6. BAD (AND SOME GOOD) GAME ENDINGS

You are listening to the Ericade Radio Network. Good evening and welcome to another hour of Amiga Retro music. And it's time for a very unannounced as per usual actually Amiga flashback. Well it should be Saturdays but sometimes I get inspired. Today's subject is bad and good game endings. Yeah we're gonna go throw some of the worstand the best endings in retro games and general games. But first, take it away, Dr. Laban.

short and sweet but well we are talking about the endings of the games you know you fought for hours you fought against the worst and the best that the game had to offer you are now victorious and to the winner goes the spoils but what are you getting I don't know sometimes it's like you're not getting anything that you really think you deserve congratulations you have freed yourself from the shadow ofbeast. That is the ending of the game with the same name. And that's all you get. A screen telling you that good. Nice, nice working. Well, what now? Well, another game, I guess. I mean, that is kind of a game that has a climax, if I may say so, that is quite unfulfilling. Not something that you want to light up a smoke after. But there we are. We're to talk about the best and theworst. And the first one a case in great game and sucky ending system shock one.

Moong. Yeah, that's what the file name is. I don't think it's Moongazer, it sounds different. Nice tune anyway. So case in point, shit the endings if I may say so, I hope I don't offend you with this kind of language, but it needs to be said. That would be System Shock 1. Well, released in 1994 and trying to merge a number of older game styles like Ultima Underworld with modern styles such as Doom, it ultimately failed.But it wasn't a bad game, quite the opposite. If you had the CD release with speech and everything, it was a marvel to behold. You're a hacker. I don't like hackers, but this hacker is a good guy. Alright? He tries to hack into TriOptimum's... Yeah, well, servers. And he's apprehended by police and taken to Saturn. You would think they would throw him into the gravity well, but no. No such luck.Now instead he gets put in front of a shodan, an AI running the space station around Saturn. A mining station and research station and everything is hunky dory except Edward Diego, the bad guy. He has decided to say, okay, you will buy your own freedom plus a nice little implant in your head.if you remove the ethical constraints of the AI because I need to, you know, hide some evidence of bad stuff I've done. Why does every single villain have to go full Bond mode? I don't know, but you're told that and because you're an idiot, you remove the ethical constraints of something as volatile as a Hollywood style artificial intelligence. What else could go wrong? Well, six months later when you wake up,after being, well, know, surgically altered to have this implant. Yeah, you wake up and everything is bad. Shodan has gone a little bit insane because now she believes she's God. Yeah, God Almighty. And she's running experiment on everyone who is surviving. And that is a dwindling amount of people. As you walk into this carnage,

You are greeted by murderous bots, lot of cyborgs and a load of weapons that you can use against said people. It has audio logs telling the story of the crew, most of them that are dead or altered. So that is an amazing journey through, well, I don't know, Dante's Inferno. Eventually, you are fighting Shodan. She first wonders what kind of insect you are.And then she starts resenting you, and after that she hates you and hates you with a seal of, well, an Old Testament god basically, because that's what she is. So she also respects you a lot because you are her nemesis. You are to her Moriarty, to her Sherlock. And eventually you face up to her in cyberspace, the last battle between two great minds.Well, that is until you find out that her visage is basically some kind of weird cone and she's building a picture of herself. And if she completes the picture before you shoot her to death, then you lose. So that's a PowerPoint slide as a shield, basically. But you're fast and you shoot like you kill the joystick and you win. That's the only thing that happens. The ending is a veryBrutally boring and fast slideshow that shows you okay good we blow her up now We're offering you offering you a job here at tri optimum and You say nope. I want to hack someone else so you go away and hack someone else well Thanks a bunch.

Ultimately being a failure for origin. System Shock 1 was still loved by the fans for its fantastic gameplay. And I know it's an immersive game and it's being remade today actually. You can buy it from Steam, but I'm not sure if it's releasing yet. But keep an eye out for it. The new version seems really good. Let's go to 1999 and the bitch is back.Sorry to say it like that, but Shodan reappears on System Shock 2. At this time, she is not in a good situation. You end up on a spaceship with the same kind of premises as System Shock 1, the Citadel Station that is. On this spaceship, you wake up and you get help from Dr. Polito who tries to help you get to the command center to set things right.But over time you wonder why Polito gets more more irate and impatience. Impatient. Turns out that's not Polito. She killed herself. No, you're actually on the direction of a newly awoken showdown. And she is now not hating you. You're another guy. This is 42 years into the future from the first game. And she just resents you, uses you and throws you out.like a really bad date. Now that is not a girlfriend I would recommend. Okay? So in this brother-shit-disposition, if I may say so, you have to fight against her, with her, and you're fighting against another enemy she's trying to best. So you are now just a pawn in a game, as Dylan would have put it. But there's no one to blame here, except Shodan, of course. So that's how it is with her. Always her fault.You fight through another gates of hell and with some really memorable, really scary situations that I can't talk much about, you reach the end. At this time, you wrestle the controls of the ship from her hands and you face her. Now, I have five screens in front of me. If I were to punch the one in front of me out, the computer would still work. I would be hurt, my hand would bleed, and it would be expensive.

