Note: This review contains no game spoilers and no flamethrower-rants about the ending. For those interested in my analysis about the uprising over the ending (including spoilers) can read – The End Is Here… And The Fanboys Are Pissed – Bioware’s Mass Effect Ending Debacle. -Z

I’ve raved about the awesome awesomeness of Mass Effect 1 and 2 before. And recently I finally finished the third and final installment in the Bioware/EA series, Mass Effect 3.

After years of gameplay, hundreds of dollars and well over a hundred hours spent on the Mass Effect series, I’ve come to the end. Via Commander Shepard, I have traveled the length and breadth of the galaxy to stop many a nefarious plan. Along the way I’ve fought, killed, helped, hindered and/or coupled with: Humans, Asari, Salarians, Quarians, Hanar, Elcor, Geth, Rachni, Collectors, Reapers, Artificial Intelligences in the most smokin-hot computer chassis you can imagine, and I even found the Illusive Man (who sounds an awful lot like Martin Sheen.)

So how did I do? Let’s just say that by the end of the game, I had couples naming their offspring after me.

I can safely say that the Mass Effect series by Bioware is without a doubt THE BEST videogame I’ve played to date.

Awesome Writing

I’m a writer, so it should be no surprise that one reason Bioware games rock my world is the writing. The game designers really understand invoking the realism of these virtual places. The concepts. The situations. The different races, and their homeworlds. Here on Terra Firma I find politics about as interesting and useful as theoretical calculus, but I was really intrigued by the motivations and goals of the different races, and especially when those goals were conflicting. An overall theme of solving our differences so together we can focus on larger issues is always a timely one.

And when I say I love the writing, I don’t just mean the story, although that’s a big part of it. The descriptions and the attention to detail that goes into making the game real and fun and real fun is sickening. I found myself stopping to listen to the news broadcasts in the atrium. Even the weapons had stories behind them. The languages of the other races were a fun spice too. Hearing a drunken Tali call Miranda a Bosh’tet Cerberus Cheerleader was a highlight of the game. Just walking around and listening to conversations can be enlightening and entertaining. I made it a point to check in with each of my crew members after each mission, and caught them doing plenty of interesting things…

Yeah yeah, the ending was a disappointment for me, and a disaster for others, but don’t believe the hate. The five-minute lukewarm ending is not bad enough to ruin over a hundred hours of awesome gameplay.

Decisions, Decisions…

The writers at Bioware understand that RPG gamers enjoy a difficult decision just as much as a difficult headshot. Negotiating a dangerous conversation can be as rewarding as a firefight in a warehouse full of Brutes. Bioware knows how to write tough decisions into their game plots. Jade Empire, Neverwinter Nights, and Dragon Age are other examples of Bioware games that put you into situations with no easy way out. No “right” or obvious answer. No clear-cut Good or Evil, but shades of grey. No idea how your decisions might pan out or the repercussions that might haunt you later. You’ll be saving your game ALOT.

In Mass Effect, the decision-making aspects of the game were amplified three-fold. Decisions you made in each game carried over to the next game in the series. Major decisions affected the world in different ways. If you decide to kill off the last of an alien species, knock boots with a hot crewmate, or side with one resource over another, the next game in the series will carry over those decisions and all the repercussions that come with them. While it ain’t quite Skyrim as far as open-worlds go, (and even open worlds ain’t exactly as ‘open’ as we’re led to believe,) it’s still weapons-grade Role-Playing Game material. You’ll want to pause your computer and think before making some choices, and you’ll want to save often so you can take back your promises and ‘unscrew’ your crewmates!

Bioware Game Hint to Overcome the 50 saved games limit (PC only): You only get 50 game saves in Mass Effect and Dragon Age. When you hit the limit, simply close the game, then copy all but the newest of your saved game files to another folder, and restart the game. Presto, as many saved game slots as you can possibly need!

Art Direction

The book The Art Of The Mass Effect Universe really shows off the quality, consistency, thought and talent that goes into making the game look amazing. And when you consider just the stills from the game are artwork, the actual game itself is that quality on Red Sand.

You’ll get more than your fair share of lovely, multi-planet vistas, and more types of terrain than you can shake a Tantalus core drive at.

One Step Closer To Virtual Reality

I’ve said it before, but Video Games are the path that leads us to the holodeck. Movies going 3-D? Feh. Games have interactivity, and that’s the key.  And so far, no one can touch Bioware for the number of epic cutscenes that make you feel like a real hero in an interactive movie instead of a nerd playing a video game.

If sci-fi ain’t your thing, then try out Dragon Age 2, which deals out the same high level user experience and cut-scenes galore, plus intuitive, interactive gameplay.

What’s the Future of the Future?

In a behind-the-scenes interview Martin Sheen dropped a hint that we may not have seen the last of the Illusive Man. And this was BEFORE Bioware promised an extended-cut ending to placate fans who were displeased with the series’ ending. I wonder if there’s a movie deal in the works? Or a sequel? Although it would be tough to follow up such an amazing and epic story, I certainly would line up to see Bioware try…

 

There’s no shortage of virtual blood being spilled over the ending of the Mass Effect series of games by Bioware/EA. Specifically the ending of the third and final game, Mass Effect 3. That uber-ending was expected to blow everyone out of the water, and it did. But not in a way that anyone expected or wanted.

One thing everyone agrees on is that the The Mass Effect series is amazing and awesome. I’ve gone on record to say that the series is collectively the best videogame I’ve ever played, and I’ve played a LOT of videogames. I played through the entire M.E. series and I read all of the novels: Revelation, Ascension, and Retribution by Drew Karpyshyn, (writer of M.E. 1 and 2) and Deception by William Dietz. I preordered the collectors edition of ME3, purchased ALL the game guides, and ALL the DLC (DownLoadable Content – Optional expansion missions that extend the gameplay.)  I’m as hardcore of a fan as they get without naming my future offspring Wrex or Tali. And I played out the three major endings of M.E.3 just like all the other diehard fans.

