Buying Options

Kindle Price: $5.99

You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.

Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

There was an error. We were unable to process your subscription due to an error. Please refresh and try again.

Mess Effect: A Nitpicker's Guide to the Universe that Fell Apart by [Shamus Young]

Follow the Author

Shamus Young

Mess Effect: A Nitpicker's Guide to the Universe that Fell Apart Kindle Edition

by Shamus Young (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

33 ratings

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$5.99

—

Paperback

"Please retry"

$25.99

$27.34

A book examining the Mass Effect series of videogames and the various writing mistakes that led to the unpopular and controversial ending. It also contains a great deal of writing advice on how to construct fictional worlds that pull the audience in.

Print length

785 pages
Language

English
Publication date

May 23, 2021
File size

10959 KB
Page Flip

Enabled
Word Wise

Enabled
Enhanced typesetting

Enabled
See all details

Due to its large file size, this book may take longer to download

Available on these devices

Shamus Young
42
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $4.99
Shamus Young
67
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $2.99
Drew Karpyshyn
106
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $24.99
Mac Walters
1,274
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $23.99

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B095PX8HTW
Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 23, 2021
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 10959 KB
Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 785 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ B094SXTJFF

Best Sellers Rank: #383,158 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #238 in Video & Electronic Games
- #279 in Computer & Internet Game Strategy Guides
- #954 in Literary Criticism (Kindle Store)

Customer Reviews:
33 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Shamus Young

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Shamus Young is a programmer specializing in old-school graphics techniques. He's the author of the blog Twenty Sided. He's the creator of the webcomics DM of the Rings and Stolen Pixels. He's one of the hosts of the videogame commentary series Spoiler Warning. He's tired of writing about himself in the third person.

Customer reviews

5 star		74%
4 star		22%
3 star		5%
2 star 0% (0%)		0%
1 star 0% (0%)		0%

How customer reviews and ratings work

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

WideAndNerdy

A must read for anyone interested in Mass Effect and/or story analysis

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 28, 2022

Verified Purchase

Shamus Young was a brilliant and multitalented individual who loved video game criticism. IMO, this book is some of his best work. He offers insightful and in depth analysis of the story of Mass Effect. Don't expect gameplay analysis though. Shamus is more about criticizing plots as opposed to gameplay though sometimes when its relevant he will bring up gameplay in the context of how it affects the storytelling.

I read the original blog series that this book is a compilation of. I'm sure the book is even better.

Helpful

Kurt W

Storytelling and worldbuilding, applicable far beyond the video game series it focuses on

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 24, 2022

Verified Purchase

Positives
-The content. This is a clear and well thought out critique of the storytelling and worldbuilding off a universe that interests me, and in which I have invested hundreds of hours.
-The paper quality is good, the typeset is clear

Negatives
-Binding quality is not impressive, the glue was already starting to delaminate from the backing when it arrived. Probably a result of the extreme thickness of the book.
-Images are low res, black and white. Having played the games, and read the original blog posts, I know what they depict, but if one was not familiar with the material, some of them can be hard to interpret.

While the book is about the Mass Effect video game series, the critique is sufficiently expansive that it would be a useful work to anyone who is interested in improving their storytelling and worldbuilding skills as a writer.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 2, 2021

Verified Purchase

I not only want to know what worked in a story, I want to know why. This covers that why. How Mass Effect worked and how it broke, and why.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

C.T. Top Contributor: Star Trek

RIP Shamus. We've lost a great author and an even better fan

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 29, 2022

4/5

MESS EFFECT: A NITPICKERS GUIDE TO THE WORLD THAT FELL APART by Shamus Young (DM of the Rings) is a work that I picked up when I heard of his passing (RIP). I am a huge Mass Effect fan and an author so it seemed like an excellent book that would discuss the series from the perspective of its storytelling. Specifically, it's a discussion of how the once-beloved (and still beloved) series went off the rails in such a way that it got EA voted Worst Company of the Year. It also has an Andromeda section.

