Point and laugh at unworthy plot moments in games.

[Zetona]

First: What's Deus Ex Machina?
Second: I totally agree on the HL2 and Fallout 3 thing. I remember, when that BOS person was like "Oh, there's a lot of radiation, whoever goes in there will die," my first thought literally was "What about Fawkes?"

A deus ex machina is some story contrivance used to provide a solution to something that's seemingly impossible to resolve, in some improbable or illogical way. Deus ex machina I beleive means 'god from the machine' which refers to ancient plays where sometimes a character playing a god would be lowered down onto the stage to sort things out. But it can be some contrived coincidence or illogically powerful machine or magic that does whatever the author says it should do to sort out the current mess they've written themselves into or similar things like that.

You answered the question better than I did. Amazingly, I can't think of a single totally ridiculous Deus ex Machina moment in a game. The closest I can come up with is the end of Need for Speed Most Wanted. The game concludes with a dramatic police chase, and after you've driven around for several minutes, the one road leading out of the city, which you couldn't access for the entire rest of the game, miraculously opens. You take it, and go over an abandoned drawbridge. Your pursuers stop on the bridge to avoid falling off. You drive away.

 

[captainwillies]

I thought everyone was in agreement that Ocarina of Time is the best game ever, not Half Life 2, which makes it into the top 20.

Virtually everything they offer up as Volgins justification in Metal Gear Solid 3. Its so very stupid, its on a level approaching a 10 minute Bushism.

Not everyone here thinks anything from Nintendo is made of pure epic win...

And not everyone thinks that everythin g made by valve is pure win either.

both nintendo and valve are made of win. (valve more so) but what would happen if they combined forces! "The Legend of Super Gordan Freeman and the Twilight Crystal Skull"

 

[Calamity]

First: What's Deus Ex Machina?
Second: I totally agree on the HL2 and Fallout 3 thing. I remember, when that BOS person was like "Oh, there's a lot of radiation, whoever goes in there will die," my first thought literally was "What about Fawkes?"

A deus ex machina is some story contrivance used to provide a solution to something that's seemingly impossible to resolve, in some improbable or illogical way. Deus ex machina I beleive means 'god from the machine' which refers to ancient plays where sometimes a character playing a god would be lowered down onto the stage to sort things out. But it can be some contrived coincidence or illogically powerful machine or magic that does whatever the author says it should do to sort out the current mess they've written themselves into or similar things like that.

Actually It was a statue of the god and the actors would give it a voice, but I'm nitpicking here.

I see Final Fantasy being thrown around a lot, I'm going to expand that and say every RPG ever made.

"We need something to help us pass X obstacle"
"Oh well, I randomly know that object Y is being made in town Z, and Y is just what we need to get around this!"

 

[CmdrGoob]

First: What's Deus Ex Machina?
Second: I totally agree on the HL2 and Fallout 3 thing. I remember, when that BOS person was like "Oh, there's a lot of radiation, whoever goes in there will die," my first thought literally was "What about Fawkes?"

A deus ex machina is some story contrivance used to provide a solution to something that's seemingly impossible to resolve, in some improbable or illogical way. Deus ex machina I beleive means 'god from the machine' which refers to ancient plays where sometimes a character playing a god would be lowered down onto the stage to sort things out. But it can be some contrived coincidence or illogically powerful machine or magic that does whatever the author says it should do to sort out the current mess they've written themselves into or similar things like that.

You answered the question better than I did. Amazingly, I can't think of a single totally ridiculous Deus ex Machina moment in a game. The closest I can come up with is the end of Need for Speed Most Wanted. The game concludes with a dramatic police chase, and after you've driven around for several minutes, the one road leading out of the city, which you couldn't access for the entire rest of the game, miraculously opens. You take it, and go over an abandoned drawbridge. Your pursuers stop on the bridge to avoid falling off. You drive away.

Yeah, that's one, but I can't think of many off the top of my head either, even though there must be some. I guess it's less common in games because in the character can happily fight their way out of situations that on paper would be hopelessly inescapable.

