I finally played Mass Effect 3, I’d played 1 and 2 but after all the stink about 3 and it being on Origin / EA Play for years I never bothered until a recent $1 sale on a month of that EA subscription, which has ME3 on it.
I spent 90%+ of the game going “Wow this isn’t bad at all, I am really impressed! This really is a good game!”
…until I got to the ending sequence, when it felt like the game had taken crazy pills all of a sudden. I understood why everyone was mad about it, and totally agree that it ruined the game. It wasn’t that Shepherd died, it wasn’t the Red/Blue(/Green) choice they gave you, it was a combination of 3 factors though:
Crippling your character and making you limp along, unable to use any of your powers, forced to slog through a bunch of token combat EDITwith only pistol, and all your cosmetic choices were erased as you drag around at half speed through corridors just to get further in the chain of conversations.
Except for the pass/fail check on the conversation with the Illusive Man (which is very easy to miss the requirements for without expecting it), none of what you did before entering that final sequence matters, it really was just press a button to receive ending. On that same note, you can have all 3 endings regardless of what you did, spent the entire trilogy making nothing but Renegade choices? Don’t worry you can still press the Blue button! Hail Mary deathbed confession!
I found the child avatar kind of out of place and a bit weird, yes I know it was a reference to the kid that died, but it was not really immersive and it made this gigantic long conversation that makes up “the last boss” really awkward, especially since half the conversation is just explaining the story for people that weren’t paying attention or missed all the side quests.
GaaS took all the profitable pieces of the MMO model, and left the entire genre a desiccated husk populated with zombie games that refuse to die from the 90s, 00s, and 10s. Other than a couple Asian market games (because that market is a lot more accepting of extreme monetization in MMO), Lost Ark, and New World, I literally cannot think of a single MMO released in the 2020s that wasn’t just a kickstarter scam, and even those are less common now.
Wtf is “atompunk” and why does every single sci fi genre have to be called somethingpunk now? Cyberpunk had a reason to be called that, I really don’t see the reasoning behind every other somethingpunk moniker.
They also had a crypto miner put into their dying game SMNC during one of its last patches, you could mine crypto from them to get keys for lootboxes to get hats in SMNC.
I mentioned this in another comment, but they’ve renamed themselves TWICE to try and dodge their shady reputation from ruining Super Monday Night Combat and the Planetary Annihilation fiasco.
Oh but do you also remember how they blew up SMNC (Super Monday Night Combat) on their way out, and their last two moves on SMNC were:
1 - Adding more microtransactions, AND LETTING THEM MINE CRYPTO ON YOUR COMPUTER TO GET THEM!!!
2 - Apologizing and promising to update the game soon, and abandoning it to work on PA, which had a day 1 price of $90 on Early Access (because it wouldn’t be fair to the kickstart backers)!
I loved MNC, I loved SMNC until they wrecked it, but I will never give that company another cent. Also if you’re curious why you never heard of Star Theory Games doing all that shady stuff, it’s because they used to be Uber Entertainment Inc. and literally renamed themselves to try and shed the bad name they made for themselves. Oh and now they’ve changed their name AGAIN to Galactic Annihilation, but it’s the same people. Do not trust them.
Discounting Steam because otherwise I’d be here typing for an hour listing all the cheap games I enjoyed from there.
Lufia 2 for the SNES, which was great because it was a prequel to Lufia 1, though it took me a couple years to finally track down a copy in the pre-internet days. I was pleasantly surprised to find out it was a prequel, and there are actually massive spoilers for the 2nd game in the intro for the 1st one, so I unintentionally played them in the right order!