I won’t lie to you – the endings of Mass Effect 3 are lame. Mediocre at best. But unlike many fans, I was not mad about it. Disappointed, certainly, like eating your way to the top of a marvelous dessert and finding a raisin instead of a cherry. But after slushing through the Bioware forums and online reviews, and talking to other gamers, I feel like a minority because I’m NOT running down to Bioware headquarters and lighting the building on fire. My friend Saveau thought the ending of M.E.3 bought the writers an eternity of chainsaw intimacy (my interpretation) and still others took some surprising online actions against Bioware.

Perhaps I enjoyed the game so much that even a weak ending wasn’t enough to ruin the game for me. Perhaps my Inner Nihilist found the ending amusing and strangely satisfying. Perhaps the novels or my particular game playthrough gave me insight into the game that helped me process the ending. Whatever the reason, I feel objective enough to criticize the game ending with only a small number of expletives, capitol letters and lighter fluid.

The Ending, Spoiled in Three Primary Colors

If you played Mass Effect 3 already, you can skip to the next section.

Warning > Spoilers ahead.

Here’s the one-sentence synopsis of Mass Effect: [Deep Breath] An alien race called the Reapers left behind portals in space (called Mass Effect relays) that warn them when organic life evolves enough to take up space travel, and then they come out of hibernation and destroy organic life throughout the galaxy, but the valiant Commander ‘Not On MY Watch’ Shepard has uncovered the Reaper’s nefarious plan and gathered together all the forces of the known universe (organic and otherwise) to wage an epic battle against them, but once he reaches the heart of the Reaper-destroying-weapon known as the Crucible, he meets a Deus Ex Machina (literally ‘Ghost in the Machine’) in the form of a ghostly human kid who believes that synthetic and organic life cannot coexist peacefully so he invented the Reapers to keep the peace by repeatedly eliminating organic life before it gets too uppity, and the only three ways to end this cycle of death and destruction are presented to Commander Shepard as a choice of three possible ending-options: control the reapers, destroy the reapers, or “synthesis”, which combines organic and synthetic lifeforms.

Within these three game ending/choices, there isn’t a lot of latitude. If you choose to control the Reapers, you die. If you chose Synthesis, you die. If you choose to Destroy the reapers and your war assets are high enough, you’ll get to see a few second video clip in which Commander Shepard’s body lies amid burned wreckage, and the scene cuts just as his body moves, so it’s safe to assume you live. If you’re lucky, the earth won’t be destroyed, but your crew aboard the Normandy will be scuttled regardless, crash-landing on a faraway planet. The mass effect relays all explode no matter what you do, spreading some primary color throughout the multiverse, destroying entire systems of planets, ending Faster Than Light space travel, and pretty much insuring that “Shepard” will go down in history as not only the destroyer of the Reapers, but also the greatest war criminal of all time, and the first universal curse word in every known language across all (remaining) species in the known galaxy.

The End.

You can watch all the endings on youtube, along with plenty of joke endings and bitching too. There’s even an ridiculously long “documentary” that suggests the entire ending was a hallucination Commander Shepard experienced while under control of the reapers (AKA The Indoctrination Theory) I watched enough of the Indoctrination Theory to say that it is cross between a compelling solution and a desperate intellectual gambit, but no one should have to stretch their imagination that far to make the ending work. Nothing else in the game made such mental leaps of faith. Occam’s Razor says the ending was poorly written, not that it was so complicated that it takes a 90-minute video to explain it to us.

As far as what effect your gameplay had on the ending, it’s easier to point out your choices that DID matter in the finale of the game, because there are only two:

1. Whether you salvaged or destroyed the reaper technology at the end of M.E.2. (And even this factor isn’t that important. If you didn’t play M.E.2, it was assumed that you did destroy it.)
2. Numbers. Also called the “cold calculus of war” by your companion Garrus. How many people did you get on board for the final battle?

That’s all. Size matters. None of your decisions mean a damn unless they add people to your posse.

Now, parse the size of your army into the three final choices, and you get a handful of ending cutscenes, all of them amazingly similar, and none of them particularly satisfying. Most likely you die, and that’s probably the better ending for you. You won’t likely see your ship or crew again (no more FTL, remember?) and thanks to your efforts, the universe explodes in one of three primary colors.

“If Bioware made a Titanic video game they would give the player some variety though with 3 different colored icebergs.”

From: http://comments.deviantart.com/1/294643094/2492277017

So What?

Is that all? People are pissed about that? I was so pissed about midi-chlorians in the Star Wars saga that I wanted to fly out to Hollywood and kick George Lucas in the balls, but I didn’t find the Mass Effect endings particularly worthy of hating on.

After some reflection and chatting with others who finished the game and filtering out all the whining, here’s a list of the major legitimate complaints about the ending.

The Endings From Left Field

Through all three games, the motivation of the Reapers is kept secret. When their purpose is finally revealed, it goes over like a fart in a closet. The gameplay completely failed to foreshadow the ending. You won’t figure it out, no matter how carefully and meticulously you play the games. (The ONLY hint I got through the whole 3-game saga was when a reaper told me “I am order and you are chaos”, which was a specific, Paragon-unlocked dialog option) So when the spooky-ghost-kid known as ‘The Catalyst’ shows up with three unsavory, primary-colored choices, it seems like a last-minute-rush-quick-fix endings, as if the game writers didn’t know what the ending was either until they actually got there and were forced to write something. In one hour. At gunpoint.

All other occasions when I spoke with the enemy, I was told that my puny mind “wouldn’t understand.” Strangely, at the end when Spooky-kid-god finally explained to me that organic life needed to be purged to contain the inevitable war between synthetic and organic life… well, that actually isn’t hard to understand at all. It was, however, inherently WRONG.  (See ‘Your God Is An Idiot’, below)

There really isn’t any excuse for such a disconnected ending. This is easy enough for the game designers to control through the use of the Inevitable Master Plotline, and while I applaud Bioware for pushing the envelope and widening their virtual worlds, the beauty of the inevitable master plotline is that it allows the game writers to force critical story plot points down the player’s throat. In this case, it would have not only been warranted but welcome.

Players should have encountered and spoke with the spooky kid-ghost-thing multiple times throughout the game. Instead you chased him around dream sequences that had no meaning. You should have had some insight into what it wanted and why BEFORE you got to the end of the game. Armed with that knowledge, maybe you could have had argued with it, played against its desires/fears, or used other intellectual leverage against it. This is the point in the story where you point to EDI and Joker making out in the observation deck. See? Organic and Artificial life are getting along just fine!

