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When people get all misty-eyed about the amazing, original Syndicate from 1993, they often overlook something. The game’s ending. Or, to be more accurate, its complete lack of one.
Maybe they never finished the game, I don’t know, but I did. And it was a tough game. So getting to the end I was expecting another wonderfully-animated sequence like the intro, some kind of badass cyberpunk imagery to congratulate me on my achievement.
Nope. Go to 3:10 to see the game’s ending. And don’t blink.
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It wasn’t that bad. It was just an ending to an old game, where this was the norm.
ME3 didn’t do a cheap, quick ending though. It had a really long, incredibly drawn out plot-hole ridden one. And if the fairly well thought indoctrination theory IS true, then they didn’t even add the ending to the game. They stopped the game during a terrible dream sequence.
Agreed. People don’t understand why ME3’s ending was so bad. It wasn’t just cut-off, it was melodramatic, overdrawn (even forcing slow-mo to take 5 minutes to make a choice) and was all-round awful.
For “So bad it’s good” endings, I’d have to go with the recent Space Marine game. After a satisfying campaign and a disappointing QTE boss fight, you land and your squadmate just snitches on you, and you’re cuffed to be sent off to Space Guantanamo. I know it’s supposed to continue with DLC but damn that ending was so anticlimatic and abrupt it bordered on comedy.
i would have been satisfied if ME ended at the anderson shepard moment. everything after that seemed tacked on.
i am lol’ing at the space marine comparison. sounds infuriatingly hilarious!
But the thing is the Space Marine ending was still worthwhile. Not to mention most likely the logical conclusion after being exposed to chaos so many times.
As you say ending it at shepherd and Anderson would have worked. It wouldn’t have given answers. But it also wouldn’t have had random moronic plot holes. Like the goddamned Normandy.
While yeah i would have liked something akin to DA:O text spiel about what effects you had on the galaxy. I could care less if the ending was happy. Hell personally i think it should have had an end sequence akin to ME2 where your entire team was important. Including those who may or may not have survived your journey.
I remember reading about a sports game that had a huge ending for beating the toughest or biggest tournament or career mode. but everytime they played the ending the game would crash (or brick the console). They tried everything to fix it but there wasn’t enough time. Eventually they resorted to just showing a picture of the Trophy.
It wasn’t exactly a plot driven game though… Plus this was completely normal for back then.
Completely agreed. Back then it wasn’t so much about the story.. it was about the game! I think stories are getting in the way of games too much these days.
Look at Doom for instance. You had one little blurb of story, and then all action! Did it need anymore? HELL NO! I swear if they make Doom 4, and do it just like they did Doom 1 or 2, but with updated graphics, I’ll throw all my money at them!
I agree. Doom actually had a decent little story, it was just mentioned only at the end of its episodes instead of stopping you every five minutes to shove the plot into your face. Again.
Doom 3 was kinda pretty much that too though, there was a little bit more story but once everything went to hell it was go time until the credits ended.
But you have to realize, this was a Peter Molyneux game. That ending was meant to be unsatisfying.
Molynuex was making a statement about 90’s corporate culture, and how devoting yourself to please the big company will ultimately leave you feeling empty and unsatisfied, that you were a pawn all along, a cog in a larger machine that only saw you as an asset, an expendable asset.
But let’s look deeper; years after Syndicate, Molyneux left Bullfrog to form Lionhead, where his game ideas became whimsical and grandiose with hopes of drawing in the player emotionally, these designs came to be because he finally had creative freedom in his grasp once again. You could say that the ending of Syndicate was a message from the man, a picture of his heart, wishing to break out from a constrictive Bullfrog that was helplessly trapped under the iron fist of a 1990′ era Electronic Arts.
It was a cry for help.
Flashback was a story driven game. *SPOILERS* In the end, you beat the bad guy, jump on a ship to escape but there is no fuel left. So you just end up drifting off into nothing. You don’t know if you just starved to death or got rescued or what, it was a fantastic ending and one I still remember fondly today.
What about Another World’s ending?
Did Lester die? Did he survive his injuries?
We simply do not know.
If you want an unresolved ending in an old game, Bioforge is hard to beat, bloody cliffhanger.
Now THAT was the sore disappointment, the fork was a minor inconvenience by comparison
You may wish to look up a game Calle Fade to black, where Conrad is picked up by the very aliens he destroyed, many years later but to him, only moments as he was in Cyro.
If you wanna talk about bad video game endings, look no further than Donkey Kong Land on Game Boy. The final screen consists of one line of black text on a white background: “CONGRATULATIONS”
What about Halo 2? There’s cliffhangers, then there’s THAT.
And it’s still the best Halo game.
That’s completely different halo 2 wasnt the end of a trilogy, and I think you ment worst halo game.
for those old enough to remember, Shadow of the Beast on Amiga was probably the toughest game with the least rewarding ending ever:
Pac-Man never had an ending either which was total bullshit because I was personally invested in those characters, their universe and the game’s lore after spending so much time (and money) on them.
I feel fucking SCAMMED. I demand Namco patches the original game at once so I can have a sense of closure, reflect on the moral choices I made throughout the game (do I or do I not go after the fruit?), and see some Pac on Pinky sexy time as a result of my chosen relationship path.
I will forever be quoting you to the Mass Effect whingers who can’t understand a good story. I give you ten stars, my friend.
At the risk of commenting on a Plunkett article with something meaningful…
All this talk about RPGs and no one mentioned Eye Of The Beholder? The ending goes something like this:
* Half-screen page of text with a button.
* Another half-screen page of text with a button.
* Surprise DOS prompt.
Matrix Cubed the sequel to Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday, a gold box game.
You beat the finally boss, a “human supremacist” who ironically has been becoming increasingly cyborg as you defeat him through several battles in the game.
There’s a few screens of lines of text about how you start up a transmutation device, to basically make the universe a better place.
Buck Rogers then says: “Three cheers for our heroes.
Then there’s a small portrait of three characters, each in turn, accompanied by the text “Hip-hip hooray!”
Exit to DOS prompt.
“Thank you for playing Matrix Cubed!”
I couldn’t even cruise around the galaxy with my powerful team anymore… so I restarted the game and imported them and did just that. :p
And it was still a better ending than Mass Effect 3.
If you think back to ME1 and ME 2 final mission length, intricacy and dialogue interaction after the “no going back” point, you cannot miss how ME3 is desperately lazy and short. Speculating is useless, look at the data. ME3 ending is insulting to all the people who remember the previous ones. Cerberus base is shockingly uninspiring, and Reaper Earth looks like a poor clone of Gears of War cities. There is not even a timed zone! Just about when I thought the fighting was going to start, on the Citadel, the game chucks up an old enemy who falls over and dies, and an unknown kid spawns and spews some unheard-of nonsense . The end. As someone who´s done literally thousands of pages of writing and designed dozens of plots and worlds, I recognize lazy, unimaginative, cheap work, and this is textbook stuff. Gawd, any half-decent Dungeon Master would feel more than a little embarrassed if he didn´t present such an ending with more than a little self-mocking irony. Sorry to say so.
Doesn´t mean the game is bad. But the ending is shockingly poor. I had a better feeling after finishing Hunted. AND I´ve felt my constant self-denial during that game actually helped something in the end.
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