My thoughts on unappeasable fans.

Two topics in the gaming and film circles that've caught my interest recently, Mass Effect 3 and Michael Bay's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Both are intellectual properties who fans recently have shouted about for not being how they want and why I think this is absolutely ridiculous. I should stress, I haven't played any Mass Effect games, nor am I a fan of any Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles media, so this point of view is strictly based on my opinion.

Mass Effect 3

Mass Effect 3 was given a lot of criticism recently due to having a controversial ending, I.E, an apparently open ended game where your choices altered the course of the story, ended up having only one conclusion, one that didn't correspond to choices the player made. This does sound like a problem, but I might add these points:

It's a story, you can never be in control of a story unless you're the writer. No matter how it appears, you're only going on a predetermined path set by the writer, the writer clearly wanted all possible stories to converge on one simple truth, whatever it is.

B) You can't write several parallel different stories and expect them to all flow together as one, a bit of one story where you make one choice, and a bit of another story where you make a different choice does not make sense because the character may have no in-story justification for this because the player will often change their mind on a whim.

I haven't played many games with interactive stories, so it could be that I don't know what I'm talking about, but there you go.

Michael Bay's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Onto Michael Bay's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The controversial change from the source material is that the backstory is to be changed so that rather than being mutated Turtles shaped to become humanoids, they're simply aliens who happen to resemble anthropomorphic Turtles. This has caused a great deal of backlash from the fans.

The original story, so Wikipedia told me a while ago, was that in the original comic books, the Turtles were ordinary turtles, mutated by a strange radioactive substance leaking from a crashed vehicle, being a parody of Daredevil. The Turtles were then trained in the art of Ninjitsu by a similarly mutated humanoid Rat, and they became assassins for hire.

So the original story was a vague Daredevil Parody comic in which the main characters were assassins, in none of the following adaptations were either of those elements present, which certainly ought to have changed the dynamic of the story.

The cartoon was changed by marketing to become kid friendly and altered the personalities of the main characters, in which the main characters were a lighthearted bunch who never killed. And being made in the 80's or young kids, presumably dropped the Daredevil references.

Then there were the films, in which the personalities were exaggerated more and involved a story where the Turtles travel through time to feudal Japan, in a storyline that may or may not have been fabricated by the filmmakers.

Then came the cartoon reboot of the franchise, in which there was the major change of a previously human villain turning out to be an alien.

This, fans, is what happens when a franchise outlasts the original creators, things get changed, things move on. Spider-Man's origin story was a radioactive spider-bite, then a genetically altered spider-bite, then a magical spider-bite sent by a higher being, then it turns out he was a mutant with radiation immunity. In Doctor Who, does The Doctor flee because he's an outlaw, because he's bored, or because he's hiding a weapon? Writers have said each.

Changing them from mutants to aliens seems to me personally like changing the missing item in a detective story, it doesn't matter if they're looking for a diamond, or a wristwatch or a small puppy, its appearance it not defined by its purpose. Just like I very much doubt that it will matter if the turtles are aliens, if they were brought up the same, had the same experiences and had the same abilities, they've not changed a lot.

If the writer DOES make the change big however, and making them Aliens rather than Mutants changes the story drastically, it'll be because this is a reboot, and the purpose of a reboot is to change a story we're comfortable with according to modern ideas, not to show us an existing story, because the existing story has already been told and a new writer wants to do something new.

Sometimes however, major changes are not good, such as the Spider-Man comic in which he relinquishes responsibility for his actions and makes a deal with Mephisto, which is bad because the writer wanted erase everything the last 10 years of writers had done and ignored 10 years of character progression.

But as I said, a good change is a change that, after using up all the good stories for one version of a character, changing the character slightly and writing all the stories for that version of the character. Which is what changing the origin story is to me. A bad change, as mentioned, would be using all the good ideas, changing it to write new stories, then changing it back and reversing the progression. Or alternately, using all the good ideas, changing it in a way that doesn't work and using all the bad stories.

Overall

What I'm saying is basically, that writers should be trusted to progress the story in the way that they envision it, Mass Effect's writers should be trusted to have their one ending, because that must have been what they intended. And Michael Bay should be trusted that his weird idea is a step forward. And if you don't like the way it's progressing, then don't bother carrying on and go and write a fanfiction.

Batman: Arkham Asylum + Arkham City

I played these two games recently upon getting my Xbox, mostly because the general hype would have me believe that Arkham Asylum and City were the best liscenced games in the history of liscenced games. While that's probably far from a lie, it doesn't mean they're perfect, but I'll elaborate quickly.

