By Kevin Lenaghan | Follow on Twitter

By Kevin Lenaghan

Opinions are fascinating things. Sometimes other peoples can offer insight and cause you to look at a situation or a subject in a new light. Sometimes they can fascinate you and make you think even if you don’t agree with them. They make some people happy and feel righteous, while others become enraged. But sometimes they are completely insane!

So very true.

I say this because, of late there has been a lot of discussion about the ending of the final chapter of a videogame trilogy that has been less than flattering. I am of course referring to the furore that has been the backlash against the ending of Mass Effect 3.

Now, some people were never going to be happy with this. That is a perfectly valid viewpoint. You can certainly be disappointed with the ending of a story. You can speak out about it and discuss it with like-minded individuals or argue your case with those who take an opposing stance. This is healthy behaviour and I am all in favour of it.

Obama even took the Paragon option and shook his hand after winning (the Renegade option was to flip him off). That’s why he’s the King of America…..Or something.

What you should NOT do is moan, bitch and whine about how it isn’t fair and how the fact that you don’t like it is some kind of terrible cataclysmic event and demand some kind of reparation. This, of course, refers directly to the online petition and proposed protests of Bioware buildings (which thankfully no-one showed up to) that have been organised in an effort to get Bioware to CHANGE THE F*&KING ENDING!

Is this the “Retake Mass Effect” protest. Where is everyone? They all swore they’d be here on the Facebook page. Surely Keyboard Warriors wouldn’t simply say that but not atually plan on doing it….would they?

What worries me more is the news that they plan to actually do it!

I am just going to get this out of my system right now. WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU? YOU ARE A SELFISH, NARCISISTIC AND SPOILED COLLECTION OF SELF-IMPORTANT BRATS! The idea that someone should change the end of a story THAT THEY WROTE without any input from you is not only laughable, but also terrifyingly ignorant and downright detrimental to the realisation of videogames being accepted as a valid story-telling medium.

And those of you who don’t think that you fit into the previously described group, but signed the petition, or at least agree with the people who started it and think the ending should be changed , well here is a reality check for you. You may not be the spoiled brat I have described here. You are something worse. You are Cathy Bates from the Stephen King novel Misery.

Now, lets have a chat about what happens to Misery Chastain…..then we’ll move onto Shepard.

That’s right! You are the cock-a-doody crazy bitch who spazzes out at someone who has every right to tell the story they want to tell and belongs to them, screaming and shouting and torturing them until they do what you want out of fear of reprisal!

And you may say “Well, they changed the end of Fallout 3, didn’t they?”

That’s right, they did. They changed the end of Fallout 3 in a really ham-fisted and stupid way that was broken. Not only that, but the only reason they did it (SHOCK, HORROR), was so that they could sell you more stuff, you bottom feeding cry-baby! And you probably bought it too!

It’s OK people, you can buy the “Head Re-attachment” DLC for 800 points and we can pretend this never happened.

Then you’ll say “But my Shephard has come with me all the way from the first game. I have a lot of emotional investment in this. It should be a unique ending for my Shephard.”

DO YOU KNOW HOW GODDAMN COMPLICATED AND INSANELY TIME-CONSUMING IT WOULD BE TO MODEL A UNIQUE ENDING ON THE CHOICES YOU’VE BEEN MAKING OVER THE SPAN OF THREE VERY LONG GAMES FULL OF CHOICES? Really goddamn hard, that’s what! I’m amazed they managed to keep it together as well as they have.

A small but great example of this is Kaidan and Ashley. Depending on who died in the first game, there’s been entire storylines in ME 2 and 3 that you may never see!

Really what it comes down to is that this story may have afforded you the opportunity to make choices within it and was very well put together in spite of the writers having to deal with all these ridiculously convoluted permutations, but it still does not belong to you! It’s someone else’s intellectual property.

I believe that they have done a damn fine job and that nobody should be allowed to dictate to someone else how the story that they are writing should end. You haven’t the right!

And, if you don’t agree with me you should move to some snowy mountains and just wait around for Casey Hudson with  rope, a short length of wood and a sledgehammer