After my first post about Mass Effect and my second post about Mass Effect 2, this third post about Mass Effect 3 was inevitable. From both a storytelling and a gameplay standpoint, I've found the Mass Effect games to be simultaneously brilliant and deeply flawed—a perfect combination for my analytical propensities. Having spent something on the order of 140 hours across the last four months in the combat boots of Commander Jane Shepard, I've had omni-gel, turians, dialogue wheels, and planet-scanning on the brain almost constantly. Just as the final installment of this epic sci-fi FPS/RPG-hybrid trilogy is supposedly the culmination of everything that came before it; so, too, is this post. Everything right and everything wrong with the series can be summed up by this one game, which has its fair share of unique ups and downs, to boot.

There will be spoilers. There will be screenshots. There will be no mercy.

By now I've learned that the hardest part of any Mass Effect game is getting it to work properly in the first place. Imagine my surprise when I found that ME3 booted up with no issues (giving me back the option to skip through the opening credits!), recognized my EA/Origin account without prompting, and located my final save file from ME2 right off the bat. I poked through the game settings and found everything to be organized and sensible. I perused the user-friendly DLC list—now integrated into the game itself instead of on some random web page that opens up—and immediately knew what I did and did not have installed. I hadn't made it past the main menu yet, and already this was the greatest game in the series.

The game allowed me to live out this delightful delusion for a whole five minutes before reminding me that BioWare, or EA, or somebody responsible for this series really doesn't care about making a game that works. So ME3 successfully located my ME2 save file, right? When I loaded the game, I was prompted to confirm that my character's imported appearance and selected class were still satisfactory. Let's compare how she looked in ME2 with ME3, and you tell me if this is satisfactory:

Wait, I'll answer for you. The answer is no. Even after fixing the most egregious errors with her hair and skin tone, she still only resembled a vague memory of my Commander Shepard. Between the lighting of the character customization screen playing tricks with my color-blindness, some slight graphical touch-ups (I think they tried to make the eyes more realistic, for one thing), and the nearly imperceptible differences between certain levels of cheek gaunt and eye depth, I had a heck of a time fixing her up. Eventually settling for "looks wrong, but close enough," I grudgingly conceded that I didn't care enough to spend another 20-30 minutes on this and started the game. No wonder it took Miranda two years to rebuild Shepard!

We'll gloss over the part where I downloaded a savestate editor to continue tweaking her appearance well into Hour 10 of the game, reloading ME2 to get visual confirmation that I was on the right track. Realizing I'd given her the wrong haircut was a huge breakthrough.

Almost as if ME3 had glimpsed into the future to read my complaints about the beginning of ME2, it took no time at all for the game to start winning my heart back. The opening cutscene promptly reunites Shepard with two old friends and offers decisions that still feel like they make a difference despite having no real impact on the end result of the cinematic segment. The cutscene dropped me off in the middle of a war zone, but I had ample time to check my configuration settings and reacclimate to the controls. They kept the HUD from ME2—still not my favorite way to select weapons, but the fact that I could see Shepard's health and shield meters at all times was a clear improvement. The in-game menu had been redesigned once again, but this time made sense: shrink the Exit Game button and move it down into the corner where you won't hit it by accident; merge the Journal and Codex entries into a single page with multiple tabs to reduce clutter. Keep everything else where it was in the last game. Good golly, someone who knows something about sequel design was on this project.

I noticed we were still using the thermal clip system, and that I had precious little ammo for my pistol. A few enemies later, I had no ammo for my pistol, and my squadmate encouraged me to swat at enemies with my bare hands. To my surprise, hand-to-hand combat wasn't a last resort; it was...fun. I didn't even need to put my weapon away to start thwacking bad guys; once I restocked on ammo, I found I could seamlessly alternate between shooting and clobbering. I think I might've punched something once in the last game. Suddenly this was a meaningful game mechanic, and it got even better when I found I could coup-de-grâce an enemy from behind or wrestle my way out of a grapple with it. Throw in some obligatory practice with climbing ladders and leaping over pits—more new actions the game taught me to do in the intro mission—and the gameplay felt fresh enough to sustain me through another 40+ hours of probably mostly just hiding behind boxes.

They took out the hacking minigames—safecracking, decoding, and unlocking no longer require any effort other than standing around for a moment as Shepard's omni-tool does all the work. One more unique element of the series to be eliminated. I was a little sad to see the puzzle sequences disappear—if you use them sparingly and provide enough concessions to struggling players, minigames can be a welcome injection of variety to the gameplay—but there's already enough complexity with the core gameplay that one more mechanic might be unwelcome. Unfortunately, that's a sentiment that is exemplified by the game's expansions to your movement abilities.

Initially, I was excited to be able to execute commando rolls BECAUSE I COULD. In no time, I was also activating doors and control panels, pressing myself up against a surface to take cover, easily darting back and forth between cover, leaping over low cover, shimmying around corners, disengaging myself from hiding behind cover, engaging in conversation with people, picking up objects, resuscitating fallen squadmates, and breaking into a sprint...all with the same button. There comes a point when a multifunction button is too multifunctional, and having about a dozen actions contextually mapped to the same button is officially overkill. All too often, Shepard interpreted my commands to run away from the enemy as permission to commando-roll into a hail of bullets. What an inspiration to the N7 program.

The HUD didn't help matters. On far too many occasions, clicking the icons on my heads-up display seemed to do something, but in fact, did nothing when I returned to battle. It's possible my pulse was pounding so hard from the action that I accidentally started to drag the icons around (as though to drop them into a hotkey slot) instead of actually clicking them. But when a split-second can mean the difference between taking out a charging Banshee and getting reaped, you cannot afford to lose a few moments wondering when Shepard is going to get around to swapping that empty sniper rifle for a loaded shotgun, or tossing a grenade instead of standing around like a practice dummy. If you're going to deny me the ability to switch weapons or use powers because, say, my current character animation needs to finish first, it wouldn't be unreasonable to put my commands in a queue, ghost the buttons I can't use right now, or change the existing "I can't let you do that, Dave" beep so it's not indistinguishable from the confirmation blip and inaudible over the din of combat.

Moreover, at the start of every mission, and randomly following certain cutscenes, my weapon selections reset themselves. Have a chilling SMG and incendiary pistol prepared in advance of an enemy attack? Not anymore! Now let's spend the next 30 seconds reactivating ammo powers for each individual weapon. It didn't help that my ammo powers spontaneously rearranged themselves on the HUD multiple times throughout the game, which led to instinctive clicking in spots that no longer did what I thought they did. Or that the cutscenes had a penchant for making Shepard appear with a weapon she didn't even bring with her on the mission, causing further confusion about the state of my arsenal. Or that, anytime I reloaded a previous save after dying, the game brought me back with the combat powers I had active or recharging...at the time of death.

What this all adds up to is a robust combat system that's irritatingly uncooperative. Not being able to trust that you can heal your teammates or bust out a special attack at the exactly the moment you decide is highly disruptive to any game experience, let alone one centered around fast-paced tactical combat. By the end of the game, my clicks on the HUD and my interactions with people and objects on the battlefield were slow and deliberate; I was tired of the Alliance coroners having to list "unreliable interface" on their reports as Shepard's cause of death. That's not how I wanted to play this game.

Come to think of it, "that's not how I wanted to play this game" sums up a lot of my experience here.

By the time you get to ME3, millions are dying by the hour across the galaxy, and there's never any shortage of ships and soldiers begging for immediate assistance. Haste is critical, it would seem. Yet the level design favors huge open spaces, asymmetrical rooms with multiple entrances, and barren-looking dead-ends, all of which are filled with credits, quest items, weapon upgrades, and story points that you can never come back for once the mission is over. Thorough exploration seems to be equally critical...but exploration takes time. The story and gameplay are out of sync: an oppressive sense of urgency and treasure-filled nonlinear level design send mixed messages about how to play.

That's fine if there are clear in-game advantages to both approaches: a choice, if you will, between coming to the rescue on time or letting the galaxy burn because papa needs a new pair of Hanhe-Kedar greaves. But as far as I can tell, you are the only one who doesn't survive if there's ever a situation where time actually matters. No need to rush through a mission on account of the dying scientists; the one you need to talk to will still be there in an hour, and her colleagues are scripted to die no matter what at specific points in the level. Once I figured that out, I started drowning out the emotional cries for help from people in peril. Though my allies urged me to get moving a few times, I rarely felt any sense that poking around the rubble for a few extra minutes was jeopardizing the fate of anybody. Except me and my sense of immersion in the game, that is.

I wanted to be immersed. I fondly recall the first time I stepped up to the galaxy map in ME1. That whoosh of the camera panning in over Shepard's head, the beautifully atmospheric music, the awe-inspiring complexity and vastness of outer space—I was there. Even after ME2 instituted the obtrusive fuel consumption mechanic, gliding around the galaxy was still a treat thanks to all gorgeous planets and their interesting text descriptions. Exploration was a joy.

In ME3, I was lucky to have two minutes of exploration before being flushed out of any given star system by mood-breaking game mechanics. This time, you send out scanning pulses to detect things of interest, but in Soviet Star System, things of interest detect you! A swarm of reapers descends on your location after as few as 2-3 scanning pulses...and most systems have 2-3 secrets to be found. If you don't retreat, you'll die. If you don't take notes about where you've scanned, you're liable to come back after a completing a full-length mission (the only way to drive off the reapers) and waste your opportunity scanning in places you forgot you already had. I don't mind a proper stealth mission, but this one turns relaxing exploration into an unforgiving guessing game that only serves to delay or deter 100% completion.

The interruptions didn't end there. Most of the fuel depots around the galaxy have been destroyed, leaving you to salvage fuel from their debris...assuming you can find any debris with your scanning pulse. There's no way to tell how much fuel you'll recover until you click the button to investigate the wreckage—which can't actually be identified as wreckage and not some other mystery object until you click the button--at which point you automatically gain however much fuel is there. Even if you can't use it all. "HAHA, I'M SO GREEDY, TAKING ALL THIS FUEL WHEN I'M MAXED OUT!" said no one ever. It is incredibly easy to overlook or blindly waste such a crucial commodity, leaving you no recourse but to constantly yo-yo back and forth between the Citadel to refuel and the next star system you want to get promptly kicked out of.

Side note to developers: When you show the same cutscene every time the player transitions from one major area of the map to the next, please don't use the most outrageously loud sound effect you can find. Scrambling to reach the volume knob every time I go through a mass relay kinda takes me out of the moment.

Additional side note to developers:

Increasing the font size of the already fairly verbose planet description text so that no more than six words, most of which are preposterously lengthy to begin with, have even the slightest, most remote possibility of fitting on a single line is a bad idea, especially when you have so much text that you'll wear out your mouse's scroll wheel reading everything for one planet, let alone a whole galaxy's worth. I mean, who's going to bother reading any of this when it takes so much effort to digest just one sentence?

Needless to say, it wasn't long before I kept a walkthrough handy at all times to minimize the amount of fruitless scanning attempts, wasted fuel pickups, and tedious backtracking. I gave up on visiting nonessential planets just to read about them. It sucked the soul out of the exploration, but that was a favorable alternative to letting the exploration suck the soul out of me. Two can play at that game, Soviet Star System.

Choosing between immersion and completionism was not the kind of decision-making I had signed up for, but if I was already looking at a walkthrough, I might as well go all the way. I recognized that this might be the only time I'd ever play through the series—and if I gave it another chance later on, it'd be as a male Renegade instead—so I wanted to ensure I didn't skip anything significant. Now, ME3 is generally very good at keeping the player pointed in the right direction: thoughtfully labeled maps, clear mission descriptions, popup identification of key objects and people, and on-demand guidance to the next objective make it largely unnecessary to use a walkthrough. That is, if you trust the game to make it physically possible to complete everything without outside assistance.

Whereas the first two games let you complete side missions at any time, ME3 puts bizarre time frames on when you're able to do things. Sometimes you get a sidequest and it's too early to start it—you're supposed to go to the Hades Nexus, but the Hades Nexus isn't even on your galaxy map yet, and it won't show up until sometime in the future when there's no good reason for it to suddenly appear. Sometimes you finish a Priority mission that advances the main storyline, and suddenly an unrelated sidequest is inexplicably impossible to complete. It's often impossible to tell whether you're too early, too late, not looking hard enough...or whether the mission has been silently rendered unwinnable by a glitch that still hasn't been addressed despite being well-documented, more than two years old, and on a platform that can be patched at any time. No self-respecting completionist would abstain from spoiling the game with a walkthrough under those conditions.

Another thing the game withholds from you is what, exactly, the Galactic Readiness Rating is that's displayed on the main menu screen, and how to increase it. It turns out that it dictates the point value of your War Assets—the people and resources you accumulate to get a better ending—and you can increase it by continuing the fight for the galaxy across three other games. These are Mass Effect: Infiltrator (a game for smartphones, therefore I can't play it), the game's multiplayer mode (which is unwinnable without human companions, therefore I can't play it), and an online minigame where you deploy imaginary fleets on invisible missions every one, three, or five hours (which I can "play," if that's the right term for this obligatory waste of time that's only interesting the first couple times you try it). Conceptually, I like the notion that ME3 is so expansive that my actions in completely different games can actively contribute to my success or failure in this one. What bothers me is that it's presented more like a requirement than a bonus. "Look at all these War Assets you've acquired! Too bad we're docking you 50% of their full point value because you're too cheap to buy our Android game."

