How to fuck up stories because of ego

 I haven't written in a while and have some games and comments pending, but I wanna finish my comment on the Mass Effect trilogy (I haven't played Andromeda anyway and I understand it should be considered apart). 

The third game in the series seem to imitate a style of making series and science fiction, popular in the first decade of 2000, were things are bleak and very unbalanced, and anyone can die. Recently I finished Battlestar Galactica (I got tired at some point of the drama and had not watched it all), and certainly the style of ME3 reminded me of that. 

I've talked about ME3 in the past, when it came out. It has epic moments, and there are plot points that are amazing. Curing the genophage, or making peace between geth and Quarians, both things optional and only available if you had done the right choices in previous games, felt very good and adequately epic. Apart from that, graphics are still great, more detailed now and a lot more gory, and the gameplay still holds quite well, although the downgrade of the shockwave ability done from the previous game hurts a bit, I have to say. So, the game is quite decent overall, and does delivery in some of their promises.

Where it fails, it's in other aspects. First and foremost, the fact that Earth is made as this special place that is worth saving over all the other races and planets. This is so human-centric that is annoying, and one cannot help but make easy parallelisms with colonialism and white supremacists, where there are countries "worth saving" and others that are not (like recently in Afghanistan, for example). Other races have planets that fall or get hit pretty hard, but earth is the one that seems to endure the most and also where everything needs to happen.

Then there's the fact that, while some decisions from previous games are truly explored and expanded, some others are translated into points. These points mark if you'll be able to reach the "best" possible ending or not, or if you will fail while trying. The point system feels...weak. A cheap way to translate decisions into something that affects the game. The ending of ME2 took decisions and made them matter. ME3 turns them into "+100", definitely a downgrade. 

What is most grating, though, is probably how the ending has been managed, and how it turned out to be. In the end, the problem is that some race decided that any universe that has AI, will then have these AI revel against their creators and kill organic life. Which is....not true, even in the ME3 universe. As part of the game, we could make peace between the current rogue AIs and their creators, and the AIs showed they just wanted to help and coexist. So this argument is pure bullshit and undoes plenty of things inside the story. Then, I mentioned it before but the last decision about what to do about it is taken there, without considering previous ones, which is....easy, very easy, not taking any risks. An ending that changes based on one last decision has been made before and is boring, you just reload and see the different ones. ME2 did this a lot better. 

What's worse in all this is that I understand this ending was the result of some boss that, instead of deciding what to do in a committee, like all the rest of the plot points of the game, decided to do whatever they wanted without external supervision from the rest of the creative team. This sounds....awfully familiar to how Game of Thrones ended, or also the creative process behind the movie Prometheus, that left plenty of bullshit too. More and more, I've seen "famous" people that did great things do shittier stuff the moment they're considered famous and don't have a support team around them that helps them streamline their good ideas, to make them really good, instead of assuming they're great and going forward with horrible stuff because no one dared to tell them they suck now. I mean, see what George Lucas did in the prequels. Check the latest movies Steven Spielberg has done, or the 4th Indiana Jones (or as we like to say, the movie that shall not be named). Check Ridley Scott, James Cameron, etc...hell, even Terry Pratchett in his latest novels where he clearly was mentally affected by Alzheimer and no one dared to tell him it wasn't that good anymore, although in this case he's quite innocent and more understandable...there's sometimes these ego trips by people that fuck stories really bad, and it's quite a shame.

Well, anyway, after all this negative comments, I have to remind that ME3 is still a great game, and I really enjoyed this replay. And I have to make a special mention to the DLC. DLC can be quite "evil", when it greatly improves the original game or adds important plot points, and I have to say, yeah, ME3 DLC is quite evil in that sense, because it's really really good and it makes up for the flaws it had quite a lot. 

ME3 has 3 big DLC packages that improve the plot a lot. First, there's Leviathan, which explains the reaper's origins (interesting but maybe it was better to leave them a mystery), is quite epic and feels a bit like Abyss (the movie). Then there's Omega, which doesn't add as much but explores a bit more an "asshole" character from ME2, Aria. She's still an asshole even if she's nice with you, but you understand her better after this and the whole plot is really cool with action. Finally, there's the Citadel DLC. This one is just amazing. It's funny, intense, curious, introduces cool concepts, and has some of the greatest moments and dialogues of the series. This DLC is an apology letter to the fans of ME3 by the creative team, showing what ME3 could have been, and it's a proper send-off for the trilogy, allowing you to interact with all the people that have been part of your squad (unless they died, and then they also get a special moment for them) . I know it's paid content and I'm against it usually, but in this case it's totally worth it and amazing. Originally I didn't get it when I played for the first time, but now I did, and this really redeemed ME3, because I think ME in general shines more when it's funny and warm and properly epic, instead of when it tries to just be epic in a very limited and overdone military-style way. 