Instead, the ending had all the ugly transition of a Choose Your Own Adventure book, and the available choices were completely out of left field. Not exactly the “control” people were hoping for, which leads me to the next issue.

RPG Decisions = Irrelevant

I really struggled with some decisions in Mass Effect. Should I play this as a Paragon or Rogue? Angel or Asshole? Should I have a love interest? Which crew member will I be knocking boots with? Should I side with criminal elements like Aria T’loak? Who should I support on the council? Who is it safe for me to piss off? Should I sabotage the genophage cure?

These were big decisions in the game. But in the end, all of that RPG gameplay was thrown out, and the “cold calculus of war” was all that mattered.

Gameplay decisions are important to RPG gamers, and they should have been important to the game designers, and they should have been important to the ending too. But it didn’t matter. None of it. All the decisions you had to pause the game to carefully consider, all the hard choices you labored over, and all the sides you took, and all the people you saved and/or pissed off… didn’t amount to a hill of Elcor dung. The only thing that mattered at the end of the game was how many troops you had to fight with.

People were promised influence over the ending. Real influence. Control. And even though you got to choose from three endings, that wasn’t the kind of control people wanted. Maybe players have some “control” by choosing the ending, but their 100+ hours of gameplay didn’t have any “effect” on the ending, and that’s what people really wanted.

Your God Is An Idiot

There was no opportunity to point out that the AI spooky-ghost-kid is incorrect in arguing that synthetic and organic life cannot live together in peace.  Even if this were true, the point could be argued that a life at war is better and more productive than a constant cycle of annihilation.

But it isn’t true. And the fact that you’re not given the option to argue with the Idiot Ex Machina is as frustrating as the fact that you also can’t shoot the little bastard. In fact, Saveau pointed out to me that the Catalyst’s beliefs go AGAINST a major theme of the game for those players who brought peace to so many warring species like the Geth/Quanari. Which is also in itself proof against the spooky kid’s theory, but there’s even stronger proof.

The Normandy’s shipboard artificial intelligence known as EDI bears special mention here, because she manages to cross the line between synthetic and organic life over the course of the game. With encouragement on your part, EDI may fall in love with Joker, the pilot of the Normandy. In fact, she may love him so much, that she overrides her own self-preservation code because she decides that she would willingly die to protect him. Later, she feels fear of death before going into the final battle.

Wow. This is quite possibly the most amazing character arc of all time, and yet another reason Bioware games are so fucking awesome. The fact that it has no purpose in the story and is completely ignored in a climactic endgame decision about synthetic and organic life getting along is not just an oversight. It’s an injustice to the writers and the gamers.

Accomplishment, Success, and the Lack Thereof

A complaint raised by the Retake Mass Effect movement (which we’ll get to shortly) raised this issue with the game. They said it was missing “A heroic ending which provides a better sense of accomplishment.” Elsewhere I saw this written as “Hard-won success through your actions in the face of impossible odds.”

I’m tempted to disagree, because too many Disney movies and Hollywood films take Happily Ever After Ending as a default, so I’m always eager to see stories that DON’T end this way. However, in this case, we are dealing with a media that has the potential for MULTIPLE ENDINGS and since the player gets to pick between them, what harm can there be in allowing someone to pick a happy ending? If the endings were truly different, then you’d have discussion about which one was better. Which are you? Team Happy or Team Martyr? Selfish Love or Self-Sacrifice? And think of the replayability, something the marketing departments love to go on about. But I doubt anyone will be replaying Mass Effect. The endings are all pretty much the same.

I fully expected to have to sacrifice either myself or my crew to stop the reapers. Actually, I expected to have to chose between my romantic interest and stopping the reapers. THAT is the kind of storytelling that tears your f-ing heart out. But all three of the choices turn out pretty much the same way, and as I said before, none of them were particularly satisfying.

“Success” and “sense of accomplishment” are relative terms. Your efforts at the end of M.E.3 were successful. If you make it to the Crucible, I don’t think there’s a way to LOSE the game, per se. Your goal is to stop the reapers and save the frickin multiverse, and no matter which option you choose, you stop the reapers and save the frickin multiverse. You might not save Earth. You might not save your friends. You will most likely die in a primary-colored, galactic explosion.

But you will be successful.

It just isn’t a very good success. It’s a very limited, conditional success, and it comes with a high cost. Too high for some, apparently. Want to know why that is?

Good, because there’s one more piece to this puzzle, and I’m going to save it for last. It’s the piece that amplifies all these points of contention to superhuman proportions. But for now, these are all legitimate complaints about the ending.

Let’s release the fanboys, and see what happens…

The Uprising

The ending of the game Mass Effect 3 ignited the largest-scale internet fan debacle the media world has encountered thus far. I’d call it as close to “rioting in the streets” as you can get via online activity.

The Retake Mass Effect Effort

Someone calling him/herself “The Mass Effect Community” used the online service ChipIn to setup a donation portal to the charity Child’s Play. Dissatisfied gamers were encouraged to contribute to the Child’s Play charity in lieu of signing a petition. The list of demands to Bioware was simple:

We therefore respectfully request additional endings be added to the game which provide:

• A more complete explanation of the story events
• An explaination [SIC] of the outcome of the decisions made, especially with regard to the planets, races, and companions detailed throughout the series
• A heroic ending which provides a better sense of accomplishment

From: http://retakemasseffect.chipin.com/retake-mass-effect-childs-play

The Retake Mass Effect effort raised over $40,000 in its first day.

As of today, the charity has raised over $80,000.

The scale of this effort can’t be overstated. over 4,000 people donated on average $20 each to get the game ending of Mass Effect 3 changed.

The Blind Leading The Angry

Unfortunately (or perhaps Fortunately) whoever started the effort stopped soliciting donations, stating that they had “won” because Bioware announced that it will provide DLC to help clarify the ending (see below), and also because of people misunderstanding the involvement of the Child’s Play charity. Many people thought they were buying an alternate ending of the game, or that Child’s Play was going to take on Bioware, or help to produce an alternate game ending. The charity was flooded with requests asking what actions they were going to take, and for updates about when the new ending would be available.

