Zoraptor

Having killable NPCs is not stupid, it was necessary and fine if you don't plan on using them again as recruitables. What dramatic gravitas ME2 has would be lost if you gave NPCs character shields. I'd also note that most of the defences of ME2 ignore that ME2 did exactly the same thing vis-a-vis ME1 that people say ME3 did to it, ie a general disregard of the main plot points, but if you look at the plot progression factors then ME1 and ME3 are clearly related and denote a- more or less- logical progression. ME2 though? It isn't just that it doesn't set things up for ME3, it's also that it doesn't really mesh with and build on ME1 either. As a standalone game it's fine enough which is why I'd be fine if it were ME: Subtitle. But you don't progress the fight against the reapers or learn anything significant about them, you don't progress the political situation in the wider galaxy, you don't progress the, er, progress of the reapers into the galaxy (until the last dlc), you're fighting for Cerberus who you fight against in 1 and 3, against a bunch of enemies you don't see in either 1 or 3. ME3 could have integrated some things from ME2 better certainly, had the odd Collector around or whatever but they were insignificant as defined by ME2 itself- a slave rave, altered and distinct from the Protheans. In the end they can barely be more significant than husks as established by ME2 itself. But there's very little to build on there (ME2) when it comes to the climactic battle against the Evil Enemy, because the game is mainly about the Evil Enemy's butler.

Yes, Iraq invaded Iran in reality. I was being snarky at the general attitude that Iran is The Aggressor all the time. The US, under Obama, rejected the deal that would have seen the Turks (note, Mor) and Brazilians supply Iran with nuclear fuel, for more sanctions. Albeit that when he still had to worry about re-election, and being mean to Iran seldom loses votes. They've got a nuclear reactor already. Ultimately, whether it was a deliberate tactic or not the US made it extremely difficult for Iran to generate power conventionally. So we have the rather odd situation of one of the champions of nuclear power, the US, throwing a wobbly at someone pursuing nuclear power. The still current public US intelligence position is that Iran stopped pursuing a bomb in 2003.

Uh. They're under sanctions- and the US will apply those sanctions to companies that ignore their own 'special' set of sanctions amounting to a total economic blockade too, so anyone selling to Iran gets zero US business- hence (1) and (2) might as well be "harness the power of djinn (which exist)" to all practical purposes. The US sanctions were imposed in 1987 in response to, er, Iran's brutal, uh, invasion of, hmm, Iraq, yet another act of aggression and instability as that war started when Ayatollah Khomenei personally head butted Saddam Hussein's fist in a truly egregious manner... Besides, renewables are Rich Person power sources, not poor. Solar is ludicrously expensive for actual power generation, though useful enough for subsidiary stuff like hot water heating. So, the US has basically made it impossible for Iran to develop enough power generation by conventional means and is now complaining that they're gone nuclear.

Can't agree- most of the reasons why those plot elements did not carry across are self contained within ME2. The base for example is either destroyed or handed over to Cerberus depending on the choice made in ME2, not by a choice made in ME3. And those choices effectively remove it from consideration for ME3. Similarly, it is ME2 that established that while Collectors may once have been Protheans they aren't now. We already knew that Reapers used organic tools since Saren in the first game so that isn't quite an earth shattering revelation. In terms of SW ME2's plot is more like finding out that the stormtroopers are clones rather than an "I am your father" moment. And then not seeing a single stormtrooper in RotJ. It's not like there weren't opportunities for developing the Reapers more- you talk to both Sovereign and Harbinger, and meet 'Protheans' at least as holodevices. But BW really ducked committing in those conversations and ultimately that left ME3 having to fill in the gaps far more than it should have and made the whole thing look rushed.

The simple historical fact is that women were treated differently than men in the medieval period, and very significantly so. If you're going for an accurate representation of those times then such things have to be taken into account. Else you'll have the catholic church and everyone else wanting to be portrayed a particular, ahistoric, way- after all, the RCC stopped their witch and heretic burning ways long before you regularly had overt women in armies. If you have a woman protagonist and it is a realistic depiction then you either have someone pretending to be a man or being asterisked over all the time for being a woman- accused of being a witch, possessed, a devil, forcibly married off etc. Those are the things that happened historically. Society was deeply sexist then, as well as being deeply a whole lot of other unpleasant things. So long as they don't decide to airbrush selectively the realism argument is all the argument needed. (Yes, as virumor notes, having a basic yokel achieve greatness and power isn't exactly the most realistic approach either. But without that you don't really have a game...)