And it's best left unexplained, so you can experience it if you'd like :)

Mass effect 2: Bigger and better

Following up on my previous post, I want to talk about Mass Effect 2 this time. The game came out some time after the first one, enough time that I had partially forgot about these games the first time it came out. It promised to continue the epic tale, although the scope seemed a bit less epic from the description. 

The game said that now you worked for Cerberus, a racist organization in the first game that performed dubious research and were bad guys, focused in humanity first and fuck the aliens, basically. And that your mission was to attack a base used by a race called "Collectors" that were kidnapping humans. When stated like that, this game seemed initially a downgrade from the first one.

Therefore, it was a big surprise to see the game ended up being awesome. I'd say, overall, it's better than the 3rd game. The 3rd game requires another post, of course, but let's say that, without DLC, it has several screw-ups that made it inferior. With DLC this is compensated, but that's "cheating". ME2 is really really good since the start, with no extras. 

The game is basically a "heist" story, with the heist being the attack I mentioned. To succeed you must find a group of people willing to help you and you need to gain their trust. Some characters repeat from the previous game, although there's plenty of new ones. You work with the white supremacist organization but they give you free reign about what to do and you can put distance with them, and there's a lot of character development, for you and for your partners.

Graphics are still awesome, slightly improved from the first game. Gameplay is similar, but with a lot more action: the power system has been remade, and biotics especially have been improved and are pretty awesome now, more dynamic, you can keep using them instead of a weapon.The weapons have been changed, and they've backtracked on the idea of having no ammo, and now they do have ammo, which I think it's a downgrade and makes no sense story-wise, but it may be true that it accelerates combat if you compare it with the previous game. Enemies are a bit more varied and there's less feeling of padding or combat repetition, although some sections do feel a bit elongated. 

What has been developed a lot are the side missions. You no longer explore deserted little squares with the same 3 interiors copy-and-pasted, now you don't really explore with a vehicle but you do missions, each with their layout, their objectives and goals. This feels fresh, interesting and does not seem repetitive at all, and the game gets really better from it. The resources mechanics, where you scan planets for resources, is still a bit tedious but in no time and just checking the ones around you as you do side missions you can get all you need.

The game now mostly consists of recruitment missions, where you find a new crew member, and then if you interact enough with them, crew members also give you loyalty missions, missions that guarantee their loyalty to you. All of this is purely optional actually because from the start or at any point, you can try and trigger the suicide "heist" mission, but if you don't have enough ship reinforcements, the right crew and the right equipment, the mission will fail. As you recruit members, there's a few special missions that let you gather extra information that you'll need to at least be able to start the suicide mission without failing immediately, and after these are completed you're free to try and do it, but if you don't have everyone's loyalty, people will die, and sometimes it won't be the person not loyal the one that dies.

That means that what makes sense is to delay the mission as much as possible while you make sure your whole crew is loyal and happy, while at the same time not delaying it too much after a certain event that happens after the third special mission. Some of them are tricky to convince, because certain pairs will fight each other and you need high diplomacy/intimidation stats to make them both happy, and the same apply to some loyalty missions where you need to do some convincing, but nothing crazy if you've been consistently trying to increase one particular stat of these two. 

Where the game shines is in the fact that you interact with all your crew members, establish a relationship, get to know each other and befriend them. This game is basically a huge character development plot for all your team members, and it's brilliant to see and experience. This is a strong character-driven story, and their diverse stories are original and interesting, and they make you wanna try and help everyone. After you've developed relationships with all of them, friendly or romantically if you romance one of them (you can only romance one person), you want to keep everyone alive, and then you try extra hard for the final mission. 

The final mission is also a very bright moment for the game. It's epic, it's big, and it's made in such a way that there's a lot of possible outcome combinations. Some characters may die, and you need to select the right people for the right tasks to avoid it. If you mess it up enough, you may also die while still completing the game, which is a pretty awesome thing, although it's a "bad" ending. The level of care about your previous choices and options is amazing and I've never seen anything like this in other games that mention that all your choices matter, since in other games it's more common that this is not true at all (and I'm including ME3 in this list, which makes the case of ME3 all the more annoying, because they did do it well in ME2).

