In Progress Let's Play Mass Effect 3: Emotional Engagements

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And once the ground forces are gone, just give everyone a laser pointer and use all the massive fleets you've recruited, and its done.

(Still don't know why they haven't given everyone a laser pointer and used orbital fleets by now, they've found a weak spot)

probably don't even need the krogan.

Admiral Kazgar, Deep-Tactical Genius

Kazgar has a point though. It reminds me of Independence Day. After drunk Quaid runs his fighter jet into the big glowing fuck-me-light on the alien ship, it turns out this super-advanced race's ultimate warships can basically be brought down by a pure American spirit... so hey, by Independence Day logic. Mass Effect 3 should be over now

You forgot the jew hacker and the black pilot suicide mission into the alien mother ship.
I love that movie. It was so cheesy, but the starting was awesome when US Jets were being blasted in the skies by plasma shooting aliens.

Is that when they upload a DOS virus that works on alien technology?

Holy shit...

So...

The laser pointer gun = drunk Randy Quaid.

Shepard = Will Smith

The Crucible = Jeffblum Virus

PS: I do honestly believe Roland Emmerich is one of BioWare's major "cinematic influences".

The Illusive Man studies the Reapers

IIRC, the floor collapsing scene originally had a choice and comrade death.

So when you activate the beacon, it registers that it is after the Prothean cycle. So this is the first time it has been activated. So how come it is speaking the common language, unlike the AI from ME1, and how did the Asari gain knowledge from it?

It wasn't a DOS virus, there was a Mac involved and you know Apple stuff just works, even with alien tech!

I'm pretty sure your NPCs could understand Vigil in ME1: it studied their conversations since planetfall or some-such.

Is there any way to keep Miranda alive?

Nah. Emmerich had the self-awareness to know what he was making was just cheesy fun made to entertain the masses, whereas BioWare geniunely believe they're making highbrow art.

You need to agree to let her use alliance funds when she asks for that during last talk on Citadel with her. At least i think that's the way, since it's the most logical way and there aren't any other real choices involving her. You gain her as ex-Cerberus war asset in that case.

Pure American spirit used to be one of the most powerful forces in the universe, but I doubt Shepard could find some (obviously it'd work against Reapers too).

But yea, it's really ridiculous how Shepard just doesn't tell people to do the obvious. Instead the obvious course of action is "hurr durr massed assault."

In addition to medigel inactivation, cutscenes also allow the weapons in Mass effect to actually kill on one hit, instead of having to shoot random mook 5 times with your space-deagle to get them to fall over.

Also seems a bit weird how a research effort in the last few years is really going to hack something made by hyper-intelligent synthetic life which has had millions of years to fine tune their tech, but frankly compared to the rest of the game that feels like nitpicking.

There are a few more actually: whether you warn her about Kai Leng (ie whether you have your 2nd Citadel meeting with her, the one in the Spectre office), whether she was loyal in ME2, and finally whether you try to Charm/Intimidate Lawson when he's holding Oriana hostage. There's quite a bit of interplay between each of these to determine whether she lives or dies. It's actually a pretty well done bit of C&C, even if the consequence is binary and doesn't really affect anything afterwards.

Oh this one's easily explained: looking at their track record in all 3 games it's obvious they're infact hyper-stupid, so should be easy to hack.

That seems to be the way of it tho'. I mean, Alpha Protocol was made up purely of these multip-factors-leading-to-different-consequences stuff. It'd mostly be small tweaks, but it'd have actual gameplay impact.

BioWare seems to have copied the mechanic of complex factors influencing choices, but the best consequence they can come up with is "get or don't get war assets" (with emphasis on ass, here). It's kind of pathetic.

That's easy to explain: It's the cutscene incompetence/hypercompetence effect, in which your character acts in a way that contradicts gameplay (and behaviour) so that the story can continue in a way the (lazy) developers wish it, for example destroying an hyper-robot of doom with a shitty pistol, or forgetting his/her small arsenal of weapons and acting like a retard when a weak zombie appears. Jrpgs unfortunately abused this technique (and they still do). Earthbound at least made fun of this flaw (skip to 1:50):

The problem is more that the consequences are, as usual, completely disconnected from the in-game events. Someone's loyal or not loyal? They live or die - why? No fucking clue. Hell, why does telling Miranda about Kai Leng prevent her from dying? Do her reflexes get worse if she doesn't know about him, even though she's infiltrating a Cerberus-controlled building and therefore should be on full alert to begin with? I'd say I want them to come up with bigger gameplay consequences, but truth be told they can't even manage to make the ones in the story make any sense whatsoever.

^ Pretty much. Not sure why that even needed to be said. There's no narratological interconnectedness to the events leading to consequences I sometimes see lauded (genophage, geth/qua, former acquaintances, etc): as has been noted on BSN some time ago about the outcome of geth/qua conflict, they simply all have a certain numerical value, the sum of which is checked at the end to see if it passes a certain threshold. Bio doesn't even bother to connect the 'events => outcomes' together - they just go "You did that? Good boy. Have a treat.", with "treat" mostly being a number added to another number which doesn't make sense or has any explanation to how it works or how and what it affects, to begin with.

The thought of the countless hours the voice actors must have spent on ME3 is starting to make me dizzy.

whatever happened to screenshots, bro?