I can see where these things could make the single-player experience more immersive for the smartphone-carrying social media generation of gamers, but I am not one of them. Logging into the N7 website before and after every session of ME3 to boost my Galactic Readiness Rating was annoying. And ME3 annoyed me plenty.

Nonstop voiceover advertisements harassing me as I was trying to shop. Shepard's inconsolably depressive state after the mission on Thessia—which, in the wake of so many equally bad things that failed to elicit that response, seems extremely out-of-character. That massacred colony where we're supposed to feel bad that these innocent, defenseless people were apparently murdered in their home while relaxing and watching television...with their corpses dressed in full combat gear. And that's to say nothing of the game eventually crashing at startup 20% of the time, or booting me out to the desktop another 20% of the time because it claimed the Origin client, which was totally up and running, was no longer up and running.

I want to give ME3 credit for what it does well: Handling the gritty and "adult" elements of ME2 with the maturity and elegance of ME1. Loading screens and cutscene transitions that seamlessly blend into the gameplay. Truly breathtaking cinematic moments, like the awesomely action-packed climax on Tuchanka and the incredibly tense final push across enemy lines on Earth. Player-friendly equipment screens. A streamlined shopping system that even allows you to do all your shopping from a single terminal (at a modest markup, of course) if you don't feel like backtracking to stores located who-knows-where. Squadmates showing up in different places around the Normandy and the Citadel, like they're real people who aren't tethered to a post. ME3 attempts to improve upon ME2 while bringing back some of the best aspects of ME1, and it is tremendously successful. But not entirely successful.

All throughout ME1 and 2, my Commander Shepard was a generally noble and good-hearted person who could see the occasional shade of gray and, in rare circumstances, be vindictive when somebody really ticked her off. In ME3, every decision was either pure good or pure evil; all my neutral options had been taken away. "Hm...do I help this person out of the goodness of my heart, or stab them in the face for asking?" Especially when Paragon and Renegade points contribute equally to filling up a single morality meter (instead of two separate meters like before), denying you dialogue options if you're not exclusively one or the other, that's like having no choice at all. The completionist isn't allowed to settle for "Paragon enough": Despite all the extra points I gained from the DLC and all the multipliers my special abilities gave me, I wasn't quite good enough to pick the final Super Good Guy dialogue option of the game. All because I allowed Shepard to be a real person and get angry or sarcastic two or three times out of hundreds of opportunities to stop doing the right thing all the time.

This points to a larger problem with ME3 and the trilogy as a whole: All of your choices matter...but at the same time, none of your choices matter. The complexities of shipboard romance live up to the notion that your choices have a cumulative effect throughout the series. The influence your decisions have over who lives and dies should not be understated. Strip away the people, and the game plays out the same way: the Citadel still gets attacked, the quarians still try to retake their home planet, and Earth is still where the galaxy makes a last stand against the reapers. The finer details are up for grabs, but you cannot change the momentum of the story. Mass Effect masterfully gets lost in the minutiae.

Killed the rachni queen in ME1, did you? Doesn't matter; the reapers made an artificial queen so you can still have a mission in ME3 where you have to fight her. Destroyed the genophage cure in ME2, eh? Well, I guess you won't be gaining the krogan as allies in ME3! Unless someone conveniently develops a cure when the krogan ask for it. You'll get different dialogue and see slightly different cutscenes depending on how you've conducted yourself and who's left standing around you, but your friends are interchangeable. If the plot hinges around one specific person who got bumped off in the last game, somebody else will take their place to keep the story moving. The fate of the galaxy is never really in your hands; the best you can hope to do is add flavor to an ultimately linear journey.

I let the Council die at the end of ME1. I denied Udina his rise to power at the start of ME2. I didn't just think I was reshaping the political landscape of the Mass Effect universe; I demanded it. Galactic leadership was ineffective, and I had the ability to change it. Perhaps this is a sly commentary on politics, but the new Council was indistinguishable from the old one, Anderson was even less useful than before, and my vote against Udina didn't stop him from taking over in ME3. Even when I cured the genophage to gain the support of the krogan—despite an ultimatum from the salarian leader that I would lose the support of her people—the salarians helped me anyhow. At what point were my decisions going to "have profound consequences on the action and the story" like the game box promised me?

In the end, every choice that does make a difference in the bigger picture is nothing more than a War Asset to be gained or lost. Choose to accept that sidequest and rescue a holy relic that inspires an alien race. Choose between saving a salarian commando or saving the hanar homeworld from destruction. It's all a numbers game with a veneer of intergalactic importance. Everything has a point value, and that's all that counts as far as the gameplay is concerned. It doesn't matter whether you take on the reapers with the combined might of the entire galaxy or a newscasting army of 700 Diana Allers clones; they'll both get you the same results. All it takes to win is making enough choices; they don't have to be good ones.

That's the ultimate disappointment of the Mass Effect trilogy: Contrary to what everyone else on the Internet has ever said, nothing you do actually makes a difference until the very last choice of the very last game. That's why I liked the ending to ME3 (a few minor quibbles notwithstanding): for the first time in the series, I knew I was making an impact that would be felt beyond the halls of the Citadel or ::ahem:: the walls of Shepard's quarters. All the times before when I thought I was massively effecting change in the galaxy, I was just populating the inflexible story arc of the next game with cameos by the people I saved. If I were fully engrossed in the narrative, that might be enough for me. But Mass Effect refused to let me forget it was a game, and as such, I expected more than thank-you notes at my message terminal from the people I saved.

I've gone back and read some of the previews and interviews. Mass Effect was not a runaway hit that spawned two unexpected sequels; it was a trilogy from the very beginning. There was a story arc in place before the first game was even released. There was a technical arc planned, gradually expanding on the weapons and vehicles in the same fashion as the story. Mass Effect had the overwhelming potential to be one complex, incredible game split into three acts. Instead, we got three separate games with a thread of common history running through them.

One of the joys of a long Dungeons & Dragons campaign is nurturing your fledgling level 1 character into an unstoppable epic-level super-warrior over the course of the adventure. How meticulously I planned my characters in ME1, leveling them up with the expectation of building on those skills throughout the next two games. How little it mattered when ME2 wiped the slate clean with a brand-new set of abilities to build up from scratch, and when ME3 made me retrain most of those same abilities all over again. My specific choices didn't matter; only the fact that I had leveled up enough to make so many choices, for which I was rewarded with a few bonus points to put toward leveling up at the start of the next sequel.

How many hours I spent scouring planets in ME1 for raw materials to build a stronger human navy. How wasteful that time felt when I reached ME2 and found my tedious efforts translated into a starting boost to my personal resource pool, which needed no such assistance thanks to my misguided prospecting spree later on. How extra wasteful that time felt when ME3 converted my excessive stockpile of resources into a War Asset worth 100 points—respectable, to be sure, but depressing when I started thinking about how much of my life went into that drop in the bucket. I never got to see those raw materials going to good use with the fleet. Well, aside from upgrading a few of the Normandy's systems in ME2 (which, admittedly, had a direct impact on the outcome of that game): Everybody survived the suicide mission in ME2. Even so, nobody joined me as a squadmate in ME3 who wasn't with me in ME1. Not Grunt, not Jack, not anyone. Fat lot of good those loyalty missions did.

At least I got to fight alongside them again in the Armax Arsenal Arena, a place that became available with the truly wonderful Citadel DLC. I will say that the downloadable content made ME3. Several hours in, I decided I was enjoying the game enough (yes, really) to justify splurging a little on the story-related DLC, which gave me a cool mystery to unravel, an intriguing new squadmate (AND HIS WEAPON, WHICH DOESN'T USE THERMAL CLIPS AND MERELY OVERHEATS LIKE SPACE GUNS ARE SUPPOSED TO), and an awesome heap of hilarity and replay value. Hunting for Leviathan fleshed out parts of the story that had been sorely missing. Javik's unique perspective on the galaxy was refreshing. Busting a gut while taking on thugs with nothing but a pistol and a party dress felt like playing No One Lives Forever all over again. Not only is the DLC a much-needed breath of fresh air from the emotionally draining story and the endless mobs of Cerberus troopers, but it's responsible for at least half my favorite memories of the game. Storming the archives with every surviving squadmate I'd ever had was one of the highlights of my FPS career.

No matter how it may seem from my criticisms, I've largely enjoyed my time with Mass Effect. The first installment alone establishes a universe with the kind of depth that takes other franchises years to develop. I've rarely played anything with such a cinematic feel and such beautiful graphics. Many of the characters are interesting; the voice acting is top-notch; the balance of FPS and RPG elements is unique; the way the finer details of the story reflect your choices is often quite neat. Individually, each game is good, if not very good.

As a trilogy, however, Mass Effect is a mass of wasted potential. I fully appreciate people's great admiration for this series because of what it does accomplish, but I'm jaded because I've seen it all before.

I pursued romantic relationships in Star Trek: Elite Force 2. I fought to gain the trust and loyalty of my allies in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II. I had my choices come back to help or hurt me in the trial scene of Chrono Trigger. I ran into some aliens in Metroid Fusion who I'd had the option to rescue in Super Metroid. I raced against the clock to gather resources increasing my odds of success in Mega Man X5. I created a custom character who'd stick with me through the whole series in Quest for Glory. Mass Effect just offered more of those things.

What it did not offer, however, was the kind of game-changing decision-making I expected after playing Star Wars: Jedi Knight III. I got a different story, a different final boss, and allies who would either fight with me or against me in the final mission, depending on how I resolved the one and only conflict where I had to make a choice between good and evil. I was spoiled by a game where 100% of the decision-making radically impacted both the ending and the gameplay. Did I even get 1% out of Mass Effect? I'll know for sure when I someday replay the trilogy as a Renegade, but I assume I'll still be disappointed when I can't follow through on the "we don't need help from aliens" human supremacist route that ME1 teases and ME3 seems to rule out entirely.

Still, Mass Effect was worth playing. ME1 is rough around the edges, ME2 sands off those rough edges with a grenade, and ME3 isn't really designed for people like me, but I found enough enjoyment in the characters and core gameplay to press on through all the little things that detracted from the experience. I like ME1, 2, and 3 well enough on their own merits, but they did a lousy job of keeping me immersed, and they make for a disappointing trilogy.

Commit to your unique game mechanics, keep the tone consistent, harmonize the gameplay with the story, don't settle for letting the fan community address your game-breaking glitches, don't go making radical changes unless there is something wrong to be fixed, and never deprive the player of their ability to shape the game experience to their liking. Then we can talk about building a series where everything you do—on every level, from story to gameplay—makes a difference.

I was really hoping I wouldn't have a reason to write a sequel to this post.

After 40-odd hours of genuine enjoyment dampened repeatedly and consistently by obtrusive repetition, excessive filler, and issues with the interface, I have beaten Mass Effect. In terms of atmosphere, story, characters, graphics, sound effects, voice acting, customizability, replay value, and originality, I give the game high marks. Regarding the gameplay, the RPG elements are pretty solid, but far too much of the game is spent doing fetch quests and redundant challenges that seem only to superficially extend the length of the game, and there's an overemphasis on micromanagement that's especially incongruous with the relatively straightforward combat. From a technical standpoint, there's a lot of room for improvement with the controls, menus, ambient audio, and general reliability of commonplace actions to not glitch the game.

In short, Mass Effect's problems are numerous, more disappointing than offensive, and easy enough to iron out. With more varied and meaningful sidequests, a lower frequency of random equipment drops that prompt the player to reassess their entire team loadout, more complex combat that takes full advantage of the "hiding behind cover" mechanic, and a thorough streamlining of the technical issues, Mass Effect could be every bit as amazing as it has the potential to be. That's why I had so much hope for Mass Effect 2: the original game was already on the path to perfection; all the designers had to do was clear a few obstructions from the path.

Or, y'know, they could veer off into the woods in search of another path to perfection.

When I started writing this post a couple weeks ago, I was ready to jettison ME2 out the nearest airlock. Everything about the game felt wrong, like the developers viewed the whole first game as a mistake but felt obligated to stay in the same story continuity. Coming back to this post some 30 hours into the game, I struggled to find that same indignation that prompted me to start writing in the first place. I'd gotten over the initial shattering of expectations and dissatisfaction with the new direction; I still recognized a number of flaws, but I was becoming numb to them, and I couldn't deny how much of the game I found to be enjoyable. Perhaps this was a classic case of player expectations giving a good game a bad rap, something I'd be ashamed to admit after criticizing the gaming community so frequently for doing the same. Now that I've finished the game, I find that my gut was right and I have no reason to reconsider the title of this post.

Once again, the problems began even before I started playing. ME1 (and practically every other computer game I've ever played) lets you skip the game company credits that flash by when the game first boots up; ME2 forces you to sit through them every time. Fine, I'll wait. But a moment after arriving at the main menu screen, a window popped up asking me to log in to some account I didn't have and to provide the software key to get the game's downloadable content. I'm sorry; I thought I installed the Mass Effect Trilogy box set that already included "THE COMPLETE MASS EFFECT SAGA"—now you're telling me I've got to log in somewhere and get the rest of it?

