The Gaming Monologues

Fallout's 25th Anniversary

2022-10-24T17:59:00.002-07:00

Fallout is now 25 years old, and I want to take this chance to talk about the original Fallout and why it is my favorite in the series. First, I didn’t play Fallout in the 90s, my brother had the game (and I always thought the CD case cover looked like the coolest game ever) but I had no space in my heart for any video games that weren’t first-person shooters or real-time strategy games. The brief time spent watching my brother play Fallout made it look like such a boring game. It wasn’t until many years later that Fallout 1 was one of the free games on Gametap and I, bored of the games I had, decided to play it (at that point in life having accepted that games other than Doom could be fun). So, when I Gush over Fallout, know that it is not as someone who played it when it launched but as someone who played it probably a decade after its release and still fell in love. It is also worth noting that I am critical of the Fallouts that followed but it comes from a place of love. They are still great games in a great series, and I am only ever sad they aren't better.

I jumped into Fallout blind, only really knowing it was post-apocalyptic and that the power armor looked rad. I was focused on the TV in the opening and ignored the slow zoom out of the camera and enjoying the world building of the ads until the TV dies, at which point I looked around at the devastation and had chills run down my arms. The perfect feeling of despair to then get hit with that perfect line, “War, war never changes.” The end result of this was that I hadn’t so much as clicked New Game and was already hooked on this game and its world. I build a character (a terrible character as I’d never played an RPG that required things like stats!) and jump into the game. This moment at the start with the Overseer is incredible at setting the tone and your mission, and it is one area I think every other Fallout game has failed to reach up to. It’s obvious that your vault is in a dire state and you are the last hope of everyone you have ever known. Importantly, it never feels like you are The Chosen One or some great hero of your vault, you just feel like the last one the Overseer has to send on this quest. The last thing he tells you is to, above all, stay safe. Almost like he is saying, “We can’t afford to lose you too.” And when you step out of the vault, you know exactly why.

You are not the first person that vault 13 has sent on this task. It is difficult to tell, but the body you come out to is wearing a vault 13 suit! Oh hey, it’s Ed! You, apparently, knew Ed! He (presumably) was the person the Overseer sent before sending you. And he has Armor Piercing 10mm ammo on him too, they only sent you with Jacketed Hollow Points (ignore game effects here, the point is he has ammo you do not have. He is better prepared than you, and look at how much that helped him). The reason they have sent you with so little equipment is because they just don’t have anything better to send you with, they sent the two people (we’ll learn way later in the game about the first one they sent out) before you with the best equipment that they could spare.

“Here’s a common handgun, some ammo, a knife, and some healing stuff; you have 150 days. Good luck!” What you get sent with does change a bit by your tagged skills, but it isn’t like they send you with a laser pistol or a rifle or body armor if you tagged the right things. It has been made clear, assuming you notice why you know the skeleton’s name, that you are not the first choice, but the safety of the vault and everyone you have ever known, is still resting on you. No pressure! In Fallout 2 you are literally called The Chosen One, you are the first and best your village has to send out to save it. In Fallout 3, you are just some kid trying to find your Dad. In New Vegas, you are just some courier who is trying to find the guy that shot you and left you for dead. And in Fallout 4, you are only trying to find your kidnapped son. Only in the original Fallout are you fighting for more than you or a family member AND not the first choice to save the day. I would say 3, NV, and 4 are much more personal stories where “saving the world/wasteland” comes in Act 2, after you have found the person you were hunting for and are then thrust into deciding the fate of the area. I can appreciate all of these stories but they lack the high stakes the original Fallout had right from the start; you are not eased into despair you are thrust into it. Fallout 2 does have high stakes from the start (your village is dying) but you are the best person they have for the job, so it feels more hopeful (you're the best, you got this!). The cave in Fallout sets the tone for the rest of the game, where humanity feels like it is barely hanging on, whereas Fallout 2 makes it clear with the first town you visit that humanity is doing pretty okay! Things are not great exactly, but we have bars and traders, a brothel, and plenty of people living pretty peaceful lives. Fallout 1’s first town does not have much other than farmers, farmers who are plagued by raiders and wildlife. This all adds to the stakes, as you slowly see that your vault being forced out would lead to a terrible life for everyone. The towns you visit are not great places, the wildlife is terrifying, there are raiders and all manner of people that would murder everyone from your vault if it paid them well enough. This wasteland is not safe and your vault may be the only safe place left on Earth! Your village in Fallout 2 seems peaceful and worth saving, but they can just move if they really have to. We can assume there are other villages such that there just isn’t anywhere else good to move to, but we never see them. Other than a dislike of “tribals” there also doesn’t appear to be a reason your village couldn’t move to farming near town or working with other farmers. The stakes just feel so much lower, even if the second half has you, again, saving the world from some terrible threat.

I find myself coming back to Fallout 1 over and over again because it feels so close to perfection. The mechanical improvements to Fallout 2 are all very obvious (why was the transfer limit 999 in a game where things, like money, go higher than that? That “take all” button is so nice!) but the story and world are not as bleak and that results in a very different game. To say nothing of the abundance of pop-culture references in Fallout 2 that always remind me I’m playing a video game. And then Fallout 2 also has so many quests and so much content all resulting in a game that is much more fun to play but a story that is less focused. Fallout 3 does a better job of creating a bleak world than Fallout 2 did; the Capital Wasteland (and that misspelling has ruined my ability to spell capitol when I need to) is honestly worse off than even Fallout 1’s world, and while a lot of that is from engine and hardware limitations (you just do not have the memory for lots of NPCs in the era of PS3/XB360 so the wasteland feels devoid of anyone farming or otherwise living) but it does make for what feels like a bleak despair of a world. (It also means wanting to bring fresh water to the wasteland makes sense and fits with what it would need to survive.) And New Vegas and 4 both present us with worlds that are pretty civilized with towns and factions and, still clearly limited by available RAM, people just living and surviving. At this point, Fallout is much more post-post-apocalyptic than anything else, as the worlds are presenting us with people fighting for control instead of fighting to survive the week. The New California Republic wants Hoover Dam because it supplies their cities with abundant electricity and for the Legion it is just the road across the river on the endless march of war. The East Coast is busy fighting over techbros replacing people with synthetic copies and military authoritarians (as an aside, this does make me wonder what a Fallout with the NCR and East Coast Brotherhood smashing against each other would look like, as NCR annexes territory as it grows and the Brotherhood brings order through overwhelming force. They could never co-exist. But I digress.) This all makes for a very different game world and story than what the original presented us with. I do really love the stories that can be told in this world now, and I like seeing the battle for how the world will be lead, but there is a simplicity in a battle for agricultural land or fighting against beasts in the wasteland that is largely lost now. I am not complaining that Fallout has grown (I actually love that it has instead of repeating itself again and again) but simply admiring the bleak hell it all came from. My favorite post-apocalyptic setting is where humanity can still survive but it could also still fail. The original Fallout is exactly in that spot, but the games since all have more hope for humanity's survival and, at least at the start of the games, feel like they'd largely do just fine if you failed. There is a great freedom in storytelling here and to watch the world grow from your choices (Coming across the NCR in Fallout 2 was the coolest, I did that! Democracy for the wasteland all because I saved one person!) I do however quite love where Fallout is at now, and continue to be excited for the future of the series, because if there is one thing that the newer post-post-apocalyptic setting of Fallout shows us it’s that war, war never changes.