This time I played with a female renegade vanguard Shepard, and I have to tell, it felt amazing and awesome to launch enemies left and right with biotics, or to dash towards them and hitting them hard to then shot them with a shotgun, and being able to be sarcastic and foul-mouthed and just a lot more aggressive than what I used to do the first time I played. I still don't like to be mean in such games and I tried to be quite gentle with the crew, they were friends after all, but it was liberating to play a female character like this, and I totally recommend the experience.

The wonders of space

After finishing most of the games I had for xbox, I decided to relive the Mass Effect saga, seeing as they were going to re-publish it in a special version. I tried to use the original games with my xbox one, and they work fine plus I have all the DLC I've bought over the years or that they made available for free after some time. 

Similar to RE, I'd like to talk about each game, starting with Mass Effect 1 (ME1). This is one of the first games I bought for Xbox 360, and when I saw the trailer I thought it was fake or misleading: It couldn't be that we had a long, well-developed sci--fi roleplaying game with such nice graphics and complex story. I thought I'd start it and it would be somehow reduced.

And well, while it had room for improvements, I have to say that no, ME was as spectacular as it seemed it could be. The game offers a lot of world-building, that is clearly inspired or derivative of other works of science-fiction, but that doesn't reduce its glory or its scope, which is massive. From the first seconds you get several choices and the game starts recording these and keeping them stored, to develop a story.

Mass effect defines a universe with aliens where humans have joined the intergalactic civilisation. You play as commander Shepard, a human, that is tasked as the first human member of an elite group of soldiers that can do pretty much whatever they want(Spectres), with the task to investigate what another "evil" guy from this group is doing and disrupt him. As you try to perform this task, you keep discovering that there's more at play, since the bad guy seems to be working helping the Reapers, giant artificial intelligences that kill all galactic civilisations advanced enough to space-travel every 50.000 years, which in this game are just some myth, a boogeyman, but that you believe are behind this. 

As you play, you discover that the bad guy's ship is actually one of those Reapers and has mind-controlled the "bad guy", something the Reapers can do, start controlling everyone in their proximity. If you have enough persuasion points you can make the bad guy see this and he kills himself, and end up defeating both of them (well, you and hundreds of other ships, the Reaper is big and tough) right before they can invite all the others to start the galactic extinction process.

So, this first game puts a very strong foundation. It creates a rich lore with different alien species, makes the scope epic enough while being just an introduction to the overall story arch and starts recording these key decisions that will influence the overall experience: did you save this or that character, did you help someone in there, did you kill these others? Depending on your choices, the experience will vary, and it's quite cool. 

Having said that, the game has numerous issues. 

The first one is that the non-story part is a bit lacking: Combat feels slightly static and repetitive: You go into cover, maybe use some powers, shot some enemies. Not having bullets and depending on the "heat" of your weapon is cool and I think it was innovative, but the combat was very basic cover-based stuff, not very exciting and a bit strange. Powers are also not very practical, most biotics make people float in some way but don't do proper damage and feels like it's not that spectacular then. Tech abilities are a bit better but not much. Then, when you're driving the Mako, a kind of tank, you just keep blasting at people and it's not that interesting, really. Combat is something you do to advance, but it's not something cool or very enjoyable, basically. 

Related to that, the exploring mechanics is cool in principle: You get to check all the planets in several galaxy sections, and you can land in some of them, some ships and some stations. However, the implementation of this results in a lot of very very similar terrains, where each planet that you can land has only a square of explorable terrain were you find some dead bodies and ruins and that's about it You spend most of the time trying to climb mountains with the Mako in order to get to some little point, no more than 5 per region, if that many. It makes you feel quite....alone, in what should be a vibrant populated galaxy. When you find structures that you can enter, all of them have the same look and distribution. You have the mine, the ship and the research bunker, multiplied by 10 or 20. You never find characters living there, only enemies with some exceptions where you can actually interact with some bad guy before they kill someone or before fighting, but that's it.  Side missions always include going to such places, and therefore a lot of this ends up being like a chore because you already have done 20 of the same, before.

So, you have a lot of time spend in the game, if you want 100% completion or close to that, just repeating the same tasks, which is not ideal. However the main story quests are good and diverse, so that compensates this issue a lot, and the main quests are really great and interesting, and the places you explore are amazing.