You can tell how much you're going to love this book or dislike it probably by the following statement: "Shamus really likes Mass Effect, he thinks Mass Effect 2 was an utterly nonsensical mess wioth good characters, and Mass Effect 3's failures are primarily due to 2's nonsensical plot." If you agree with that, it'll be a lot of agreeing and if you disagree with that, then it will probably have some issues for you.
I'm a huge fan of Mass Effect 2 and think it's the best of the trilogy. I recognize its flaws, however, and just because I disagree with an author's interpretation doesn't mean that I think the book is bad. Still, a lot of the middle part of the book was me going, "You don't want to work for Cerberus because it's icky bad evil but you're a Spectre, which means that you're supposed to work with morally ambigious people. It's part of being a spy."

Shamus Young handles much of the book from the unconscious bias of playing a Paragon Shepard, IMHO, and that is something that he's never really able to shed nor seemingly aware of. This isn't necessarily saying he's wrong, though. A huge chunk of the fandom played Shepard as a Paragon and Sole Survivor with the view Cerberus is absolute evil as well as a group that they would never work with even for the greater good. They also played a Star Trek-esque idealistic Shepard so the trilogy taking the stance the Citadel Council races aren't necessarily humanity's friends would also feel hugely disappointing. Others like the emphasis on realpolitic and betrayal that they'd argue, like me, were in ME to begin with.

Now is the above paragraph is something that makes sense to you and is the kind of thing you'd like to read, then this is absolutely the book for you. It's a detailed discussion of the politics, world-building, storytelling choices, and ideas of Bioware's sci-fi universe. It also very much takes the opinion that the retcons and deliberate forced morally ambiguity of the games as well as incompetence of the Council races were mistakes than choices. I LOVE this sort of thing even when I wish I could type up a bunch of response posts about how much I think he's wrong.

I also think the book has one serious failure and that's lacking an extensive discussion of the romances in the game. That is definitely not something Shamus cared about and probably imagined Bioware did fine on but they're such an intristic part of the gaming experience that their lack of discussion is noticeable by its absence. He discusses all the characters but not their relationship to Shepard. Which is a shame as I'd love to hear him compare Ashley vs. Liara vs. Tali (or Garrus).

In conclusion, this is a book for hardcore Mass Effect nerds and those who strongly care about things like the economics of the Alliance or how the Turian Navy functions. It's a fair and detailed work that, sadly, suffers a bit from the fact that he doesn't include many arguments against his own points. I feel that would have benefited the book a bit more and made it feel more inclusive of alternate viewpoints. Still, we've lost a great writer and an even greater fan.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

A guide to good writing

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 16, 2021

Verified Purchase

As popular as the Mass Effect franchise is, there's an obvious change of focus from the first game to the latter ones. While the games have remained popular due to their gameplay steadily improving, from a storytelling standpoint things have gotten considerably worse. While you might hear here and there that games were great until the very end of the third entry, in reality things were in a steady decline since long before and most people didn't care because the games had started to cater to shooter fans rather than sci-fi storytelling fans, and the formers don't care that much about story as long as the shooting is satisfying.

For the latter, though. what happened to the games is heartbreaking. That being said, whatever happened and however the games went wrong is not easy to put into words. Enter Shamus Young, writer, programmer and all around sci-fi fan who understands storytelling in a more clear way and is perfectly able to analyze, unravel, distill and relay into words exactly what happened to this franchise, how and why it went wrong, what worked and what didn't and how it could have possibly been fixed if things were taken in a different direction.

This book is a long, deep and very interesting analysis like no other into what makes Mass Effect's story tick, how it changed focus, why it did and what positive and negative consequences that had for this universe and its fans. Please understad that it's not just a hater rant. It's a genuinely well thought out analaysis from a storyteller's standpoint. It not only provides an interesting and entertaining view into the world of videogame creative development, it's also a bit of a goldmine if you're interested in writing and want to get some good tips into how to properly develop and structure a story and what pitfalls you should avoid and hw gives you a proper reasoning for all of it rather than simply telling you and expecting you to take his word for it.

The book started as a series of blog posts, and while the information given in it is still heavily available online in Young's personal blog, there have been a few changes for the book, including correcting a few mistakes, adding some extra text and overall working on making the experience more streamlined for reading on the go.