Once people realized that the Child’s Play charity was actually…um, a CHARITY, and not taking action towards a new game ending, many people asked for their money back, to the point where the charity was contacted by Paypal directly to see what was going on. Tycho Brahe released a statement clearing up the charity’s position:

Child’s Play cannot be a tool to draw attention to a cause.  Child’s Play must be the Cause.

http://penny-arcade.com/2012/03/21/childs-play-and-retake-mass-effect

What’s ironic is that the pissed off gamers lost money on another bad ending here, too. But this is what happens when the blind lead the angry. I’d say this worked out for the best…this time. The angry mob got the attention of Bioware, who promised to make things better. A charity got soaked in angry e-mails and phone calls, but they also got $80,000, so they can pay someone to answer phones and e-mails for them.

Bioware should be really fucking thankful. Mark my words this will happen again, by someone with a real plan. And it will not end pleasantly.  Had someone started a kickstarter account with some semblance of an action plan involving lawyers and class-action lawsuits, this story would have turned out quite differently. They could have really done some real damage, not only to Bioware, but to any potential video game makers, their insurance agencies, and the entire video game industry.

FTC? BBB? WTF?

Another disappointed gamer decided that Bioware’s game did not live up to the promises of its marketing department:

“After reading through the list of promises about the ending of the game they made in their advertising campaign and PR interviews, it was clear that the product we got did not live up to any of those claims…”

From: http://www.gamepur.com/news/7426-fans-filing-ftc-complaints-against-ea-after-mass-effect-3-ending.html

His solution was to file complaints with the Federal Trade Commission and the Better Business Bureau.

Hopefully none of you reading this need a lawyer to tell you how silly this is, even if BBB employees agree that Bioware marketing needs to learn to lie better . If there were repercussions for media not living up to its marketing hype, then all marketing execs would be strangled to death with their own intestines, and George Lucas would be doing jail-time for midi-clorians.

Operation Letter Tsunami

A latecomer to the Mass Effect Ending Rebellion is an attempt to flood the Bioware offices with hand-written letters, postcards, drawings, pleas and other hard-copy materials.

The Operation Letter Tsunami website offers template messages and addresses of Bioware HQ. Their target date to flood Bioware offices with letters is 12 May 2012.

We want to send letters and not just some letters. We want enough letters to fill the entire building. Many people have great ideas for the letters. Rather than just pick one and limit the choices, we will send them all. We will send postcards. We will send POV letters. We will send artwork. We will send them all.

Date has been set, the tides will rise on 12 May

http://www.holdtheline.com/threads/operation-letter-tsunami.1386/

I’m not entirely sure what this hopes to accomplish, since Bioware has already agreed to run damage control on the issue.

Bioware Relents, Promising An “Extended Cut” Ending

Just before the Internet actually physically exploded with all the intensity of a mass effect relay, Dr. Ray Muzyka, co-founder of BioWare responded to the seething masses on his blog:

Exec Producer Casey Hudson and the team are hard at work on a number of game content initiatives that will help answer the questions, providing more clarity for those seeking further closure to their journey. You’ll hear more on this in April.  We’re working hard to maintain the right balance between the artistic integrity of the original story while addressing the fan feedback we’ve received.

http://blog.bioware.com/2012/03/21/4108/

This isn’t new. We’ve all seen “director’s cut” or “alternate ending” versions of films that attempted to undo previous damage. And if there was ever a medium made for content retraction, videogames are it. Treat it like a bug in the code, upload new ending and presto! Now game designers can release poorly written code AND poorly written content and patch it up after delivery! But notice that Bioware isn’t offering a new ending, they are offering “clarity” and “closure”. Which is like saying “If you understood what we were trying to do, you’d approve.” I’m not so sure. It’s doubtful that there’s any way Bioware will placate angered fanboys unless they give them quadruple their money back and an Asari handjob.

As I write this, the new ending is already in production, and the term “Extended Cut” is being thrown around. I’ll link here when it goes live.

Many people disagree with Bioware’s re-actions, suggesting it is like “Negotiating with terrorists.” The fact that the mob efforts were successful will only make people more likely to do it again in the future. But that’s a blog post for another day.

So, Was The Ending Of Mass Effect 3 Really THAT bad?

No, it really wasn’t. It was a dud, but it certainly wasn’t worth asking for your money back, or launching an angry fundraising campaign, complaining to the FTC or BBB or letter-bombing Bioware HQ. Some people actually liked the M.E.3 ending and others said it was time to leave Bioware alone.

Anyone who disagrees certainly hasn’t played Neverwinter Nights 2, or Fallout 3, or watched the Matrix movie trilogy. These media all had crap-tastic endings, but none of them launched this kind of uprising.

Neverwinter Nights 2 put in bold on the back cover of the box “Everything you do has meaning” but your actions in the game only ran up your Good/Evil score, and the game ended with a Good or Evil slideshow, spiced with tiny bits of your gameplay decisions. A much bigger disappointment than the Mass Effect ending, I assure you.

Fallout 3 bragged about having many different endings, but that turned out to be a lie, since there were only four, and all of them were far lamer than M.E.3.

I was only disappointed that all the endings of M.E.3 were so similar and lame, when they could have been so much more varied, compelling and memorable. Bioware has great writers, but the endings of ME3 don’t really show that. I’d give the game a 4 of 5 star rating, pulling a star because of the weak endings.

So why the uprising? What did people really want? In M.E.3, people were promised to have influence over the ending:

Experience a sci-fi epic with multiple endings determined by your choices and actions throughout the game

From Mass Effect 3 Collector’s Edition ‘Key Game Features’ on Amazon.com

The problem, as I said before, is that they got this, but it just wasn’t good enough. They had choice, but none of the choices offered were good enough.

To put it bluntly, the endings did not meet player expectations. Here’s why:

Emotional Investment, Cubed

“Remember – don’t write a check with your mouth you can’t cash with your ass.”

The Wise Man from Sucker Punch

A multi-game series is one of the largest media investments you can make. The Mass Effect series makes the Harry Potter series look trite. You could sink well over $200 into the Mass Effect series, and push 150 hours of gameplay.  For some people that could be an entire year’s worth of going to the theater. Or a year’s worth of books. Or a year’s worth of Netflix. And the physical cost pales in comparison to the emotional investment fans make via the magical interactivity of videogames. You could spend the length of an average movie just setting up your character in Mass Effect.

