water_wendi
Water is not wet!
Congratulations! Your LTTP: MASS EFFECT has evolved into RTTP: STAR CONTROL 2!
This sums up my last two weeks of playing Mass Effect. i just met a Reaper on Virmire and the comparison is just too much. i cant enjoy what little there is to enjoy in ME1 because i keep being reminded of Star Control 2. Worse still, the reminders show an incompetence because multi-million dollar budgets and huge dev teams cannot outdo what two guys did in six months seclusion.
i remember before ME1 launched i watched all those videos of the game and was hyped beyond belief. Any demonstration of the Galactic Map, zooming in and out, reminded me so much of SC2. "This is fantastic," i remember telling myself. "The template for fun is already there. Surely all they have to do is follow the outline of whats come before." Little did i know the disappointment i would feel when i finally bought ME.
Things at first seemed not great but i tricked myself into thinking things would fix itself later in the game. i rationalized away things i disliked like poor RPG gameplay by convincing myself that Star Control 2 wasnt an RPG either. SC2 didnt need to the RPG trappings of Starflight to remain fun, so maybe their absence in ME wont matter either. "When i got to the Galactic Map, all would be made better." How could i have known how wrong i was?
After i joined the Interstellar Secret Police, the main aspiration for humanity a couple hundred years from now, i was granted access to the solution to the problem i had with ME. Exploration would be the Omni-Gel for my broken expectations so i immediately set off exploring the galaxy that Bioware crafted. Twenty minutes later i uninstalled the game.
My latest foray into the universe of Mass Effect
Fast forward years until a couple weeks ago. i decided to give the game another shot. i avoided all side-missions or exploration and just made my way through. i was determined to finish the game. Then i hit Virmire and the Reaper. i always figured the Reapers to be similar to the Eternal Ones from Star Control 3 but now i was being confronted by another reminder of Star Control 2. Reapers look and sound like Korh-Ah. This video here illustrates the similar color scheme and voice between the two: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh6PGp9G2W8
Now you might question why this is an issue. If its good enough for Star Control, why not Mass Effect? The answer is simple. Bioware has completely bungled anything interesting about the Reapers in comparison to the Korh-Ah.
The Korh-Ah have a very good reason for wanting to destroy other life in Star Control 2. They are not generic bad guys. There are cultural and historical reasons you learn about during the course of the game that paint both factions of the Ur-Quan as sympathetic villains. They start off cookie cutter villains but quickly morph into a complex and deep alien menace.
From checking a walkthrough i can see im pretty much at the end of ME and there is nothing i know about Reapers other than indoctrination and a incomprehensible "vision" that looks to be a cross between a Saw movie and some long lost Halo numbered VHS in NINs discography.
Heres some other issues i have with Mass Effect other than the similarities to Star Control:
- Interstellar Gestapo. i almost threw up in my mouth when i was made a Spectre. There was a gigantic opportunity missed by not confronting the Secret Police of the Mass Effect universe. There are only two real references to the hypocrisy of the Spectre.. the Turian ambassadors throwaway comment and that one reporter who attempts to snare you in a Gotcha Interview /Palin wink!
- No real choices. This has been a Bioware problem for a bit. Again this links to the missed opportunity listed above. Instead of having interesting outcomes linked to a Paragon character acknowledging that Spectres might not be the best thing for humanity to aspire to, we get Jack Bauer in space where violence is really the only option.
- Alien races that arent really that alien. Now, there are some good things that Bioware has done and its hard to fault them because the well for sci-fi is one almost all stories draw from. That being said i think if there is no difference in interaction between alien cultures dont choose to use only exposition to interact with them like Star Control or Starflight (you interact but only via view screen and not "in person" like in ME). If any game designers read this, you are not constrained in the manner of sci-fi TV like Star Trek. You dont have to use human actors modified with make-up as your base. You have a blank slate. Go wild, please.
Similarities between Mass Effect and Star Control
While writing this post i started looking to see what others have said about the glaring similarities between the two. At first i was going to write at length on it but i discovered that others had already done that for me.
From Naylor at Vidgamas article Head2Head: Mass Effect vs. Star Control II
i wanted to bold passages of that paragraph but really the whole thing needs to be highlighted. i think thats about all that needs to be said really.