Fine. Let me waste five minutes trying to register for an account I apparently already have. There. Took long enough for the password reset e-mail to arrive. Logged in. WHAT DO YOU MEAN I HAVE TO PURCHASE THE DLC? Another five minutes navigating the separate website that popped up in the middle of my game—why isn't the DLC downloadable from a sub-menu within the game, like with Mega Man 9 and 10? Ohhhh, I get it. There's extra DLC that wasn't included in the box set, presumably because it's brand-new. Interactive comic book? Don't need it. Let's get to playing the game already.

Incidentally, every time I've started up the game since, I've been delayed by a popup window telling me there's an error and I can't be logged in automatically to check for new DLC. Look, game, if I want to check for new DLC, I will tell you. Lay off.

ME2 gives you the option of importing your character from ME1 so that your decisions and appearance are preserved. I selected the option from the main menu to import my character. No saved characters found, the game told me. So back to the Internet I went, to determine whether it was my fault for not creating an ME1 save file correctly or ME2's fault for being inept. The consensus? It's not me, but ME, that's inept. Just find the configuration utility in the game folder and change the file path where ME2 looks for ME1 save games. Easy fix.

...Oh, but wait, says the Internet, don't use the configuration utility or else your game will fail to launch. Permanently. Even after reinstallation. Instead, simply copy/paste your save file into the folder where ME2 is looking by default.

Oops.

Thirty minutes of research and trial-and-error later, I was able to get my game running again, and it recognized my ME1 save. Highlights of this process include discovering my saved games in the My Documents folder, which is nowhere remotely close to where the rest of the Mass Effect files are found; deliberately defacing the contents of the game data folder to attempt an installation repair; and renaming the executable program file from whatever the configuration utility had changed it to so that I could launch my game again. Have I mentioned how much easier it is to get ancient games with timer issues that weren't even designed for modern operating systems to run on my computer?

Already I was cranky, what with it taking more than 40 minutes to get past the first screen. This game had better be worth it, I thought to myself. Import character, launch new game, let the pretty intro cutscene commence.

Let the spoilers commence, while we're at it. I'll try to keep them to a minimum, but I make no promises.

The cornerstone of the Mass Effect series is that you get to make the big decisions. Nothing in ME1 happens without the player having a say in the outcome—whether it's a simple choice about how to handle an obnoxious solicitor, or a no-win situation where two friends are in danger and you can only save one, you affect the outcome of each conflict. By the end of the opening cutscene of ME2, any sense of control, and any sense of connection with the first game, had been severed. My entire ship was destroyed, half my crew was dead, my main character was dead, and the only real choice I had been given was how quickly to rush to the exit.

I was cranky before; now I was angry. I liked that ship. I liked that crew. I liked...my...me. I don't care if it was a no-win scenario, and if all of that had to happen in order to advance the story—at least give me a chance to fight back, to save someone's life, to buy the ship a couple more minutes. Anything where I had the power to make a difference. ME2 made all the big initial decisions for me, and it was two years (in game time) until I had a say in the fate of the universe again. The opening cutscene set the tone for a darker, dystopian, and desperate Mass Effect universe where your choices only matter when the developers feel like it, and I just about walked away from it right there.

Except there was a fire in the lab where I was revived, and I had to escape before everything blew up.

Having learned from the configuration fiasco that delayed my entry into the first Mass Effect, I had held off from customizing the controls until the gameplay began. The moment I gained control of my character, I brought up the menu...and almost accidentally kicked myself out of the game. The appearance of the menu screen hadn't changed, but the placement of the buttons had—and "Exit Game" was now where "Save" and "Configure" used to be. Sure, because that's a necessary change. Let me close out of my game by mistake every time I go to save my progress.

This time I could customize my controls to my liking. I was disoriented for a few moments, getting used to the new menus and getting reacclimated to the familiar movement controls the last game had trained me not to use, all the while being bombarded with too much audio and visual stimuli—alarms and someone shouting at me and fire and explosions and I think even a countdown timer. It's all a bit of a blur. Bravo for an exciting start to the game, but...give the player a couple seconds to figure out whether they checked or unchecked the "Invert Mouse" box correctly before telling them they're about to explode.

Still reeling, I picked up a weapon and escaped from the room. Wait—why does it look like this pistol has an ammo limit? Nuts. One of the best things ME1 does with its combat is abolish the need for ammo with the weapons. Instead, weapons overheat and shut down for a few seconds if you hold down the trigger for too long. It's an elegant system that works well with the cover mechanic, because it keeps the focus on timing rather than resource management, and eliminates all the time you'd otherwise spend running around in search of tiny ammo clips.

I'm not opposed to an ammo system, but ME1 introduced a combat mechanic that was unique, well-executed, and logically explained in the Codex; for ME2 to abandon all that for a generic ammo system is a major disappointment, and the in-game explanation for why we're suddenly using ammo clips is weak. ("Uh...guns will overheat if you fire them too much! So you need thermal clips to absorb excess heat so you can get back to firing again quickly! But...uh...don't ask us why a high-quality sniper rifle burns itself out after 10 shots without spare clips.") The dubious explanation is bad enough, but it's extra suspicious that some of the weapon upgrade descriptions ignore the "thermal clip" pretense entirely and just call it "ammo."

Then all the on-screen tutorials started popping up. And they lied to me. In an age where having customizable controls is the rule rather than the exception, it's not unreasonable to expect a game to tell you things like, "Press [KEY YOU'VE MAPPED TO OPEN DOORS] to open doors," rather than, "Press [DEFAULT KEY THAT IS NOW MAPPED TO MAKE YOU DANCE LIKE A CHICKEN] to open doors." Imagine my panic and confusion when robot soldiers were closing in on me and the game was popping up instructions in my face that I instinctively followed, getting myself into more trouble because of what those buttons had actually been mapped to do. And then imagine my panic and confusion later on when the game started telling me to right-click or left-click in the middle of a cutscene, even though the actions I was being prompted to execute weren't in my key configuration menu. Could I trust the popup, or was I accidentally going to skip the cutscene if I clicked?

And speaking of popups, the neat little popup list of XP gain, alignment points, and Journal/Codex updates that kept the first game's onscreen display clean and organized was gone. It had been replaced by a series of obtrusive popups conveying partial detail about every significant item and accomplishment...but the amount of detail is neither concise enough to read in the short time allotted, nor thorough enough to save you the trouble of opening your Journal/Codex to read more. It's not uncommon to come out of a cutscene or shop menu and have a good 30 seconds of popups obscuring your view and demanding your attention as new equipment and Paragon/Renegade points and quest updates parade by one at a time. ME1 does it right: one popup that pauses the game so you may review the items you've just picked up; one brief popup in the corner reminding you—at your convenience—to check your Journal/Codex for any entries listed as "NEW." The inelegant presentation of ME2's popups defeats their presumed purpose of conveying all that information without interrupting the action.

I somehow survived the initial excitement and saved my game the moment that option became available to me. Good thing, too; immediately thereafter I irrevocably failed a challenge to hack into a computer. The on-screen tutorial once again declined to convey exactly what keys I would need to navigate the minigame. I reloaded to try again, but I got to thinking about how I was able to attempt a hack in the first place. My character was a soldier, just like in ME1, where I had to rely on more tech-savvy party members to do all the computer work. Did she suddenly become an expert hacker? And whatever happened to Omni-Gel, another innovation from the first game, which allowed me to bypass hacking challenges altogether if I had a sufficient quantity? Absent. Gone. Another unique and effective game mechanic that was completely overhauled for the sequel. I was not liking this trend.

It wasn't long before I found myself in combat again, and now the onscreen tutorial was telling me to switch weapons to the grenade launcher. I brought up the tactical HUD, which had been logically (for a change) rearranged to have all squad members' weapons and abilities within easier reach of each other...but I didn't see a grenade launcher. There was just a picture of the pistol I was currently using. I tried clicking on the pistol, just in case I was mistaken about what grenade launchers looked like, and I was surprised to see that part of the HUD expand into a longer window that included both my pistol and my grenade launcher. I clicked the grenade launcher, and the window collapsed again so that only the grenade launcher was pictured. Well, that was inconvenient. Two clicks and a momentary hover to switch weapons (one for the HUD, one to open the weapon menu, and one to select the weapon)? Surely I could map each of my weapons to a hotkey instead.

Surely I expect too much from this game.

Every other first-person shooter I've ever heard of has had weapon hotkeys, ME1 included. And when my shotgun and grenade launcher both hold fewer than a dozen rounds (sorry--can only fire a dozen times before I run out of thermal clips), you can bet your sweet bippy I'll be swapping out guns frequently to make the most of my limited ammo. I can't even fathom how an oversight like this occurred.

No, wait. I can. I think I understand the underlying causes of the game's flaws. I think I understand why I was so eager to keep playing the game despite being even more disappointed and frustrated than I ever was with the first one. ME2 shows all the signs of a divided development team, with some people earnestly trying to improve on the original, and some people ignoring the original because they wanted Call of Duty in space. The whole thermal clip debacle is a prime example: the new gameplay doesn't flow logically from the old gameplay (who in their right mind would trade infinite ammo for limited ammo?), and the writers, who did a brilliant job explaining even the most trivial scientific details in ME1, practically concede in their explanation that the new gameplay doesn't make any sense within the context of the game universe.

I look at what ME2 does right: the sidequests are meaningful; there's a lower frequency of random equipment drops that prompt the player to reassess their entire team loadout; there's more complex combat that takes full advantage of the "hiding behind cover" mechanic; there's been a thorough streamlining of the technical issues that plagued ME1...hang on; that sounds exactly like everything I hoped for in a sequel. Practically without exception, ME2 fixes every single issue I had with the first game...which makes it all the more frustrating that there are still as many problems as before. ME2 learned all the right lessons from the worst parts of ME1, and then changed—rather than refined—all the best parts. ME2 relies very heavily on the player's immediate acceptance of different as better, and this is its greatest flaw.

ME1 presents a game universe with heroes and villains, joy and sorrow, triumph and failure. It is a world of balance. As a Paragon, a Renegade, or something in-between, you bend the world around you to be as bright, dark, or gray as you wish it to be. ME2 presents a game universe with villains and worse villains, sorrow and worse sorrow, failure and worse failure. It is a world of ruin. As a Paragon, a Renegade, or something in-between, the world bends you to be a shade darker than you were before. ME2 is drastically grittier and more "adult" than its predecessor, but no attempt is made at a gentle transition in tone.

The game is front-loaded with bitterness, loss, hostility, and mistrust, to the point where the Mass Effect universe you knew is almost unrecognizable; only after several hours and multiple missions to earn the loyalty of your squad does ME2 feel like a natural continuation of the first storyline. It's as if the game is screaming, "I'M MADE FOR GROWN-UPS!" like an insecure child, when it would be more compelling to gradually demonstrate its maturity as time goes on, like someone becoming an adult. ME2 forces the player to acclimate instantly to a harsh new reality, and that simply doesn't work if the player isn't already itching for a change. The game as a whole is so wrapped up in what the franchise should be that it forgets what it was, and the ravine that separates the two is awfully unpleasant to cross without a bridge in place.

Look at the way the first game ends: it's an ending full of hope. Despite all the casualties, humanity has made a name for itself, Shepard has become a renowned hero with a greater purpose, and a new era is dawning. Then we start ME2 and all the warm fuzzies get blown up, Shepard wakes up in the hands of a shady organization responsible for atrocities in the first game, and the first people you meet are a gruff guy with daddy issues, an angry traitor, and a self-righteous know-it-all who shoots people in cold blood. You talk about a few of the major decisions you made in the first game, and they all seem to have backfired. The leader of the shady organization manipulates Shepard into doing his bidding, sends the team off to a dismal spaceport where people are dying of poverty and disease, and there they find nothing but vile mercenaries and crime lords. Almost every crew member Shepard recruits is a murderer, and even the former teammates whose paths Shepard crosses are angry, regretful, obsessed shadows of their former selves. Alcohol, tobacco, gore, and profanity—all but completely absent in the first game—are suddenly around every corner, not necessarily because they make sense to the story, but because this is a game for adults.

Because when the usually mild-mannered Tali'Zorah begins to swear, it sounds like someone's forcing her to.

It takes far too long for any sunshine to reach this corner of the Mass Effect universe, but when it does, you feel right at home again. As you get to know the characters, they seem less like thugs and more like real people with complex pasts and emotions. The personal messages you receive at your computer terminal grow to include heartwarming and sometimes hilarious notes from the people you encountered in the first game. Bright, beautiful locations begin to supplement the grungy, serious places you've seen so much of. The tone of the game is still considerably darker, and the gameplay is still notably different, but those little injections of continuity, joy, and optimism go a long way in being able to recognize the heart of the first Mass Effect underneath its own wreckage.

The importance of positivity to the Mass Effect universe is something the people who crafted the Paragon responses would do well to remember. The Commander Shepard I led through ME1 was largely a goody two-shoes, always helping people in need, being kind and polite to people who didn't deserve it, and favoring diplomacy over violence. (Well, almost always, anyhow; once I discovered that Renegade actions fill up a separate meter rather than drag your Paragon score in the opposite direction, I'd occasionally be a bit of a rebel when my goody-two-shoery started to make even me sick.) This same "too good for her own good" Shepard is technically the same one I commanded through ME2, but you'd hardly know it from my actions. The Paragon path in the sequel looks less like the path of a hero and more like the path of a religious zealot who's starting to lose touch with what their religion actually teaches about being a good person.