Playing Fallout New Vegas as a vegetarian

2014-11-03T13:03:00.000-08:00

Well, I took the plunge last night and went vegetarian. Well, okay, I went vegetarian in Fallout New Vegas (it sounds more fun than going vegetarian in real life). I cheated and add the Animal Friend perk at the start (otherwise it'd be some stupid "run from hostile animals and have someone else kill them" and that doesn't sound fun), but the perk annoying doesn't include insects like the giant ants and all that. I figure they're technically not animals so it's okay, I just won't kill any that aren't hostile and I won't loot anything from them. It was going really well up until one of my shotgun pellets hit a Legion Dog and made it hostile.

I'm basically role-playing it as a stereo-typical Oregonian, since, why not? My rule set is as follows:

Vegetarian but not Vegan. (Vegan really wouldn't be much harder though, since few foods use animal products in New Vegas)

Not anti-establishment, but not pro-establishment. I.E. I won't attack the NCR, but I won't go out of my way to help them either. I'll basically only attack the things that are hostile, and I won't attack anything that's not known to be hostile. So no shooting those people I meta-knowledge know to be raiders but character wise shouldn't know to be raiders.

No stealing at all. It's annoying when it's good karma to kill an escaped convict and okay to loot his body, but it's bad karma to steal something from his "house." At any rate, no stealing; stealing is wrong.

Hardcore mode so eating actually matters.

Hard difficulty. I find this the best setting since enemy weapons do a lot of damage but your own still do damage as well.

No fast traveling since that makes any Fallout and any Elder Scrolls game instantly better. When a quest sends you half way across the map it actually feels like a quest. Fast traveling is easily the worst part of Skyrim, but that's for another blog post.

No Nukacola (even to loot and sell). Nukacola is a representation of a giant corporation and Oregonians seem to support the little guy (in this case, Sunset Sarsaparilla) rather than the mega-corp. It's worth mentioning that Portland Oregon has more craft breweries inside its limits than any city in the world (http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/220319) and, as such, I can pick up a fancy micro-brew for little more than most people pay for national brand brews. On tap at bars, it's often a very minimal cost difference between something like PBR and a Widmer Brother's Hefeweizen. Now remember from Fallout 3 that Nukacola Quantum had some bad test problems and the family of any people who died in test groups got a fruit basket as a sorry; this paints Nukacola as a uncaring and large corporation. Sunset Sarsaparilla is painted as a much smaller company in Fallout New Vegas (they aren't even national). Put these together and you'll hopefully see why my stereo-typical Oregonian will shun the big corp and embrace the (at least comparatively) little guy.

No over-bartering things. I'll still loot and sell things, but I won't do it too much. This plays better with the next (and final) rule. This is mostly done to make the game a bit tougher (but not as hard as my "no bartering" masochist mode rule set) rather than for role-playing.

Max caps is 1,000 times character level. So I can't ever get mega-rich, but I won't be as broke as I am in my "no bartering" masochist mode playthrough. I'm tempted to lower this to 500 caps times level to keep money even lower. Once I reach the limit, I won't be looting any more stuff I don't need. Keeping weapons and armor in repair will also keep me from getting too much money.

Like any good PC Fallout NV player, I have a crap-ton of mods installed. Most of these mods are weapon and ammo based so that there is a massive level of verity in enemy weapons and all that. And pretty much every weapon mod ever puts those new guns somewhere in Doc's house. As a result, I limit myself to only picking up a few of these guns whenever I start a new game. This time around I limited myself to 3 guns. The Tokarev (TT-30) fits very well as a cheap pistol that I'd expect an Oregonian to own (hell, I know at least 2 people who do). It's not expensive and flashy, it's reliable and cheap. If you've ever wondered why you see so many old Toyota's, Subaru's, and Volvo's on Oregon roads, this is the reason (along with the weather and crappy roads). All of the guns I picked follow this route. Second up was an Ithica M37 shotgun (in 20 gauge) with the side paddle shell holder installed. And lastly is an SKS (annoyingly in 5.56mm even though there are mods that add 7.62x39mm to the game). I used console commands to lower the reliability of all these weapons (I just pulled a random number out of my head, but they were all between 60% and 75% repaired), and all of them have the ability to jam when shooting, not just when reloading (one of my favorite things ever, since having a rifle jam in a fire fight really makes for a rush of adrenalin). I dumped anything else that wasn't these 3 weapons from my inventory, along with all the armors but the Armored Vault 13 suit, and then ditched the vault 13 canteen to make sure I had to worry about water.

I'm excited for this playthrough, but I'm afraid I'll have the same problem with it that I have with the masochist mode playthrough; I have no interest in aligning myself with factions and moving the story along, I just want to explore the wasteland. This is made worse in this playthrough since none of the factions really match with the type of character I'm playing as. And with no real end goal to aim for, it's tough to play the game for too long. I'll likely just play until my first death and call it done.

Bioshock (game worlds)

2013-07-30T11:29:00.000-07:00

I'll start this by saying I've not beaten all of the first Bioshock (the lack of Steam cloud saving is a pain. I've played the first half or so of the game more times than I can count because I never back up my saves) but I've still played it. I've also not played any if Bioshock 2 or Infinite, but I do plan to play Infinite at some point (after beating 1).

I'd normally just Tweet this, since it's not a huge post like I normally do, but it's a bit too big for a Tweet. Today we have Bioshock: Infinite DLC announced and one of the packs takes place in Rapture before it all went to shit! I'm really excited for this, but not for the reasons people would probably expect. Bioshock's Rapture is a beautiful city and an interesting idea, but it feels so empty and 2D. It's like an amusement park ride or a cheesy western town. If you move along the route and don't look too hard you'll enjoy it, but the second you look deep you see that's it not a real place where people have ever lived. I never (and again I haven't beaten Bioshock 1 but I've played a decent amount of it) ever felt like people lived in Rapture. The areas flow badly and don't feel like I'm in a place anyone would build let alone live in. I'm sure some of this is because the game doesn't let you explore everywhere and does things to force you along a set route (so you're not moving through the city like a normal person would, you're instead going through broken walls and maintenance doors). When you add in the fact it's underwater you see it doesn't make any sense to have the buildings not designed perfectly before building. It's sad that I've felt like some Call of Duty maps could have actually been filled with people before a war and not in Bioshock (CoD has the advantage of being able to just copy real world areas or movie scenes though). I compare the two games because they're both hallway shooters (Bioshock is better at making you think it's not, but it's pretty damn linear) even if Bioshock likes to throw in RPG type things into the mix (though, once again, it's mostly normal shooter type things with an RPG paint job. In CoD you'd put on a red dot and you're gun would become more accurate where in Bioshock you'd upgrade it or equip plasmids). Borderlands is an example of an FPS/RPG hybrid with a close to a 50/50 split of the two). So the reason I'm excited for this DLC in Rapture is because I'm excited to see if Rapture can feel more like a real place if it's got people living in it rather than just enemies. I've not played Infinite, but from screen shots and in game video it doesn't often look like it'd feel like a real place with people in it. I do feel like Infinite starts out feeling like a real city (the fair parts at the start I've seen feel like a real place) but I won't know for sure until I play it; and the price (along with that damn Steam backlog) keeps that from happening anytime soon. Most games fall very short of making it seem like people could or do live in it, but few games ever really try for this either (by which I mean that they don't set out to simulate a real world, they set out to make a game, then throw in NPCs to make it sort of feel like a real place). Skyrim, Fallout 3 and NV, Borderlands, Final Fantasy, Pokemon; they all fall short of making me feel like I'm in a real place where people live, I'm hopeful that this DLC will finally make it feel like you're in a real place. I could go into detail about what I feel each of those games is lacking to make it feel like a real place with real people, but that would make this post a bit too long (and I'm too lazy to type that much).

