? That was a bit supernatural. The thing is, the kid was never actually real, and it was just a symbol for Shepard's battle against the indoctrination. Remember the weird forest place from his dreams? After Shepard gets hit by the Reaper laser, suddenly the exact same shrub vegetation from his dreams appear on the path to the teleportation thingy. And from there, things get really supernatural. Shepard finds himself in a room that has scenery pulled directly from the Collectors ship, the Geth ship, and another ship from the first game. It makes no sense. What's even more unnatural, Anderson somehow beats Shepard to the panel even though it's a straight path.
Now it gets even more crazy. Anderson represents Shepard's willpower to resist the Reapers, and the Illusive Man represents the Reapers trying to fully indoctrinate Shepard's mind. Why do I think that? After Shepard shoots Anderson, you hear not one but two groans of pain. YouTube the ending - it's totally there. Remember, Anderson more or less represents Shepard. Later on, the camera actually pans to a new wound in Shepard's body - the exact same place he shot Anderson. Also, during this scene, Shepard sees black tentacles at the edge of the screen. When the game was talking about symptoms of Indoctrination, it specifically mentioned the black tentacles. BioWare knows their fiction. Why would they put all this stuff in? It can't be just an accident.
So, after that, when Shepard get transported to a new magical place (which, you gotta admit, is pretty silly and unnatural), the kid is there. The kid was always the symbol for Shepard's indoctrination, and at this point, he's directly talking to him. He says that you can destroy all synthetic life, but he discourages it because apparently "people will just build synthetics again, repeating the process." He encourages Shepard to take control of the Reapers instead, and if you choose to do that, he gives a menacing smile. What's happening here is that Shepard is making his last stand against the indoctrination. If he decides to control the Reapers, he's giving into the indoctrination. I mean, he's even covered with Reaper/Husk looking stuff. If he decides to destroy the Catalyst or whatever, he's resisting against the indoctrination. Think that's silly? The "destruction" ending is the only ending where Shepard actually wakes up in the London rubble. The part that really underlines this stuff is how the "destruction" ending is tinted with Renegade red, and the "control" ending is Paragon blue. It's a neat device that BioWare used to represent how the Reapers are trying to convince him to get the "control" ending, and as a result give into the indoctrination.
So yeah. That's kind of a lot of stuff. If you don't buy this "indoctrination theory", you gotta admit, there is a lot of stuff in the ending that's weird and unnatural. They know their fiction, and there's no way all this stuff was just an accident. You could say people are looking into it too much, but keep in mind: BioWare knows their fiction better than any of us, so maybe it's not crazy that you have to look into the fiction this much to understand what's going on.
If you do buy it, it makes the ending weird in a different way. If all that stuff really was happening in Shepard's mind, then how the hell does the story really end? So, he wakes up in London, free of the indoctrination, but then what? All that stuff with control/synthesis/destroy was just an illusion, so none of that really happened. And that's the part that I'm hopeful for. BioWare is in a tricky spot right now. They could just forget that indoctrination stuff and say "fuck it, let's just pretend that never happened", or they could provide a real ending to the story. Either way, they put themselves in a really bad spot. If they do run with the indoctrination stuff, a lot of people will call bullshit. If they decide to ignore it, then we've got a really shitty ending to Mass Effect 3.
This. I played through the first game begrudgingly before ME2 came out and didn't get what people liked about it. Then I played 2 and it blew my freaking mind. Still my favorite game this generation easily, other than maybe Super Mario Galaxy. My love for 2 led me to be more forgiving of the piles of flaws and poor design of the original and really dig into the universe more.
And yeah, the ME3 ending totally sucks. The game was awesome otherwise, and I was hoping I wouldn't react like most people did to the ending...but man, what were they thinking?
Gotta remember ME came out back in 2007. In terms of rough edges, they were legion, but in terms of raw ambition? There hadn't been a game quite like that yet. Remember we are talking 2 years before nuTrek here, a sci-fi universe so well realized hadn't come on the scene like this in a decade.