Example: Shepard encounters a wounded mercenary who might possess some valuable information. If this were ME1, there'd be a Paragon option to politely scare him into talking, a neutral option to make overt death threats until he talks, and a Renegade option to kill him outright. But this is ME2, so everything has to be a little darker. "Paragon" now translates to "person who shoves wounded mercenaries against the wall, shouting at them threateningly until they comply, and then averring to her team afterward that she kind of enjoyed it." I'm sorry, this is not the same Commander Shepard who made a career out of using only her words to persuade the foulest villains to see reason. And let's not forget about all the Paragon options where Shepard overreacts about aliens adhering to anything other than traditional human morality before attempting to learn anything more about what she's rejecting. Is it so unrealistic to allow even the option of being gentle to your enemies and open-minded toward your friends? Or is this universe so far gone that heroism and goodness can only be expressed in displays of machismo and righteous xenophobia?

It reached a point where I was receiving Paragon and Renegade points from the same conversation, and I had no idea which responses had earned me which. Every once in a while I caught a glimpse of the Shepard I remembered—her speech during the big trial scene would've made a Starfleet captain proud, for instance—but too often there was a disconnect between the responses I thought I was choosing and the responses I got. Like going into full-on flirtation mode with one of my crew members the first time I tried to talk with him on the ship. And every time after that. Shepard would suggestively slither up against a table and put on her "hey there, big boy" voice, WHICH IS TOTALLY INAPPROPRIATE FOR INITIATING CONVERSATION WITH A SUBORDINATE WHOM YOU'VE JUST MET.

To balance this out, the character with whom Shepard did end up pursuing a romantic relationship might as well have been a lampstand, for as intimate as they were together.

I exaggerate a little, but it's striking to me that ME1 has a tasteful love scene that dares to show a little skin, while ME2—at least with the relationship I pursued—practically glosses over the whole thing. There had been a lot of funny discussion about how a romance between Shepard and her love interest—an alien—would present some logistical challenges, and I was kind of curious to see how they'd work it out. Intellectually curious, that is; I'm sure the Internet is full of pictures I don't need to see. The culmination of the romance subplot with this character started with a brief scene of Shepard—from the shoulders up—in the shower, and the rest of it played out like the beginning of Awkward Prom Night, faded to black at the first sign of physical contact, and was never referenced again. Not even the two of them sitting together over breakfast the next morning trying to hold hands or avoid eye contact. Yes, game. Now I'm convinced you're made for adults, forcing swearing, cigarettes, drunkenness, blood splatters, and piles of mangled corpses down the player's throat, and then getting all shy when two of your characters would realistically start to undress, share a tender moment together, and possibly talk about it afterward like mature individuals.

There's so much about ME2 that just doesn't fit; so many elements that work fine on their own but don't mesh well with other elements. I look at the oversimplification of the weapons and character customization. You'd think that micromanaging equipment and abilities like in the first game would've been beneficial with ME2's more complex combat, but instead you've got no more than six or seven abilities to upgrade (only three, if you're looking at a squadmate who isn't loyal), and your weapon choices are limited to either "I'll go with the obvious upgrade" or "all of these are awesome; why can I carry only one." The new loading screens are artistically interesting, but they disrupt the consistently cinematic feel the first game had down from the get-go—particularly because they're far more abundant. Is it really that difficult to start loading the next area before you get there, especially if there's a cutscene first that can cover it up? And that's to say nothing of the mission reports that interrupt the gameplay at the conclusion of a major quest. Did I honestly need all that fanfare when I've still got half a space station to explore and unfinished business to attend to later with these NPCs?

I look at how fluid Shepard's movement is in ME1, and how cumbersome she is in ME2—she runs around swaggering with her head pointed low and off to the side, and any attempts to pat someone on the back appear to be well outside her comfort zone. As illustrated in part by the new thermal clip system, resource management is a big part of ME2, but nobody ever tells you how expensive and unnecessary it is to strip mine all the planets in the galaxy, nor how much money you'll need in order to buy every item from every store. A completionist or thorough explorer such as myself will inevitably find that there is not enough money in the game to purchase everything available to you. ME1 lets you sell excess equipment or play quasar (read: space poker) when you're strapped for cash; your only recourse in ME2 is to repeatedly bet a pittance on a pit fight over which you have no control.

Oh, there's that idea again: no control.

Before embarking on my final mission, I took a peek at a walkthrough to see whether I'd missed any quests that would provide that last few hundred thousand credits I needed to finish buying all the upgrades I couldn't afford. Right away, I found a mission I hadn't completed: turns out there was one more team member to recruit. Who...is only available if you buy the DLC. I looked very carefully at the prerequisites for her quest to appear, and I had met all of them. Either my game had glitched, or else the compilation package I bought was missing another downloadable extra.

This time I went directly to the DLC page of the ME2 website. And I almost wished I hadn't. There was that same comic book the game had prompted me to buy at the very beginning...alongside ten other expansion packs it never bothered to tell me about. Apparently "THE COMPLETE MASS EFFECT SAGA" includes the three base games and a few random pieces of DLC that are free to download. The really complete Mass Effect saga would cost me upwards of $90, which is triple what I paid for the three-game compilation pack.

I wasn't kidding when I said resource management is a big part of ME2. Who has the budget for that anymore?

I might've sprung for a few of the more substantial extras had the game told me about them instead of just the comic book, but at this point, I was ready to be done. Just when I had warmed up to the game, forgiven the initial separation trauma from the first game, and come to appreciate the new direction, I got the wind knocked out of me by a mandatory sequence every bit as horrible as that intro cutscene. The game manufactures a credibility-defying excuse to get every person with any combat ability off the ship, and then—surprise!—spoilers happen. One of the biggest events of the game, and Shepard is once again deprived of all ability to influence the outcome. I was simultaneously livid and vindicated. It wasn't my inability to get over my own expectations that had put a damper on the entire game. It was the developers' inability to settle on whether ME2, at its core, was all about what the players wanted to do, or what the developers wanted to do. That struggle reasserted itself at the wrong time for me to be considering giving BioWare and EA more money.

Sorry, bonus crew member. Maybe I'll download you if I ever decide to replay the game as a Renegade. I shudder to think of how depraved that playthrough will be if my "Paragon" was any indication.

It's all riding on ME3 now. The first game was very enjoyable, but could have been better. The second game was, at times, equally enjoyable, except it should have been better. The third game needs to be better.

I think of ME1 and recall the immersiveness of the game universe, the care with which I leveled up my squad, the beautiful locations, the simple pleasure of running around with a tricked-out shotgun, and the tiresome visits to random planets with excessively mountainous terrain. I think of ME2 and recall, the needless negativity of the game, the constant lack of money and ammo, the recurring sense of powerlessness, repeatedly being mislead by the popups and the conversation wheel, the Game Overs that followed every attempt to get close enough to use my shotgun, and some really cool plot twists and action sequences. I know I enjoyed myself for portions of ME2, but it was more often despite the game than because of it. If ME3 is anything other than a cohesive synthesis or refinement of the two, then I will very likely consider this series a failure.

Because if the story is the only part of the series that has a logical continuity, next time I'll buy the comic and skip the game.


Next up: Mass Defect 3

One of my all-time favorite RPGs and video/computer games in general is Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which—for me, at least—set a new standard for how immersive a game world could be. Before SW:KotOR (or just KotOR, because sometimes even abbreviations need abbreviating), it was generally an emotional connection with the characters, a large degree of freedom in my actions, or the overall atmosphere that got me immersed in a game. With KotOR, it was all of these plus one more key component: there were story-defining consequences to my actions.

In any other RPG I'd played, consequences were typically limited to the gameplay: if I choose to burn through all my most powerful items in this boss fight, I might be ill-prepared for the next one; if I fail to explore the dungeon thoroughly enough, I'll miss out on some fun secret area. I'd learned to start being a jerk whenever somebody started asking me to save their missing cat or go on some silly quest to save the world, because I'd always be forced to choose "Yes" anyhow, and the responses my characters would give to weasel their way out were usually pretty entertaining. Every once in a while there'd be a Chrono Trigger or a Space Quest with one or two pivotal moments where you could alter the ending of the game, but by and large, the only consequences I ever faced were of no lasting impact to the story.

KotOR made me choose. When there was a man being threatened in the street, I had to decide whether I'd swoop in to rescue him, walk past him quickly to avoid getting involved, or kill the assailants so I could threaten the man myself. I found myself invested in my character and the game world in a way I'd never been invested before, because I was actively shaping their development. You can play GoldenEye 007 and use the corpses of your enemies as target practice for throwing knives, but when a cutscene rolls around, you're still the good guy and not some twisted psychopath. You can play King's Quest and attempt to do cruel and unusual things to every person and creature you meet, but at the end of the adventure, you'll still be the pride of the kingdom. KotOR was the first game I'd played where even the most insignificant actions regularly had ramifications that wouldn't manifest until later on, and watching my decisions mean something got me hooked in a big way.

A few years later, I started hearing about Mass Effect. I knew very little about it, other than that it was another sci-fi RPG made by BioWare—the same company behind KotOR—and that your decisions made some sort of cumulative impact, and that it was very pretty. At the time, "very pretty" equated to "no hope of running it on my computer," so I kept the game in the back of my mind for several years. During that time, I made it a point to avoid spoiling anything about the game for myself. I had to stay off the Internet for about a week when people made it to the apparently controversial ending of Mass Effect 3, which I still refuse to learn more about until I get there myself. When Mass Effect started coming up in conversation again recently on the blogs I follow, and when the realization began to sink in that my new (used) computer has been running almost nothing but '90s adventure games since I got it, I had no trouble picking out which PC game to start playing next.

I had to restart the game three times before I got to the opening cutscene.

Mass Effect has a number of customization options, but for once, overdoing it with the graphics wasn't to blame. Even at the maximum settings, the game runs perfectly on my new (old) rig. I'd made it part of the way through the cleverly immersive character creation process ("Sorry, Mr./Mrs. Shepherd; your personal file has been corrupted. Please help us recreate the data by making selections about your backstory, character class, and personal appearance.") and then the game froze. More accurately, it stopped responding normally to my input. I tried clicking on the new options being presented to me, but instead of making selections, my clicking simply moved the selection cursor up or down. How can I advance to the next screen if clicking on the option I want only makes the cursor jump to the next option?

I did a forced shutdown of the game and booted it back up again. Maybe this was just a glitch; these things happen. I got back to the point where I got stuck before...and got stuck again. At this point, I was starting to suspect I'd somehow brought this upon myself, having spent a good 10-15 minutes fiddling with the settings before launching the character creator. Best to set everything back to the defaults and sort out the problem once I was into the game proper. Another forced shutdown.

On my third attempt, after reverting all settings to their initial states, I was feeling more annoyed than immersed. What kind of game developer lets the player configure himself into a corner before the game even begins? My suspicions proved correct when I reached the point where I'd gotten stuck twice over, and suddenly I had no problems clicking on anything.

What had happened, precisely? It all had to do with the way I'd mapped the mouse controls.

For as long as I've been playing first-person shooters, the left mouse button has always moved me forward, and the right has always moved me backward. None of this WASD nonsense where there's no good way to reach half your hotkeys in combat; all my basic movement of looking and walking around is mapped to the mouse. I grew up on platformers, where precise movement is paramount—I've got greater control over where I'm moving by pointing my mouse in that direction than trying to nudge myself back and forth with the keyboard.

That leaves my entire left hand free to use the entire keyboard for all other actions—CTRL for firing, SHIFT for running, SPACEBAR for interacting with objects, X for jumping, D for ducking, and all the surrounding keys for any extra options I might have. Again, platformers taught me how to do some combination of running, jumping, charging, firing, and sliding at the same time, so holding down two or three keys that are right next to each other is second nature to me. Plus, it's rare that a game either requires or allows you to take more than two or three actions at a time, so it's not a big deal if I have to stop firing for a split-second to activate my health recovery item that might require me to stop firing in the first place. I've still got full mouse control to wheel myself out of harm's way if I'm still under attack.

Beyond that, I play most first-person shooters as a sniper, so having my gun trigger mapped to the left mouse button (which is usually the default) actually increases the chances I'll click too hard and throw off my aim. I don't care if it's weird; it's worked for every FPS I've ever played, and I can't be held responsible if you offer me the opportunity to map the Q key however I see fit. I've been alt-firing with Z and cycling through weapons with the mouse scroll wheel since 199X; it's too late to change those habits now.

Unless those habits prevent me from getting through the first few screens of Mass Effect. For the first time in any game I have ever played, mapping movement to the left mouse button replaces your ability to make menu selections with the mouse. Instead, left-clicking moves the cursor up (like pressing the up arrow on the keyboard, typically reserved for moving your character forward), and right-clicking moves the cursor down (like pressing the down arrow on the keyboard, typically reserved for moving your character backward). Mass Effect interpreted my character movement preferences to apply to the menu screen as well. Left-clicking only made selections if it wasn't mapped to a movement command.