The 2 games I can think of that do a decent job of making a city feel real are Deus Ex: Human Revolution (Detroit feels like a hell hole, but it mostly feels like a real hell hole. And China feels like a real slum without being over the top. The fact you can enter a lot of houses and apartments that you don't need to go into really helps this) and Assassin's Creed 2 (lots of people in the world and lots of places to go to. You can't enter house like in DE:HR but it makes sense that you wouldn't in AC2. The advantage here is that the developer can just use real world pictures/paintings/maps to make the city so it's easier to make it feel like a real place just throwing a shit-ton of NPCs into). You could also add GTA4 to this list, since it does a good job making an entire city feel pretty lively. I've not played enough of GTA4 to really have much of an opinion on it though so I won't (and, yes, you could say the same about me and Bioshock: Infinite. The point of this post is more Rapture across the games than it is about a particular game). Hopefully the next Fallout game can make the world seem like there are real civilizations built from the ashes of atomic hellfire, since one of the best parts of post-apocalyptic media are the people who climb back into the ruins of the world.

Rage

2012-01-26T20:14:00.000-08:00

[Post updated for clarity and grammar. Also it's now gluten free and is fortified with iron!]

It's been a long time since I've done a blog post, and it's been a long time since Rage came out. So most of you would either own Rage, or wouldn't care to own Rage. So, like most of my posts, this isn't a review, but I did plan this post in my head while playing the game.

I was very excited for it and I picked it up at launch. I was slightly disappointed, but mostly because I hyped myself up over the idea of a new id IP. The A.I. was amazing (it reacted in ways that were semi-predictable, but most shooters have the enemies doing things that you 100% see coming every time. So it was a massive step forward, but not so large of a leap that I feel I'm going into the field of video game A.I. too late), the textures were not as awesome as I wanted, but they had a wonderful amount of detail (playing on PS3). The guns sounded great, the cars handled realistically without being a racing sim (though the game felt like a racing game with an FPS mini-game a lot of the time), and the world was both original and strange without going too far in either direction. But, alas, the game had a lot of faults. Mostly, however, I found the faults were in the story.

[Super fast plot details for anyone who hasn't played the game. The governments of the world find out that an asteroid is going to hit Earth and destroy all life. They all decide to make Arks and store select people underground in them to survive the impact, and also decide not to tell anyone so as not to induce panic. These people are given magical nano-machines that basically revive you on death, help you heal over time, give you a HUD; basically anything a normal shooter likes to give you anyway. The Arks preserve everyone in a sleep state for, like, 100 years at which point you'll go above ground and restart humanity! The first group to come out of the Arks are military members, with everyone else following in 20 or so years. Some Arks, like your own, are staged to come out later than the others. And everyone else in your Ark is, for some reason, dead (likely a long time by the decay). So you're all alone, thrust into the wasteland. You're also wearing an Ark-suit. The plot is basically Fallout as a pure shooter, but it's set up well enough as to be a fun time! So, join me as we see this plot fail.]

The story was a pretty good one, but (much like the Halo games) the story wasn't much of the actual game. My biggest issue, however, was with the Authority and some of the raider groups. Or, more specifically, a lack of a problem. The Authority is, at no point in the game, a threat to you personally until you start shooting them/invading their bases (as in you can drive up to their defensive wall and they won't start shooting at you until you start shooting them). Everyone in the towns tells you they're evil and fascist, but the game doesn't show them in an offensive light until you've started killing them. Of course the Authority wants revenge/justice at that point! You see some floating robotic scanner things (think scanners from Half Life 2) in the first town after you stir things up a bit, but they don't really respond to you (even when they see and, presumably, scan you). Shouldn't the Authority have the ability to scan you (and others) remotely with these things and, I don't know, pick up those nano-machines all Ark survivors have? We also don't see this Authority killing civilians in the towns or really doing anything generic fascist-like that the townspeople seem to be insistent on. One of the Authority soldiers (after taking control of a subway town) will tell you to "pick up that can" in a very nice homage to Half-Life 2 and the Combine. A group that is shown to be evil before you ever get to pick up a crowbar and bash some skulls (and headcrabs) in! In this case, if you look down, you'll see there is a can of food on the ground. So this evil Authority soldier is pointing out a can of food on the ground and telling me to pick it up.

In this subway town (the Authority take it over after you complete this mission) you get tasked with killing a group of "raiders" who supply the town's power (because they're charging more money now or whatever). Now the mayor of this town seems way more evil than these raiders; and the same can be said of most of the raider groups. In this case you are tasked with killing them simply because the mayor wants cheaper power. The world is bloody gone, be happy you have power! So those raiders are walking around the town demanding protection money or looting your caravans? No, it's a group of Russians who have power plants. In one of the co-op missions (the first) you get to hear how the guy who gives you the sniper rifle in the main story got that rifle. It's a nice bit of backstory (that isn't needed, but it's probably more fun shooting wise than the main game) but his reason is also more evil than these Russian "raiders". The Russian group of raiders is drilling for oil in an old (abandon) prison. You are tasked with stopping them. This would be like America invading Canada because they started drilling for oil that they planned to export to the US anyway! The first raider group you fight (the ghost guys) are typical savage raiders, so killing them makes sense (although, even then you're doing it because the guy who saved you from them told you to rather than because you want revenge or something). But the British group is a bunch of drunks who tinker with cars (not evil, but not good. It seems likely they harass local populations, but you don't ever see it). And every other group seems to be pretty okay. One raider group (located where another Ark pops up) is said to be savage, killing anyone that enters their land and not speaking a language anyone understands. I felt bad killing these guys (though not as bad as the group or Russians [in hindsight that feels really racist of past-me]) because I didn't have a good feel for them being "bad guys" in the least. They defend their land, and if someone comes into it and doesn't leave (while being shouted at) then they get killed. I bet more than a few Native American tribes wish they had taken that stance when Europeans came to America (and some, of course, did).

