One Divine Machine

I just finished my first replay of the MASS EFFECT, the first game in the trilogy recently completed March 6. What follows is my too-long ramblings and ruminations on the game in comparison to the rest of the series as well as on its own.

I have been with the ME series since it was released in 2007, which meant that a lot of the storylines and particulars of the first game had withered away in the back of my mind. While the series prides itself by providing choice to the player and constantly reminds the player of choices that he or she has made from day one, the details get fuzzy and glossed over (the price of a manageable series). I decided to replay the first Mass Effect while still absorbed in the series (I beat the third game in three days over Spring Break, so it's been heavy on my mind). I surprised at several things I found/realized while playing.

A few notes on my various playthroughs:

1. R. Shepard. Sex: Male. Class: Vanguard. Alignment: Paragon. Time (ME1): 35:00.

R. is the playthrough I have taken through all three games.

2. S. Shepard (unfinished). Sex: Male. Class: Infiltrator. Alignment: Renegade. Time: 25:30.

AKA The Jerk Save.

3. W. Shepard. Sex: Female. Class: Sentinel. Alignment: Paragon. Time: 12:51. 

First time to play a female in a Bioware game. For the record: "FemShep," as the internet has decided to name her to my disdain, has the better, more emotive voice actor. "ManShep," as I have scathingly decided to label the male Shepard, is much more flat and sounds military 100% of the time, even when he's not supposed to be.

Now the spoiler-free stuff:

The ominous presence of EA. ME1 was released in November 2007. Electronic Arts (EA), popularly known in the gaming world as the Evil Empire, bought Bioware, ME's developer (also responsible for amazing games like Baldur's Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Dragon Age), in October 2007. ME1 escaped EA's gravitational pull, and it shows in the game's priorities. Lots of emphasis on the story, tough enemies that take forever to take out, huge levels that can take several hours to traverse and eliminate all foes, diverse class systems with lots of skill trees, and large inventory systems.  By ME3, these emphases shifted dramatically: tough enemies are traded out for more enemies that are mostly easily dispatched; extremely linear levels, which eliminate the possibility of getting lost but also shrink a game about space to the size and scope of tunnels; same number of class systems but with dramatically fewer skills (they make up for this by adding myriad teammates to make up for Commander Shepard's (a.k.a. your) inadequacies); and an elimination of the sprawling inventory system for a more streamlined one. Some of these changes are good, some of these are questionable. By the time ME3 rolled around, Bioware had completely devoted itself to a user-friendly experience that made it more interchangeable with some of EA's other titles. For instance, Shepard can now heavy melee, which is on par with other third-person games available. Perhaps one of the most pandering decisions of all was the addition of a bare bones multiplayer mode that allows players to compete against waves of enemies. To force players to play online (and buy online access if they didn't get the Collector's Edition), multiplayer in the third game is actually tied (through some strange calculus) to the possible outcomes of the game.  This latter point about ME3's multiplayer highlights another EA effect on Bioware: the Downloadable Content (DLC) scheme. In ME1, very little that was very interesting was added to the game, but the DLC was cheap and worth the extra gameplay. In ME2, DLC was released through the "Cerberus Network," which required players to pay to be able to download extra content as it was released, including extra characters. Most content could be downloaded while paying the one fee, however. But with ME3, the game changed completely: new missions and characters could be downloaded, but only by paying for each one. DLC was available Day 1, and included a character that basically acts as an interpreter for many of the events of the game that would go unexplained otherwise.  Bottom line: EA's cynicism regarding the intelligence and pocketbooks of video gamers seeped into Bioware's game philosophy. Playing ME1 is like visiting a point in time when all of this had yet to happen.  

The distance between ME1 and ME3 is in light years. This isn't shocking. The XB360 was just two years old when ME1 was released, and in many ways plays more like a late generation XB game than a current generation XB360 game. Part of it has to do with EA's influence. ME1 is slow, trudging. ME3 is a blast. Things happen quickly. The game requires you do very little backtracking and conventional explore and fetch quests (for better and worse). The pacing is snappier. Shepard has more control over his squad mates, and the locations are more diverse and interesting. Interactive cutscenes (which require a trigger pull for paragon or renegade actions) require players to be on their toes. Combat reinforces this. Floods of enemies mean Shepard can destroy armies in minutes but also be overwhelmed if not taken seriously enough. ME1 seems almost rudimentary in comparison (though ME1 was mind-blowing enough in its heyday).