I discovered SPACEBAR, my interaction key, could make selections on the menu screen. So...if I wanted to do this my way, I'd have to highlight my menu options (save, equip, level up, etc.) with the mouse, and then use the keyboard to select them. This system was awkward, to say the least, and it broke down entirely on the Codex sub-menus, which do not cooperate well with keyboard commands. A good 45 minutes into the first 10 minutes of the game, I gave up. No amount of comfort during the non-menu portions of the game was worth the utter inconvenience of having to handle the menu portions this way. I reverted the controls to their WASDefaults, gingerly adjusted some of the more obnoxiously placed controls, and made duplicate mappings of fire (default left click) and backpedal (default S) to CTRL and right click, respectively, where I knew I'd be reaching for them by mistake from time to time. I was not happy about this, but at least I was finally able to play.

Once the initial irritation of the control fiasco began to subside, I found myself experiencing that same kind of immersion I came to love about KotOR. The graphics were indeed pretty, the voice acting was top-notch, the animations were fluid and realistic, the sound effects and music gave off all the appropriate vibes of being IN SPAAAAAAAAACE, and the intimations I'd heard about your choices potentially affecting the next two games in the series made every selection from those dialogue trees seem all the more important. I was hooked.

Then they dropped me on a planet with two teammates I couldn't directly control, put a gun in my hands, and demolished any lingering misconceptions that combat was turn-based like in KotOR. I know I'd been configuring the game to play like an FPS, but I wasn't expecting it to be an FPS. Now the control situation had been upgraded from inconvenience to serious problem--how could I possibly survive an onslaught of enemies when I move when I want to fire, and fire when I want to move? How could I manage giving commands to my squad when I can barely manage giving commands to myself?

In what is becoming an unpleasantly common occurrence, I bumped the combat difficulty down to the minimum. The controls were going to be a handicap; the least I could do was try to level the playing field. I engaged my first enemies with all the grace of a sedated water buffalo, but I survived. I knew I wouldn't be the crack shot I was in Elite Force and No One Lives Forever, but I'd at least be able to get by.

The rest of my first game session went well. I emerged victorious from a few more battles, got a better feel for how the dialogue wheels worked (polite or friendly options at the top of the wheel, neutral options in the middle, rude or angry options at the bottom), read up on my galactic history in the Codex, and played around with leveling up my lead character (leaving my squadmates to automatically level up until I had any idea what any of their abilities meant). As had happened many times before with my KotOR sessions, I completely lost track of the time. The only reason I made it to bed on time that night was because I failed to disarm a bomb in time and was blown up, which is usually a good stopping point. I had spent several valuable minutes trying to find a way to get to the blinking beacon on my minimap, which I presumed to be a bomb, but was in fact a marker I'd accidentally placed in the middle of a wall while fumbling through my map screen. Only the best and the brightest are saving this galaxy.

I'm now a fair portion into the game—I'd say halfway, but I'm not about to look it up and ruin the surprise—and I'm finding more and more that the interface is interfering with the immersion. My control scheme lacks the finesse to which I'm accustomed, so every combat situation ends up being less about tactics and more about brute force than I'd prefer. I could bump up the difficulty to "encourage" myself to be more tactical, but I'm concerned I'll end up dying more frequently than necessary because I'm still occasionally standing there trying to figure out why my gun is overheating when I'm supposed to be running forward.

I'm encountering a similar problem with the decryption minigame where you essentially play Frogger, trying to move your cursor into the center of a circle while avoiding the blocks that move past. I'm fairly decent at Frogger, but my skill is hampered by the control. Sluggish mouse control makes it challenging to swing the cursor into position when there's a tight squeeze, and maneuvering around to the upper portions of the circle (where there may be less block traffic) takes even more time than it does to deal with whatever's in front of you at the bottom when you start. I don't even bother with the hardest decryption level anymore—under normal circumstances, I could probably crack it about half the time, but with these controls I don't stand a chance.

Then there's the issue of inventory management. Any other RPG (hybrid FPS or not) will give you a master item/equipment list where you can see everything you have at once, and usually organize everything to some degree. Mass Effect only lets you see what equipment you have when you're on the tab to equip a character with that particular piece of equipment. For example, you can only see what pistols you have when you're getting ready to equip someone with a pistol, and even then, you'll need to scroll down on the page if you have any more than about four or five in stock. Annoyingly, equipment seems to be organized in the order everything was obtained, with no way to sort by name or strength. This gets to be problematic if you're trying to quickly sell off any duplicates you have of a particular item, because the shop menu isn't subdivided by category, so it's one long list of everything you own in the order you obtained it, with any duplicates being all over the list.

Any quest-related items are only viewable by opening the associated quest record in your Journal...which is of no help whatsoever if you pick up a Turian Medallion of Gastrointestinal Fortitude or somesuch that pertains to a quest you had no idea existed.

I'm also getting frustrated with how inconsistent the dialogue wheel is with adhering to its own rules about where certain kinds of responses should be placed. I'm going for a generally good character who always chooses the Paragon route over the Renegade route, though I'm not above being a little blunt or unfriendly from time to time if the situation calls for it; therefore, I should be sticking to the top and middle options on the wheel, and using the bottom options sparingly, right? Nope. At times, you've got as many as five different questions you can ask someone, all of which are completely prosaic, but they're scattered all about the wheel just so there's enough room for all of them. Other times, an option that looks absolutely harmless will be unexpectedly negative simply because it's on the bottom of the wheel, even when you just clicked on a different response in the same spot and had nothing negative come of it. I sincerely hope they streamlined this with the next game, because I'm tired of saving my progress before I talk to every single person, for fear I'll try to inquire about an alien's culture and end up insulting their mother and sparking a war with their people.

Oh, and let's not forget about the numerous times I've put down my sniper rifle to find my ability to run or even jog has been completely revoked until I reload a saved game. Or all the times I've tried to skip through a line of longwinded dialogue and accidentally selected a dialogue option that wasn't even visible on the screen yet. Or the phenomenon where hitting an elevator button too quickly will lodge my squadmates in the corner of the elevator and keep the whole thing from moving while my main character is frozen helplessly in place until the elevator reaches its destination (which it never does).

The Mass Effect universe is compellingly complex. The story, characters, technologies, locations, choices, and challenges are fun and interesting. The audio and visuals are top-notch. By all rights, I should be hopelessly immersed. Yet there's a stack of little things now towering high enough to cast a shadow on this otherwise brilliant game. It's difficult to get lost in a game when the elements that are supposed to blend into the background keep reminding you it is a game.


Next up: Mass Defect 2

So wait. You're telling me that Star Wars: Episode VII, Ghostbusters III, Indiana Jones 5, and Beetlejuice 2 are all real movies that are happening or likely to happen in the next few years? Look, I'm all for a sequel if there's a good story to be told, but I think everybody missed the boat here. If we've learned anything from the likes of Star Wars: Episode I, Indiana Jones 4, and Terminator III, it's that sequels made 10+ years after the last installment consistently fail to resemble the movies they're following (which is occasionally advantageous; just ask Men in Black III or Rocky Balboa). More to the point, I'm concerned about this apparent resurgence of interest in continuing film franchises where half the people involved in the original film are either dead or of retirement age.

You had all of the '90s, guys. This isn't some long-lost parent you reconnected with in the twilight years of their life; these are properties that have happily been in the public consciousness for decades, enjoying continuous merchandising and no end to the books and comics and video games that have continued the story you could've been telling on film this whole time. I don't pretend to know how long these filmmakers have been trying to make sequels to these films, but I have to imagine at least one of these planning sessions went something like, "Jeez, Harrison Ford's getting up there, isn't he? Guess we'd better start making sequels again before he's too old to lift a whip or a blaster. You know, I'd completely forgotten he was still acting until I saw a few minutes of Air Force One on TV last night. That was only from a couple years ago, right? He looks great!"

There might be hope for Star Wars: Episode VII, which is being brought to us by the very same director who brought us the last two Star Wars movies (Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness). Otherwise, I'm skeptical. Unless the people involved—new and old—profoundly understand both what makes the originals good and how to effectively pick up with a story some 10, 20, even 30 years later, I think I'd rather save my money and catch Joe Dirt 2 whenever it arrives on Netflix.

There's a fascinating website called Ex Astris Scientia (EAS), which is a Brobdingnagian compendium of Star Trek data—everything from starship galleries to timelines to forgotten alien emblems across every flavor of Trek. In contrast to Memory Alpha, a straightforward wiki with minimal commentary on the facts discussed therein, Bernd Schneider's Star Trek site picks apart the littlest details of the long-running franchise and presents some thought-provoking observations and arguments about how everything we know about Star Trek fits together (or doesn't fit together, for that matter). While the rest of us are watching cool action sequences with ships blowing up everywhere, Bernd is trying to figure out why the USS Defiant can't decide whether it's 50 or 200 meters long when compared to the sizes of the other ships it's flying alongside.

This absurd attention to detail is right up my alley.

Yes, EAS points out countless inconsistencies with everything from warp travel to Klingon physiology, but you'd be hard-pressed to create an airtight continuity with five decades of writers, directors, set designers, prop masters, actors, and so forth making their various contributions to the canon. Of course there will be issues—and with this level of scrutiny, practically anything can be shown to contain some degree of human error. After reading through the exhaustive lists of definite and probable continuity mistakes in J.J. Abrams' reboot universe as well as the preceding ten TOS and TNG films, and after digesting two refreshingly longwinded and nitpicky reviews of the latest films, I think I've finally come to terms with the Abramsverse...and it's thanks to the mistakes of the old Trek.

When you look at the inconsistencies with the Prime Timeline movies, you find some unexplained extra scorch marks on the Enterprise hull between STII and STIII, a turboshaft that reaches Deck 78 on a starship with no more than 23 decks, and some confusion about whether the Son'a are a whole race of people or merely a merry little family of face-stretching misfits. Logic and precedent are occasionally flexible for dramatic effect, minor historical details are sometimes fudged or overlooked, and the writers don't always consider the ramifications of introducing big new ideas, such as a sub-culture of Romulans who we swear have been here the whole time. Still, the majority of glaring continuity issues from ST:TMP to Nemesis can technically be explained away if we're creative enough, or swept under the rug as an obvious but essentially harmless goof.

When you look at the reboot, you see the USS Kelvin firing phasers mere seconds after the weapons are reported to be offline, an astoundingly massive starship (the Vengeance) being constructed in utter secrecy in less than a year (it took 20 years to build the Enterprise-D!), and the only time travel story in Star Trek history where the time-traveler (Spock) makes no effort whatsoever to restore the timeline to its original state. It's not free will, but rather destiny that guides these characters. The Abramsverse disengages itself from all the wrong parts of Star Trek, abandoning a fidelity to canon and an attentiveness to the logic of any given situation. Freed from these shackles, it can boldly go absolutely anywhere it wants...which, ironically, is back to Nemesis and Wrath of Khan, but in a format more accessible to youngsters who've never seen Star Trek but will watch it if it looks like what they had wanted the Star Wars prequels to be.

As summer action flicks based on a popular sci-fi property, these new movies are a great success...but as a reboot of the Star Trek franchise, they are an abject failure. One, they aren't really a reboot; two, they aren't really Star Trek. They are half-remakes more influenced by Star Wars than the show they're based on, and from my own observations and from what I've read on EAS, it's clear to me that the new movies fall spectacularly short of meeting the standards laid out by every other Star Trek. Even the worst of Star Trek—"Plato's Stepchildren," "Genesis," "Threshold," and "These Are the Voyages...", for my money—has its heart in the right place, even if the execution is uncomfortable, ridiculous, or downright awful. Whereas old Trek tries to tell a good sci-fi story and does't always succeed, nuTrek uses somebody else's universe as a playground for gonzo action sequences and tells a story that isn't even internally consistent, let alone in relation to the rest of the universe.

Yes, it's fun to watch these new movies, but I can get fun anywhere. I would've loved the Abramsverse as pure remakes, a pure reboot, or something that didn't claim to be Star Trek but was otherwise identical--I don't hate these movies. But when I order a bacon cheeseburger with onion and lettuce, I expect a bacon cheeseburger with onion and lettuce, not a turkey burger topped with blue cheese, vegetarian bacon, scallions, and cabbage. It might look the same from a distance, and it might even taste great, but it's not what I ordered.

Was it possible to reboot Star Trek without incurring the ire of curmudgeonly fans such as myself? Absolutely—though I think Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future is a big enough place that we could've had another 50 years in the same continuity before even starting to consider the need for a reboot. After all, there's plenty of the Beta and Gamma Quadrants left to explore, there's a lot of history to fill between ENT and TOS, I hear the USS Titan is a fine ship, there's no telling what the universe might be like a century after Nemesis, we've never had a TV series at Starfleet Academy or centered around anyone non-Starfleet, and a Eugenics Wars movie could be interesting...but nah, let's do Kirk again.

Tell me how this sounds instead:

EARTH, 2385: Scene opens in a classroom at Starfleet Academy. Camera pans across a sea of diverse students—humans, primarily, but the likes of a Denobulan, Edosian, Caitian, Bolian, Vulcan, Klingon, Tellarite, Trill, and a Benzite or two make up a fair portion of the class. The instructor begins to speak. "Suppose..." At that moment, one last student attempts, unsuccessfully, to slip into the room without detection. "Suppose you're late for class," the familiar accented voice continues. "Again." Chuckles from the class. We see the instructor is none other than Miles O'Brien.