The best I can think of is that there must be lots of situations where the character gets captured but escapes in minutes in some contrived way. Like Oblivion, you start off in jail but escape instantly because in defiance of all probability and common sense the emperor is escaping and they put the escape exit in your jail cell. Who'd put the secret way in and out of your castle in a place where criminals you've locked up will see you using it?

 

[samsprinkle]

Assassin's Creed. I think it should be(though I may be wrong...) that when a foot long blade is plunged through your jugular vein all the way through your spinal column that you shouldn't be able to move or breathe, let alone have a ten minute dialogue with your assassin...Hey, maybe I'm just being a douchebag...

 

[Revenent]

The entire plot of Resident Evil 4. Do I even need to elaborate?

Yes you do

The president's daughter has been kidnapped by Ganados. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president's daughter?

Leon: Oh, shit. We've been infected by parasites. Wait, never mind. There's a randomly-placed machine here that will kill the parasites and get rid of the infection. (Deus Ex Machina at its finest) And it's just before the final boss fight.

Did you miss all the logs left by Luis that explain why it's there and why Saddler wanted it made?

As for the MGS series, Metal Gear Solid 2 takes the cake with "Shadow Moses was really a prototype operation for the Big Shell, which was set up by the Patriots as a training program to create a new Solid Snake!" That pretty much just ruined the whole plot of MGS2 and MGS1.

 

[captainwillies]

back on topic: in Kotor2 when playing a female. any moment when atton is hitting on you.

 

[samsprinkle]

First: What's Deus Ex Machina?
Second: I totally agree on the HL2 and Fallout 3 thing. I remember, when that BOS person was like "Oh, there's a lot of radiation, whoever goes in there will die," my first thought literally was "What about Fawkes?"

A deus ex machina is some story contrivance used to provide a solution to something that's seemingly impossible to resolve, in some improbable or illogical way. Deus ex machina I beleive means 'god from the machine' which refers to ancient plays where sometimes a character playing a god would be lowered down onto the stage to sort things out. But it can be some contrived coincidence or illogically powerful machine or magic that does whatever the author says it should do to sort out the current mess they've written themselves into or similar things like that.

You answered the question better than I did. Amazingly, I can't think of a single totally ridiculous Deus ex Machina moment in a game. The closest I can come up with is the end of Need for Speed Most Wanted. The game concludes with a dramatic police chase, and after you've driven around for several minutes, the one road leading out of the city, which you couldn't access for the entire rest of the game, miraculously opens. You take it, and go over an abandoned drawbridge. Your pursuers stop on the bridge to avoid falling off. You drive away.

Yeah, that's one, but I can't think of many off the top of my head either, even though there must be some. I guess it's less common in games because in the character can happily fight their way out of situations that on paper would be hopelessly inescapable.

The best I can think of is that there must be lots of situations where the character gets captured but escapes in minutes in some contrived way. Like Oblivion, you start off in jail but escape instantly because in defiance of all probability and common sense the emperor is escaping and they put the escape exit in your jail cell. Who'd put the secret way in and out of your castle in a place where criminals you've locked up will see you using it?

Piccard would of course!

 

[Mean Mother Rucker]

Or Final Fantasy 8: Gotta laugh at their plot twist attempt with the orphanage. At one point, the story goes 'Suprise! All of the characters important to the plot went to or ran one single orphanage, and then later went their different ways, all of them forgot about it (because of a mysteriously selective, handwavy plot device with limited further relevance to the plot the magic!), all got back together again, and then remembered!'. As a twist it's actually more like 'Suprise! The writers are retarded!'. Now that twist you'll probably see coming.

Edit: What made it even worse was that if they'd actually run with it a bit and made the characters lose more and more of their memories and identities as the plot continued, it could have been interesting and even poignant. But nope, it was just the deus ex machina to make one stupid 'twist' work and then that was pretty much it.

Like FF7 where Cloud can't remember bloody hell and everyone else is too much of a schmuck to tell him that his history's off. Hell, Shinra even rebuilt and repopulated the town with actors! Actors! I put down the controller and didn't play FF7 again for like 3 years because of that.

It wasn't a point and laugh moment, but in Vampire: Masquerade-Redemption, the neutral and evil endings were "WTF!" moments. I mean it completely unraveled the entire quest that playing as Christof started.

