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| Re: There were a shit-ton of dropped plot threads/plot holes/whatever by Ice Cream Jonsey 01/08/2012, 6:39pm PST | ||||
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I don't know how you guys finish these games so quickly. Didn't it drop on August 24th? Jesus Christ.
2. One of the endings is for you to blame the entire thing on "tainted Neuropozyne" from VersaLife on behalf of the Illuminati, creating a backlash against cyberware technologies. Uh, that's great and all except BOB PAGE OWNS VERSALIFE, which becomes one of the biggest producers of nanotech in the first fucking game! Bob Page is still an Illuminati member at this point and the MJ-12 split hasn't occurred (proof of this can be seen in the fact he speaks with Morgan Everett in the secret conversation at the end). WHY WOULD THE ILLUMINATI WANT YOU TO DESTROY BOB PAGE? It makes no goddamn sense. I didn't like the ending mechanic where you hit one of three buttons to make stuff happen. People hitting buttons to sound alarms happened in FarCry. We shot those people in the head. Now, keep in mind that the ending of BioShock, the last big game I solved, made me angry. The ending to HR did not make me angry, I simply didn't like it. Whether that is because I have mellowed in my old age or not, I dunno. Endings are not a thing video games do particularly well, which is sad, because every other medium seems to be able to handle them (except the most-shit of mediums, television, which oftentimes never gives an ending to a series). What I didn't like was how they twisted my choice. My choice was obvious: give all the information on what happened to all people. I try to admin a forum with the same level of transparency. But then this was twisted to be RISKY by the HR writing team because people would suddenly REJECT TECHNOLOGY. This is bullshit: in real life, there's shit revealed about our phones that is just as dodgy coming to light every other week and we haven't all gone back to party lines. We haven't even prosecuted or started class-action lawsuits against the people who tap voicemail and who installed rootkit-style logs of everywhere we've been. So I didn't appreciate these guys saying what "mankind" would do. Computer Science and Liberal Arts nerds do not know what mankind would do. As a CompSci and Liberal Art nerd I will therefore state that mankind would probably get very upset that you can turn augs (er, some augs) into zombies for three or four days, but then some marketer from Boston would get on Penny Arcade's bad side and the zombie aug thing would no longer be news. In order to celebrate "support" from poe-news deleting my post over there about their users coming to Caltrops (nice work dropping it from your search results page though, you stupid fuck), I deleted your bullet point about Adam's parents. I thought, since Sarin calls Adam "son" all the time, that it would be shown that ... ah, nevermind, they didn't go that way. 5. Ezekiel Sanders. He becomes a redshirt enemy in the later half of the game. It's really absurd considering how much development they put into this fucking guy that his fate is to be waiting for you behind a door with a shotgun to be blown away. I do admit the trap he sets for you was pretty hilariously clever though. Hahaha! I know - I actually replayed the first conversation with him so I could set him free. Each life is so amazingly precious and valua-- oh, here comes Zeke running through the door, guns blazing. I thought I hit a bug. I thought, "Huh, he took a shot at me, but I am sure another conversational interlude is coming... no? Really? OK, single shotgun blast to the face, then." (Actually, I hit the Q button and let him live because I was *positive* if I left him alive his character would get some sort of resolution. But that's really because I had respect for the writers. And they did a good job for about 75% of the game.) 8. David Sarif mentions the Illuminati to you in a cutscene. But it's also never followed up on, other than that a vague "they" are behind all of this. But it's all spoon-fed to you on a plate. Sarif just tells you out loud instead of explaining it or having you figure this shit out. You never find MJ-12 facilities beneath your streets, or hackers talking via e-mails about it. It's just there, dumped on you to never be mentioned again. You never find out who the people Bob Page was talking to in the intro were, other than that some of them were possibly people you meet later in the game. I was surprised that the game would let you avoid one last conversation with Sarif. Sarif had the worst argument I've ever heard, by the way, for covering all this shit up. Jensen has been stealing credit chips from people for the last few weeks. He doesn't require food or water or sleep. Sarif's gambit is that Jensen would lie in order to save his company. Sarif was one step away from offering to give Jensen a blow job if he would just leave the office furniture. On one hand, this is how business owners actually think. None of them really understand that their employees show up for work each day because they are paid to do so. On the other hand, the other ending arguments were pretty bad as well. 9. The Illuminati's motivations are fucking stupid. They're afraid of augmented people so they start anti-augmentation sentiment across the world and try to use the U.N. to ban the practice? Oooook. This is a complete 180 from what their behavior was in Deus Ex, where cybernetics are the norm (though the social stigma to them is still attached) and nanotech is on its way in to supplant cybernetics, while the luddites were the conspiracy theorists and anarchists of the NSF and etc. I glazed over a lot of that. I mean, I don't know how much of this they put in the game, but here is how it should have gone: - A Secret Society of Corporate Douchebags (fine, the "illuminati," if you wish) are bored with being so rich and handsome are therefore interested in this "augmentation" stuff going around. - They capture scientists (like Megan, fine) who write software that allows you to literally control augmented people. Which they kind of did! They kind of did that. I didn't think they needed to make complicated plans just because it was "The Illuminati." I know you are coming at it from a perspective of what happened in the original, Wittgenstein, and I have not made it past the first mission in the original. But I think that controlling people through software patches is wholly creepy as-is. By contrast, if you take the tainted biochip (like one of your secondary objectives STUPIDLY tells you to do), you have to fight the third boss without any aug powers. I liked where they were going with this, but I'm disappointed that they didn't reward my worrying that I was shooting myself in the foot in order to avoid becoming affected. I trusted the secondary objective counters, so I was happy to see the game itself betray me. And yes, that boss fight was retarded. I was playing on easy mode and it still took me forever. I had to do the thing where you shoot him, run around a corner, create a new save game (since I couldn't see how much health I had... which is incompetent of the boss designers, because Jensen would STILL know how banged up he was, and the health bar is a fucking artifact of a video game's inability to simulate pain, and isn't something that ought to be taken away unless the PC is comatose and numb, but whatever, the dumb fucks who did the boss fights have been properly skewered all over the net) and then make progress in pieces, hoping that he didn't regen health. Which makes great sense. He's got all those improvements, but his health doesn't ever increase. However! Putting the living Slim Goodbody statues in motion was brilliant. I was constantly distracted waiting for the Czech guy to show up by the statues. No sarcasm, that was amazing level design with a laughably bad boss. 13. In general, the game pretends like choosing to fuck people instead of help them will come back to bite you in the ass, but asides from Ezekiel who it turns out WILL fuck you unless blow his brains out, this never happens. The only other time I can think of is that if you give a hacker a gun around the game's midpoint, he'll later wire you 2000 creds as a thank you, while if you tell him to fuck off he'll die. He dies? Where is that? Is this the same hacker that tries to extort money out of you? The more I think about them, the less I like the NPCs in HR. Hmm. There's other stuff that bugged me (and a lot of stuff I liked: this is seriously my favorite game in quite some time) but I guess I'll try to write a long review for the site. the dark and gritty...Ice Cream Jonsey! |
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