I played the entire game waiting for plot twist. Waiting to take down part of the Authority only to find out that the group I had been working for was self serving, and used an Ark survivor knowing they would be naive and powerful. When the game ended (and, much like a fall, it's the sudden stop that kills you) I was left disappointed and wanting so much more. Not because id didn't bring me a good game, but because id could have brought me an orgasmically-amazing (amazingly-orgasmic?) game with a slightly better story and a slightly longer game. I look forward to the DLC that I pray comes [future me: it did. I bought it. I didn't beat it but plan to. Though I'm on PC this time around]. And the same with a Rage 2 [which will likely never happen]. But I hope Bethesda helps them bring in a good story teller. No id game has ever had a drop-dead amazing story. "Space Marine killing the spawns of hell" was fine for the 90s, and it still makes for a fun game today, but it feels dated. id doesn't need to make a story driven game (Halo isn't story driven, and yet it has so much story. Final Fantasy games are pure story these days), they can keep a linear game (like Half-Life) and still tell a fun story. I really look forward to seeing what the bring forth, and they will always be one of my favorite companies (if only because they bring some of the coolest new tech engines to the gaming world).

[I'd love to rewrite this post but it feels dishonest to do so. I'll likely play the game again and write another, better written, post about it. This post was updated for clarity and grammar, but not for content. 1/14/2015]

Metal Gear Solid 4

2011-08-08T22:51:00.000-07:00

The first game I bought for my PS3 was Metal Gear Solid 4. I had wanted a PS3 just to play this game, back in the days before I had a job when it first came out. I managed to keep all the spoilers at bay and so I was able to enjoy this game. And shit bricks. Lots of them. The story was almost too easy for me to follow after MGS1/2/3's joy of twists and turns. It had a few, but they weren't hard to follow. And it had to make sure it cleared up everything at the end. And man did it ever. But that's not what I want to talk about.

What I want to talk about is the engine used in MGS4. The story made me shit bricks at times(as stated), and the engine did things I won't talk about. But really, I have never had an engine in a game feel this perfect. Bungie does a really good job with their engines, as does DICE and Valve. But a "plain" (man, it hurts to say those engines are plain. I love you guys, really) FPS engine working perfectly isn't as impressive as a stealth game's. In a first person shoot your focus is on moving from point A to B, and killing everything you can (save a few games). If the environment reacts to you and your weapons it's a solid engine. Throw in bullet physics, destructible environments and such and you're pretty much golden. More than Call of Duty has done. (I hate on CoD so much not because I think their games are bad(though they are not my cup of tea anymore), but because I don't see them trying to push the envelope and do new things with their games anymore). But with MGS4 I can go from 2 points and kill anything, and do it any number of ways. Or I can sneak by and kill nobody a number of ways as well. They took out the spinning boxes for items which helped make them harder to spot and make the world feel better. They added the Solid Eye which did a great job of adding nice H.U.D. features to enemies and such (really nice when you can't tell if that person hates you or not from a distance). And the guns, oh God the guns!

They got the guns perfect! Snake doesn't tactically reload "right", sadly. But if you shoot half a mag, reload and look on the ground you'll see that one of the rounds is still a live cartridge. So even though he works charging handle on that AK when he doesn't have to, it correctly ejects a live round. It's easy to see in the Shooting Range. I can't tell if the ammo count goes down because of this but either way it is very cool to see. It was really nice to play a MGS4 game that really allowed you to play it as a shooter just as much as it allowed you to play it as a stealth game. MGS4 is mostly stealth, but for someone who likes the story more it's nice to have the freedom to play it how I want to.

I loved being able to aim in either 3rd person or 1st person at the press of a button. And I could lock it into 1st person when aiming right in the menu. I kept it in 1st person most of the game while in combat. And I could finally fight and not totally waste ammo (and get shot up). But I could still explore the world in 3rd person which lends best to the MGS experience. I really REALLY want to see this engine used for the next Resident Evil game. I loved RE5, but the engine made it a bitch to play. I needed to be able to aim down my weapon sites a lot of the time (the laser dot was a joke on target) but 3rd person is just what RE games are. I think this engine would be perfect at accommodating both types of players.

Everything else about that game was really awesome. The way the environment reacted to you was awesome. The flashbacks and such were great. The little hidden things were awesome. The cut-scenes were just like a movie as always. Only thing missing was trophies to convince me to play the game on harder settings a bit more [when there isn't a way to track the awesome things I've done in a game, I'm often less likely to do them]. But I at least want to do a "kill everything" and "kill nothing" playthrough. Now I want to see the rest of the games remade in this engine. Both MGS and MG. Mostly the Metal Gear games, as those are hard as hell for me (as most NES games are).

Medal of Honor

2011-06-13T14:26:00.000-07:00

Remember when I did that "review" of the upcoming MoH game, like a year ago? Well I finally got the chance to play it. It was the first game I beat with my new PS3 and I think it's a good sign of things to come. The cover mechanic is nothing short of perfect. I could finally aim down the sites of a weapon and just barely creep over the top of cover to fire. I could also quickly bolt around cover to see if anything was there before I moved past my cover. It also kept me in first person view (Rainbow Six Vegas too you to third person and I felt that was overly cheap). You also weren't glued to the cover and you could take cover behind anything.

But the game wasn't perfect. I beat the campaign in about 4-5 hours, playing on the hardest difficulty on the first playthrough. I got at least 8 when I did this with CoD:MW2. But these 4-5 hours were the best of any campaign I have ever played, ever! It beats out Call of Duty 2 (which has held that ground and been that campaign for which I compare every other campaign to) in everything but length. A lot of the time I just forgot I was playing a video game, I felt like I was playing Airsoft or reading a really well done book. There were no over the top cliches and there wasn't the one bad guy that you killed at the end. Hell, only once did I enter a room with that "slow motion" thing that CoD has seemed to fall in love with. And I won't lie, I didn't like that part as much as the times I had to enter a room without slow motion. It really added to the adrenalin involved in kicking down the door. With most of the guns you don't carry a crap ton of ammo. (the SAWs are the only exception to this that I found). I liked how I had a few hundred rounds for my M4, and if I needed more I'd ask one of my team mates (who would only give you more if you were low enough. I guess the NPCs have Solid Snake's bandanna from MGS1 and they aren't keen on sharing). This was a good reason for you to keep the guns you started the mission with. I found myself ditching the M14 EBR and the shotguns for AK47s and G3A3s. Ammo was fairly rare for the guns you picked up off of bad guys, and your team mates couldn't give you ammo for a gun they didn't have (or an ammo type they didn't have).

Everything they did with the weapons I expect to be done with the weapons in any FPS. They got reloading right (I have a blog post on that so I won't go into it here), they got the ammo amount right (you have an extra round if you reloaded with a round in the chamber), they got the reload speed right (I mean that it wasn't too fast, but it wasn't too slow. It allowed reloading to bring tension, but not to take a year to do). There was one thing I never expected any game to do, and they did it. You can change the fire mode of most weapons (I can make my G3A3 shoot semi-auto or full-auto. Same with my M4, etc). I love this! But it has been done before, showing your character toggle to change the fire rate, yeah, I've never seen that done before. Hell, CoD has their M4 and M16 modeled with the selector switch on semi.