But in the endgame of System Shock 2, that's how you kill Shodan, who has been relegated to a screen. She tries to lure you in with promises of false alliances, but you will have none of it. So you have an epic line there when you tell her, no, I will not do that. That epic line goes, nah. Then you take a big ramrod or some kind and yeah, well, pretty much punch her out. And at this time,You would expect some kind of epic happening, but it does not. She has her eyes open in fear, which doesn't look scary or pathetic or something that would trigger empathy. No, it looks hilarious. You laugh when you kill the bad guy or girl or whatever you want to say. Okay, that's the end of it, right? Not really. No, she has reincarnated herself in some poor girl's brain, wakes up.and suddenly goes full seductress.

Lee Banyard Music Free is the name and before that it was Lisbon Fee-Nom something. Okay. We're gonna continue with Pools of Poison but first we have a story to tell. The good game. The good kind of ending. Endings do not have to be super complex. Sometimes a very simple ending can be exactly what you want. Civilization 1-6 delivers the goods. You see civilization yeah it's avery creative world builder where you pretty much create a nation that should stand the test of time. Okay? You can win by being scientific, you can win by being barbaric and kill everyone. And in later games you can be cultured in belief or win a diplomatic victory in UN. And as you probably know, United Nations, if you win there, you get to rule the world. I don't know how that works.And I don't think that is a good thing, but the game allows you to win that way. Seriously. And the end game is pretty much all of the time either a very short animation or a still picture with something beautiful you created for some value of it. Well, beautiful and a text telling the world how great you are. So I guess a little bit of sugar in the end in the bottom of the can makes the well, the medicine go down or something.But it's a very nice way of ending because the game was never bombastic. You slowly and methodically conquered and you like overcame everything. So that kind of calls for a less pronunciated ending. And that's what you're getting.

Cools and Poisons, I think I said that, never mind. Yeah, it had to do that. Anyway, let's talk about good endings from one of the most coolest retro games ever. That would be Fallout 1 and 2. Created in 1997 and 1998 respectively, they were interplay's stab at making a newer, better wasteland. You know, that old game. That real old game.Well, it's United States. The nuclear war has passed. 80 years have passed as well. And you're emerging out from your fallout shelter. It's an uncaring, unforgiving, radiated world with burnt out cities. A lot of husks of whatever humans used to be there, roaming around. Normal humans trying to survive in a very, well, bad world basically. And you can be the savior of theOr you can be the ruthless but fair mercenary that help everyone for a fee. Or well, basically you can be the biggest asshole in the world. You can go full Hitler on them if you want to. The game is fully open-ended. You can give hope or fear and despair to the world. I'm kinda an obligate good guy. I always help everyone because I feel that's who I am in real life. But you are free to explore the world and put everything right or wrong.The ending is a thing of beauty. Both Fallout 1 and 2 have a slideshow that is narrated and the narrator tells you that hey, this is what happened in each of every location you were. Well, this city that you helped so much thrives and everybody's happy and it's heaven on earth. No, it really doesn't say that, but maybe you killed everyone.Yeah, well the location will never ever look good and that was before you came and afterwards like Nothing happening in there anymore because yeah, you know you killed everyone and This means you get a comprehensive story of every location and everything you ever did that is fantastic Sometimes you can't get good endings. There's a city called Broken Hills in Fallout 2 Irregardless of what you do the city will fail,

You're not supposed to be the person that changes everything, but you do have a vast influence. And when you stop the game, you're so happy about everything you do. So the first thought is, how do I do it differently? It invites you to play again and again and again and again.