And for the trifecta of things I say every time it comes up, ME2 should have been Mass Effect: Colon Subtitle, though it certainly wouldn't be perfect even as that. ME2 is the game equivalent of the person that borrows a car in order to do an important job but instead drives around having fun and picking up a bunch of friends while promising them all lifts later, then returns the car having failed to do the tasks it borrowed it for with the tank nearly empty plus said big list of people who've been promised lifts. It's the 16 year old spoiled middle class teenager who's just got their drivers licence, in other words. Then again I'd be more forgiving of the departure from the usual Bioware formula if it didn't focus on the thing that I typically don't like in BW games- the recruitables in ME2 are like the plot/ gameplay in DAO, fine up to a point but there's just 20% too much, 20% too same and holy smokes is there anyone who doesn't have daddy issues? I far prefer fewer, more in depth NPCs. It probably did a better job as a sequel than DA2 did though, especially as they are (sensibly, imo) using a Colon Subtitle for DA3.

The other area where it is very obvious where there was long term planning- parts which are, generally, praised even by those who hated the ending- are the genophage and Quarian/ Geth storylines which were interwoven throughout the plots of all three games and met a logical denouement where the 'not quite perfect' resolution felt far more natural and, er, organic. It's a shame the main plot was not treated the same way. I genuinely don't know whether a more ME1/2 style gung ho, humanity asterisks yeah! ending would have been preferable to what we got, but I bet I would not have liked it in any absolute sense.

Well, I would make a very significant practical differentiation between your/ my/ anyone's 'ideal' woman and their 'idealised' woman. You do have the potential to meet your ideal woman because, ultimately, the ideal woman in real life is the one who makes you happy. The idealised woman on the other hand cannot really exist precisely because she's idealised, perfect, designed by you to, ultimately, please you. Her, you are never going to meet, she will always be on the pedestal of imagination, a perfectly formed object. Also, I'd happily concede that you could have something like an idealised orc if they actually existed, or similar, where the traits would only be positive From a Certain Point of View, it's just that I cannot think of anything in the real world that isn't a facile example or about something that is an object and thus not subject to objectification. On the MT description "old, pious, selfless woman" is itself, imo, a cliche and caricature. In this sense I'm certainly using 'role' as mental shorthand for a classification/ archetype system, and most cultures do have a 'pious old woman' stereotype, ie it's a bit more than just her literal role, hence not using the literal descriptor 'nun' in my description. If you use that description too there will be a large set of preconceptions based on the expectations of the archetype. And yeah, there's a fair bit of mental gymnastics being performed. It's more trying to communicate the philosophic reasons why I think that way rather than attempting to get at a set formal debate style argument.

I do wonder how much of the failure* of the ME ending was due to Bioware not really having done an epic continuation tale since Baldur's Gate/2/TOB more than a decade previous. The cracks in the narrative for both Dragon Age and Mass Effect were pretty evident between DAO/2 and ME1/2. ME2 tends to avoid or get only muted criticism nowadays for its wtf? moments like working for Cerberus and DA2 was at best a parallel narrative to DAO. I've said in once (well, once every time in comes up, so probably several dozen now) but I'll say it again, ME2 failed to do its job properly in either setting up or progressing the narrative, which left ME3 with far too much to do in that regard. Introduce the stuff used in ME3 which was just about literally deus ex machina earlier and you can avoid the jolt from it a lot. *** **** is still likely to be a complete waste of space and you'll still have the moronic Malak Moment of kicking his butt then 'losing' by cutscene but if he had been set up as a credible threat from the first or second game at least it may have been more credible dramatically. What ME desperately needed was proper planning for the whole trilogy. Another thing I say every time is that the ending is not fundamentally flawed, the same ending style worked for Deus Ex itself because it was set up properly through the game and not just sprung on you towards the end. There were hooks for the set up given you talk to reapers and prothean databases and the like. *I do also wonder what people really expected as well. As someone who basically dropped Babylon 5 after the ludicrous "Get the hell out of my galaxy speech!" I'm at least glad they did not do the equivalent to that.