Now for the ME1 reflections/mild spoilers.

ME1 very plainly lays out the trajectory of the series in ways I hadn't remembered. Most of the series plot points can be predicted from a few key conversations. By "predict" I don't mean "crystal ball" - I mean "plainly spelled out without much attempt to cover meaning." For instance, Vigil, the VI on Ilos (one of many planets I'd forgotten about), pretty much reveals the true identity of the main enemy in the second game and describes the Citadel's role in the final game (which, again, I had forgotten had already been revealed). 

Then again, Bioware also plays a lot of the reveals of ME2 and ME3 as if it hadn't already tipped its hand, which made some of my replay both revealing and perplexing. So much is given away in the first game and seemingly so little added to it by the second and third installments (ask any irritated fan what they learned from ME3 about the enemy and its motivations, and they will likely, ah, demur).  In later games, characters will reference Shepard's background and missions from ME1: Eden Prime, Feros, Virmire, Noveria, Ilos. Each of these missions (besides Eden Prime and Ilos, perhaps) require the player to make decisions that reverberate throughout the series. Playing through those decisions again was really a treat (if extremely tedious - some missions took quite a chunk of time). 

I finished The Witcher a few days ago. It was the first computer adventure game I'd played, with the exception of the TaleWorlds Mount & Blade series. I usually reserve games like this for console gaming. But as Witcher is PC only, and it's $10 over at GOG.com, I thought I'd give it a whirl. And a good whirl it was! 

Likes:

It's Fairly Massive. This one cuts both ways. A massive game means you may never finish it, but it also means more bang for your buck. With my ridiculous "$1/hour of gameplay" standard, I like things that take a long time. Though there's no way to check, I'd guess that I had 27-35 hours on The Witcher. While some of it is artificial, in that there are lots of missions that make you go hither and yon to gather X number of resources (more on this in a little bit), just completing the main story line is a fairly long affair.

The Combat System. This one has been the most iffy for people I know who've tried to play the game, but man, I loved it. There are three combat styles - strong, fast, and group, and two different swords - silver (monsters) and steel (people). The different swords can be a bit annoying, because there were a few times when I was surrounded by five guys and one monster or vice versa, and one sword couldn't do for them all. It doesn't help that switching between swords takes a good three seconds, which is just enough time for you to get shredded to bits if you're not careful. Still, I enjoyed switching between the styles. Geralt, the titular witcher, changes stances and the position of the sword, as well as his position when he's slicing and dicing. The combat system, besides selecting styles and swords, is just a clicking affair. If you time your clicks with the changing flame around your mouse cursor, you can fire off a combo with no problem. If you're too fast or too slow, you lose your rhythm and have to start over again. It sounds frustrating, but it's actually lot of fun.

The Leveling System. This is an RPG, meaning there are a lot of skills to upgrade, a lot of modifications to make to weapons, and a lot of potions and things to use. The leveling system in this game is really balanced and fun to use. It uses a three-color talent system, with bronze, silver, and gold - the former of which is only in plenty at the beginning of the game and the last of which only starts showing up with you're leveling up late in the game. There are all sorts of upgrades - fighting styles, potion and bomb-making, stat upgrades, status upgrades (which Geralt is drunk or poisoned, for instance), magic upgrades, etc. Every time I leveled up, there would be some real decisions to make based on my style of playing the game, and I found that to be ridiculously enjoyable.

Gather-As-You-Go Questing. Okay, so the game has a lot of fetch quests. But 75% of the time, I had acquired what I needed by the time I got the fetch quest. Witcher doesn't have a whole lot of trigger events - that is, you have to talk to someone or read something before a quest becomes active and you can gather what you need. Instead, Witcher allows you to gather what you need as you play, which makes questing a lot less annoying and a lot less about walking miles to get one thing than about making sure you keep everything you get in your inventory. 