And lastly I want to compliment the dialog. This is one of the reasons I felt like I was there (or reading a really good book) and it was something I was really looking forward to ever since I read about it on that Joystiq review. The time spent in the Apaches is filled with a lot of com chatter. And every bit of it feels so real. To the point at which you can only guess what exactly they mean (though a lot of it is still easy to follow). it was the same way in the game with the rest of your team.

The enemy AI wasn't the brightest in the game, but I'm not bashing it. Far from it, I'm complimenting it. If I came around a corner and shot a guy, there were a few times where there would be another guy in the room, but he wouldn't have heard me come in and shoot so I'd be able to shoot him as well. Seeing as how he is shooting his gone, and not looking my way, it makes sense that he wouldn't have a magic sense to know where I was. But at the same time the enemy would flank me, and that would often lead to some pretty frantic moments of shooting. The AI killed me maybe 7 times in my play through. 3 times I got stuck on something, once I shot the hostage rather than the hostage taker, but the other 3 were pretty illegitimate kills. Where I had done something that probably wasn't the brightest thing to have done (or the AI did something I didn't expect them to do). So thank you AI team, you guys did an awesome job!

In short, I want more games like this. Please. And I'd also like to ask, why do people call this a rip off of Call of Duty? Is it because it's "modern"? Comparing this to CoD is like trying to compare a Michael Bay movie to a Steven Spielberg movie. Michael Bay will have everything blow up, and will have the pacing set to "balls to the wall" the entire movie. Steven Spielberg will use action and explosions like a chef will use his spices. Often enough that you know they're there, but not so often that they get boring and you know exactly how every other "dish" is going to taste. I'd also say that comparing the early Medal of Honor games to the first Call of Duty game wasn't possible because in MoH you had fairly bad AI and rarely had anyone on your team along with you. Were CoD gave you team mates and had you fight in a war for a change. I look forward to the next MoH game, and I hope they go the same route of getting veterans (and active duty personnel) involved in making the game, so as to keep it as real as possible. So hats off to the amazing team that made this game (as well as to veterans).

Wow, for once I did a "review" with referencing Valve or Half Life. As for random experiences I had playing the game, I really didn't have any. And I don't find "I took cover, leaned out of it and shot 3 people before ducking back in" that interesting to share.

Portal 2

2011-05-31T22:12:00.000-07:00

It’s hard not to just do a review of Portal 2, but there are plenty of those out there already. What I really want to see is someone (not me, because my computer isn’t powerful enough to play Portal 2) take the levels and turn them into an FPS. I’m not sure if I’d want any puzzles (depends on how it could be done), but the dark areas just lend to a Doom 3 style setting. If you were Gordon Freeman running through the compound fighting Combine, I think you’d have a really fun game. It could also make a neat L4D2 campaign if you rebuilt stair cases and catwalks and put in the classic “press this button to spawn the horde and slowly open the way past” things.

I’d also like to make note of the doors in the game that don’t have handles, but had a number pad above them. The texture of the number pad was very nice, but the texture on the “handle” was slightly poorer. This leads me to the idea that these will be accessible with an update later in the game, maybe to announce Half-Life 2: Episode 3 (much as they did to announce Portal 2). This is, of course, total speculation and it could lead to nothing, but it could still be a hint of what’s to come.

Dead Space 3 (how it should end)

2011-03-13T13:41:00.000-07:00

I've never had the joy of playing Dead Space. It's a game that's on my list, but not too high on it. I've played DS2 and, while fun, it wasn't a game that made me want to go out and drop 60 bones. I have, however, seen about 70% of Dead Space 2 being played including the ending. Just so you know where I'm coming from when I tell you how Dead Space 3 should end.

You should have to take out another marker of some kind near the end. At some point you finally get captured by the Space Forces (whatever their name is). You wake up and you're no longer under the effects of the marker (something has been constant through the game to show you've been under its control or rather its effects). You are informed that you've been drugged in some way so as to remove these effects. Your guy starts bitching them out for not doing more against the necromorphs and anything more about the marker you've learned. At which point they call you a sick son of a bitch.

"Necromorphs? Is that what you've been killing in your head? You sick mother fucker. You've been killing off living breathing humans! They've been trying run away as you've walked through blasting off their limbs with mining laser!"

"That..that's not possible! They've run at me!"

"In self defense. They don't have the right door codes to get any farther away from you, what do they do? They turn around and fight in a last ditch effort."

Something like that at least. I think it would be the best twist a video game has ever thrown out there. And I've played (and understood) Metal Gear Solid 2 :P I don't see it happening because it doesn't seem like something EA (or the original creator) would want to take the series. At this point you pretty much have to end it. It would be pretty cool to see a level where you have to run past a bunch of necromorphs to destroy the last marker. You can either kill them all (needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few) or you can dodge them and still destroy the marker. I love when a game gives me very hard moral choices, it makes a game feel a whole hell of a lot more real and way more memorable.

Oblivion

2011-03-02T17:44:00.000-08:00

First off, sorry. I know it has been almost 2 months since my last update. Not that I have a bunch of readers, but still. I've been playing a lot of Minecraft, and there isn't much "blog worthy" in that game. It's like playing with Legos. You can't show off anything until you get done, and the adventure of building it is only fun for you. Unless you're the kind of person who likes hearing "I was digging for this brick, and I kept finding this one. And then I found the brick I was looking for only to realize I now needed that other one I kept finding! But now I couldn't find it!" Which, in Minecraft is "I spent 3 hours digging a mine shaft last night. Found like 5 diamond and 20 iron. It was awesome."

But this blog title isn't Minecraft, it's Oblivion! So, who has seen the Skyrim trailer? Oh man, is it awesome :D
http://www.joystiq.com/video/8845f15c For those who haven't yet seen it. All two of you in the whole world. It's a Bethesda game. It's pure crack! They make games that you'll get hundreds of hours of gameplay out of. I'm still playing Oblivion. Just going everywhere and killing everything. It's a beautiful game and it's built around looting. Which is my favorite part of gaming. Why, I don't know. But it's just so addictive. Anyway, even though it's an awesome game, I haven't had a lot of epic stories involving it. But I have found a lot of things that raise questions and the like.

First off. Gems. They serve no purpose in the game other than gold. That's pretty lame, in my opinion. In most fantasy games gems are good for something. Often something cool, like increasing the power of weapons and the like. I'd really like to see gems have a use in Skyrim. Maybe they can be used in alchemy at a high enough level. I think that would be pretty interesting to see.

Next. Why is the gameworld for Oblivion so huge, but the game world for both Fallout 3 and New Vegas so small? It's annoying to play Oblivion and see this massive game world and then play New Vegas and feel like the world is so small.