For the physical description part I'm not sure it's even possible to do that. There isn't really a happy medium between 36-24-36 blonde 19yo triplet and a robotic litany of mathematical formula that literally objectifies, because whatever you say the implication is that you'd be unhappy and reject the brunette 19 yo triplet because her elbows are too pointy she isn't blonde or because her hip to waist ratio isn't 1.414:1 and that mole means she doesn't have excellent symmetry- and you are listing a bunch of physical characteristics as if they are important. The best you can do realistically is a dodge and say that the physical appearance is unimportant or say 'my wife/ gf is perfect' and avoid it that way. But I rather suspect that the vast majority of people would have an ideal appearance in mind for a partner if they were 100% honest about it. I do agree that people gonna people but that has to be accepted, you cannot exclude human nature in a discussion about, essentially, human nature. And especially so when there's argument here about what constitutes objectification in the first place. Unfortunately, one cannot rigorously apply objectivity to something that relies on subjectivity- Bruce purports to find things to be offensive objectification that others purport not to, there is no rigorous approach to that because where the line is drawn on objectification and idealisation is dependant on personal opinion. I'd apply it to pretty much anything that is (a) subject to opinion and (b) where objectification is appropriate as a concept. Conceptually, I make the distinction of being 'objectivised' similarly to the earlier distinction between character and caricature. If all you're saying about a person is their role, or just a physical description then you might as well be describing an object, it's bereft of nuance. By that measure, idealisation is just saying specifically positive things without nuance. Detail and knowing the person ('characterisation') is the enemy of both objectification and idealisation because it adds that nuance. Meh, don't really know if I'm doing a good job of describing it. Take Mother Teresa as an example. The idealised view is that she was a great woman who lessened suffering and lived a life of selflessness- to my mind that isn't describing her though, it's describing her role, without nuance, and you might as well be describing a light bulb for all you know about her from that. Once you get more detail though you start seeing her more as a human, and the 'Mother Theresa' ideal image starts to fray at exactly the same time you stop describing her by her role only.

Have some respect for the fallen. The Russia tread transcended mere threaddom and became something more. RIP in peace, sic transit gloria treadi etcetera.

Yeah. Basically, objectification is regarding something as an object and assigning arbitrary 'values' based on that; a simplification and stereotyping of something more complex- which is usually negative when applied to something as complex as humanity because it reduces people to a set of criteria and list items. Idealisation is exactly the same thing, just with choosing the positive parts or using positive descriptors for your list items. It is different for actual objects like flowers or abstract stuff like stories or poetry because, of course, they cannot be objectified in the first place but for the sake of this discussion we're assuming that video game characters are 'human' analogues and should be judged as such, by and large. To give an example, if I were asked to describe my idealised woman then no doubt that would be seen by (some) others as objectification in several respects- and certainly so if I limited it to a physical description. Plus, it should be noted that the vast majority of truly awful things done in video games are done by men, not women. That's hardly ideal.

Personally, I'm sure that Bruce is 100% totally serious about everything he says and is totally not early stage Volourn or obyknyven's more successful 3rd alt. Idealisation and objectification are, of course, exactly the same thing just with -/+ spin applied by the person using them. Language is much like subatomic physics in that respect.

BT is notoriously bad for such things. Not sure I've ever heard anyone say anything positive about them. Since it's them and only them being effected and they are terrible logic dictates it's their network at fault, not Ubisofts. May even be the NSA monkeying about with a french company to benefit a US one, given Snowden's revelations :tinfoil: Still, ironic that RPS decided to blame Ubisoft despite knowing how rubbish BT are when the previous week they'd automatically exonerated steam for MG: Revengeance needing a constant connection for a while. Almost as ironic as John Walker complaining about sexism then telling companies to ignore the complaints from fans which he doesn't like.

Well, it is meant to be realistic medieval, which was not exactly renowned for its enlightened attitudes to much at all. And you do have examples of set protagonists where the 'class' doesn't matter except peripherally to the story- in PST class is basically irrelevant to the story for example. Having said that I have seen it said that there were far more women soldiers in medieval times than people think because the attitude was that any soldier wearing trousers was a man by definition. But playing one of them wouldn't really be playing a woman anyway, it'd be playing a woman pretending to be a man.

Someone at health and safety told them lead was bad, so it's For Your Protection. I slay me, or I would if I don't sometimes wonder if that's exactly how MS's software engineering works. Clippy may be gone, but his spirit lives on every time an MS product does something 'helpful' automatically which you absolutely, totally don't want.

Fallout (1)'s intro. Perfectly set up the game. Fallout 2's intro was excellent too, but not quite as good. L-L-Look at you Hacker... Again, perfectly set up the game. The Andrew Ryan cutscene (albeit in engine) from Bioshock. Sad that it ultimately meant 2/3 of not much at all though. That cutscene from Thief. If you've played it, you know it. 3/4 are from Ken Levine games, strangely enough. I also have a particular soft spot for the end video of Stalker though I don't think it is objectively great, it's mainly that finishing that game felt like an actual achievement.