The Story. Geralt has amnesia, yes, but the story really does try to build around and beyond that (though he seems to remember odd things here and there that he really shouldn't, but I let it go). Over the course of five chapters and an epilogue, your decisions build upon one another, almost all of them irreversible (you can have a change of heart at some points during the major storyline, but they cut you off at a certain point). Each chapter has its new locations, new characters, new problems. It's genuinely interesting dark fantasy.

The Choices. As briefly mentioned above, there are choices to make in this game and they build on each other. But these are not standard "BE YE GOOD OR EVIL" choices, a la, say, Mass Effect. These are "I really don't know which is the best side in this, so I'm just going to choose the side that I can identify with" kind of choices.  By the end, there are two main sides throughout the story (though there is a neutral path by the end that has its own major consequences).  I sided with one of the major players (I won't say which) because I disagreed with the methods of the other. At one point, Geralt cannot choose neutrality or the other side, so I ended up being stuck with my choice. After making said choice, I saw the true murderous, torturous methods of the side I had chosen, had an "oh no" moment, and reloaded. It was a true shock, because I hadn't understood the game The Witcher was playing a game with me. It was an interesting twist and a good challenge to my perceptions of Witcher as a standard RPG with standard choices.

Geralt. While having amnesia isn't the most original back story for a character, Geralt was also brought back from the dead and no one knows who did it or why. That makes for some interesting questions (that linger into the second game, apparently), and some intriguing quests and inner monologue. Geralt is a character who is truly both on the outside (as his witcher training has made him into a "mutant") and in the middle, as arbitrator, savior, and as executioner. I thoroughly enjoyed being Geralt, and is one of the reasons I would play the next in the series in a heartbeat.

Oh yeah. Graphics. They're pretty good!

Dislikes

Voice-acting. Some of it, like Geralt's voice, is passable. Some of it is atrocious. Part of it is the editing, which clips off some of the sentences and makes it sound rushed when it shouldn't. Mostly it's the voice actors, some of which made me laugh in a bad way. But this is a low-budget game, the studio's first (they run the GOG.com store, or vice versa, and made the jump into games), and I wouldn't hold it against them too much. The next game? Yeah, maybe. But this one, not so much.

Dialogue. There may be a bridge of translation here, as the game company is Polish. Regardless, some of the pacing of the dialogue is terrible, and some of the beat-you-over-the-head obviousness is laughable - characters stop short of telling you when to save before something major happens, but just barely. Pretty hilarious evidence of the bad dialogue comes at the beginning. One of your party, in an epic battle at the beginning of the game, gets mortally wounded and can only be saved by a potion you have to make. After getting all you need and reviving your companion, she immediately prompts you to get into bed with her (more on THIS later), and Geralt has the option of sleeping with her. Then, post-coitus, she asks him what happened at the battle that she didn't make it through. Her reaction to being told someone died is basically, "Oh. Well, that's a shame." SEX FIRST, GRIEVING LATER.

???

The Sex Cards. Being a witcher, with his traveling lifestyle, Geralt doesn't have a lot of time for relationships (a fact that plays into the story later on). Within the first two hours of playing the game, he had the opportunity to sleep with three women. Each "encounter" pays off with a sex card, which shows the woman in question in a particularly revealing, semi-pornographic or absolutely pornographic pose. Some made me laugh. Some horrified me. So it goes in the ??? category.

Art/ist of the Day: Franz Marc's The Fate of the Animals. This is my favorite painting.

Franz Marc was drafted into WWI, and was on a list of notable artists to be withdrawn from war when he was killed at the Battle of Verdun. His short career produced some amazing works. 

Marc is considered one of the fathers of the art movement futurism.

I'm a fairly pretty big nerd. I love to play video games, especially RPGs (I have a $1/hr of gameplay standard - otherwise I usually feel like I don't get my money's worth). I love Magic: The Gathering so much I've had to swear it off, and it's all I can do to keep myself from buying a new booster pack every time I pass by the "impulse buy" isle at Walmart. I like to play complicated, two- or three-hour long board games with my friends. I'm a big history nerd (it's kind of my thing). And as a child growing up in AMERICA, I grew up on and loved Star Wars Episodes IV-VI. 