Can we please get more than one waypoint on these maps? I'll often find something really cool that I want to go back to later. Maybe it's not on the map, or maybe it's fairly forgettable. I'd like to be able to mark these places on the map. Something that says "hey, I found something cool here that I either want to go to again or that I can't get into now." This happens more in the starting levels of Fallout as you find high level locks that you can't pick yet. But you don't want to forget about this safe! Now I don't want all these to appear on my HUD, but something that will help me remember that they're there would be nice. I don't feel like I should have to print off my own map to do this kind of thing.

There aren't many areas I'd really want improvement on the "Oblivion engine" but those a few. That weren't fixed in the last 2 Fallouts. They added a keyring in Fallout 3, so I won't bitch about that being annoying in Oblivion. Etc. But this leads me to one HUGE bitch of a complaint. Why did you put New Vegas on the Oblivion engine rather than waiting and putting it on the Skyrim engine? Once I play Skyrim, going back the New Vegas (with all the DLC. Because God knows I've already done everything I could do in that game as of now) is going to be a pain in the ass. It will feel so... well... ugly. Unrefined. It's like going back to Morrowind after playing Oblivion. The same game is there, it's just missing so many things you've gotten use to that it makes playing it a chore. The only good thing that comes out of this is the hope of an awesome Fallout game on the Skyrim engine. The last 2 have been fun, well worth the money, but they haven't been as magical as I really hoped for. Maybe a newer engine (and the leaps and bounds worth of improvements from 3 to NV) will help to capture the feel of the original Fallout games better.

Michael Baying it up in New Vegas

2011-01-05T12:54:00.000-08:00

I had made an explosive character and decided to name him Michael Bay. If you don't understand why I'd name him after that director, you've never seen one of his films. At any rate, I picked all the Explosive based perks I could get my hands on, and it made for one hell of an awesome playthrough. I normally just used the grenade launcher (the one that like every boomer has) but I'd break out the missile launcher when I felt like doing a bit more killing. I waltz into the Great Kahn's camp and walked into their main house. I've still not figured out how to convince them that Ceaser's Legion is simply using them, but I don't dwell on it too much. I pull out my missile launcher, stand by the door and point it at the wall behind the leader's table and fire. The resulting explosion is so massive that I lose about half my health, my partner gets knocked unconscious, and every Kahn in the building is dead and and flown all over the house (and blown apart). There are 2 things that makes this awesome. The first is that I yelled "Michael Bay!" before I fired the missile. The 2nd is the fact I was using normal missiles. I thought I had shot a high explosive round by the amount of damage I had done, but no. Maybe the fact I named my character Michael Bay made his explosive damage triple or something. If I was a programmer I'd so do that. Add lines of code into the game that some names effected the gameplay in unknown or little known ways. Buck Rogers would make energy weapons do a lot more, and maybe make more aliens show up. I'm sure it would be a fair amount of work to intertwine it through the whole game, but it would be very awesome to see none the less. One day when I'm programming video games I'll be sure to do something like that.

Doom 3

2011-01-04T18:36:00.000-08:00

I haven't played Doom 3 in a while, but I remember it had a feature I haven't come across in another First Person Shooter. Or I haven't remembered it being an option in anything else. At any rate, one of the options in the menu was to turn off "auto reloading." That is to say that you wouldn't automatically reload when your gun's magazine was empty. I know more than once this threw me off (mostly with the shotgun) because I'd drain the mag into something, and then frantically click the fire button. Freaking out as no shooting was being done, until I'd remember to reload. It's quite embarrassing to admit, what with being a gun nut and all. But I'd really like to see this added to more video games. It really added to the horror aspect of Doom 3 and I really think it would add to the thinking aspect of other tactical shooters. It's not an option I'd ever use in online play (just like turning crosshairs off. I love playing with crosshairs off, but when other people can use that unrealistic advantage I see no reason for me to cripple myself and turn it off. Games like Halo I exclude from this since you have a realistic device that would give you a heads up display in real life) but it's an option I'd really love to use in the campaigns. The level of stress added is amazing, given a change so small. This is a change I see as being fairly simple (coding wise) and something that would really change gameplay. Remember how you never had to reload the pistol or the shotgun from Doom? You had to time a pump with the shotgun, but you never had to reload it. I can only imagine what a hellish time I would have had in Doom had I had to worry about reloading the pistol and the shotgun. But I can't tell you how much I'd still love to see that change.

I like a level of realism in my games that a lot of people think takes away from the fun. They don't want to be limited by real life when they play. A lot of people don't like aiming down weapon sights. A bunch of people hate when weapons do a realistic level of damage. I find that being limited by such things makes a game that much more rewarding. I can go play the Call of Duty 2 campaign on easy and die only from my own stupidity. Or I can play it on veteran and watch myself dieing more often than shooting. But when I finally beat a level, the reward is more than worth the effort. Any idiot can beat a video game with invisibility on. And while it's fun to screw off on easy or play CoD4 with the slow-mo cheat on, there just isn't any reward when you beat the level or kill the final boss. I'm sure I've said it before but I beat MW2 (I like to call it CoD7. Since MW means Mech Warrior to me before it means Modern Warfare, but I digress) on veteran the first time playing it. There were a few challenging points, but nothing that got me stuck for days. Hell, I had it beat in 2 days (totaling under 10 hours of gameplay, if I remember correctly). In contrast, it took me months to beat Rainbow Six Vegas. I had to take EVERY corner tactically. The second I stopped worrying about the enemy was the second I walked around a corner right into a shotgun. When I finally did manage to beat it I felt a level of accomplishment that I hadn't felt since beating CoD2 on veteran years earlier. I'm still trying to beat CoD2 on veteran on my 360 (I'm a PC gamer at heart, so the joysticks won't ever give me the same control as the mouse) but that's another story for another time.

Fallout: New Vegas. Masochist mode!

2011-01-01T16:22:00.000-08:00

Yes, that really does say masochist mode. I beat New Vegas and earned every achievement. I've now got every achievement for both the 360 fallout games. This is awesome, but it means there isn't a lot left to push me to play the game through, again. I've beaten it in hardcore mode, and with no xp boost there is no real reason to play it in very hard. Plus it just means your guns are nerfed beyond all reason. So I decided to play it in a new mode. I sat down and made a mental list of all the things that I found too easy with the fallout games.
-too much ammo
-too much health (by which I mean a mass of health packs)
-vats makes dealing with most enemies much easier
Now how can I limit my ammo and health? Hardcore mode really helped, but I can still walk around with infinite stimpacks (I just realized I called them Stempacks all through my last post. I feel like an idiot) and can still have plenty of ammo. So I then came up with a list to "fix" these things. I don't ever want to see this mode put into a game, but I'd suggest at least trying it. I've found it to be quite refreshing.
-game on meduim. This is the perfect balance of my weapons doing good damage and being dealt damage.
-play on hardcore. This goes without saying. it's mostly for the slower working stimpacks though.
-never barter. That means no buying, and no selling. (more on this later).
-never quick travel. (yeah, I gave up on this one pretty fast).
-no repairing items, except with repair kits or paying someone in the wasteland to do it.