"Except this time it's not just a...a slap on the wrist, or a few points off your next test."

"Or being pulled out of recreation hour to practice Vulcan meditation with Professor Somak, who won't let you go until he's convinced you've learned the value of every minute," interjects one of the students. More chuckles.

"Or that," continues O'Brien with a half smile. "This time, the Academy wants to expel you. Off you go, back to your family farm in Kendra Province, or your old job shelving bottles of yamok sauce on Pelios Station. Of course, you don't want to go back. You want to stay here with your friends, attending Professor O'Brien's riveting lectures. So you do what any soon-to-be-expelled Starfleet Academy student would do: you find a way to travel back in time to fix your mistake before it happens."

O'Brien asks a few students in rapid succession about their preferred method of time travel. Chronitons and triolic waves. Time portals. The slingshot effect. Politely ask the nearest omnipotent being to send you back. Wait a few centuries and hitch a ride to the past on an Aeon-class vessel. The class grows more animated with each comment.

"What about you, Professor O'Brien?" asks one of the students, bringing a fleeting hush of curiosity to the room.

"The holodeck." Another round of chuckles. "I hate temporal mechanics. At least with a holodeck, the past is just a holographic simulation. You can make mistakes without worrying about how they'll affect the future you came from. No matter where the story takes you, no matter how much you change history, your home is still there, just beyond the doors, same as it was when you left it. And no one's going to stop you if you want to help the Texans win the Battle of the Alamo for once...well, no one except Santa Anna."

O'Brien smiles to himself for a moment. Clearing his throat, "But, somebody's got to watch the engine room when the captain orders a slingshot around the sun, and that's what we'll be talking about today."

Fast forward to the end of class. O'Brien steps out a little too quickly into a busy hallway, and Chakotay—now a professor of Anthropology at the Academy—slams right into O'Brien's bad shoulder. I haven't worked out the rest of it from there, but I figure they exchange dialogue as they walk, tying up a few loose ends from the TV shows in passing ("My family on Dorvan V says you'd almost never know the Cardassians had been there"), foreshadowing a little bit of what's to come, and hinting at the whereabouts of people we haven't heard from in forever ("Starfleet Medical is planning to expand next year; Katherine Pulaski asked me to look over some of the schematics"). They pass a group of students and teachers huddled around a viewscreen, and stop to take a look: it's a live news report of [insert situation that sets the plot in motion—the destruction of Romulus, for example].

TIME TRAVEL ensues! Doesn't need to be obvious time travel, either; whatever's featured on the news may simply vanish, for example, or appear to be sucked into a black hole, or what have you.

EARTH, 2159: Orbital shipyard—perhaps Copernicus, or San Francisco, or Utopia Planitia. A nice, long shot of a handful of starships in various stages of construction. Work Bees go about their business. All is pleasant. Then all heck breaks loose. Whatever it was that disappeared from the news broadcast in 2385—say, Nero's ship—suddenly appears, and begins firing on the shipyard. Widespread destruction, and half-built ships nearly fly themselves apart as they mobilize to defend the shipyard. NX-02, the Columbia, soon joins the fray. NX-01, the Enterprise, isn't far behind. The attacker, enraged at being unable to find what they were looking for, warps away (possibly in search of another means of time travel to get to when they want to be), leaving the shipyard in ruins and the ships—the ones that survived—in no condition to go anywhere.

EARTH, 2267 (or 2255, if we insist on having characters too young to plausibly run the ship): Oh, look. It's James T. Kirk.

There, J.J. I've set things up for you. An olive branch has been extended to the fans of TNG, DS9, VOY, and ENT. Maybe it's not a gripping space battle right off the bat with heroic self-sacrifice and women dramatically going into labor IN SPAAAACE! But spending six or seven minutes in Starfleet Academy, or anywhere else in the Prime Universe, might be all it takes to get a curmudgeonly fan invested in the new direction of the franchise. We haven't forgotten about you, and we still care about this universe—we're just excited to put a new spin on it, and we hope you'll come with us. And blowing up a whole shipyard in the early days of Starfleet seems like it'd do a whole heap more to affect the timeline than blowing up just one, a ship whose only notable accomplishment was that it carried both of Kirk's parents, in a century when Earth has more ships to spare anyhow.

I'm sure Bernd would have a field day with my movie.

Back in college, I started a little project to watch Star Trek. What started out as a simple matter of borrowing the first season of Next Generation from the library soon turned into a mission that would make V'Ger proud: Buy all that is buyable; watch all that is watchable. I set out to own every film and season of every Star Trek, systematically watching them with my roommate, my family, my wife, and anyone else who would join me on this five-year mission. Which turned into two five-year missions. Which...very well may turn into three five-year missions if I get too distracted by Doctor Who.

But last night was a triumph, for my wife and I finished Deep Space Nine.

I'm no stranger to long, drawn-out projects. Look at any of my Mega Man videos for YouTube—this latest recording endeavor, a playthrough of Mega Man 7, had been on hold for over a year. But in the last two months, I went from having only the intro stage recorded to having everything but the final stage and end credits. Over the course of this past week, my wife and I marathoned the entire second half of DS9's seventh and final season. More than likely, tonight we'll be watching the Season 3 finale of Voyager or kicking off Enterprise with the double-length pilot episode. Things are picking up, and it's exciting.

There's something to be said for a leisurely pace—taking my time through The Original Series and The Next Generation was enjoyable, because I'd already seen many, if not most, of the episodes and savoring the continual presence of my favorite sci-fi franchise in my weekly routine. An episode here and there was fine by me.

Things were different by the time we got to Deep Space Nine—I'd watched most of the first two seasons (and a scant handful of episodes after that) when the show was first on the air, but lost interest when they didn't boldly go anywhere! Now, two decades later, I have a greater appreciation of the character interactions and darker themes explored by the show. Entranced by the compelling stories and recognizing the huge gap in my Star Trek education that demanded to be filled, I was eagerly watching two, three, even four episodes at a clip whenever we sat down to watch DS9. I was hooked.

As soon as I had my first special weapon for this playthrough of Mega Man 7, I started discovering and remembering all the ways I can show off and goof around in the game. I was having a blast—some of the most fun I've ever had recording videos for YouTube, in fact--and couldn't wait to (a) try my hand at the next stage, and (b) share my enthusiasm for this oft-derided game with the online community. I was hooked.

Having spent so much time with the same few projects in progress, it is supremely gratifying to reach a major milestone, an ending, or even a point where I can see a milestone or an ending. It's rejuvenating to actively feel the anticipation of starting the next phase of something. I've set aside my other side projects to concentrate on these two, but I think I've needed a break from all the short-term satisfactions of blog posts I write in an hour and chipping away at one of the random movies on our ponderous Netflix Instant Queue. It's become a fact of life that I always have two Star Trek series and a Mega Man game going at any given time...but turning the status quo into a temporary situation with a clear endpoint is what I needed—and what I suspect we all need, sometimes—to pull me out of a comfortable rut and place me on a fresh path that's even better.

My wife likes to sneak fun doodles into the lunches I take to work, and our recent adventure through some allegedly classic episodes of the British sci-fi series Doctor Who was the inspiration for this keeper:

Don't pretend like this isn't true. I can tolerate the occasional recycled plotline and I don't mind vintage science fiction, but toward the end of our adventure I was counting the minutes until some Mystery Monster showed up to terrorize a populace that had taken the Doctor and/or his companion(s) hostage. I excitedly looked forward to hearing the cool theme song, and did everything in my power to stay awake and engaged during the actual show. Yes, it's another terrifying green plastic bag monster, aaaahhh...zzzzzzz...

To be fair, we were at the mercy of Netflix, whose roster included a bizarre sampling of serials from 1963-1989. Instead of seeing complete story arcs and pivotal plotlines, we were exposed to a standalone bit of fluff here, the middle of a story arc there...and not a consistently random assortment, either, where each of the various Doctors was featured once or twice. There was a single serial each with the first, second, and seventh; two with the fifth; four with the third; nine with the fourth; and none with the sixth (unless you count any cameos they made in someone else's show). Confusing, to say the least, but varied enough that—statistically speaking—you'd think at least one episode in 25 years would pan out a little differently.

Still, I imagine Star Trek would seem pretty tiresome if you had two episodes from TOS, one from TAS, four from TNG, one from DS9, nine from VOY, and one from ENT, with no context whatsoever, and they're basically all the one where somebody gets replaced by an evil android. Or an evil shapeshifter. Or an evil transporter clone. Or an evil alternate universe twin. Or an evil mind parasite that takes over their body. Actually, I think I'm just describing all of The Original Series. Oh, well.

My wife, who grew up watching Doctor Who, did some research and was able to fill in the massive gaps between serials for me. Hearing about the Daleks, the Time War, the Doctor's various regenerations, the Master, the history of the TARDIS, and the fates of a few of the Doctor's companions was intriguing—it sounded like a great show; when could I start watching? Oh, right. I'd already seen 18 serials—which translates out to something like 24 hours of television, or an entire season of any other show.

If it were just me, I would've simply skipped ahead to the next Doctor at the first sign of tedium. I'm enough of a sci-fi junkie that I'll subject myself briefly to things I don't like for the sake of self-education, but to power through 24 hours of questionably entertaining entertainment, and then agree to watch through the entire new series with the ninth Doctor and his successors...that takes the kind of insanity that only comes from being an in-law.

It wasn't just my wife, but her whole family who grew up on Doctor World Health Organization. Any time we go to visit, it's a guarantee there'll be at least one extended conversation about the show, which is typically where I bust out the Game Boy and they lose me for the rest of the weekend. Both for my own edification as a sci-fi fan, and as a son/brother/nephew-in-law who would like to be able to communicate with his extended family beyond what's for dinner and no I'm not playing Mega Man again, it's important to me to press on.

But oh, is it a challenge.

I liked Hartnell, the first Doctor, well enough. Despite the awkwardness of jumping right into a story ("The Aztecs") with no idea who these characters were, where they came from, or why they were gallivanting across space and time, the overall quality of the first serial was pretty good for its time. None of the characters left too much of an impression on me, but as I'd soon discover, that's not necessarily a bad thing—I'd rather have low-key heroes and villains than abrasively prominent ones.

Troughton, the second Doctor, struck me as a cartoon. Combined with his screamy companion What's-Her-Face, "The Mind Robber" was a bit painful to watch with how over-the-top some of the performances were, especially against such a mishmash of antagonists and supporting players—it felt less like a land of imagination and more like a land of, "Well, I guess we could throw this in." On the plus side, Upbeat Scottish Guy was the first Doctor Who character I liked, and not merely liked "well enough."

The third Doctor, Pertwee, remains my favorite. Intelligent, rational, and stern-yet-gentle in a fatherly sort of way. I liked the Brigadier he served with. I liked the woman who seemed to be shaping up to be his first companion. I liked that I finally got to see a first episode with a new doctor, "Spearhead from Space," so I had some context for a change. Things were looking up, I thought to myself.

Then the first companion was replaced by Jo, who aggravatingly caused more trouble than she resolved, constantly ignoring or countermanding the Doctor's orders and failing to exercise basic common sense. This made "The Three Doctors" and "The Carnival of Monsters" a little less enjoyable, but at least those episodes began to showcase some of the more interesting aspects of the Doctor Who universe (the diversity of creatures, for instance) and exercise more of the show's storytelling potential (finding an excuse to get Hartnell, Troughton, and Pertwee working together was brilliant).

Then came "The Green Death," and with it, a decade of shoddy writing. Pacing slowed to a crawl as the serials became less about telling a good story and more about keeping the Doctor detained or waiting for the Mystery Monster to bump off all the expendable characters before the Doctor takes any real action. So much padding for so little plot.

Thus began the reign of Tom Baker as the fourth Doctor, who I understand is a fan favorite. I must have missed all the fun episodes, because most of what I remember about him is how harshly he interacted with his inferiors, his distinctive scarf and hair, and that trademark grin that he flashed right before doing something needlessly reckless. I liked K-9, loved the tribal alien something-or-other companion, gradually warmed up to Romana I, frowned at how Romana II was starting to remind me of Jo, and was excited to see four consecutive serials pertaining to a single storyline—finding the pieces of the Key to Time. I grew weary of the Doctor's constant disregard for the people and situations around him, and had trouble getting to know him when his personality was so inconsistent—he'd go from angry to frightened to laughing in the face of death and back again.

It doesn't help that "The Ark in Space," "Horror of Fang Rock," and "The Power of Kroll," which all transpired during this era, were some of the most plodding, unproductive serials yet. I also admit to falling asleep more frequently during the second half of the Netflix roster; not sure if this is the cause or the symptom of my displeasure with these shows.

Credit where credit is due, however: "The Pirate Planet" was hands-down the best serial of the lot—and not simply better than the others, but legitimately good sci-fi in its own right. Good action, meaningful character interactions, great pacing, some humor, a few plot twists, many interesting locations, memorable villains, and plenty of creative situations and solutions. All around, a very well-told story and solidly entertaining television...which shouldn't be much of a surprise, because it was written by The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy scribe Douglas Adams. If I can't call myself a Doctor Who fan, it's not because the ingredients aren't there; it's because the people behind the camera rely too heavily on, "Look! Weird stuff! And the characters are inherently likable!" to sell the story.