After all that time, money, energy, effort, planning, guessing, frustration, failure, success and hope… when all of your button-mashing efforts and mind-bending, ethics-flexing, political-maneuvering, decision-making culminates in the final climactic climax… the end of all endings… the role-playing orgasm you’ve waited for, worked for, and paid for when you could have used that time/money/effort for other things…

The ending better not SUCK. In fact, it better not even be just OK, because the audience expects awesome-covered-awesomeness with a cherry on top. An awesome cherry, too. Because all that emotional energy carried over from ME1 to ME2 and on to ME3, ramping up as it went.

But this was not just three games added together in a row.  Everything about this game grew exponentially with each part of the series. It wasn’t just three times as much marketing hype, it was marketing hype cubed. With all the awesome gameplay and good reviews of the first two games, all that emotional energy built up, storing up silently in your Saved Games files. Sitting there like a shaken up pop bottle, getting another jostle with every husk you killed and every decision you made, building up pressure and waiting for the game ending to pull the trigger…

With so much emotional energy riding on that ending, the final minutes of the Mass Effect series released with a fizzle. I’ll be those who jumped into the series on the third game and did not play M.E.1 or 2 probably weren’t as upset by the ending. But those who carried all that expectation with them would be more likely to think the ending was an Epic Fail. And when the ending failed to properly resolve all that emotional energy, people put it to other uses: complaints, letters, forums, calls to action, and blog posts like this one.

A Good Ending

The good news is that if people didn’t love the game so much, they wouldn’t have gotten so mad about the ending.

So, while Bioware seems to be getting burned by it’s own fans, lets not forget who lit those flames in Mass Effect 1 and who threw a can of gas on them with Mass Effect 2 and then stoked the fire with TNT during 99% of Mass Effect 3. Bioware burned themselves by writing a check with their mouth that their ass couldn’t deliver. Their only crime is putting a raisin on top of the greatest dessert in the world.

It may be too late for the game, but perhaps the entire Mass Effect Ending Debacle can have a good ending.  The gamers spoke, and Bioware listened. They realize the error they made and are taking steps to correct it. Video game companies worldwide are watching this unfold, and I hope they learn a valuable lesson: the ending is important. It’s not something you skimp on, cut short, or kick out half-finished because you have deadlines. I’m pretty sure Bioware game endings will improve because of this, and that’s something they’ve needed for a long time. I’m looking forward to the “Mass Effect 3 – Extended Cut” ending from Bioware, as well as other games they release in the future.

Since I’m going to be helping to moderate a discussion of social media for authors for the Minnesota Speculative Fiction Writers Group this weekend, I decided to give pinterest a try. There’s been a lot of buzz surrounding pinterest recently, no doubt spurred on by the ‘country club’ waiting period while they go through some rapid growth. Some people have waited for a week just to get a login. I had mine the next day, but this waiting period should decrease as they tack on some more server power.

Setting up a new account on the latest social media buzz site made me feel this way:

• 2006 – Hey! Check out MySpace! It’s Cool!
• 2007 – Myspace sucks! You should check out Twitter!
• 2008 -Twitter’s cool, but Facebook is better!
• 2009 -Facebook sucks! Check out Google Buzz…  Nope. That aint it. Go back to Facebook.
• 2010 -Facebook sucks! Check out Google Wave… Oh screw that! Sorry! Back to Facebook!
• 2011 -Facebook sucks! You should check out Google Plus! Wait a minute… OK, Google Plus is good. No wait… ummmm, OK! Google Plus is good. For now. Just keep that Facebook account in case of emergency.
• 2012 – Google Plus sucks! You need to check out Pinterest!

Le sigh.

Welcome to 2012 – No flying cars, but we have pinterest!

For those who don’t know what Pinterest is all about, it’s really quite simple. Sign up at pinterest.com, add the “Pin It” button to your browser toolbar and when you see a picture you like… bam. Pin it to your online albums. Group your pix into categories, like my “Shiny Gothic” page group, shown at the right.

Seriously? That’s it? Now, why the hell would an author – someone who makes their living selling words – want to join the illiterate version of Twitter? Especially since many social media sites already handle pictures and do so much more?

Well, I’ll tell you.

The Secret Is Simple

After using pinterest for a couple weeks I can tell you that it’s like my ex in many ways. It’s easy. It’s fun. There’s not much to it, really.

I can understand why people who are interested in scrapbooking, stamping and the like would be interested in pinterest. The fact that it handles images (and videos too…) with ease and a clean, bulletproof interface… it really makes Facebook look messy and cluttered. Probably because Facebook IS messy and cluttered. There’s no damned games here on pinterest. No farmville. No angry birds. Well, there’s probably pictures of angry birds, but no stupid pokes (wtf is a ‘poke’?) no messaging, no events. Just pix, arranged in categories. Simple, clean and elegant.

So it’s simple. Big deal. Why would authors want to sign up for yet-another-time-sucking-social-networking site?

Character Dossiers

You’re probably expecting me to say something like “A picture is worth a thousand words” or some-such. But somebody smarter than me already did. So instead, I’ll tell you that I’m a very visual person, and a page full of pictures of what I think a character or place looks like gets the idea across faster than a page full of text.

Every now and then I will trip across a picture of a person who looks very much like one of the characters in my head, or a character I suddenly WISH was in my head. Or a location I’d love to use in a story. My current method is to copy those pix and save them into location and character dossiers in Evernote for future reference. But now I may be tempted to save them in pinterest as well, if for no other reason than pinterest is so flipping easy to use.

Psycho-Social (Networking)

Pinterest makes it really simple to share pictures and graphics with others. In fact, there is no Private setting. Everything you pin, like, group, or comment on pinterest is shared, and there’s no way you can hide it. This means you won’t be pinning up pix of your last private session with Mistress Jean, but then again, there are none of those pesky privacy settings to complicate things either. Simple.

Because of the social component, pinterest can be used as yet-another-funnel to guide people toward your product/e-mail list/whathaveyou, and I have every faith in the American ability to twist this new platform into a money-grubbing, graphical, spam-fest. I also guarantee you that the only way to make money using pinterest is as follows:

How To Make Money Using Pinterest!