Another problematic point is that, in this game and the third one specially, you can feel the USA military industry has influenced it. I'm hundred per cent sure of it. You, in theory, are a spectre and respond only to the council, but you accept your former military chain of command without question, taking missions and orders from them, and there's lots of instances of "patriotic" moments and comments about how good it was to serve the military. I mean, I get it, shooters in general tend to be militaristic, and you need fights in theory to make the game challenging. But there's a....tone, in the game, that defends a lot the military, explains its glories and shows it as they say with modern ones, that they're the people defending your freedom and fighting for you. However you soon see that you're fighting for the humans, and the other races sometimes can go fuck themselves, which is totally not fair. I mean, you do try to help other races, but when there's a human-other species conflict, the game tends to heavily side with the human one, to the point that is shameful and bothersome. There's stuff that humanity's army does, that would be painted as evil if it wasn't because it's the human army. 

Related to that, there's a human bias in the game, as if humans are the best ones, more diverse, more daring, etc. This feels....very racist, sometimes. And the game gives you the option to explore this "racism" as a valid way to play the game, sometimes as "renegade" options, when maybe part of being "renegade" would be to say, "well, fuck humans, I'll help this other species now because I like them more". I kept finding this rather problematic. I mean, I understand in rpgs you are free to be an asshole, and it may be part of your choices....but there's "racist" options that are not painted as "bad" as they should be, in my opinion. Also, let's face it: humans are boring! You have a lot of other species to explore, and the game centres on  humanity, as if you'd be unable to relate to some other species. I guess there's male idiot players that think like this, and there's too many of them, and the developers pandered to these groups, but well, these incel-type with no empathy can go fuck themselves as far as I'm concerned and the game industry should not cater to them.  

In this first game, your supporting characters are also missing some definition. You start knowing them and you talk with them, but they don't say much. You can already do a type of "loyalty" missions for them, but they're very generic missions like the rest of side quests, and they only trigger a bit of conversations with them. However it's enough at least to start knowing them, and seeing glimpses of their personality, and they're already likeable, just not very developed yet, and they all adore you somehow without you having done much yet. 

Another issue that the game has is sexism. Sexism is rampant in videogames, but well, as you create new species, the typical thing of giving the females boobs is quite common in here, while at the same time hiding some females of certain species that look weird already as males and probably the developers thought would be too unappealing to the standard male gamer and didn't bother to design, at least in this first game, where you only see males apart from female humans and Asari. And related to that, special mention for the Asari, a race of hot blue girls that are all girls and pair with any other species, clearly a sex fantasy of someone. Although in the second game you do discover that the way you see them as beautiful human-like may be them mind-controlling you a bit, since every other species sees them as beautiful and similar to themselves, a nicer explanation that does not remove the fact that all of them are beautiful in-game and tend to have quite big breasts....

Finally, it's worth mention that the game is quite derivative. We're not doing anything revolutionary here, the game uses tropes and ideas from famous other science-fiction works and movies, from Ender's game to Alien, Star wars, etc. You could still take it as a homage more than pure plagiarism: The game tries to evoke a feeling most present during science-fiction works of the 80s, as the developers mentioned.

However, even after listing these issues, the game is quite awesome. The side quests are tedious but necessary to get nice perks in later games, and the main plot is great and amazing. The Citadel gives you a sense of wonder that is difficult to describe, but feels amazing. Ilos is incredibly creepy and epic. The music accompanies you in great ways, especially when it's not the military sections, but the sections where you're in awe. And the interactions you can have, the choices and the people you meet, all create an amazing experience, like having really a first contact with alien life.

Mass Effect's Ending

Between the Olympics and preparing to move out of this country, some time ago I actually managed to finish Mass Effect 3. I want to talk about it a little, while trying not to spoiler it, even if by now most people have seen it/have heard enough about it.

So, the ending....when the game was released, and the complains about its ending started to be heard everywhere, there was a comment that Bioware was going to release some kind of expansion, or epilogue or something. Since I didn't have that much time to play anyway, I waited for a while...and when they finally released the expansion, I started to seriously play. Therefore, I never saw the original ending, but I did search for it afterwards, and yeah, it was really really bad...

