The Many Failures of Mass Effect 2
One of our writers posted a critique of the latest wildly-popular BioWare RPG, Mass Effect 2, on our sister site, InfoAddict, and it’s seriously stirred up the emotions of quite a few fanboys so we thought we’d reprint it here for you to enjoy (or hate) too. (If you’d like to read some of the encouraging comments and fiery criticisms left on the original post, you can find it here.)
With an average score of 96 on Metacritic, one would be justified in believing Mass Effect 2 has little room for improvement. An overwhelming majority of so-called game critics have weighed-in, predictably showering Bioware’s latest RPG with roses and garlands.
Bioware is one of a select number of game companies that receives a +3 modifier in review scores. So take an average game that would normally receive a 7, add Bioware’s name to the box, and oila! Instant 10. While this may be great for Bioware’s bottom-line, it’s actually a grave disservice to the company and gamers, not to mention a glowing example of everything that is wrong in game journalism; criticism specifically.
Having played and finished Mass Effect 2, I can safely say, without reservation or hesitation, that Bioware’s latest RPG is a complete mess, from top-to-bottom and not a product worthy of Bioware’s heritage.
Before I launch my critiques, allow me to post a comment from Bioware’s very own Ray Muzyka that appeared in a recent interview given to Computer & Video Games:
Early feedback and reviews for Mass Effect 2 have been hugely positive. You must be delighted?
We look at it really practically. We’ve had a lot of 90-rated games right? Pretty much every game we’ve ever released has been 90-plus. So we take it in our stride. We kind of look at it that sometimes our teams are our worst critics in terms of the way they look at our past work.
While we’re really ecstatic about the feedback we also look at it and say ‘Where are the opportunities for improvement? How do we make the next installment in this trilogy better? How do we make the next installment of Dragon Age better? How do we make Star Wars: The Old Republic better?’ I look more to the future than to the past.
It’s interesting being at the EA meetings and receiving the launch congratulations. I appreciate it and it’s nice to receive nice words and congratulations, but I’m more interested in how we drive success in the future, how we make our next games even better than Mass Effect.
Well Ray, if you want to know how to improve your franchise then I highly recommend you don’t read any actual reviews, because my brethren in the journalism community are rabid fanboys who unfortunately have bylines. You also won’t find much at Metacritic because they de-list any site that has review scores that are not within some arbitrary average, which defeats the entire purpose of aggregate reviews when you remove low scores.
So Ray, that leaves you and me…and few lonely stragglers shouted down in forum posts. Besides, the public has spoken with their wallets: they love Mass Effect 2. Then again, people love the Transformers movies. There is no accounting for taste, but there is bookkeeping when it comes to quality.
Enough preamble.
Mako Gone = Great, Planet Survey = Bad
One of the many aspects of the original Mass Effect I despised was the awful Mako, an ATV the player drove to explore planets. The problem was the physics behind the Mako, which made it feel like a lame arcade game with all of its bouncing around and assorted nonsense. Bioware obviously heard people’s criticism but instead of fixing the issue they simply removed the feature altogether. Unfortunately, their overall solution is to have the player survey planets from the Normandy, a truly boring and repetitive process that involves holding the mouse button down as you scan the surface of a planet for minerals. This is presented in such a boring and uninteresting way that it comes across as a huge speed bump for the game, a necessary evil imposed on the player because you need those resources to create new upgrades.
Mass Effect 3 Improvement: Make surveying a planet challenging and truly interactive. Make it an experience. Develop an economic model that powers the entire enterprise, have the player fight off enemies for resources, invest in mines and factories. There are a lot of ways to handle this besides looking at a boring planet display and hovering your mouse over the surface. This concept wouldn’t pass muster as a free iPhone app.
The British Romans Effect
Mass Effect 2 places you within a bustling galaxy packed with many alien species and cultures. Unfortunately, they all speak English and have human mannerisms. They are alien in look only, which is quite lazy on the part of the designers. Perhaps Bioware believes people can’t stomach subtitles or have low reading comprehension. Whatever their reasoning, Mass Effect 2 reminds me of several TV shows recently, like Rome and the new Spartacus, wherein all the Romans have a British accent because the production company in question is British. At least when George Lucas made Star Wars, his aliens sounded and behaved like aliens, complete with subtitles. No one complained and it made the universe feel like it had aliens with tangible cultures. When George made the second trilogy, he drifted away from alien languages and we were left with Jar Jar Binks.
Mass Effect 3 Improvement: Develop alien languages for at least a few major species so your game doesn’t feel so culturally and racially vacant.
Wii Sports Resort Review
Nearly three years after the release of the original Wii Sports, gamers have been faced with the ugly reality that no developer has managed to successfully one-up Nintendo’s flagship motion-control launch title in terms of controls - excluding recent Motion Plus games from EA of course.
Perhaps Nintendo naturally knew its hardware better than anyone else. Or, perhaps most developers just didn’t attempt to utilize the motion controls in a more engaging format.
But either way, beginning around 2008 Nintendo’s R & D Division began experimenting with the concept of connecting the Wiimote to a gyro sensor for more accurate controls.
A standard Wiimote can only sense movements in a straight line as well as detect angles off a plane parallel to the horizon (as demonstrated by the tilting used for control in ExciteTruck, Wario Land Shake It!).
When combined with the Sensor Bar’s infra-red detection, the Wiimote can also act like a mouse, providing fairly accurate cursor movement (as seen during Wii Menu surfing).
But the limitations of standard Wiimote functionality manifests itself in the lack of 1-to-1 motion controls. Put in simpler terms, when the standard Wiimote is moved in any sort of pattern by the player it is not tracked identically on screen (e.g., Wii Sports boxing).
So while huge, exaggerated motions could, say, swing a baseball bat in the original Wii Sports, a simple, unenthusiastic flick of the wrist could produce the exact same effect. Or, even worse, the same small flick of the wrist which was used to hopefully putt in Wii Sports golf could go entirely undetected due to the small straight-line movement of the user’s hands along a single plane.
Now thanks to the nifty little pack-in gyro sensor we mentioned earlier, the Motion Plus, all movements by the Wiimote can be tracked on screen in practically a 1-to-1 ratio. No more undetected putting, and no more unnecessary over-swinging (unless you still like that).
Not only does Wii Sports Resort manage to surpass its progenitor in terms of controls, but also in terms of quantity of content. Whereas Wii Sports contained a total of five separate events, Wii Sports Resort contains 12 different activities. And as we shall find out, that number is a conservative considering each of the 12 activities feature various modes, which, in some cases, are entirely different events altogether.
I will try to provide a general overview of the game’s events while dividing them up into what I call the gold, silver and bronze medalists.
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