• How Does Mass Effect: Andromeda Compare to Previous Mass Effects? [Noah Caldwell-Gervais]
    15 replies, posted
[video=youtube;Ma0VKHnwArQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ma0VKHnwArQ&t=0s[/video] Noah's first video on Mass Effect was pretty great and this was no exception. I have to agree with him on how frustrating it is that today it feels like big budget story driven campaigns are being completely handicapped by the existence of DLC and the base games themselves fail to really stand on their own two feet. Beating an unsatisfying campaign and being told later to come back when expansions are released just exemplifies what Bioware games have become over the past 5-10 years.
MEA is certainly mediocre but it's not mediocre for the reasons he's given, and about 20 years from now when he figures how insufferable and up his own ass his politics are, he'll probably be an ok reviewer. The fact he praises the kett's fanfic level 5th literal grade politics as innovative, compelling, and complex is reason enough to dismiss the entire rest of his entirely politically driven premise, especially in light of spending what ten minutes blasting them as boring and monosyllabic as mechanical enemies before that. yawn. He literally covered anything relevant in the first 8 minutes, and the video is an hour.
[QUOTE=27X;52179089]MEA is certainly mediocre but it's not mediocre for the reasons he's given, and about 20 years from now when he figures how insufferable and up his own ass his politics are, he'll probably be an ok reviewer. The fact he praises the kett's fanfic level 5th literal grade politics as innovative, compelling, and complex is reason enough to dismiss the entire rest of his entirely politically driven premise. yawn. He literally covered anything relevant in the first 8 minutes, and the video is an hour.[/QUOTE] [img]http://morrisbeginningart.weebly.com/uploads/5/9/1/9/59197355/450-178588006-egyptian-hieroglyph_orig.jpg[/img]
Noah possesses an incredibly pro-developer standpoint most of the time, so his pretty heavy-handed criticism of Bioware this time was pretty unexpected. That being said, woah boy did he make an ugly Ryder.
[QUOTE=27X;52179089]MEA is certainly mediocre but it's not mediocre for the reasons he's given, and about 20 years from now when he figures how insufferable and up his own ass his politics are, he'll probably be an ok reviewer. The fact [B]he praises the kett's fanfic level 5th literal grade politics as innovative, compelling, and complex[/B] is reason enough to dismiss the entire rest of his entirely politically driven premise, especially in light of spending what ten minutes blasting them as boring and monosyllabic as mechanical enemies before that. yawn. He literally covered anything relevant in the first 8 minutes, and the video is an hour.[/QUOTE] What? Where did you get this from? I'm genuinely curious, as I never got this impression from his words, infact I had to rewatch minute 19 to 22 to make sure we watched the same review. He is heavily criticizing the kett for being uninspired and terribly written among other things. The only thing he mentions that could be taken as praise is "the kett's religious structure is interesting" which he directly follows up with how badly it was executed. To me it sounds like he is saying that the kett's religious and militaristic structure is an interesting premise, albeit completely unoriginal and dull in practice.
[QUOTE=27X;52179089]20 years from now when he figures how insufferable and up his own ass his politics are[/QUOTE] hopefully u will too [editline]4th May 2017[/editline] actually i just finished the video i have zero idea what the hell you are ranting about
Is it from the same guy who claimed CoD:WaW was racist against Japanese? [editline]4th May 2017[/editline] Yup, it is. Most of the time he's pretty good though, but damn his stuff is long.
[QUOTE=mchapra;52184661]hopefully u will too [editline]4th May 2017[/editline] actually i just finished the video i have zero idea what the hell you are ranting about[/QUOTE] Try watching the rest of his videos before making baseless statements. [quote] japanese [/quote] and that Monolith software is "institutional misogyny". Like the company itself. Somehow.
[QUOTE=gudman;52184868]Is it from the same guy who claimed CoD:WaW was racist against Japanese? [editline]4th May 2017[/editline] Yup, it is. Most of the time he's pretty good though, but damn his stuff is long.[/QUOTE] You forgot how everyone in ww2 was a patriot hero and how every soldier past ww2 were/are just glory-hound murder dogs.
[QUOTE=27X;52187071] and that Monolith software is "institutional misogyny". Like the company itself. Somehow.[/QUOTE] Which video was that? Sounds... interesting.