Easy – write a book called “How to make money using Pinterest!”

Your Author Image

Another way to use pinterest is in your “image” or visual expression of yourself as an author or your work as part of your overall brand. Pin up a bunch of sunny, rainbow, happy unicorn pix… and people who enjoy those things may also be interested in what you’re writing about. Pin up a pix of dead animals left over from the Nine Inch Nails Downward Spiral photo shoot….and people who enjoy those things may also be interested in what you’re writing about. This used your image (literally) to filter your target market out of the users on pinterest.

Just make sure to keep your image accurate. Give people a false impression and they may not be forgiving about it.

At the very least, you’ll want to have pix of your awesome book covers up.

Pinspiration

Pinterest is a guaranteed time-suck if there ever was one, but is there a social networking site that isn’t? Nuff said. But you have to admit trolling through pinterest for inspiration is faster and more efficient than reading random articles on Wikipedia. If you wanted to find some cool visual inspiration for characters, places, weapons, fashion or food (LOTS of food and fashion on pinterest) then pinterest is one place to do it.

Just thinking out loud here, but Google Image Search might be better for graphical inspiration only because it has a larger resource pool to draw from. But pinterest adds in the ability to view current and trending images, if that makes a difference to you. And I’m sure their database will grow larger at a preposterous rate, but there is already plenty there to look at.

Pinterest – More Than Just Twitter’s Illiterate Younger Brother

Expect big things from this site. Once you see how easy and intuitive it is, you’ll agree that Pinterest is not a fad. It’s not next year’s Google Wave, and it has much to offer. If you’re already on facebook or twitter, you can log into pinterest through those services, so you really should give it a try.

By the way, there is no official app for pinterest just yet, so watch out for scams claiming to have pinterest apps available. If it ain’t coming from the pinterest website, it ain’t the real deal.

Happy Pinning! And friend me up on pinterest here: http://pinterest.com/conradzero

 

 

 

 

Imagine a cross between the action of Fight Club, the mystery of recent Sherlock Holmes films, a splash of horror a’la Seven, the darkness of The Crow, and maybe a dash of paranoia from Angel Heart or Jacob’s Ladder…

I know, you can’t really imagine such a thing. So stop stretching your imagination and go see The Raven starring John Cusack as the enigmatic granddaddy of all horror authors, Edgar Allen Poe.

The Divine

I haven’t seen a bad John Cusack film yet, and he continues to impress even though he still looks, sounds and acts like John Cusack, and you half expect him to whip out a boom box and hold it overhead like he did in Say Anything (1989). All the same, he does a great job as Edgar Allen Poe…that is to say, a drunken lush of an author-slash-suffering-artiste.

The sound was wonderfully loud and clear. I usually make mental notes about the score/soundtrack throughout movies, but The Raven kept me so engaged that I never had time to notice the music. Obviously, this is a good thing, because bad background music will pull me right straight out of most films, and that didn’t happen here. Till the end credits anyway, see below.

The Splendid

The horror that occurs in The Raven is the top-shelf psychological stuff crossed with enough really-real gore to set a disturbing mood and enough mystery and mind-screwingly, insidious, underlying darkenss to keep you biting your nails right up until the end.

You needn’t be well-versed in the works of Edgar Allen Poe to appreciate this film. I doubt there’s any historical accuracy in this, but it’s a good primer of Poe’s stories for those who don’t know much about them. Many of his classics come up throughout the movie, wonderfully woven into the actual plot by a serial killer who murders his victims in the method of Poe’s writings: The Pit and the Pendulum, The Cask of Amontillado, (which I’ve been apparently pronouncing wrong all these years), Murders in the Rue Morgue, Masque of the Red Death, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven (of course)…

The Tragic

Don’t try to solve the mystery. I’m not spoiling anything by telling you there aren’t enough clues shown in The Raven for you to solve it. In fact, I’m saving you the trouble. Just keeping up with the plot will keep you busy. Actually, the film attempts  to duplicate the hectic pacing and feel of the recent series of Sherlock Holmes films, with limited success.

The denouement seemed like a “we’re about to run out of film!” rush-job. While it provided ample closure after a marginal climax, it would have done better as a cookie; a bonus feature shown after the movie credits.

At the very start of the end credits there was some annoying music and some metallic-animated-thing that that was so utterly bizarre that if it didn’t actually say “The Raven” in it, I’d swear the projectionist screwed up the reels. My guess is that someone got a new After Effects Plugin. It belonged in a music video behind a Tool song remixed into dubstep.  Whatever it was, it did not belong in this movie.

The Raven

If you like your fiction as dark as your coffee, and if you enjoy John Cusack, then you owe it to yourself to check out The Raven while it’s still in theaters.

A hefty package showed up today from Sam’s Dot Publishing. It was no surprise that my preordered copies of Sky-Tinted Waters had arrived. The second MNSpec compilation was supposed to be completed in time for this year’s MiniCON, but the printing was delayed. Just as well, because I wasn’t able to make it to MiniCON this year. But the book is out NOW, and I’m told the release party will happen at CONvergence 2012.

The cover art for Sky-Tinted Waters looks great. It was a rush to open the box and see the lush, multi-colored landscape, Ethereal Beach II by Mitchell Davidson Bentley. Nice work.

Opening to the table of contents, I had to laugh. My story, Pinky the Invisible Flying Pony vs the Giant, Carnivorous, Poisonous, Exploding Spider-Leeches took up three whole lines! And I was pleased to see “…an invisible flying pony” get special mention on the back cover.

Little did I realize, those extra lines would be taken back…with interest! As I read through Pinky…etc, I was disappointed to find that seven of the eight section breaks were missing from the story. The text just ran together, which affected the pacing and obscured the location changes, making the story confusing. I’ve noticed this same problem in several other stories in the anthology, so I’m guessing it’s some kind of conversion error and not an editing decision. Unfortunately, there was no ARC (advance release copy) to proofread for typos or errors like this. I’ve hand-written the section breaks into the books that I’m personally handing out. Oh well, it’s a small price to pay for taking up so much space in the table of contents!

If you pre-ordered a copy of Sky-Tinted Waters from me, I’ll get you a signed copy next time I see you.The book should also be available soon at Sam’s Dot Publishing Bookstore. And stay tuned for updates about the upcoming book release party at this year’s CONvergence.