Pretty sure I read that article when it was linked by RPS (Sunday Papers?, or someone in the comments maybe). I don't really have much in the way of rebuttal to it since I actually agree with a lot of its basic premise and the points it makes. But imo two other things have to be acknowledged- marketers aren't infallible, there are plenty of failures in the gaming industry to prove that; but also that if marketers are so good that they can sell ice to latitudinally advantaged ethnic groupings then if there were a way to market games effectively to both men and women then there would be such games, as they'd be a licence to print money. As it stands you tend to have identifiably 'male' games and identifiably 'female' games too, as the article notes, and they do tend towards being dissimilar games in immiscible genres, there's no sensible way to have 'Farmville of Duty' or 'The Grand Theft Sims' or 'DooMMysT' and appeal to both markets. Personally I don't really want 'CoD' or 'Dragon Crown', I want an in depth and rewarding gaming experience gained from challenging and engaging gameplay, an equally engaging story (if appropriate) with 3 dimensional characters and a consistent and well though out visual style. But I am reticent about making any implication that people who do like them do so due to marketing. It isn't just that I don't think it's true- I think that most CoD players genuinely do like it- but also that I think it's not a constructive position even if it were true. Telling someone they only like something because it's been marketed to them or because they're a walking stereotype will just annoy them and come across as preachy sanctimony, and Activision or whoever won't have a Road to Damascus moment while their game is a licence to print money. Plus of course, even if 'Dragon Crown' got more realistically proportioned women it'd only be treating the symptom if they're still just demure window dressing as opposed to alluring window dressing.

Omar was 'oh right, the gay hitman guy' for ages when I watched the Wire, and he's about as distinctive as it's possible to get. It's just a personal thing how long it takes characters and programmes to click, and indeed whether they ever do.

That doesn't depend on that all, you may disagree with the conclusion of publishers that their games will have a primarily male audience and thus adding on top of that more content targetted at them is in their interests, but it doesn't rely on the potential gaming market as a whole, just games on an individual basis. The existence of Saints Row IV doesn't stop the next Sims or Animal Crossing game from existing. It results in bad games when a developer decides to target the broadest audience, the lowest common denominator, that's how certain developers do things but the developers that make good games don't. If there's a potential market publishers will exploit it, Bejeweled and The Sims show that, it doesn't require other games to be changed, it doesn't need to effect the existing industry, developers, and franchises. A new potential market should begin and grow alongside the existing market. Yep. There are computer games targeted at women primarily, if you tried to alter them to make them appeal (equally) to men as well you run the risk of alienating your target without achieving your aim, the same is true in reverse. It's like turning Robocop into a romantic comedy to try and attract women. Most women won't like it, and the previous target audience will go "what the asterisks?!?!?" at best. Same if you take some romantic comedy and try to turn it into an action extravaganza. A nice broad set of discrete choices in products works fine, and there's nothing wrong with targeting a specific audience- in principle, at least, and assuming it isn't a really obnoxious or dangerous niche. The question as to whether the prevalence of such directed entertainment reflects underlying reality or is a result of self reinforcing bias is a good one, but like many good questions there is no way of answering it with any certainty. There's a plethora of reasons for products, especially games, to fail and isolating which is the reason is problematic. Given that there is a lot of targeting in most entertainment forms (less maybe in music) it does suggest that that is the most successful strategy on an economic level. Niche products catering to smaller targets do occur, but most often at a premium (eg cable TV, Matrix games too, arguably), and they often fail.

I'm not sure about chicken/ egg. There are inherencies, for want of a better word, where certain things appeal more to men (in general) than women (in general) or vice versa. If there were a magic formula to appeal to both equally then it would be used, but as it is you often end up appealing to neither or less overall, rather than more.

I'd like to try it but my computer is apparently now below the min specs for even retro releases.

There is differentiation though between a 'blank slate' protagonist and playing a pre-determined character. You can't easily have Mikaela Thorton as an option because AP is specifically written with the set male protagonist in mind, not a blank slate one- if it were written with a female protagonist or option for both in mind then it would inevitably have to be written differently. Same if you allowed Lars Croft: Tomb Raider. And for certain games you're using someone else's creation too, as with Geralt. I'd play as Triss if it were an option or she had her own game, but I'd still have to concede that most would want to play as Geralt. Ideally games would make allowances for both sexes being playable with a realistic amount of variance, but most of the time dialogue for a male/ female choice RPG is identical except for the pronouns, romances potentially and maybe some flavour. And there is a (completely understandable) tendency in those games towards defining the character, whether male or female, by their role- Warden, Knight Commander, The Sheperd; as a way of channelling decisions into set categories. If you don't make the differences significant enough- ie the female option plays exactly or almost exactly like the male except for appearance- you risk trivialising the whole thing, basically what the initial complaint was. If you do make them significantly different it'll cost. I do have sympathy for women who are interested in gaming who dislike being forced to play males most of the time, certainly more than I'd have for someone complaining about it not being Lars Croft. But that is what happens if you're a minority/ niche grouping, you don't get as much targeting as the mainstream.

Well, I can't say I didn't know you'd have a problem admitting you were wrong. Still, the haiku analogy was intentionally amusing.

Seems they're also suing the United Kingdom for unauthorised usage. This will no doubt hit Britain hard as they already have to pay Paradox a royalty every time someone uses the 'your Majesty' address to Liz.