We should tack on book and movie facepalm moments just to broaden up the point-and-laugh spectrum.

 

[CmdrGoob]

Assassin's Creed. I think it should be(though I may be wrong...) that when a foot long blade is plunged through your jugular vein all the way through your spinal column that you shouldn't be able to move or breathe, let alone have a ten minute dialogue with your assassin...Hey, maybe I'm just being a douchebag...

Hahah, yeah, that counts as a laughable lazy plot device. It's the lazy kind of plotting where the writers have only managed to master the most obvious form of storytelling, which is buckets of exposition straight from various characters, so they have to cram in buckets of exposition into places where it is blatantly illogical.

 

[rekabdarb]

The entire plot of Resident Evil 4. Do I even need to elaborate?

Yes you do

The president's daughter has been kidnapped by Ganados. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president's daughter?

Leon: Oh, shit. We've been infected by parasites. Wait, never mind. There's a randomly-placed machine here that will kill the parasites and get rid of the infection. (Deus Ex Machina at its finest) And it's just before the final boss fight.

Did you miss all the logs left by Luis that explain why it's there and why Saddler wanted it made?

i know... dumbass

anyway i think the convenient go back/forward in time (most likely 1000 years) thing [usually the opening of the game]

 

[canarmane]

Something that made me facepalm is in Tales of Symphonia; while running around finding ingredients to make a key crest to save Presea, you run into an old teammate who betrayed you. So of course, you sit down and have a nice chat while he tells you what to do next. WTF?

 

[Avatar Roku]

As for the MGS series, Metal Gear Solid 2 takes the cake with "Shadow Moses was really a prototype operation for the Big Shell, which was set up by the Patriots as a training program to create a new Solid Snake!" That pretty much just ruined the whole plot of MGS2 and MGS1.

I think you misunderstood it. They were saying that, after seeing what Shadow Moses did with Snake, making him badass and such, the big shell was just to see if it could be repeated to make anyone a good soldier. Shadow Moses wasn't planned by the Patriots.

 

[Duck Sandwich]

Did you miss all the logs left by Luis that explain why it's there and why Saddler wanted it made?

Actually, yes I did. (*checks GameFAQ's for a memo guide*) ... yeah, that's pretty stupid, considering that if the machine had never been built in the first place, Leon and Ashley would have been screwed.

From the initial stages of the research, we have been searching for
a safe and practical removal of the Plaga. Ironically, it turns out
that the real objective of this research was not to find a way to
remove the Plagas from the infected persons but to find a way so that
the Plaga could not be removed from the body easily. In the end, we
were able to find out that the Plagas could be removed only by
exposing them to a special radiation.

 

[Calamity]

Something that made me facepalm is in Tales of Symphonia; while running around finding ingredients to make a key crest to save Presea, you run into an old teammate who betrayed you. So of course, you sit down and have a nice chat while he tells you what to do next. WTF?

Or the time when Collete's crest magically starts working right before she's about to be re-captured and the rest of the party is trapped, Despite the fact she had it on for quite a long time before hand.

Now that I think about it...I could probably fill a page with Symphonia's plot failures.

 

[coldfrog]

Yeah, the Half Life 2 thing bugged me for a while, I got to that point and was like, why would I get on this thing? seriously? there must be another way for me to go.

I really spent a minute or two trying to figure out the other way to go because it was so blatantly a trap. Plus, how do you even know that it will take you ANYWHERE worth going?

As an add-on, comparing Nintendo and Valve is like comparing peanut butter and Johnny Walker Blue. Sure, they're both great, but for completely different reasons.

 

[Bulletinmybrain]

As for the MGS series, Metal Gear Solid 2 takes the cake with "Shadow Moses was really a prototype operation for the Big Shell, which was set up by the Patriots as a training program to create a new Solid Snake!" That pretty much just ruined the whole plot of MGS2 and MGS1.

I think you misunderstood it. They were saying that, after seeing what Shadow Moses did with Snake, making him badass and such, the big shell was just to see if it could be repeated to make anyone a good soldier. Shadow Moses wasn't planned by the Patriots.

One things for certain, there is a serious need for a editor.