My fascination with the original Star Wars trilogy was more than just a love for the funny robots, the big furry monster, and the cool superpowers. I remember sitting in front of the TV one summer with a blue legal notepad and writing down things to watch for in a list on the left ("R2 Beeps," "Lightsabers," "Laser Blasts") and leaving space on the right to write down tally marks for however many times those things happened/appeared throughout each movie. It was incredibly nerdy and incredibly pointless, but I enjoyed the films enough to watch them as many times as it took to fill out my little form. I went back to school before I could really get started, but I remembered thinking I was going to be pretty cool if I could cite all of my statistics to my friends (how weird my perceptions of cool were).

I saw the entire prequel trilogy in theaters, and I had posters of Ewan McGregor and the Battle of Geonosis on my bedroom wall. I didn't like the prequel trilogy nearly as much as the originals, and I did outright dislike the third movie. Even so, I did honestly like Attack of the Clones and all of its huge battles. It was a mixed bag, but I took it for what it was and went on with my life.

My falling out of love with Star Wars really (and oddly) began in earnest with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I went and saw it with my mom opening weekend, and was utterly incensed at how inane it all was. I wasn't even upset about the ultimate supernatural force behind the plot (after God, uh, eggs, and Jesus in the first three, aliens didn't really phase me). The plot was insane, Harrison Ford was really old, Cate Blanchett's accent was atrocious, and Shia LaBoeuf swung from tree-to-tree with monkeys. The movie was so terrible, so cynical, such a pandering mess, that I couldn't get any enjoyment from it. 

Once I saw the cynicism, I couldn't un-see it in Lucas's work. From the pandering of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, to the evidence that the putting the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi was a marketing decision (because cute toys sell better), to the complete disregard for continuity among the movies out of laziness, my dislike for Star Wars grew out of my disgust with George Lucas. Everything he had touched was tainted (except for Jurassic Park - that bun was almost out of the oven by the time Lucas got his grubby hands all over it). 

Then I saw the devastating RedLetterMedia reviews of Episodes I, II, and III.  Talk about exposing the rotting, hollow center to a series gilt in pretty CGI.  After watching these, it confirmed what I had already suspected: these movies don't make sense; they are artistically bankrupt; they disrupt the mythology, look, feel, and message of the series; and, oh yeah, they don't make any sense.

Even after all of this, I could still hear about Star Wars without cringing, and I still referenced it very occasionally in conversation. Hearing someone talk about George Lucas would annoy me, but somewhere in my heart was the little girl with her notepad, her eyes glued to the original trilogy, enjoying every scene, every minute. 

Then I snapped.

I was reading an io9 review for God's War by Kameron Hurley with the headline "The heroine of 'God's War' makes Han Solo look like a boy scout." I understand that blogs run on clicks, and for io9, a nerdy sci-fi blog, putting a name like Han Solo in the title is cash money. But besides the tiniest similarities, Han Solo and Nyx, the main character of God's War (which I bought and have been reading), are absolutely nothing alike. The situation is completely different. Her status is completely different. Her behavior is completely different. The politics of the world she is in are different, and have helped make her character different, and so on. This is apples and oranges stuff.

In addition to the comparison being completely inaccurate, no matter the qualification, comparing Nyx to Han Solo in the first place is boring. Again, I know how blogs work, and contrast is a legitimate way to frame something readers don't know about. But are we so unimaginative that Han Solo, who, in retrospect, was a pretty tame idea of a rogue with gray morals, is the only archetype people can understand? Why are we still using Star Wars, when so many great sci-fi films have come out before and since that fill out archetypes much better? Is it because we credit Star Wars with the invention of the archetypes? Because even that's not quite the whole story, though it may get close.  The review wouldn't have annoyed me even half as much if the reviewer had mentioned even one other cultural item. But it's as if drawing the throwaway comparison between Nyx and Han Solo was enough, the work done. And really, it was - the whole point was to get some extra clicks. I admit, I clicked for that very reason.

What bothers me about this isn't that Star Wars still has cultural currency. By all rights, it should still have purchase, because it changed a lot in cinema. It's not that it doesn't deserve its dues. It's that, to paraphrase Patton Oswalt in his recent Wired editorial, we simultaneously live in a culture that places special importance on creativity and originality, but also in a culture that places pride in planting a flag on something that has come before. Geek culture is a snake eating its own tail.*  Geek culture is masturbatory. Geek culture is fiercely territorial for things it claims but does not create. It depends on a wide and (sometimes) deep library for its cultural references, and it depends on the same library to understand it. It is self-referential, self-important, and self-congratulatory, and it isn't concerned with creation that does not include recycling bits of other people's work.