The fifth Doctor, Davison, was a refreshing amalgamation of Pertwee's controlled cleverness and Tom Baker's spontaneity—he might throw himself haphazardly into a situation, but at least he seemed to have an idea of how to get out of it. I'm inclined to say he's my second-favorite Doctor, though his companions were...tolerable. I was not completely enthralled by Snippy, Whiny, and Well-Meaning-But-Impetuous Boy-Child. I also wasn't too keen on either of the serials I saw him in, "The Visitation" and "The Caves of Androzani”; the former would've been more appealing to me as a straight-up "androids have invaded 17th-century England" story instead of some convoluted Terileptil plot to wipe out humanity with rats and bracelets, and the latter focused so much on political intrigue and military strategy that the Doctor and his companion were almost incidental characters up until the very end. Doctor...Who? Oh, the main character. If you say so.

Netflix thoughtfully left out any episodes starring the sixth Doctor, Colin Baker, so you're getting off the hook with a sentence instead of a paragraph.

By the time we got to the seventh Doctor, McCoy (I'm a Time Lord, not a doctor!), I was hoping for a departure from what I'd seen so far; a reinvention, if you will, or at least a storytelling style more in line with the better-paced, character-focused sci-fi I grew up with from the late '80s. Instead, I got "The Curse of Fenric": same ol', same ol', with better film quality. And oppressively bombastic music. It sounded like a bad Sega Genesis game. Like Hartnell, I didn't get much of an impression from McCoy, but that's also because I was too busy shaking my head at the parade of fools who chose to gaze in horror at the slowly approaching sea vampire zombie fish people instead of running away at quadruple their speed. Ace, his companion, was another obnoxiously independent tagalong; I don't mind tough guy/tough girl characters, but all I can think of is her yelling at the doctor about how he never tells her anything, and her flirting with a guard in the most incomprehensibly flirtatious way I've ever seen—like, using something to the effect of, "my, the sun is comprised of helium," as a pickup line. Odd, self-centered, and prone to emotional outbursts is not a character trait combination I find appealing.

Skipping over the eighth Doctor, McGann, due to his absence from Netflix, my wife and I proceeded to the new series of Doctor Who, watching the first two episodes with Eccleston, the ninth Doctor. Well, he wasn't in our living room with us; we were the ones watching him on the screen.

Anydigression.

This Doctor looks destined to be my third favorite, possibly slipping past Davison for second place. He's passionate, efficient, and mysterious (but not irritatingly so). Likewise, Rose is on track to become my favorite companion, or at least in my top three. A little rebellious, a little inquisitive, a little sentimental, a little overwhelmed...a little of everything, making her feel more like a well-rounded and real person than the previous companions, who took two or three character traits and ran with them.

What I like about this new series is that it takes the time to develop the characters, hints at things yet-to-be-revealed, pays tribute to previous shows, keeps a steady pace, and goes beyond the needs of the episode to consider the ramifications of an entire universe filled with weird aliens and time travel and whatnot. What I don't like about this new series is that the climax of each episode superficially creates drama by putting the characters in a tight spot and stretching out their inaction for far longer than necessary, too many people get needlessly killed off, and the aliens are way too weird for me. I appreciate that the aliens are far more diverse than the large, speechless beasts of Star Wars and the multitudinous ridgy humanoids of Star Trek, but...talking skin? Gross.

Overall, I'm liking the direction of this new series, but there's still something about the execution that's holding me back from professing I'm a Whovian, or a Whoite, or whatever fans are called. Who-heads? I suspect, once again, that the writers are responsible. Everything else—acting, costumes, makeup, lighting, set design, you name it—is just as good as it's ever been, if not better. I'm not sure yet about the storytelling; the body count of the innocent is already too high, and overreliance on manufactured tension makes for tedious viewing (see: The Hobbit).

As a side note, in the first episode of the new series, Mystery Monsters terrorize the neighborhood, and the Doctor gets captured by them. The more things change...

Four years. I've waited four years for this. Four years of inner turmoil. Four years of disappointment, denial, and anger.

Four years since J.J. Abrams' Star Trek reboot. If you couldn't tell, I was not entirely pleased.

After four years of discussing, debating, and speculating, I finally have the resolution I've so desperately craved—I finally have a sequel. It's called Star Trek Into Darkness, and it's allowed me to sort out these conflicting emotions and make peace with my beloved entertainment franchise.

If you're familiar with my work at Exfanding Your Horizons, you know I've written about this at length. No need to click on all of these, but they're here if you'd like a refresher or some background on the matter. Plus, I really like some of these titles.

- Star Trek RIP, Part 1
- Star Trek RIP, Part 2
- Reconnecting with the World
- Abandon Fandom!
- J.J. Abrams, Please Stop Killing People
- Star Trek by the Minute
- (Re)Star(t) Trek
- New York Comic-Con / Anime Festival 2011 Recap: Part Two (scroll down a ways)
- Star Trek Into Darkness of the Movie Theater Again
- Lastly, from this blog: A New Hopelessness

Now, brace for impact, kiddos; sensors are detecting spoilers on a collision course.

First off, let's review my predictions for Star Trek Into Darkness, based on what transpired in the first movie (discussed in the penultimate post above):

Things We'll Probably See:

Nurse Chapel, whose only function is to scream at scary things, and give McCoy somebody to talk to, 'cuz he really doesn't seem that tight with Kirk - Close! We got Carol Marcus, who screams at scary things and has her biggest scene together with McCoy. And she mentions Nurse Chapel, so there you go.

An impromptu Gorn battle that completely interrupts the flow of the story - There's a brief moment at the beginning where Kirk shoots a big animal that appears out of nowhere, and they do mention the Gorn...so I'd say that's close enough.

Vulcans behaving completely out of character - Actually, I think the writers understand Spock better than anyone else, and Spock's the only Vulcan I saw...so I guess I whiffed on this one. Blame it on the scuttlebutt I'd been hearing about the videogame tie-in.

A reference to a classic Trek scene or quote, which inadvertently devalues the scene or quote if you think about it too hard - "Reference" is putting it lightly. Half the film was a remake of Wrath of Khan, though that devalues this film, and not the one it's referencing. More on that later.

LENS FLARE - PROBABLY. MAYBE I MISSED IT.

An incredibly important plot point that's barely explained and/or makes absolutely no sense if you think about it too hard - If you want to avoid detection by the indigenous people of a planet, why fly your starship into their ocean instead of staying in high orbit and sending down a shuttle? Why did Kirk steal that scroll that got everybody chasing after him? And let's not even start on haphazardly promoting crew members (seriously, your tactical officer who has been shadowing the chief engineer is a better candidate for a replacement than anyone else who works in engineering?), Marcus loading cryofrozen war criminals into torpedoes, plotting to sabotage the Enterprise, and escalating to wanton murder of Kirk and his crew in a matter of moments.

Adults who are absolutely useless in crisis situations, leaving the young'uns to take matters into their own hands - I'm pretty sure Kirk was the only person at that staff meeting who didn't stand there and wait to get shot.

Petty bickering over a woman (I'm already blaming Uhura) - What? A lovers' quarrel between Spock and Uhura? Couldn't be!

Someone getting killed off for plot convenience and/or a cheap emotional response - We didn't need Pike anymore, right?

No Klingons, or worse yet, pointless Klingons - Or, worse yet...actual Klingons. But they all died like punks.

Really awesome action sequences that make you forget about everything I just mentioned - The Enterprise rose out of the ocean! Stuff blew up real good! Lots of punching! ...What were we talking about?

Needless to say, Star Trek Into Darkness was very much what I expected it to be. The original press release was a bit misleading, talking about someone "from within their own organization" (not really) who "has detonated the fleet" (not really), but I still laid my money on Khan as the villain well before the speculation took off. As a side note, the teaser trailers were misleading as well; try watching any of the later ones after seeing the movie, and note how cleverly they took scenes out of context and out of order, showing you just enough to make you think you know what will happen.

So I've gotten pretty good at figuring out how an Abrams/Orci/Kurtzman production is gonna pan out. The question is, how does Into Darkness compare with its predecessor?

Let me put it this way: I might be inclined to watch this one again. It's been four years, and I have yet to rewatch the first one.

I'll break this down the same way I did with Oblivion: by reviewing the lessons that subsequent films in this new Star Trek continuity could stand to learn from Into Darkness—and from any other Star Trek, for that matter.


Lesson #1: You've got 40+ years of continuity. Make references.

Carol Marcus. Christine Chapel. The Gorn. A tribble. The NX-01 amongst the model ships lined up in Admiral Marcus' office. Uniforms in the style of Star Trek: The Motion Picture's. Klingons. Adaptations of the main TOS and TNG themes in the end credits music. Section 31. The destruction of Vulcan. "The Mudd incident." Star Trek Into Darkness makes references of all sizes, some more obvious than others, and they help form meaningful connections with the franchise as a whole. A well-placed reference can be a rewarding treat for attentive viewers, and it's an acknowledgement that there's more to Star Trek than just this film.

However, some discretion is required, lest we forget the quotes and references that were ham-fistedly crammed into the first movie: the Kobayashi Maru scene trivialized one of Star Trek's best untold stories for cheap comedic effect, some random planet nowhere near Delta Vega was called Delta Vega just to reference "Where No Man Has Gone Before," and Spock Prime's first interaction with Kirk was peppered with familiar sayings that ring hollow without the emotional context originally associated with them. Simply dropping a reference isn't good enough; it needs to fit with the story, regardless of whether there's an audience watching.


Lesson #2: You've got 40+ years of continuity. Treat it with respect.

One of the reasons I got so angry at Star Trek (2009) was the lack of reverence for the source material. With such a long and rich history, you'd think there'd be no shortage of plot threads to follow and new aspects of the galaxy to explore...but instead of building on the foundation already in place, the film proceeded to destroy everything from Romulus to the core personalities of some of Star Trek's most memorable characters, merely to have a fresh slate to tell a (mediocre) story.

Uhura went from a strong, subtly sensual communications officer to a floozie who probably served some function on the ship (my guess: Flirts Officer. Ha ha.). Sarek, a true Vulcan of commanding presence and profound wisdom, was relegated to a generic fatherly role. McCoy's nickname of "Bones," previously derived from "sawbones" (old slang for a surgeon), lost its meaning when Kirk picked it up from McCoy's passing comment of being nothing but "a bag of bones" after his divorce. The list goes on. The names are the same, but they're not entirely the same people.

Perhaps because the film is only accountable to its predecessor, which did all the dirty work of introducing characters and severing almost all ties with the previous continuity, Into Darkness has some breathing room to (a) insert references without trying so hard to appease any dubious diehard fans, and (b) let these versions of the characters develop more naturally.

Scotty has gone from "happy comic relief Scotsman" to "friendly, expert engineer who cares deeply about his ship," for example. However, I still have no sense of this Uhura's personality other than that she's Spock's girlfriend, and that she speaks Klingon more fluently than she did in Undiscovered Country, where she was condemning food, things, and supplies. (That has to change.) There's certainly room for interpretation when a new actor or director is working with a character, but especially when dealing with an alternate timeline, that core personality should remain intact—after all, as far as the story's concerned, it's only the appearance and aftermath of Nero that should account for any differences in a character's character.

Into Darkness does a better job than its predecessor of respecting Star Trek continuity because it works within the boundaries of what the previous movie established. Instead of bulldozing the foundations and framework to make way for something new, it fleshes out what's already there—and because it pulls so much of the story from "Space Seed" and Wrath of Khan, Into Darkness naturally feels more like Star Trek than last time.

That's the kicker: It's not just adherence to canon, but embracing what it means to be Star Trek. It's the interplay between characters. It's the strange, new worlds. It's the new life and new civilizations. It's the thought-provoking questions about social issues and human nature that arise from combining all of the above. Into Darkness seems to get more of its details straight about who these characters are and what their universe is like, but it's still missing the heart—or the brain, if you will—that elevates Star Trek above any other sci-fi action movie. We're getting there, but we're not there yet.


Lesson #3: You've got 40+ years of continuity. Boldly go where no one has gone before, for cryin' out loud.

The purpose of a reboot, as I see it, is to do things differently—or better. To its credit, Into Darkness features some great action sequences, turns Spock's iconic death scene on its head with a clever role reversal, and utilizes the full potential of Khan's genetic enhancements (something I've always felt Wrath of Khan skimped on a bit—"Khan, I'm laughing at the superior intellect!"). There's a lot of good in this movie, and a lot we haven't seen before...but not enough.

For starters, it would've been brilliant to have Khan, defeated on the bridge of the USS Vengeance, shouting "KIIIRRRRKKK!!!" at the top of his lungs.

I wanted to see any other antagonist—Gary Mitchell, those mind-control parasites from "Conspiracy," the Suliban, Trelane, the Borg (Kirk versus a female foe, particularly the Borg Queen, would've been interesting...), even Gary Seven could've somehow been worked in as a villain in this alternate timeline. A reboot offers the freedom of choice, and they chose a bad guy and a situation that led to all the same major plot points that were hit before. Nemesis already rehashed Wrath of Khan to a certain degree; now we're doing it again?

How was it that Khan put it? "You should have let me sleep"?

