I keep thinking about it and I *still* don’t understand what the hell this gelato man mission was going for.
This is supposed to be an NSA substation, right? And it is holding information on its servers that is apparently pretty darn important, otherwise you wouldn’t be trying to obtain it, right? So presumably the NSA, one of the most important intelligence organizations in our government, would want to protect it, right?
So then why is the sole resident of this substation a greasy, moronic idiot? Is this the best operative the NSA can assign to the servers here? Is he not an NSA agent at all and is seriously just a guy selling gelato? If that’s the case, then why is there no one else there? If it’s really just a gelateria, then why would there be servers storing valuable NSA data on them in the back room? Why would a gelateria even need servers at all?
And these are just questions relating to the presence of this one incompetent. There are other problems, like why the game possibly thought that you would shoot this poor loser there at the end when he’s obviously not a threat and didn’t make any kind of aggressive move whatsoever. And then you have to wonder if the NSA just didn’t notice that their data was accessed without anyone giving any kind of approval for doing so. It’s a very sloppily written segment in an otherwise fairly well-constructed game (at least in regard to its plot) and it really just leaves you walking away from it shaking your head in confusion.
Sure, there’s the weird theory of “Gelato Man is behind it all!” that has that weird non-hint displayed at the beginning of a veteran playthrough, but I don’t think that’s really solid enough to forgive the bizarre nature of this mission, especially if that’s the only explanation.
Stark Raving Sane 