The io9 review, as benign as it really is, flipped my switch from "tolerate and sometimes participate in" to "loathe and cringe at the sight or sound of" Star Wars and large swaths of geek culture in general. The idea that something that has been proven, through analysis and the words of its creator, to be creatively bankrupt in dozens of ways and can still command the respect that it does, even knowing what we know, makes geeks, nerds, "enthusiasts", and whoever else falls into that category, stubborn and sheltered. The switch io9 flipped (again, it's still very benign) has changed how I see the references to Star Wars or to The Legend of Zelda or to Batman. It's all part of the same recycle and reuse that fuels entire industries which run on nostalgia and fear of disappointment in the new.

This isn't a hipster argument. This isn't about the mainstream making nostalgia and obscurity into commodities. This really isn't even an argument, as I'm trying to express, not convince. The point I am trying to get to is that I am of the opinion that Star Wars (among myriad other geeky icons), as stunted in growth, commercial in sensibility, nostalgically revered, and crassly cynical as it is, has infiltrated and modified our cultural assumptions for the worse. We are constantly comparing apples to oranges to Star Wars or to some other famous tidbit, when the degrees of relation are so distant they can't even be considered to exist in the same plane.

Walker Percy once used the analogy of the postcard experience. People travel to see the postcards image of sights and landmarks. But what they don't realize is that the trip is never going to be fulfilling, because they are going to see exactly what they and millions of others have seen before. Going to the Grand Canyon and standing at the railing, looking down at millions of years of formations, isn't experiencing something new and personal - it's experiencing 1/n^nth of the full experience. Going off the beaten path gets you closer to the 1/1 experience, and gives you the chance to be fulfilled by your adventures. Star Wars is a 1/n^nth experience. It saturates our current pop culture, being the go-to for references, archetypes, etc., so much that it makes people lazy, expecting or desiring nothing better. Those movies are everywhere. When I finally started to notice, I couldn't help but feel nauseated and unfulfilled.

I understand my opinion is largely impractical. There really hasn't been in a time in history when the present isn't scouring the past for inspiration, if not outright recycling, and I am not under the illusion to the contrary. I am also aware that I am just as much a participant in the nostalgia machines and nothing-new industries, and that I am just as responsible as the next human being for giving people like George Lucas my time, devotion, and cash - making this a self-indictment and not just an opinion. I also do not begrudge anyone for loving this culture and claiming it as their own. It simply isn't for me, and everything I've expressed here applies to how I see the culture and isn't an attempt to interpret anyone else's experience. But maybe, just maybe, I can break some of the cycle by refusing to keep participating in what I see as the mindless repetition, the knee-jerk references, and the tired cliches of Star Wars that have seeped into our culture.

But likely not.

___

*I do disagree with Patton that Star Wars was ever uncool or not mainstream (have you seen those box office numbers?) and that one group can own or even has the right to own any part of pop culture. People are territorial about all sorts of things, but that doesn't mean they have any right to it.

That's how many hours Steam tells me I've played Civilization V. The majority of those have been in the last four weeks. Having played so much, I have developed an educated (read: extremely nerdy and unimportant) list of likes and dislikes about Civ V, which I have now played more than any other installment in the series. 

Likes:

Playable Countries/Nationalities/Personalities. In addition to the standard fare, such as Julius Caesar, Gandhi, and Washington, an impressive number of less-widely known personalities are available through the normal game and the DLC, such as Pachacuti (Inca), Hiawatha (Iroquois), Ramkhamhaeng (Thailand), Askia (Songhai). While game designers have allowed one leader to represent an entire region in the past, they have shown some cultural sophistication for certain regions, giving separate representation to regions that have been culturally diverse both simultaneously and over time, such as Polynesian, Thai, Chinese, Mongolian, and Japanese cultures, and the the Songhai, the Ottoman, and Arabian cultures.