Reuse villains. Recycle familiar plotlines. But do so in a way that's worthy of a reboot. Take the story in wildly unexpected directions; combine elements that couldn't possibly have been combined before; give the old stories and characters the kind of depth and complexity they've never had. Into Darkness offers some of that, but it squanders the opportunity to offer something truly novel to the Star Trek universe, opting instead to flesh out and fudge some of the details of an existing story.

There's an excellent comic miniseries called Star Trek: The Last Generation. It plays out a "What if?" scenario, wondering how TNG might've looked if, at the climax of The Undiscovered Country, Kirk and his crew had failed to foil the assassination attempt at the Khitomer conference. It's a rough-and-tumble, post-apocalyptic kind of setting in which the Klingons have conquered Earth, and the Federation looks more like the Rebel Alliance. Due to the situation, certain characters find themselves in very different roles, and interacting with very different people—Worf is a villain; Sulu is an almost mythical freedom fighter; Ro Laren and a decidedly not-dead Tasha Yar are a couple—yet they are the same people. Picard is Picard, Troi is Troi, and Data is Data, just in radically different circumstances. Their universe is almost unrecognizable, but it still feels like Star Trek because the characters, technology, and flow of history stay true to their roots.

Compare this to a bunch of irresponsible brats who get their own starship and redo Wrath of Khan.


Lesson #4: You are not Star Wars.

Lobot doesn't belong on the bridge. And only Imperial officers are allowed to wear those doofy hats. Knock it off.


Lesson #5: Separate your heroes from time to time.

One of my favorite seasons of Deep Space Nine allows something to happen that I'd never seen before on a television show: the heroes go off to war, and they don't immediately come back! For the majority of the season, half the main characters are on opposite sides of the quadrant, and it's fascinating to watch the story and character development when everyone is so far removed from each other, and from the space station they call home.

Into Darkness has the guts to kick Scotty off the ship before it leaves Earth, yet he remains as involved in the story as anyone else, ultimately being in a unique position to save the day because he was separated from the rest of the crew. Uhura faces a group of armed Klingons with no one beside her as backup. Spock finds himself trapped in an active volcano. Being alone is one thing; being separated is another entirely—there's dramatic potential that's difficult to tap any other way.


Lesson #6: Blend the comedy and action into the story.

Star Trek (2009), like most any Star Trek movie, has its moments of levity. Unlike any other Star Trek movie, the flow of the action grinds to a halt as neon signs light up, saying, "THIS IS THE FUNNY PART! TIME OUT FOR COMEDY!" and/or, "HERE'S THIS COOL THING WE WANTED TO DO! LOOK! HERE IT IS!" Scotty getting stuck in the tube in engineering. Random monster battles in the snow. Kirk's anatomy inflating. (Side note: I should probably be more specific; that could be misconstrued.) Into Darkness works the humor and whiz-bangery into the story, smoothing out the edges so there isn't an abrupt shift between storytelling and technically unnecessary digressions. The movie as a whole flows much better this way.


Lesson #7: Big ships are cool. Don't overdo them.

The Scimitar was a big ol' beastie of a ship. The Narada was a big ol' beastie of a ship. The Vengeance is a big ol' beastie of a ship. Impossible odds are easy enough to find; be careful not to fall into a rut, no matter how cool that rut may be.


Lesson #8: Make sense.

Look, we're talking about a science fiction franchise that once had Spock's brain telling McCoy how to do surgery on it. Suspension of disbelief is a necessity. But there's a fine line between "makes sense in Star Trek," and, "buh...WHA!?" With the first ten films, you were supposed to think about them long after the credits rolled—give those Big Ideas time to simmer. With these new films, the pacing is such that you don't have the chance to think about what's going on; consequently, the writers aren't held as accountable to craft a coherent plot. As long as it's entertaining, who cares whether anything gets a proper explanation?

I'm not saying the films are completely unintelligible; I'm saying they don't seem to stand up to scrutiny as well as most of the other films. "Because it's cool" is a better explanation for much of what happens than, "because it makes sense within the context of the story." Refer to any of the items mentioned in my one prediction above.

"Because it's cool" is not inherently a problem for me—after all, I've run plenty of D&D campaigns where logic was relegated to the corner just so I could drop an ethereal filcher on the party—but it's a concern when it becomes the primary explanation, especially in a Star Trek film. Deliberately masking incomplete or incoherent plot points with grand set pieces and special effects is tantamount to lying to the audience; inadvertently doing so is a demonstration of carelessness or incompetence. When a franchise is defined by the intelligence and integrity of its characters, it's not unreasonable to want the storytelling to share those traits.


Lesson #9: Get the dialogue right.

There's a Next Generation comic miniseries called Atonement. I don't remember much about the story—something having to do with the inventor of transporter technology being a man out of time—but I do remember the dialogue. At least, the style of the dialogue. Throughout the entire story, something felt "off," and I couldn't put my finger on it...until I realized the lines Picard and Data were saying were written for Kirk and Spock. Star Trek feels inauthentic when the dialogue doesn't fit with the characters; voice is just as crucial as plot when it comes to a character-driven story.

All throughout Into Darkness, I tried to imagine what these lines would sound like as spoken by Shatner, Nimoy, Kelley, Doohan, Nichols, Takei, and Koenig. (I gave up with Besch and Montalban, as they themselves sound nothing like Eve and Cumberbatch.) Sometimes, the lines felt right. Sometimes, I had flashbacks to my high school English classes. The words got the point across in those cases, but the characters didn't own them.

Example: If memory serves, Scotty calls Kirk "Jim" at least twice in the film. I've heard Scotty refer to him as "Jim Kirk" when talking about him, but when talking to him, it's always been "Captain." It's that lack of nuance that's making it harder for me to buy into the assertion that these are the same characters I grew up watching. The preponderance of modern vernacular doesn't make these characters sound more relatable; it makes them sound like they've got script writers who planned out all the action sequences and a couple of quotable lines before realizing they needed more dialogue to pad the empty space between them.


That's all for now. I have no doubt I'll continue to ruminate on the new movie, and the old movie, and all the movies—this is merely my first stab at putting my thoughts down on virtual paper. Ultimately, I enjoyed Star Trek Into Darkness. It's fun, it's a neat twist on a familiar story, it's a visual spectacle. It's almost Star Trek. I still have my misgivings about the film and the new continuity as a whole, but I've mellowed considerably since I first saw the trailer that heralded a new era of the franchise I hold so dear.

Having seen more of Abrams, Orci, and Kurtzman's films in the past four years, I've come to understand how they operate. Abrams doesn't make the kinds of movies I like, plain and simple—but he keeps attaching his name to films that sound right up my alley until I find out he's involved. Orci and Kurtzman write movies like they're comic books; like George Lucas, they need somebody to act as a creative filter to translate their ideas into something more cinematically structured. I see Damon Lindelof's name in the writing credits; knowing absolutely nothing about him, I'm already attributing the more cohesive and Trek-like feel of Into Darkness to his influence.

As a side note, I'm noticing an alarming trend in the movie and TV previews I've seen in theaters recently. See if you can detect a theme here: Defiance. Olympus Has Fallen. White House Down. After Earth. Oblivion. Elysium. World War Z. There's only so much "fall of civilization as we know it" I can handle, you guys.

So anyhow. Star Trek Into Darkness. Better than the last one. Good enough to want to see the next one. Still hasn't convinced me this reboot was necessary, though. Kick off the training wheels, take off the parking brake, and make the next one the best one.

Boldly go, Star Trek. I'm looking forward to welcoming you back into the family next time.

April brought everything back into balance for me. I found time to write, play, record, and do all that other cool off-camera stuff the rest of the world can only guess at (though if you guessed, "making an impromptu trip to the grocery store because you had an uncontrollable craving for salad," then you are correct). Here's what happened as it pertains to the Internet:

This Blog:

Groovy. A little bit about YouTube, Facebook, geeky gifts, and cinema, plus something more philosophical. Yay variety.

- Retrospective: March 2013
- Debacle, Explanation, and Apology
- About Face(book)
- Good Things Come in Threes
- When I Die
- On Oblivion
- Series Opinions: Mega Man series: Mega Man 6-10

GameCola:

Groovy. A totally esoteric comic, admission of a videogame crush, a new format for the podcast video posts, and coverage of a game genre I don't talk about nearly enough. Yay variety.

Columns:
- Q&AmeCola: Your Videogame Crush

Comics:
- Sprite Flicker: Middle-EarthBound

Reviews:
- King's Quest III Redux: To Heir Is Human

Videos:
- GC Podcasts #41-43 on YouTube: No More Turnabouts
- GC Podcasts #44-46 on YouTube: Let's Not Get Too Limited on Saramail

YouTube:

Footage from the livestreaming 2012 Megathon continues to trickle in, and I made an honest-to-goodness video (referred to in one of the posts above).

GeminiLaser:
- [April Fools'] Mega Man 7 - Part 1: About Time!

DashJumpTV:
- Megathon 2012: Rockman 6 (Famicom) / Mega Man 6 (NES)

The Backloggery:

After seeing the frighteningly long list of additions to my Backloggery back in February, I swore I'd cut back on collecting games and start playing more of the ones I had. This went exceptionally well until I was gifted with a mega-pack of fantasy roleplaying games from GOG.com. Only my Backloggery is complaining, though; a lot of these are games I've been curious about, and the rest seem right up my alley.

New:
- Dungeon Keeper  (PC)
- Dungeon Keeper 2  (PC)
- Dungeons & Dragons: Dragonshard  (PC)
- Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone  (PC)
- Neverwinter Nights 2  (PC)
- Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer  (PC)
- Neverwinter Nights 2: Mysteries of Westgate  (PC)
- Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir  (PC)
- Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness  (PC)
- Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress  (PC)
- Ultima III: Exodus  (PC)
- Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar  (PC)
- Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny  (PC)
- Ultima VI: The False Prophet  (PC)
- Ultima VII: The Black Gate  (PC)

Started:
- Half-Life 2: Lost Coast  (Steam)
- Mega Man X: Command Mission  (GCN)

Beat:
- Half-Life 2: Lost Coast  (Steam)
- Tomb Raider  (PC)

Completed:
- Boing! Docomodake DS  (NDS)
- Half-Life 2: Lost Coast  (Steam)

Lookin' good, me.

My wife and I went out this week to see Oblivion, the Tom Cruise film that's already my top candidate for favorite new film of the year. I watch a lot of sci-fi both old and new, and one of the things that appeals to me about Oblivion is how many things it does right. Sure, it's entertaining and thought-provoking and stuff blows up real good, but the movie is crafted in such a way that it transcends the basic hooks of premise, characters, and the novelty of the sci-fi elements to engage the viewer. I think plenty of science fiction movies—and movies in general—could stand to learn a thing or two from Oblivion.

Lesson #1: Set the Stage

Whether it's aliens, futuristic technology, or a post-apocalyptic setting, something about your sci-fi universe is going to be unfamiliar to the viewer, no matter how many times they've seen it in other films. Sometimes it works to be thrown into the action and figure things out as you go (see: Star Wars), but even then there's a certain amount of context that needs to be established. Oblivion takes the time to explain loads of backstory before the movie really begins, but the exposition is concise and effective—within the first five minutes, I had a firm grasp of the universe, these characters, and the life they lead, immersing me in the story before much of anything had happened. All too often I've seen movies devote too much screen time to introductions and backstory that are vital, but delay the start of the main plot (see: Harry Potter). Just as often I've seen movies that tell you nothing, possibly glossing over some critical backstory more than halfway through the film (see: Star Trek (2009)). Oblivion tells you everything you need to know up front, devoting the rest of its running time to telling the main story and further developing these characters you feel like you already know.

Lesson #2: Subvert Expectations

A hero lands in an empty field to repair a damaged drone that was shot down by scavengers. As the screenwriter, you should:

a) allow the hero to fix the drone, but be ambushed by scavengers on the way back
b) allow the hero to fix the drone, but have it malfunction and try to attack him
c) allow the hero to fix the drone, and go about his business

Most any other movie would've picked a) or b), but Oblivion frequently comes up with an option c). Murphy's Law is usually in constant effect elsewhere in the cinema world, because turncoat technology and overwhelming odds tend to make for better drama than when things go as planned. Oblivion uses this to great effect—every time something goes right, it builds greater tension for the things that go wrong. Veering away from the obvious while staying within the realm of reasonable possibility makes the story feel more authentic and less contrived, and it's easier to invest the audience in your story when they really don't know what will happen to the characters.

Even in the places where things do happen as you expect them to (a few minor deus-ex-machina moments come to mind), they're not overdramatized.

Lesson #3: Use Death Responsibly

From the noblest of heroes to the lowliest of Stormtroopers, people die in movies all the time. Death is often a climactic emotional gut-punch (see: Serenity) or an obligatory component of action sequences (see: Flash Gordon); all too infrequently do characters die as a natural consequence of choices and chance. Oblivion kills off its share of individuals, whether we know their names or not; the difference is that it would do the same regardless of whether an audience was watching.

Lesson #4: Always Keep One More Secret Up Your Sleeve

Oblivion is full of plot twists. Sometimes it's an unexpected revelation about the plot; sometimes it's the unexpected actions of the characters; sometimes it's a bona-fide out-of-the-blue surprise. Up until the very end, there's always something more for the viewer to discover about the characters and the universe. This also makes for a fresh experience re-watching the film, knowing now what you didn't know then.


Overall? I could stand to see more movies like Oblivion.