First of all though, the hype is definitely accurate about the well praised combat system, which is the best I can personally remember handling, the general idea of the combat in the Arkham games is "Engage an entire prison block's worth of poor muscular criminals in a fistfight.", and it works very well, you punch somebody a few times, they get hurt and fall down, but not out, then another knucklehead approaches you and you repeat the process until they all stop moving. I understand I just said 'repeat' in a sentence about the combat, but really there's more to it than that, there are a ton of combos within memory so it never feels like you're endlessly smashing them with webs like in Spidey: Shatty Dims, and plus there's the fact that you can target enemies and the combos will take you right to them, and if you can't be arsed hitting them with your limbs there's the option to use gadgets (Batarangs and Grappling Hook in 'Asylum', Batarang, Grappling Hook, QuickBomb, Quick Electrode shot and a bloody ice Grenade.) which can knock out a load of knuckleheads before they get near you.

Also good in the games in the stealth sections, the best way to describe them would be by asking you to remember the scene in Batman Begins where Batman gradually picks off the gun wielding thugs from the darkness by scaring them a whole bunch. In Arkham Asylum and City, this is done through hiding on the top of curiously plentiful wall mounted Gargoyle statues and slowly taking them out silently without the other knowing you're there, because if they do they'll use their bullets to make Batman kick his addiction to breathing..

..Or I assume that was the intention, because in Arkham City, all I ever seemed to do in the stealth sections was to challenge them to a fistfight while they shot me from afar and my armour upgrades and smoke bombs protected me from being shot, yes the sheer amount of upgrades and gadgets, while quite fun in the combat sections, kind of break the stealth over its knee due to the fact that there was little need to be stealthy when I could take a large amount of bullets and disable at least three gun wielding thugs at a time anyway using various methods of stunning, I generally take this option because the stealth, while fun, is time consuming and not necessary unless the enemies can shoot you from very far away.

Back to the good though, what I like about both games is that the ArkhamVerse's interpretation of the various Batman characters are spot on, though in the first game it was more in the style of Batman: The Animated Series characters, which made since because the plot of both games was written by the showrunners of Batman: TAS. Though having just said I liked of aspect of the writing, I was somewhat less than fond of the actual story of both (Stop reading now if you don't want spoilers.), first and foremost being that the games are written by two guys who write for a TV show very well, which doesn't necessarily mean that they can write for a wholly other medium such as video games just as well.

For example, the main focus of the gameplay is exploration, stealth and combat, and while that might be fun for fighting several knuckleheads at once, it's hard to make conflict with the singular villains fall into this category, like the fact that Batman far far outclasses The Joker, Two-Face, Poison Ivy, the Penguin and other powerless villains in terms of fighting ability, and the superpowered characters like Killer Croc, Bane, Clayface, Solomon Grundy, Ra's Al Ghul and Titan Joker who could put up a fight don't feel that powerful. The only boss fights in the games who actually feeels as threatening as fighting their comic counterparts are Mister Freeze who feels as clever and as powerful as he is in the comics, and Scarecrow and the Mad Hatter, who pit you against your own delusions rather than fight you directly. Wheras Bane, who figures out Batman's identity and cripples him though a combination of intelligence and power, does not come across as such in his fights where you trick him into running into a wall a few times.

Also, I have a love/hate relationship with the environments too, in Asylum, I hated navigating the overworld because it felt like a less distinctive version of Hyrule Field and I hated navigating the buildings because every room looks the exact same and made me lose about two weeks of playtime trying to find a room that I had access to but I forgot the route to, and made me feel like like Batman and more like Link if Link was stuck in the Water Temple the entire game. This is why I like the overworld in Arkham City because not only do you feel like Batman traversing the rooftops and drop kicking criminals that're beating up innocents, but the way you travel is both quick and very Batman, specific buildings are often hard to find but they're usually on the map anyway and my problem with the level design is far lesser.

The game has a ton of side things to do for all the psychopath level OCD sufferers like collecting Riddler Trophies and solving riddles, as well as (In City.) side missions where you fight other villains or help people alternately, some of the side missions are very fussy about when and where you're allowed to continue them (Gameplay tip: When the game tells you "Look for more leads.", what it actually means is "Play the main story and we might think about unlocking the rest of this mission.".), but that's nothing that'll put me off the game.

From all my criticism it might be easy to assume I don't like these games, but that's not the case, I like the combat, the stealth, City's travel system and overworld, and the characters, which is more than enough to subsist me. The games are definitely not perfect, but I wouldn't claim to challenge the notion that they're deserving of praise.