Historically Significant Special Abilities for Different Cultures. All Danish troops (under Harald Bluetooth) can disembark and attack in the same turn, which allows you to attack quickly across bodies of water - just like the Vikings. The Germans have a 50/50 chance of recruiting the barbarians when attacking an encampment, which hearkens back to Germanic barbarian alliances during the Roman Empire (which is where the French and Spanish words for Germany - "Allemande"/"Allemania", or "all men" - find their root). The French earn extra culture every turn up until the Industrial era - that is, right after the French Revolution. The list goes on and on, and all of them are fascinating historical commentary.

Cultural Policy Tracks. Earning culture gives you points to buy social policies. If you are aggressively progressive, you can earn five or six entire policy trees (each of which have at least six steps) over the course of the game. The cost of each policy goes up, however, if you expand too quickly. This parallels the real world nicely:  Want to implement progressive policies? The fewer people to please, the easier the transition. You also can't activate two antithetical social trees. Liberty (culture and growth) clashes with Autocracy (military efficiency and fascism). Piety (culture and happiness) and Rationalism (science and progress) don't mix. Finding the right balance for your type of game is fun.

Steam Achievements. I'm a sucker for achievements in any game (they provide ways for me to wring more gameplay out of a game and explore it in ways I might not have thought of before). In Civ V, this has translated into me playing cultures I never would have thought to play before, such as Askia of the Songhai.

The Narrator. He's a mix between Leonard Nimoy (who narrated Civ IV) and Ian McShane. 

Dislikes:

The AI can be pretty terrible. I mean, really terrible. Sometimes the other player will come to me with a deal, and I'll click accept. Then they refuse, as if I had offered them a bad deal. Here's one that happened today: Suleiman the Magnificent came to me with a peace treaty - and offered me five of his cities, with populations ranging from 2 to 8, not to mention allowing me to keep three I had already taken. A city with a population of 1 or 2 (these translate into huge numbers actual population numbers, but I don't know the algorithm) will go for 2500-3000 gold - which is extremely expensive (a settler for a new city alone, depending on the settings, may cost 500-800 gold). In other words, Suleiman threw cities at me to make me go away. On higher settings, it's a little bit better, but only because cultures play a bit more efficiently, a bit closer to the chest, and a bit more aggressively.

To make the game harder, the AI cheats. The difficulties, which range from Settler (easiest) to Prince (normal) to Deity (hardest), don't refer to how hard the other players play - they refer to bonuses and penalties dished out to your culture and others. This is like being running a marathon with other runners, but to mess with the odds, the game makes either you or your competition run it three-legged, as opposed to, say, putting you up against lesser or better runners. The way the game manages the difficulty comes off as incredibly cheap. Though it all seems to balance out in the end, I was surprised to find that King (which is just above hard) was still a walk in the park. Then again, I've played it a tad bit more than the average Joe.

The achievement system is crazy-go-nuts unbalanced. One achievement for Alexander is to defeat all known civilizations by 350 BC, which is fairly easy on a long timeline and easier difficulty. France's is to attack an enemy with three musketeers (get it?). Russia's is to discover horseback riding before any other civilization. All of these are fairly simple given the right conditions. Germany's (convert 10 barbarians in one game) is time-consuming, but not hard. The Ottoman Empire's (convert 10 barbarian ships in one game) is a bit harder. Then there are the crazy ones: buy 1000 tiles over any number of playthroughs, build 1000 mines and roads, destroy 1000 forests, construct 1000 temples, sink and destroy 357 enemy naval units as Elizabeth over any number of playthroughs, etc. There's even one achievement - this is ONE achievement - that asks you to recruit 100 generals, have an army 100 strong, and win the game 100 times. These are just exhausting and don't add to gameplay. They just evoke a little "oh, that's cool" when you get them in your 432nd hour of playing. To give you an idea of how crazy these are, in my 105 hours, I have not gotten any of the crazy achievements.

It does get a tad stale. Yeah, I'll admit it. I run the game in the background, knowing I can win without paying attention (which is why my hour count is so high). It's fun and pretty, but there aren't enough special units and buildings for the different cultures to really make it super-fun. This was my initial reaction to the game when I bought it upon release, and I stopped playing not long after I got it. It was only recently, when I realized my computer was just barely powerful enough to run it in the background while I do other light tasks that I really jumped back in.