I know I shouldn't, but I like my avatars to be pretty to look at

Am I a bad person because I think all the Mass Effect characters are so homely (including my own that I couldn't customize to anything even approaching the golden ratio) that I'm not interested in playing the game any more? Hmmm... No. No I'm not a bad person. And I want my money back.

 

I'd seriously rather lie here in bed at 3 am writing an essay about Mass Effect Ai than play the actual game. I get the idea that, practically and scientifically speaking, it makes sense that the average person is average looking in the future. A scifi purist might want to see that.

 

Just a voice in your head.  Image by Linnea Boyev

Just a voice in your head.  Image by Linnea Boyev

But the draw for me with Bioware and RPGs in general are the romance options. (Be still my heart, Carth Onasi, who had barely more pixels than a Minecraft toon but was still hot.) I haven't finished Halo 5 because I'm afraid the Cortana-117 romance will be over and then why bother saving the galaxy at all? If they can't be together than let the Flood eat everyone; I don't care anymore.

 

Anyway.... every time there's a conversation scene in Mass Effect Ai I blurt out "Gah!" and then the next person talks and "Gah!" As for my weird toon I can keep on my helmet most of the time but she keeps taking it off in cutscenes and "Gah!" I even tried to make her look like Default FemShepard but she just looks... weird.

 

And come on I don't need physical realism in my $100 videogame! I can look at an AVERAGE person's face every day in the mirror for FREE. If I leave the house there are average people LITERALLY everywhere.  By definition.

 

I don't need physical realism in a romance game anyway, because it isn't real. In real life, I become attracted to a person if I can relax and laugh with them and I can laugh with them; it usually comes down to one moment of me noticing a guy is incredibly competent at some task for me to get hooked. That takes a LOT of time. If I'm going to devote 50+ hours to slog through a game shooting the same mobs over and over so I can spend a total of 20 minutes to romance a fictional character with a few dozen total lines of dialogue then he or she should at LEAST meet basic international and cross-cultural standards of beauty (see golden ratio) to fulfill the fantasy.

 

There were surely SOME trained artists working on the game; the environments are gorgeously designed. And come on, there are more girl gamers these days but surely MOST people who buy these sorts of games are still men. Men like pretty, vaguely symmetrical faces without gross exophthalmia, don't they? I've been counting on the shallowness of men (no offense) to keep videogame characters looking ridiculously sexy. Sigh. It's all just so disappointing.

 

I'd seriously rather they just stylize the humans in the game to look like the characters in "Star Wars Rebels" or even "Max Steel" or even... gulp... anime "RWBY"... than be forced to suspend disbelief about weird puffy people with strangely low foreheads, bulging eyes, zits and odd silicone hair that moves as a solid sheet.

 

Bioware managed to make Garrus's face sexy in the old Mass Effects, and he was a shaggy, scarred lizard man. Golden ratio, people.  

/rant

Today's Medical Vocabulary Word: exophthalmia
  Pronounced: (ex-off-thal-mee-yah).
   (definition: bulging eyes)
Exercise: Use "exophthalmia" in a sentence:
Example: Homer Simpson has exophthalmia, possibly related to Grave's disease; this makes him unsuitable to play Commander Shepard.