The reason that it was bad it's that in the original one, they don't show anything. This game has a huge detailed mythology around it. The universe where things happen has a huge backstory, you could literally spend hours reading about it in the in-game encyclopaedia.  The attention to detail is impressive. Therefore, if you finish the game with a big explosion, a couple of characters surviving it, and a fade to black, that's really an insult. It clearly shows that whoever did the 3 games did not participate in this ending. It has no explanation whatsoever of the consequences of your choice.

That said, the expansion is much better in my opinion. Things make slightly more sense, and you get a little epilogue, where you can see the effects of your last actions. If that was the original ending, there would have been some muttering about the lack of sense, but I doubt it would have reached the levels that the original ending created. And while watching this ending, one gets the real impression that some company directives tried to sell the ending as a DLC, and when the shitstorm hit them they backed away and offered it for free.

Nevertheless, the expanded ending is still...lacking. To explain that, I'll use the review and article made by Yahtzee. For those who do not know him, he's a games critic that always shows the negative points of a game. I like his reviews, even if I disagree with several of them. He did not like Mass Effect, for example, and I believe that he misunderstood the point of the game. But it's still a good article.

In his article, Yahtzee mentions that Mass Effect gets an ending, even if you don't like it, and that the ending serves to finish a story. And no matter what you did before, this way everybody gets the same ending, and the story has a clear beginning, centre and end, which is the same for everybody. He mentions that that was the ending creators wanted, and the fanbase should not be able to change it, because it would create a bad precedent

I disagree with that. Games are interactive storytelling, which is a very modern storytelling technique, that can be approached in very different ways than traditional storytelling. Mass Effect shows a perfect basic example in its ending: Instead of one ending, you have 3 of them. That's something really innovative, that you cannot do in a book or a movie (there have been books that tried to do it, but it doesn't work really well with them). Well, it's innovative in the sense that game are innovative, because almost since they had more complex plots than "eat yellow pills, avoid ghosts", games offered multiple endings.

The problem with that comes when the difference in the ending is like the one in Mass Effect: You have a couple of options, each one gives a different ending. This causes the feeling that no ending is really the true one, because with a simple load you can get back there, choose a different one, and see what happens. It's a lazy basic mechanic, to show off the "interactivity" of a game compared with a movie.

There are games that go further than that and really explore the storytelling capabilities of interactive media. Let's put as an example Silent Hill 2, a Yahtzee favourite. The game has a number of different endings, I believe that there are 3 normal ones, a joke one, only available after clearing the game once, and a 5th one that only appeared with an expansion. Let's focus on the original 3....

Each ending depends on how you played. I don't mean a decision you took, but literally how you played. Did you receive a lot of damage and didn't heal often? Did you spent lots of time checking on a character and trying to talk with them? Did you check certain objects a lot, and ignored others? That's how the game decides the ending.

The effect this makes is that the story is consistent with your gameplay. You can argue that it's actually 3 different stories. Your different gameplay shows a different story. And when you reach the end, there's not a damm thing you can do to change it. That's the one you chose, voluntarily or not. Do not try to reload, it won't change. To see a different one you would have to replay whole sections of the game, or start a new one directly.

This is what games offer when telling stories. The option to have a lot of different stories. You start from a common point, and then each branch goes somewhere different. Maybe some branches cross each other later on, but in the end they do not, each one going their separate way.

Mass Effect 1 and 2, and the first 2/3 of 3, follow this logic. Depending on your choices in the 1st and 2nd game, there's entire characters and plots that some people will never have. And this is awesome. That's what games offer. It's very complex to pull off, and programmers will  have nightmares thinking about how to do it. But it has been done, and it's possible to do it.

Mass Effect 3 should not let you choose and ending. It should not translate decisions into little points that showed how close or far you were from completing the game. It should have taken all these  plots and subplots, and offer you N different endings, each one depending on who you saved, who you killed, and who you met. But I guess it would have been too brave to do that and tell players that if they wanted a different one, they better started Mass Effect 1 again....and that was an incredible missed opportunity to show games' true potential.

Music in games

I'm going to discuss the plots of some games, so be aware that I will post some mild (very mild) spoilers in this post. Here we go.

In Mass Effect 3, there are key moments in the plot where you accomplish something really big. Like the genophage cure and the end of the geth-quarian war. And in these moments the music makes you feel again the wonder of the universe with this simple theme from the first game, Vigil. This music is a reminder of the feelings I got playing the first game, when you have a universe to discover, everything is new, and the great scenery impresses you.