The Ericade Radio Network, with a lot of Swedish Amiga tunes that are true oddities. The DJ is kinda strange too. gee, thanks. As per usual, you're nagging. I know. Anyway, Fallout has not always been good at this. When it comes to Fallout tactics, the storytelling is pretty railroaded and the ending is, yeah, well, railroaded too, but not that bad. It's an okay ending.because it never tried to be anything more. But Fallout 3 and 4, which shouldn't be called retro games really, they are quite recent. They totally screw it up. Fallout 3 promises something like 200 different endings, but delivers, I think it's like two, three or four. You can either side with this Eden, President Eden, and poison the water, you can give people clean water, and that's pretty much most of the endings. You can give your life for this cause, or you can send the poorAladdin Sarah into that radiated chamber because you're an asshole and she's a saint. That's it. That's the ending you get and yeah, thanks a bunch I guess. Fallout 4 has a number of factions that are all bad except the railroad that are nice because they want to free the slaves. That's nice. I agree. But I don't like the Brotherhood of Steel being a crypto fascist faction.and sometimes not so crypto at all and Institute going full Nazi mode It is a game that totally botched whatever fallout stood for then we have Fallout New Vegas which has some morally ambiguous way to resolve the problems four factions why four control they are well mr. house they are NCR they are Kaiser's Legion and the jazz man who you find mid gameWhatever it shows, whatever end you choose, whoever you choose to help, will give you a bittersweet ending. If you want the Kaiser's Legion to rule the land with an iron fist, they do that, but they also bring stability to the area. If you're a good guy like me, you want NCR to bring democracy to the wastes. You get that, and a lot of annexing and enslaving people, which they shouldn't do.

and the libertarian choice that is Jessman, he seems to have some kind of plan which you don't feel good about but you never really get to know what it is. And yes, Mr. House is a douchebag. Good luck if you choose him.

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Let there be light? Or what is the name of the song? Well, let there, obviously. Did you know that? Before that it was Dr. Awesome with Exotic 1. I have a rhetorical question for you. Do a game really need a good ending or an ending at all? Sometimes you hate the idea to know that the princess is in another castle. Sometimes it's like, I don't care, it was fun.Some games really don't need an ending. In Silent Service, a submarine simulator, which was super fun, you won the war. Well, which war? The Second World War. Have you heard about it? You know, that's the one you always win in those games. And it's fun enough. You have a really nice time going there, so who cares what the message says at the end of the story? And the flight simulator, the ending is simply, land without crashing. Thank you very much.That is a thing. So endings are not that important unless the story is epic in itself. If you really feel the hero's journey in your veins as you play it, you'll immersively go through the world and explore, explore, explore. Don't you think you deserve something from it? You do. But if all it was, was shooting down bad guys and eventually landing there, well, maybe it was good enough just to know that you had some fun.

That was Silence Tune, the final version obviously. What I'm trying to do right here is a bit of an experiment. I'm trying to see how it works if I just speak ad hoc without a script or anything. Just telling some stories. Is it fun to listen to or do want me to go back to shorter things? Please tell me in comments. Write me an email on radio at rk.net or communicate somewhere else like Discord channel.I'm very interested to see how you feel this different format works, if it does. If you hate it, please tell me so. I'm listening. At any rate, when it comes to the endings of games, that is a story which has been covered here in the program, I like to say that the journey is bigger than the ending, but sometimes you feel like, my god, couldn't you have ended on a better note?

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Congratulations for getting this far in the show! The Eracade Radio Network Stuck in our mother's basement since the 80s I have a rule and it is retro games for me that's games made and released before the year 2000 and some of the games I've told you about are newer than that so I take a bit of an artistic license hereto call them retro games because you know they were not released yesterday at least. One series of games which I really feel have gone downhill they are technically not retro games but that would be the Dragon Age lineage of serious, serious lineage whatever you know what I mean. The first one was a thing of a marvel a compelling story where you could dress people down in underwear and have they run around in their panties and bras.That was fun, but actually that was not the well, allure of the game, I can tell you that much. You could do a lot of things there. could, well, explore the world and you could take different kind of roles if you were a nobleman, a peasant, a warrior, and everybody had their own backstory. The first one was a real immersion gamer feast, that is.And the ending conversely was not bad at all. I don't think so. You can work yourself up until understanding the whole thing. And the ending was not so much a slideshow or anything like that. It was simply you worked into the ending work of a book. The story simply winded down a bit after, wound down, sorry, after you defeated the big bad. But in a very interesting way. Well, Dragon Age 3, sorry, 2.That, on the other hand, had a really, really storyboard 1A ending that ended with a very errant person who thought she was a good, burnt to a crisp, and you standing around and saying, hey, where's the marshmallows? Well, that was not a good ending. I say so.

I want to point out that the Angry Video Game Nerd has a hate boner for games with bad endings. Actually, he has a hate boner for all games that are bad. And that is quite a list. I recommend you go to YouTube and listen to him. Angry Video Game Nerd. Thanks again to the Discord Bunch for some tips here. Well...I forgot one bad ending which I have never seen actually, but it is plenty bad. That would be Ghostbusters for the Nintendo, the original one. You kill Catwoman, then you win. And lose.