The author here has a point.
The collective internet is kind of like the little kid in AI: Artificial Intelligence. When it loves something, that love is the most passionate, powerful and awe-inspiring thing. And if you even slightly interfere with that love in any way, it will destroy you with a cold, mechanical fury.
Particularly since the author was referencing what happened when they made a live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender — No! Sit back down! It’s OK! It’s OK! The franchise is dead! It can’t hurt anybody anymore! You can even click the link; it goes to a Blu-Ray of the real show. The animated one.
Anyway. See what the author meant?
I think there’s a certain mix of Puritanical hipster-ism in there somewhere: It just becomes a meme, regardless of anyone’s familiarity with the source material. I do not follow the Avatar shows, yet I know the movie became the cherry on top of a “Shamalan-is-crap” sundae. Because that’s what anyone with “good taste” was saying**.
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Not unrelated is a certian verbooten topic in this house.
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Yes, The Internet is a spoiled three-year-old.
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** I didn’t have to ask if they had “good taste.” They told me so themselves.
This reminds me of the demotivational poster: When everyone has the choice to be whatever they want, they pretty much choose to be like everyone else.
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Also, Mass Effect 3.
Which was good.
Except for the first hour, which sucked. And everything after Shepard started to float, which sucked. And having homosexuality rubbed in our faces, which was obnoxious.
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But all the hate Bioware got for that ending was earned.
There is no justification for it. It was on the same level of playing a cyberpunk game that ended in a cutscene of the floor giving way, with a description of how you’d fallen into the pit of zombie hamsters and died.
It flagrantly violated the tenets of storytelling, all the promises of what the story would be like, and several established themes within the work itself.
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I sunk hundreds of hours into the first two episodes of the series, making sure I found everything, uncovered all the lore, and tried the different moral forks.
I have never been tempted to play the third episode again. Once was plenty.
Leaving aside the ending (for me the ending was the fleet arriving, and everything after that was torture gravy, but YMMV and I know that everybody else disagrees with me) I don’t think that they could have escaped the first hour. Some people, astoundingly, were buying ME3 as their entry into the series. You gotta have that tutorial. 🙂
Valid points all.
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The first hour to me seemed like they thought: this is going to be a huge game, how the heck do we kick it off.
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The Kaiden stuff was amazingly completely absent when I replayed it recently. I was shocked cause I was waiting for the awkward and it never came. I was wondering if they made a few changes (altered dialogue based on prior choices or whether you were already locked into a relationship.)
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The ending is a problem, but I look at other choices (not just the color ending) as the issue:
– the Rachni: really? All that and we get some mechanics?
– The Geth: you spend all that time, effort and drama putting together an understanding and getting the Geth on board only in two of the endings to either commit genocide or the green ending, which the less said about the better.
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The biggest point at issue is that I am not sure whether they A) Ran out of time and had no idea where they were going with this. B) Had an ending scheme going and just lacked the balls to follow through on it. or C) EA or Bioware upper management were in a hurry to ship and just sent the game out clearly unfinished.
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Still, the gameplay is amazingly fun.
Citadel is the best damned DLC/Expansion ever made.
The story and characters are fantastic for 90 – 95% of the game.
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You were betrayed, and at least you can enumerate the reasons, which I bet a lot of the people on the internet who have posted memes on the game might not be able to do- which is to Moe’s larger, original point.
I didn’t mind the tutorials.
I got a bit aggravated that there were only about ten minutes of actually playing the game in the first hour, that the first major battle was deliberately coded so that it was impossible to win, and that my character was stuck carrying the idiot ball (the Catalyst was obviously Reaper tech, and what little explanation there was, was obvious BS. I’d have minded less if I got to choose a “hell no” response, with my character responding the same way and having the subtitle reading “Indoctrination”.)
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I think the ending they had set, was with Shepard and Anderson sitting on the Citadel, bleeding out, and watching the world burn. Thematically, it works beautifully.
And I can imagine Upper Management almost stroking out when they found that their most valuable IP was about to be killed off.
Followed by some rather insulting retcons.
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I do think there was some uncertainty about where they were going to go, what with the dropped “Dark Energy” threads. But I think they had a return to Cosmic Horror nailed down pretty solidly. Everything that doesn’t fit within that narrative, clashes so hard that it’s jarring.
Having seen the Avatar movie, it’s not the worst thing ever. It’s not even an example of Shamalan’s worst tendencies. It’s just a rather bland and boring adaptation of the first season of the cartoon, which is reason enough to skip it.
It isn’t the worst thing ever. That would be either “The Room” or “Battle Beyond the Stars.” But it is bad, and the comparisons to the animated series (which is excellent) probably make it seem worse than it would be if it was an original movie.
It might not have been the worst thing ever, but it was destined to suck.
Compressing 10+ hours of tightly-written animation into 2 hours of movie, while having the CGI thread the needle between looking realistic and ridiculous…
Sometimes the ‘net has a point, though, like what they did to Exit To Eden in the movie version.
If you don’t know about it, you probably don’t want to know, least of which it’s all NSFW territory.
Oh, dear Lord, I don’t know what the heck that either the book or the movie did in a previous lifetime to deserve what happened there*. If I put that in a story, people would rightly tell me that it was too over-the-top.
*I would tell you what this movie is about, but to quote the 7th Sea RPG: then you would know.
Dana Delaney naked?
There were a couple of good points…
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But if you must watch it, I advise doing so with the sound off. And fast forwarding a lot.
Apropos of nothing, I’d never seen the movie or read the book, so I googled it, and found a Siskel and Ebert review, and was intrigued by this passage: ” I’m sorry, but I just don’t get Rosie O’Donnell. I’ve seen her in three or four movies now, and she has generally had the same effect on me as fingernails on a blackboard.
She’s harsh and abrupt and staccato and doesn’t seem to be having any fun. She looks mean.”
Back in ’94 wasn’t she still popular on Nickelodeon and called the Queen of Nice or something? Apparently Siskel wasn’t buying it.