That being said, I do have a small complaint. Despite the fact that this originated as a blog, with included comments section, it seems Young didn't take those comments into consideration at all, which seems like a missed opportunity, since a few of them contained different points of view on the interpretation of certain lines of dialogue or story beats. It was nothing major, and it certainly would feel strange to include someone else's writing in your personal book (don't even get me started on the logistics of giving credit and possibly even royalties), but perhaps a line or two saying stuff like "Some people interpret this in a different way" wouldn't have hurt.

That minor nitpick aside, this is still a fantastic read. Though I advise you must assuredly have played the games in order to get the best out of it.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English

Andrew Harding

Better than the games

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 9, 2021

Verified Purchase

... for those that loved the first game but were left cold by the others, anyway. Wish more people did this sort of criticism.

One person found this helpful

Lars Hoffmann

Brilliante Analyse, die unter Schwarz/Weiß-Screenshots krankt

Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on August 3, 2021

Verified Purchase

Nein, "Mess Effect" ist keine Parodie auf die Mass Effect Reihe, wie etwa Der Herr der Augenringe. Es ist eine kleinliche Analyse darüber, was Bioware Entertainment erschaffen und zerstört hat. Es geht um Story, Welt und Characktere in der Mass Effect Quadrologie. Was war brilliant, was "nur" gut, was hätte besser laufen können und was war eine Beleidigung für den Intellekt des Spielers (Looking at you, Kei Leng).
Dabei wird nicht nur auf das berüchtigte Ende des dritten Teils hingearbeitet, sondern - viel wichtiger - auch auf die Fehler des beliebten zweiten Teils hingewiesen, die zu dem finalen Desaster geführt haben. Dennoch kommen die Lichtblicke in allen vier Teilen nicht zu kurz und werden hervorgehoben. Es werden nur weniger.

Die Print-Version des Buches ist ein Türstopper enormen Ausmaßes. Problematisch daran ist, dass alle Screenshots und Diagramme nur niedrig aufgelöst und in Schwarz-Weiß gedruckt werden konnten um die Kosten des selbst verlegten Buches niedrig zu halten. Manchmal lässt sich kaum erahnen, was auf dem Bild zu sehen sein soll. Besonders Schade wenn, speziell in Andromeda, über den exzessieven Gebrauch von Farbfiltern gelästert wird.
Die eBook-Version soll farbige Bilder enthalten und wäre die selbst vom Autor bevorzugte Version, hätte diese nicht massive Probleme mit der Fußnoten-Navigation. Natürlich steht auch fast der gesamte Inhalt kostenlos auf dem Blog des Autors (google Suche: Shamus Young) zur Verfügung. Dort mit hochaufgelösten, farbigen Screenshots und aufklappbaren Fußnoten, jedoch in seiner ursprünglichen Form. Für das Buch wurden Fehler bereinigt und Teile umgeschrieben - diese Anpassungen gibt es nur hier.

Wer nicht weiß, ob das Buch interessant für einen ist sollte sich vielleicht das YouTube video von Young zum Thema ansehen. Es gibt einen kleinen Teil dessen wieder, was einen hier erwartet.

Translate review to English

Karl K

This hurts you, Shepard

Reviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on June 1, 2021

Verified Purchase

I'm biased, as I'm a fan of Shamus Young's work, of the Mass Effect series (particularly the original game), as well as shows like 'Everything wrong with X in Y minutes', so this is a perfect blend designed for my tastes.

Mass Effect 2 and 3 are great games, but in many fundamental ways go against what made 1 special, often nonsensically. This masterful critique will take you through the universe of Mass Effect step by step, giving a post mortem of just how much went wrong, while still celebrating what makes the games great. "If you love thinking deeply about fictional worlds and worldbuilding, you don’t want to miss this retrospective"

Buying Options

Buy for others

Buying and sending eBooks to others

Follow the Author

Mess Effect: A Nitpicker's Guide to the Universe that Fell Apart Kindle Edition

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Product details

Videos

About the author

Shamus Young

Customer reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries

Customers who read this book also read