The Mass Effect saga understands quite well the importance of good music when creating a story. Plenty of times I feel that the right theme can create emotions and associate states of mind with characters or scenes. I'm not a big fan of certain typical action movies, and therefore sometimes certain music doesn't even register in my brain as something special. For example, in the first Mass Effect game when you become a spectre there is some intense music I could not care less about. However, some games add... something. This something is hard to describe, I can only refer to it as music that connects with you. Sometimes it's energetic, sometimes it's sad and tragic, sometimes it's a soppy love song, but in all the cases that music reaches you deeply, and affects you. I'll put some examples I have from my gaming life. We'll start with a very old one^^:

Sonic 2: Mystic Cave Zone: Sonic 2 is one of the first games I had with my first console, the mega drive. It was a really addictive and fun game, but it had some difficult moments. One of the first stages that spikes the difficulty quite a bit, in my opinion, was Mystic Cave. The earlier stages were not easy, but this one was full of nasty traps, places where you got squashed, enemies that were following you through walls, spikes...and the infamous pit of death, that was inescapable even when you were invincible, so you had to wait to lose your invincibility to properly die and start again. To add to the feeling, we got this music on this stage. You can clearly hear the evilness of the stage, mixed with the feeling that it's laughing at you. It's really awesome.

Soleil: Boss Music:  Since I had the mega drive I didn't play Zelda games...but instead we got this game, Soleil (I think it has a different name depending on the country). I enjoyed it a lot. The plot was really nice and kid-friendly, while having some depth to it. But from time to time, there was some boss fights. The easy ones had special music, but nothing spectacular. And then you fought the big ones, epic fights against powerful creatures, and you got this music, which pumped you up a lot. You had to destroy them, it was urgent, and you had to keep moving and attacking faster and faster...

Command & Conquer: Red Alert: Hell's March: Once I had my first computer, my uncle let me borrow one cd of the first Command & Conquer. It was awesome, and I loved the game. It's true that the game was pretty broken, and both sides had weapons that could destroy you in a matter of minutes even if you had prepared defences, but that was part of the fun^^. After this first game, came C&C: Red Alert. It was still addictive while being a little more balanced, and it came with this music in the intro and during the game. It really motivated me^^.

Final Fantasy VII: Aerith's Theme: Final Fantasies should get a special mention by the number of amazing songs they have, and most of them achieved that something special that I was commenting at the beginning. Whatever you may say about the games, the story they tell is usually quite polished, and the music fits perfectly. In this case I talk about this particular song because of the emotional impact it had. You hear it several times during the game, but the crucial moment, of course, is when Aerith dies. It was traumatizing, after so many hours invested in the game, knowing the characters, one of them died. And then a battle ensues with this music as the background. In one of my replays I went to the bother of getting the ommnislash in disc 1 only to use it against that boss and one-hit the bastard....

Final Fantasy VIII: The Castle: Here again it's hard to pick a song for this game. I didn't select Eyes On Me as the main example because it's a well known song, but the way this song is used is really devastating: The first time it sounds with lyrics, you just rescued Rinoa from a cold death in space. This whole moment is extremely tense, because since Aerith died  in the last game I was not confident Rinoa would survive this one. After several cinematics, lots of text and time with oppressive, minimalistic music, when she's alive, you got an airship and everything is ok, this music sounds and it's a really happy moment. This is repeated in the end: You are lost in time, remembering things that happened without being able to focus on Rinoa, as if something is wrong and does not fit. The images speed up, in a sickening way, and then you get an image of her dying in space, as if you didn't save her, with a single feather on a white floor. I thought for a second they would end it like this (it would have been cruel, but it would have been amazing: The whole time after space you were in some fantasy world, completely broken, and you just now managed to remember what happened: Fade to black, and the end...). And then Eyes on me start playing again, making everything right, and continuing to an amazing ending song, that finishes in a high point, as an example of how to do happy endings correctly, implicating the player in all of it while keeping the tension until the very end. And well, after this long rant...The Castle song is the song of the final dungeon. You arrive to a haunted castle, and this cheerful music starts to play....and then, the organ enters the scene, showing you're in a proper haunted castle, full of tricks, corners, mysteries and secret passages. It creates an eerie atmosphere, and makes this section one of my favourites.