The cover art has just been released for the upcoming MNSpec Anthology, Sky-Tinted Waters and it looks great! It’s exciting to see this project come together after months of planning, writing, submitting, editing, and waiting.

Click on the graphic at the right for a larger pic.

Sky-Tinted Waters is being released by Sam’s Dot Publications, and edited by Michael Merriam. The book will contain my mega-titled, dark fiction short story, Pinky The Invisible Flying Pony Vs The Giant Carnivorous Poisonous Exploding Spider-Leeches. I can’t wait to see the words in print!

All told, Sky-Tinted Waters will contain 20 stories from my fellow authors of the Minnesota Speculative Fiction Writers’ Group, AKA: MNSpec.

The book should be available soon, and there will be a release event including readings and signings by contributing MNSpec authors at the 2012 CONvergence festival, July 5-8 at the Sheraton Hotel in Bloomington, MN.

The Minnesota Speculative Fiction Writers’ group hosted a table at the 2012 Bloomington Writers’ Festival and Book Fair. It’s a great event, put on by the Bloomington Theater and Art Center. I’ve attended for the past couple years, and the event continues to grow and attract people from all corners of the writing and publishing industries.

Dana Baird was on hand with her brand new book, Broken Legacy. Michael Merriam was our anchor, working the table from open to close, and administrating matters financial. Jason Wittman brought along his very tiny books, the size of postage stamps (by far the most popular item, and winner of ‘Most Units Shifted’.) Terry Faust helped with setup and provided a lovely lamppost to help guide the masses to our table. I brought copies of The Blackness Within, which contains my short story, Big Game.

QR codes were a given, along with free snacks and/or giveaways at most tables. I watched one person who walked up and down the rows, filling a bag with all the free stuff he could carry. My contribution to the MNSpec free snack fund was Apple Pie Gum, but no one wanted a piece. No one. Not even the guy who was loading up on freebies. I eventually broke down and tried a piece myself. It was like stuffing ten whole apple pies in your mouth for thirty seconds, then it magically turned into a bland rubber piece off an old shoe.

I sat in on two seminars. The Evolution of E-books was the more interesting of the two, and I can sum it up in one word: Apps. Instead of the “epub” format, some publishers are turning their books into apps for Android, I-phone, Nook, Kindle, etc. I’d compare it to the current “3-D” trend of movies, extra fluff that costs big bucks, with little more than “gee whiz” factor as a payoff. Publishers can afford to shell out for flash animators and app programmers, while indie/self publishers might be more limited in this capacity. Should be interesting to see where this goes.

The Future of Publishing seminar was disappointing. Most of the discussion was lost in waxing romantic about social media, and discussing the fate of indie bookstores. I dared to ask a (on topic) question about whether author exclusivity with amazon/i-tunes/bn.com might become a more common factor in the future of publishing, but it was quickly brushed off as if “yes, yes, we all know that.” Oh, I’m sorry, let’s go back to talking about Twitter, because that IS the future of publishing. I had a much more enjoyable, informative (and Free) discussion after that seminar with fellow MNSpec members Randy Holland and Kiernan Gladman.

All in all, the event is a great networking opportunity, and not such a great event for sales. Seminars are hit-or-miss.  The crowd was mostly older folks, and the tables were a mix of authors and author resources, but weighted heavily toward self-published authors, and self-publishing support. I’d recommend this FREE event to anyone who wants a jump-start on the summer author festivals.

Check out Bloomington Writer’s Festival on Facebook.

I’m sifting through the manuscript of Evil Looks Good, and I’ve run into one of the most difficult things I’ve had to do as a writer – justify my writing.

Part of the difficulty stems from the fact that I wrote Evil Looks Good before I put a structure to it. What started as a 200,000 word free-form quagmire has been boiled down to a 85,000 word painstakingly-arranged work of jaw-dropping genius.

Oddly enough, that was the easy part. Now I’m both discerning and applying a structure to the story, and one way to quickly identify sections of the story that don’t belong is to ask myself this question for each scene in the story:

“Why is this scene important?”

And I don’t mean this in a rhetorical way. I mean, I write out the answer to this question for every single one of the 50-plus scenes that make up the manuscript. What gives this scene the right to be in this story? Who the hell cares whether this scene lives or dies?

Most of the time the answer is easy. You have to introduce new characters. You gotta make things harder for the protagonist. The protagonist and antagonist gotta battle. No conflict = no story. Duh.

But sometimes answering this question is hard. Really hard. So hard that I put the work aside and log into wordpress and blog about how god-awful hard it is.

It’s hard because sometimes, the answer is not obvious. Sometimes the answer is, well, bullshit contrived to keep scenes that I really love in a story where they don’t belong at all. “Because it’s a kewl fight scene in a kewl place!” simply doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for Quentin Tarrantino movies. And it doesn’t work for any writer who wants a solid story that won’t be railed by readers.

Readers are not stupid. In fact, they can sometimes see the work more clearly than the author who wrote it, because they aren’t blinded by backstory, implications, intentions, and years of rework. And readers WILL question why the hell each and every scene is in this story. And they WILL know if it’s simply there to pad the word count.

The good news is that if a scene is worth saving, asking yourself why the hell it’s in the story in the first place often gives you the very method for saving it. In many cases I’ve been able to combine scenes or raise the level of importance of scenes, and make them stronger by making them more integral to the main storyline.

And yes, in some cases, I remove scenes that simply don’t add to the story. It hurts to see that work get cut, but it’s a drawback of the method I chose when I started writing without an outline. Perhaps next time I’ll structure my story before writing it, and I can come back here and blog about how difficult THAT method is… But I’ve said on this blog plenty of times that Good Writing is Hard Work. I’m hopeful that this hard work up front pays off for readers in the long run.

Anyway, back to the hard work…

 

Authors J.A. Konrath, Blake Crouch, Lee Goldberg, J. Carson Black, and Scott Nicholson are running up a lovely promotion for their combined 5-book “Ultimate Thriller Box Set” by giving away 10 Kindle Fires and other prizes. The promotion is called Big Kindle Boogie, and you can find out more at http://bigkindleboogie.blogspot.com/.