[QUOTE=gudman;52188939]Which video was that? Sounds... interesting.[/QUOTE] [URL="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVa6wlgR9CM"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVa6wlgR9CM[/URL] It's mostly the FEAR 2 and 3 Alma changes that he sees as sexist. I have never played the series, except for Extraction Point, but regardless the 3rd game did a good enough job shooting itself in the foot to the point where I don't really care about (or can comment on) his views on sexism. [editline]5th May 2017[/editline] [QUOTE=27X;52187071]Try watching the rest of his videos before making baseless statements.[/QUOTE] Then you should try taking your own advice and address my earlier questions. [editline]5th May 2017[/editline] I didn't realise, but Noah actually commented on his sexism criticism regarding FEAR 3, for the sake of easier accessibility I will paste it here: [QUOTE]If you really didn't feel like I was making myself clear, here we go: 1) In the original FEAR, Alma was treated like a human being, a real human being with emotions, agency, and motivation, who was twisted into a monster by Armacham. Her monstrous nature was sympathetic, and tied to the plot. And she was powerful. 2) In FEAR 2, she still has agency and motivation, but her sexuality is incorporated into what's supposed to make her a monster. Instead of her psychic children being an abuse she suffered, it's a superpower she uses to rape Beckett at the end. This, I would argue, does fall under "dumb writing, but not sexist or misogynistic". 3) Okay, now FEAR 3. BlueMaxima's argument is that my word choice is too strong, but I disagree-- Alma is no longer even a character in the third game. She's a reward. All her power is directly tied to her pregnancy and her womanhood-- her contractions are literally destroying the city. Thematically, it's incredibly stupid-- a kind of super-edgy take on "Girls are icky, kinda, doncha think?". But explicitly-- there are only two women characters in this game, Alma, and Jin Sun-Kwon, and in FEAR 3 both are used as rewards. And even though I didn't explicitly talk about it, Jin is only in the game to be rescued and flirt with the ever-silent point man. So, if the Point Man wins he gets the baby and is rewarded with affection from Jin. If Fettel wins, he gets the baby and is rewarded with total power over Alma, so he eats her alive. What's misogynistic here is that they took a dynamic, powerful female character with a serious inner life (that gets focused on in both previous FEAR games), and tosses all of that out the window because Fettel and Point Man are way more important. They get to decided her fate-- even worse, actually, her fate is decided by whoever got the most fucking combo point bonuses. So, I see why you're having trouble with the idea-- it does not represent systematic discrimination of women, it isn't explicitly hateful. But the entire game negates Alma as a character to use her womb as a plot and gameplay device. It's literal objectification. Now, you add in how the game handles Jin and how it values its male characters to the point of sympathetically delving into their inner lives and personal psychologies without paying the same courtesy to Alma, who is literally the most important, well-developed character in the franchise, and you get something that's wholly disrespectful of, dismissive towards, and idiotic in its use of the only two lady characters because they are ladies. I think it's fair to say this is sexist. You're free to disagree, whether you disagree based on definitions or interpretations, but I'm not talking out my ass-- my argument comes directly out of engaging with the game itself, not shoehorning anything in. Again, I make this argument explicitly in the video. It just takes me three games, two expansions, and a DLC to set up the context. Which ya'll are ignoring by saying I went "SJW with it."[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=SFArial;52188998]I didn't realise, but Noah actually commented on his sexism criticism regarding FEAR 3, for the sake of easier accessibility I will paste it here:[/QUOTE] I don't know if i would call it sexism, just shitty writing.
I agree, but I can see where he is coming from. But then again I didn't jump at his statements when I watched the FEAR video.
[QUOTE=megafat;52189055]I don't know if i would call it sexism, just shitty writing.[/QUOTE] At some points I can see what he means as well. Makes sense to me. You have the lack of characterisation and you kind of have to realize that any character, regardless of how important they are, can only have so much characterisation before it gets boring and overused and you have to drop it. By [i]F.[b]3[/b].A.R.[/i] (which has to be a crime against humanity in and of itself) Alma is not a character anymore, she's part of the world, part of the lore, that's understandable. Her characterisation is done, she's now a device through which you characterise other characters. It's not sexist because it has nothing to do with Alma's gender (and even then she has none, she's not a woman or a person at all, she's a narrative function commonly referred to as "a character", you can't be sexist towards her even if you really wanted to), it's just how narrative develops. But then shitty writing and unnecessary character (Jin) comes around which makes it appear kinda like some sexist stereotypes indeed played a role.
She did seem completely useless as a character in F.3.A.R. It's been a while since i played it and all i remember was thinking most of it was bad.
Everybody is a useless character in F.3.A.R.
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