Metal Gear Solid: The Best Is Yet To Come: The first modern Metal Gear is an incredible game: With the graphics of the time, it makes you feel you're in some kind of realistic movie, and I recall it as if the squared graphics were actors shown in HD. The gampeplay is based on stealth and combat while the story punches you at every opportunity with the message "War is REALLY bad", without becoming tiresome or overly dramatic. This song, which appears in some key moments in the game, makes you feel the isolation and the cold in Alaska, mixed with the hopelessness of war, punctuated with some hope once it becomes a little bit more cheerful.

Halo: Mjolnir Mix: I didn't play many different games during a long period of time after the first playstation, and I concentrated more on PC games (Lineage 2). When I re-encountered console games, the first one I played was Halo, and I really loved it. It had simple mechanics, a good story and great gameplay. And the music was excellent as well, guiding the story and making battles so much more epic. The key here, I believe, is that it does not use your typical action music. It adds more...well, weird instruments and sounds, more "futuristic", combined with traditional instruments. It manages to repeat what I commented at the beginning, this feeling of wonder towards the universe and the futuristic places that you're visiting, but this time more action-oriented.  In the 3rd game, even if the campaign itself is pretty short, the music and the story combine to make playing it an incredible experience.

Well, there's more games that could appear on the list, of course, but these games and musics left quite an impression on me^^.

Humans are always special

I am currently playing Mass Effect 3, and I'm probably one of the last people who has not seen the ending yet, even if I have read enough about it to know what's going to happen.

Before reaching the ending, Mass Effect 3 feels like a natural extension of 1 and 2, just taking the plot and making it even more epic than before. I've read in TvTropes that the first game is based on science-fiction in the eighties, and the second follows more closely the philosophy of the nineties. This trend would proceed then to the third one, with an apocalyptic setting similar to Battlestar Galactica. I like the game so far, and I know that I can decide to ignore the ending and I will get a nice story that spans long hours of gameplay. However, there are things that bother me, of course.

One of these things, that appears heavily in other games, books, movies, etc., is the fact that humans are always "special". In Mass Effect, for starters, you will always be a human. You will always be in the military, as some kind of elite soldier, and all your actions will benefit or not impact humanity. Here one can argue that, for example, saving the Krogans may cause the extinction of humanity in the future, but the point here is that this is a long term situation that may or may not happen.

In the games there is several "specieist" characters, but you cannot use a renegade option to disagree with them. Sure, Mass Effects is an "RPG-for-Dummies", but I feel there's a wide range of options that are just never presented to the player. And the central idea everywhere is what I commented, humans are special.

When creating a science-fiction world, the writers had the chance to explore all these different cultures, completely alien to us....but humans are somehow better in lots of ways, even if it doesn't make much sense. They get access to the galaxy government sooner than other species, they manage to impress all the rest with their "adaptability"(because the Krogans clearly have trouble to adapt, for example), the bad guys target them because of their "bigger genetic diversity"(somehow more diverse than the Asari, a species that actually takes genetic information from other species and adds it to its own), and so on.....

It's a little detail maybe since a big part of the game, specially if you play the paragon route, is to insist on the idea that you should respect and accept each species with their differences and work together. But this detail always bothers me, because it invokes the "white male old producer" image as the force behind it. By that I mean that this, in my opinion, shows that the writers were forced to make sure humans were special, because the producers of the game wanted protagonists that would be idealised versions of themselves. Therefore, they wanted white, male and more or less young humans, and the humans had to be the special ones, the protagonists. It seems that they expect that there's no other way to relate to the protagonist if the protagonist does not comply with these specifications.

There's a chapter of Doctor Who that reminds me of that too. Doctor Who in general treats humans in a very special way, since the Doctor goes to great lengths to save them from the current threat, while sometimes other species are more easily sacrificed. But there was one episode with the 11th doctor that was specially bad in that sense.... The double episode where a group of humans drills too deep, and find a dormant species of human-lizards, that were the original inhabitants of earth. In this chapter, the lizards attack and capture some of the humans, but it's the humans who actually kill one of the lizards first. With any other species, the Doctor would condemn them for this, and make war against them. In this case, the human is forgiven, and the lizards are forced to keep dormant, because they cannot coexist well in this time and age.

I feel sometimes we're too proud of ourselves, and plenty of works of fiction cannot achieve the idea of maybe not considering ourselves so special. With so many attention to the humans, chances are lost to explore other fictional species, and that's really a shame.

Of course there are examples of this being exactly the opposite, like in the Chanur Saga,  But in the most popular works, it's harder to find this brave approach of putting us in a secondary plane. And I think it's a great missed opportunity to make science-fiction more diverse, specially in games and movies...