*Spoilers. Obviously.*

I'm kinda as close to giddy as I get these days, because Journey comes out tomorrow. I played through Flower and, to be honest, had my spirits rallied that video games can really create an effective/affective art experience and not just feed me the same pop culture nonsense that gets slogged around constantly.

I was a hyper-intelligent two-and-a-half-year-old... or a seven-year-old. Depending on which one makes for a better story - your call.

I don't know. When I was a kid and I got shot by a Stormtrooper, it was at least a good ten seconds that I was dead/"no, not really, my shields just got taken down for a second, but I'm OK because I have a personal shield generator inside a titanium shield that can stop any lasers." That kind of graphic violence, I…

I agree with you, but I've never thought Bioware's dialogue is particularly spectacular. Some of it's good - great, even - with the party characters and the quests focused on revealing their character (thinking of some of the loyalty missions - well... thinking of Thane and Mordin, really), but most of the NPCs in the…

You mean, like, running around the house and playing with friends? Don't be ridiculous.

I'm notoriously cranky when it comes to writing, but this one might bear a little explanation beyond that:

Because those synthetics could have wiped out organic life, killed the synthetic life meant to save organic life... well, and then could have created organic life again through synthetic research and experiments - like organic life creating synthetic life. Or, no, wait... When a synthetic form of life loves another…

My inner scientist awaits a fascinating explanation of this phenomenon.

My understanding is that he was mostly responsible for ME1, then had a significantly smaller role in ME2. If this is the case, then I'd be prone to agree. If, on the other hand, he was still responsible for most of ME2 - which, in my opinion, is where the series started to fail from a writing stand-point - then I…

In all fairness, you wrote ME3 as much as any test audience or fanbase has written a movie. From a technical standpoint, fan-service plays a prominent role in most movies with a large fanbase. Additionally, film studios will often change (sometimes radically) the film if it doesn't test well with pre-release test…

If you didn't like the ending to ME3, why would you petition Bioware to re-do it?

I'm not going to get into whether the ending was good or not, but there's merit to argue that a bad ending is enough to ruin the series. The execution of the conclusion is among the most significant parts of any story, as it generally solidifies the author's interpretation of what can be described as an incomplete…

ME2 and ME3 are poorly-crafted stories founded on themes of exceptionalism and dialogue/actual story-telling founded spectacle. People make the Mass Effect series out to be this great achievement in art, but it's little more praise-worthy than a popcorn flick. It may sound exceedingly bitter and certainly elitist, but…

1) It's true to say that the vast majority of people complaining are angry about the endings themselves. To be totally honest, I've ignored a lot of these complaints because they're so drastically uncalled for, it's hard to believe than an audience would really think their disagreement should be made into a reality.…

I think some people were more or less disappointed by the breadth of the cutscenes more than their actual content. The ending to a relatively long-winded series just kinda happens, then there's, like, 30 seconds of denouement - and then a horrible epilogue. I think, given the length of the series's other entries, some…

You're going to need to stop making so much damn sense. (Although, really, I'd still play ME1 and just ignore the rest of the series - kinda like how I feel about The Matrix.)

Oh, yeah - I forgot about Project 10 Dollar. That was all of, what, two years ago? Whew - quick turn-around.

I completely agree, and was just thinking the exact same thing while reading this. The human desire to consume the same familiar (and sometimes shitty) media for some feeling of comfort is pretty well-documented at this point. This is why developers are going to need to get creative in terms of publishing solutions.

People shouldn't ignore Ebert because he's a film critic. If you've played a game with cinematics, your analysis of that game was colored by the same critical language that Ebert uses (and has written extensively about) on a regular basis. (Regular gameplay is also guided by principles directly shared with film - and,…