So now I can't barter. I decided to allow myself to barter for weapon mods as well as for primers (not for gun powder or cases). But when I do that I have to pay in caps, not items. This means that you can't simply have a mass of bottle caps to buy thousands of rounds of 5.56mm. This also means that you never pick up anything you don't need. As well as making you drop things a lot more often. You can pay people caps for services. Like doctors or bribes. But since you can't sell items you won't have a mass of caps just sitting in reserve for things like this. 50 caps to heal your limbs etc will be a pretty big deal when you don't even have a 500.

The idea behind this was that it would make it more realistic. If I want to go here, I need to take to 20 minutes or so to run there. I decided to not do the first time I got crippled and lacked any more doctors bags. I don't want to spend 30 minutes hobbling to a doctor. And about the 3rd time I got my limbs crippled in combat I decided I had made the right choice. If you can stick with this one, more power to you. I might decided to do it once I get the reduced limb damage perk and some better armor.

This one is the biggest pain in the ass. Period. You end up dropping so many pistols and rifles because you can't sell the spares, and you can't use them to repair your current one. So I'll keep 2, at best. To try and keep my damage as high as possible. I try and keep them in decent shape with the weapon repair kits (which are the main reason to get your repair high) but it only does so much. You can only find so many wrenches in the wasteland to loot. Where this really kills me is armor though. I can't repair armor with those little kits. So I end up having to just deal with the best I can get off of a dead raider. I can pay to have my armor repaired, but it costs a lot to repair armor from an NPC. And a lot is a lot more money than I have. So you really take a lot more damage than you normally would (thus making the game more of challenge).

If you give this a try be sure to tell me how it works for you. It has really changed the game for me, to say the least. I've really loved it, but as I said it isn't something I'd really want to see put into the game as a mode. Repairing guns is a lot of fun! I love being able to fast travel and barter and repair limbs with stimpacks. But if you've played the game 5 times and still want to get a bit more out of the game, I think this mode will give you at least one more play through. And if you decide not to fast travel, it's going to be one long play through.

Dead Money

2011-01-01T15:59:00.000-08:00

So the first bit of Fallout: New Vegas DLC game out a little while back. What, 2 weeks? Whatever.
I paid 10 bucks, and got about 10 hours of gameplay (I just managed to beat it in one day). When you think of that on terms of other entertainment to dollar ratios it's really worth the money. A movie is like 8 bucks, and will barely give you 2 hours of fun. A book is rarely 10 hours of reading AND under 10 bucks. That being said, I have a lot of complaints with this DLC. I have noticed that I have more complaints with the new Fallout games than most any other game I've played. I see this as a good thing though. When you really use something, really love it, you start to see areas that you'd change and tweak. Not to make the game "good", because it already is, but to make it flow more to your tastes.

So first thing is first. If you have already played the Dead Money DLC, this paragraph will be mostly boringness, and thus should be skipped (unless you really like reading). Dead Money takes place before the end of the game. It raises the level cap by 5, and adds a few new perks. It also adds a whole new area to the game, but a very small one. After the DLC is loaded you get a radio broadcast that points to a pre-war casino out in the über-boonies. You walk into the abandon BoS bunker (finally I figure out what it's for. It was really driving me nuts), get knocked out and lose EVERYTHING just like in The Pitt DLC from Fallout 3. Unlike the Pitt, you'll not see any of that gear until you leave. You wake up to a hologram that tells you that you must gather up a team to break into the casino. If you don't work together, he'll set off the bomb collar around your neck and find new people to do it.

The character I used was my level 30 character. The one I had been using to collect everything I could and go everywhere I could. So I was kinda pissed that I couldn't use my cool weapons. But I understand that the DLC would be "boring" if you walked into it with a million stem-packs and more ammo than you could ever use. This DLC played pretty much nothing like New Vegas did. I loved it! But I also love New Vegas. It's kinda hard to explain but it was a really fun little add on. So the area is set up like a European town. tiny cobbled roads (too small for cars), lots of tile and fountains. It's really quite beautiful. But of course, nothing in the wasteland looks like it did 200+ years ago, and this is no exception. There are new monsters that are a real pain (mostly because you have limited health without your mass of stem packs and lack of ammo caches worthy of a third world country) and this pollution that slowly drains your health while in it. And by slowly I mean "At level 30, I couldn't stand in the shit for a minute without dieing." There is nothing you can do about this. Hazmat suits are apparently destroyed by the stuff (the metal fittings at least. Trapping the wearer inside, at best) so, even if you had one, it wouldn't help. The monsters are humanoid, and wear some form of chemical suit that seems to either protect them, or protected them enough to let them built up an immunity to the crap. To kill these enemies, you need to break of a limb. If you deplete their health, they fall down dead for about 20 seconds, and then stand back up with full health and attack again. So you either target their limbs in vats, or knock them down and blow their head off with a shotgun when they finally go down. Their weapons aren't too bad to deal with at least. They have throwing spears, stabbing spears, bear trap fists and gas bombs. The gas bombs are kind of a pain, but they don't do too much damage and aren't used all that much.

I'd go more into detail about this DLC, but I'm not here to review games, I'm here to talk about the random crap that happens to me while playing them. So lets go do that!

First off there is a radio broadcast that will set off your bomb collar. So you have to do things like turn of ham radios (FINALLY! They get used for something. They kinda were in Fallout 3 I guess, but still. I've been turning them on for ever simply because I can) or shooting radios on the wall (feels like playing Metal Gear Solid at times). Oh and turning off the radio broadcasts via computer terminals (because some radios are bullet proof, or something). The first time you have to worry about this is when you go to pick up DOG. He is a super mutant (Nightkin) sitting in a cage in the police station. The second you walk in Elijah talks to you through your pipboy (he was the hologram dude). I didn't hear all of what he said the first time (I was busy playing a Frank Sinatra CD in the real world, because this place lacks the music stations. And because Frank Sinatra is awesome like that) and it proved to be pretty annoying to figure out what he meant. I see DOG sitting in a cage, crying or something, and start walking to him. My collar starts beeping. "Oh cool. It has like a tracking system in it or something" is exactly what I think to myself just before it blows my head off. Turns out I had to run up to the ham radios and turn them off. Or blow up the radios on the desks etc. Once I figured that out the police station became a very fun place. Suddenly I was faced with an enemy that could kill me in one hit, period. So I had to really think before I went anywhere. Maybe this is why I had such fun with the DLC. I was fighting a lot more than just something with a huge gun or claws.

Before you make it into the casino, health is hard to come by. You can't sleep anywhere so that's out as a way to heal up. In the hospital the auto-docs can only heal your limbs. Which is huge, but it's not healing health. So things like food became more important than they'd ever been for me. I played most of that section of the game at about half health. There are no bottle caps, but there are these casino chips that can be used in vending machines to buy things. I chose to save them for ammo etc rather than spend them on food. Unless I really REALLY needed it. This really did add to the stress factor of the DLC, but that was really a good thing. If it wasn't for that, it would have been fairly boring (and much shorter). Once you make it into the casino you can use beds, and you can drink from water sources. Thus food goes back to something you ditch when cooler stuff comes along to be looted. And the combat changes more to a MGS style. Now there are holograms that patrol. You get caught by them, and they shoot you with some laser beam thing (and you can't hurt them at all). They don't do too much damage though so it isn't too frustrating.