I wanted to like the game so bad, I got it when it came out and everything. But it really didn't live up to many expectations, but I struggled through the parts I didn't like and got as much out of the good parts as I could, and then proceeded to really enjoy the second game once it came out. And yeah that ending...not even an ending.
This. I played through the first game begrudgingly before ME2 came out and didn't get what people liked about it. Then I played 2 and it blew my freaking mind. Still my favorite game this generation easily, other than maybe Super Mario Galaxy. My love for 2 led me to be more forgiving of the piles of flaws and poor design of the original and really dig into the universe more.
And yeah, the ME3 ending totally sucks. The game was awesome otherwise, and I was hoping I wouldn't react like most people did to the ending...but man, what were they thinking?
Gotta remember ME came out back in 2007. In terms of rough edges, they were legion, but in terms of raw ambition? There hadn't been a game quite like that yet. Remember we are talking 2 years before nuTrek here, a sci-fi universe so well realized hadn't come on the scene like this in a decade.
I wanted to like the game so bad, I got it when it came out and everything. But it really didn't live up to many expectations, but I struggled through the parts I didn't like and got as much out of the good parts as I could, and then proceeded to really enjoy the second game once it came out. And yeah that ending...not even an ending.
I think the second game was more of an action movie than say an old school sci-fi film. It's definitely more fun, but for my money I really liked the feel of the first one BECAUSE of it's flaws.
Heck, I would have preferred NOT being the savior of the galaxy. I'd have loved just tooling around the galaxy with my crew just trying to scrape together some credits. It works better in game mechanics, things like why I'm paying for or rebuying stuff, why I don't have more than two buddies at any given time despite many missions not really having a good reason for that limitation (why say Garrus would accept not going to Haestrom whether I picked two other guys ahead of him or not) why I can't seem to get anyone to listen to me, etc.
I think what really hurt ME was their ambition, paradoxically what I love about it. Not enough time, money, or resources to try to have compelling vehicular exploration of alien worlds in the first game of a trilogy (even Lucas never tried to have more than 3 major settings in his movies), or oodles of weapons and gear that had to be seriously generic cause again all that time and money to try and make distinctive looks...
Honestly think a PS2/Xbox start to the series with a MUCH smaller scope to each one to allow for asset/gameplay/lore building before jumping into their opus might have been the way to go. Games where each one was set on a single world (with a single hub city, but actually build it GTA lite style, rather than the couple of corridors and rooms we get to represent sprawling multimillion metroplexes in the ME series) against a single antagonist type with a couple alien NPCS's gradually building the Codex through the course of the games might have been the way to go on such an ultimately ambitious project.
I mean isn't it weird we still haven't seen a female Turian or Batarian? I concede the in story excuses for the Salarians, Drell, etc. even if they are a bit too convenient. I like that we are getting some alien looks to some of the gear in ME3 though.
@huser: An interesting look, but to me 2 felt more like I was exploring the more interesting parts of the universe, like Omega. Where as ME1 felt like a straight line, very clean and basic. The ending and final boss of ME2 seemed much less the focus, it was more about the places you were going and the people in it. ME1 was more about chasing Saren. I guess the loot system has the advantage of being a "scrap collector" or explorer type thing, but it being so poorly implement and shallow kind of made it nothing but a headache to me. But really, Wind Waker gives you a better feel of being an explorer than any of these games. That being said, I would like an ME game that is more like Skyrim, in a large central varied world, where you can play as any of the races you have had in your party in 1-3.
OH MY GOD OH MY GOD THE SOUND QUALITY SLIGHTLY CHANGED, THAT MEANS THAT THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE MICROPHONES ARE NOW SOULESS CORPORATE HUSKS11!!!!!!!1!1!!11!1!!!1!!!!1!111!1!!11
Oh god. Shut up. The sound quality is worse than before, that's all. Don't be an idiot.
345 Comments