Digging around online, all the buzz revolves around the FREE KINDLE FIRES and the PRIZES, but I can’t seem to find out anything about the contents of this “Ultimate Thriller Box Set.” Can’t even find the titles of the stories involved. Are they a secret? It certainly is suspenseful.

What really is thrilling is finally seeing someone promote the Kindle Fire over the i-pad. But I wonder if there is an actual “box” involved in this “box set”? I”m guessing that these are e-books, since they’re giving away Kindle Fires and all, so I wouldn’t get my hopes up for a physical box.

Here’s the official press release:

WIN A KINDLE FIRE IN THE BIG KINDLE BOOGIE

10 Free Kindle Fires, 75 free ebooks, $300 in gift cards, a $500 library donation! Entries for 10 free Kindle Fires are already underway at http://bigkindleboogie.blogspot.com and gift cards are bing randomly awarded on Twitter for those who tweet about the Big Kindle Boogie.

On Feb. 1-2, bestselling thriller authors J.A. Konrath, Blake Crouch, J. Carson Black, Lee Goldberg, and Scott Nicholson are making 75 Kindle books free on Amazon. They are also making a $500 donation to the local library of one Kindle Fire winner. They are also releasing the five-book Ultimate Thriller Box Set for free during the event. Contest is international, no purchase necessary. You can also join the Facebook party at http://www.facebook.com/BigKindleBoogie.

Three easy ways to enter:

• Use the entry counters at http://bigkindleboogie.blogspot.com
• You can also enter manually by tweeting to be eligible for Kindle Fires and Amazon gift cards: 10 free Kindle Fires. 75 free ebooks. http://bit.ly/xWOoKN #bigkindleboogie RT to enter for a Fire!
• You can email bigkindleboogie@yahoo.com ONCE PER DAY with “Boogie entry” as subject line

Everything free, everything fun. Good luck!

So spread the word and best of luck!

I am legally required to tell you that “I was invited to a pre-release screening of The Devil Inside by Paramount”, which is how I’m able to review it before it’s technically released in theaters. Good thing too, otherwise you might actually have gone to see it.

I am not legally required to tell you that I actually watched the movie as research for the story I’ve been working on about Demons and Demonslayers, called Evil Looks Good.

I feel ethically required to tell you that the movie is a joke, and it actually makes The Blair Witch Project look good.

Review of The Devil Inside

Believe me, before seeing The Devil Inside, you’ll want to get a few spirits into your own body. I recommend Fireball Cinnamon Whiskey. One quart should be sufficient.

First of all, for a movie about demonic possession, it’s about as frightening as tepid queso dip. Here’s a hint to producers wanting to make a horror movie: if you feel the need to have something jump out (be it person, car, dog, cat, bird or whatever) to keep the suspense up… guess what? Your writing sucks. Try adding suspense to your script, and you won’t have to rely on stuff-jumping-out-at-you tactics as a crutch for your lame writing.

Also, is there some law that requires indie films to be shot as a “documentary”? Sure it worked great for Trollhunter, but no one fell for that bullshit with The Blair Witch Project, and no one’s falling for it with The Devil Inside. This story would have been much, much scarier if it were scripted, filmed and cut together like a regular horror film, using the exact same resources. Remember, there’s not much difference between a “documentary” and a “mockumentary”.

The heart of the story was not bad, but parts of the story were so bad that they were able to actually detract from the movie and scream “SCRIPTED”. For example, why did the cameraman follow the priest to a baptism which had NOTHING to do with the plot of the movie? Ah, that’s right, otherwise we would have missed an [IMPORTANT PLOT POINT]. Wow. Good thing the cameraman was there, or the screenplay writer(s) would have had to write that plot info into the script some other way. Who has time for that?

Why did a mom have to move her daughter to the basement of the house before calling the exorcists? Guess her daughter’s bedroom had too much lighting and not enough grungy textures and peeling paint in it for an exorcism. No, I’m not kidding. Moved her demonically-possessed daughter to a bed in middle of the fucking basement. Wow, good thing, because that dingy, poorly-lit basement was much creepier than any kid’s bedroom.

And the ending? The audience laughed out loud. And I heard several people actually say out loud: “Oh no they did-int!” and “Aw, hell no!” and there was even one “That’s it? Really? You gotta be shittin’ me!”  Wish I were kidding. It was the cheapest, “We’re out of time, so let’s wrap this up! Cut! Print! Where’s the Fireball Cinnamon Whiskey?” that I’ve ever seen. And the end credits were an exercise (pun intended) in patience, crawling across the screen slower than the credits in Pray For Daylight, and that had to be a challenge.

This Review of The Devil Inside Is Not, I Repeat, NOT Sanctioned By The Catholic Church

So much for the review. The movie sucked. But what I really want to talk about is the marketing genius of the promotional/street team who were on hand to introduce the movie The Devil Inside, because they were far, far more intelligent than the screenplay writers.

Just before the film started, three prim, young people stood up in front of the audience and made an announcement. A clean-cut kid dressed as a priest, wearing a banded collar and flanked by two Polly-pureheart-puritan girls. He produced a notecard, and in a head-down, self-conscious monotone, (soliciting some “louder” and “we can’t hear you” responses from the audience) he read off some gibberish about how he did not condone the film, and he would be available for discussion after the film.

Now these three were even more fake than film itself, if that were possible. He never said he was a priest, but that was obvious. No priests are that young, and they aren’t shy in front of crowds. They introduce themselves by name, and by religious branch, including the location of their place of worship. They know to project their voice. And they don’t read off notecards.

And the Polly Purehearts? They ain’t that pure. I checked.

But, the very idea of having people dressed as religious authority stand up in front of the entire theater audience and tell them that they DID NOT CONDONE your decision to watch the movie? That they did not endorse the movie content?

Sheer marketing genius? Definitely. But I can do better.

Here’s a Million Dollar Idea:

If you want people to remember your movie, you should have “plants” in the audience – members of the street team disguised as regular theater patrons, who scream, puke, and/or pass out at strategic moments during the film. I could have slept through The Devil Inside, but if someone near me barfed or passed out? Now there’s something to blog about!

Remember, you heard it here first. Drop me a thank-you if this idea works out for you.

And don’t waste your time with The Devil Inside. If you want to see a real horror movie, check out The Thing remake instead.