Any thoughts?
This sums up my last two weeks of playing Mass Effect. i just met a Reaper on Virmire and the comparison is just too much. i cant enjoy what little there is to enjoy in ME1 because i keep being reminded of Star Control 2. Worse still, the reminders show an incompetence because multi-million dollar budgets and huge dev teams cannot outdo what two guys did in six months seclusion.
i remember before ME1 launched i watched all those videos of the game and was hyped beyond belief. Any demonstration of the Galactic Map, zooming in and out, reminded me so much of SC2. "This is fantastic," i remember telling myself. "The template for fun is already there. Surely all they have to do is follow the outline of whats come before." Little did i know the disappointment i would feel when i finally bought ME.
Things at first seemed not great but i tricked myself into thinking things would fix itself later in the game. i rationalized away things i disliked like poor RPG gameplay by convincing myself that Star Control 2 wasnt an RPG either. SC2 didnt need to the RPG trappings of Starflight to remain fun, so maybe their absence in ME wont matter either. "When i got to the Galactic Map, all would be made better." How could i have known how wrong i was?
After i joined the Interstellar Secret Police, the main aspiration for humanity a couple hundred years from now, i was granted access to the solution to the problem i had with ME. Exploration would be the Omni-Gel for my broken expectations so i immediately set off exploring the galaxy that Bioware crafted. Twenty minutes later i uninstalled the game.
My latest foray into the universe of Mass Effect
Fast forward years until a couple weeks ago. i decided to give the game another shot. i avoided all side-missions or exploration and just made my way through. i was determined to finish the game. Then i hit Virmire and the Reaper. i always figured the Reapers to be similar to the Eternal Ones from Star Control 3 but now i was being confronted by another reminder of Star Control 2. Reapers look and sound like Korh-Ah. This video here illustrates the similar color scheme and voice between the two: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh6PGp9G2W8
Now you might question why this is an issue. If its good enough for Star Control, why not Mass Effect? The answer is simple. Bioware has completely bungled anything interesting about the Reapers in comparison to the Korh-Ah.
The Korh-Ah have a very good reason for wanting to destroy other life in Star Control 2. They are not generic bad guys. There are cultural and historical reasons you learn about during the course of the game that paint both factions of the Ur-Quan as sympathetic villains. They start off cookie cutter villains but quickly morph into a complex and deep alien menace.
From checking a walkthrough i can see im pretty much at the end of ME and there is nothing i know about Reapers other than indoctrination and a incomprehensible "vision" that looks to be a cross between a Saw movie and some long lost Halo numbered VHS in NINs discography.
Heres some other issues i have with Mass Effect other than the similarities to Star Control:
- Interstellar Gestapo. i almost threw up in my mouth when i was made a Spectre. There was a gigantic opportunity missed by not confronting the Secret Police of the Mass Effect universe. There are only two real references to the hypocrisy of the Spectre.. the Turian ambassadors throwaway comment and that one reporter who attempts to snare you in a Gotcha Interview /Palin wink!
- No real choices. This has been a Bioware problem for a bit. Again this links to the missed opportunity listed above. Instead of having interesting outcomes linked to a Paragon character acknowledging that Spectres might not be the best thing for humanity to aspire to, we get Jack Bauer in space where violence is really the only option.
- Alien races that arent really that alien. Now, there are some good things that Bioware has done and its hard to fault them because the well for sci-fi is one almost all stories draw from. That being said i think if there is no difference in interaction between alien cultures dont choose to use only exposition to interact with them like Star Control or Starflight (you interact but only via view screen and not "in person" like in ME). If any game designers read this, you are not constrained in the manner of sci-fi TV like Star Trek. You dont have to use human actors modified with make-up as your base. You have a blank slate. Go wild, please.
Similarities between Mass Effect and Star Control
While writing this post i started looking to see what others have said about the glaring similarities between the two. At first i was going to write at length on it but i discovered that others had already done that for me.
From Naylor at Vidgamas article Head2Head: Mass Effect vs. Star Control II
i wanted to bold passages of that paragraph but really the whole thing needs to be highlighted. i think thats about all that needs to be said really.
Any thoughts?