So I'm sure you get an idea of what the DLC is like, more or less. You can find videos all over I'm sure. They added the coolest gun ever (the BAR. .308 light machine gun, more or less. Makes for a really fun gun to use) and gave some good enjoyable play time. I have but one complaint. One thing that really keeps me from loving this DLC. I feel like it was more fun than the Mothership Zeta addon from Fallout 3, but with a lot less content. It should not have been 10 bucks. So what is this complaint? It doesn't allow you play after beating the game, but I didn't really expect it to so that wasn't it. You can't go back, ever. You go there, build up all kinds of cool stuff and then once you leave, you can never go back. It just feels like a total bitch slap. I paid 10 bucks and I can't ever go back and play around in that place!? I want to go have fun in the Villa now that I've got Stem-packs and ammo out the wazoo again! I want to teach those fucking monsters what an upgraded hunting shotgun to the face is like. Give me a little revenge. But no. As you activate the gate it tells you "you're sure you'll never be able to find your way back to this place" and then you leave. Like that Pipboy on my wrist wouldn't be able to help me get back there. You get to see the Fallout style slide show ending, telling you what each person you encountered will do etc. And it's a really cool ending (at least for my actions). It hints heavily at the next DLC. Which, to me, sounds like DLC that will let you play after the ending. According to The Vault (The fallout Wiki) it has been stated that no DLC will let you play after the ending. I real hope this is not the case as I know there could be a lot of awesome new quests added. Or at the least have you play after the ending, but making you travel to California for whatever reason. But anyway, it really makes me wish I had New Vegas on the computer (and that the DLC was on more than just the 360 right now) so I could hack and go back there.

Scribblenauts

2010-12-16T15:56:00.000-08:00

So one of the puzzles you have is to get a girl to jump off of the diving board into the pool. Well I chose the only thing I could think of that I knew would scare her (and everyone). And planted a nuke on the board and activated it. She ran off the board and I got the Starite just as the nuke went off. Best winning screen ever. Maxwell is laying down dead in the nuked world holding the star.

I love a game that lets me solve problems my way. The only annoying thing is that you either know exactly how to do it, or you spend an hour screwing around trying to figure out how to do it. In the end I find it has the same feel that Animal Crossing did. It's a game built entirely around just dicking around and I'm okay with that, because it ends up working out really well.

Cataclysm

2010-12-14T15:27:00.000-08:00

So I've been playing Cataclysm. I haven't been playing for too long but I've been playing both before and after cata. The new quests are so amazing! So far the best quest was a number of quests I did with an NPC named Maxamillion (spelling is probably off on that). Anyway he is the standard "knight" and his quests show it. First he wants you to kill "dragons" with him. They're just dinosaurs, but it's really amusing none the less. Next quest is "rescuing" damsels in distress. The first one is a male Blood Elf in a rob. The second one is a lady who is up on a hill and he "saves" her by shoving her off the cliff. And then blames me for not catching her XD The next one was the best I've ever done. He wanted to kill the "queen dragon." So I hopped on the back of his horse and we road to meet her. Well, she's a freakin' T-rex. She chases us and we run away on the horse like scared little girls. During this chase it's my job to damage her, with rocks. Yes, I throw rocks at her. (and stun her if she gets too close). The entire fight is something that would fit right into Jurassic Park (you know when they are in the jeep being chased by the T-Rex? Yeah, it look exactly like that) and it's the most fun I've had in a quest in a very long time! After this amazing fight he wants to pray to the spirits of the nearby lake. Well they are hostile to me. So I have to stand there and take their attacks while he prays to them, after which they disappear. You can't kill them, because he gets mad and doesn't finish his prayer.

I've had some other awesome quests. The game has made a lot of changes, and all of them are pretty awesome, if I do say so myself. Since I'm not a level 85 (I don't have Wrath of the Lich King, let alone Cataclysm) I don't know how many changes have been made that far up the ladder. But the game is really worth checking out. They have 14 days free, and I say you owe it to yourself to try it. Maybe you played it before and it just wasn't any fun, try it again.

And last, but not least, FOR THE HORDE!!

Halo Reach

2010-11-28T14:56:00.000-08:00

Because Finals are so close, I'm taking a break from New Vegas. It's too hard to put that game down, so it's best not to pick it up. For now at least. Thus, I'm playing Halo Reach.

I'm not a huge Halo fan. That is to say I'm not a fanboy.I've always enjoyed Halo games, but I've never seen them as my favorite. Halo has however been the staple at any LAN party I've ever hosted or gone to. We may enjoy Call of Duty more as a group, but when you have 15 people and 7 systems, the only game everyone can play is Halo. So thank you Bungie for allowing Split screen and system link. The multiplayer is very well built (nothing feels too over powered. It's not as balanced as Team Fortress 2, but it's pretty damn close). The single player is enjoyable, but rarely does it feel "perfect." On a scale of 1 to Call of Duty 2. Halo Reach brings back everything I loved from Halo 1 (the pistol, the health, the shield recharge rate) and added many new things (the DMR being my favorite). The enemy A.I. is amazing. Elites will walk in front of another that has their shield depleted. Which gets very annoying. The Grunts will often flank. Which isn't too bad to deal with, but it's still impressive. The Hunters will hide behind things if you're taking pot shots at them.

Everything that's great about the enemy A.I. I swear is lost on the allies A.I.
I feel like I'm baby sitting. Now the normal Grunt A.I. [by which I mean your allies] is as good as it's ever been been. They shoot, they take cover, they rarely advance (but they rarely do enough damage to warrent advancing) and are fun to give fuel rod cannons to. The "bad" A.I. is the Noble Team. My word do they suck. I don't know why, they just feel beyond pathetic. You're leader tells you to "Leave the Lone Wolf stuff behind. We're a team." Perfect! I love squad based combat. But then the squad is all but useless. They can't die (which is good, because I don't want some escort mission type thing going on) but they do stuff that just doesn't make sense. I've seen them drive around in Warthogs getting blasted with enemy rounds while I take cover and shoot the enemy. They could get on the gun and shoot but no, they would rather just drive through the enemy. In multiplayer or if you catch the enemy off guard (or are a really good driver) you can kill a lot of guys doing this. Their A.I. is neither of these. And this always happens when I REALLY need their help. I've got two hunters I'm taking shots at. In Heroic I was able to get inside and kinda run around them. Took a long time but I was able to kill them. I really needed my A.I. to be smart enough to attack them from the other side. But she never really wanted to attack them. Just run around. In legendary, in the same area, she only shot at them once. Now this time I shot charged plasma pistol shots at them from a distance. Like hell I was going in there and engaging them, I'd get slaughtered. It would have been nice if she had at least taken some pot shots with me. Make me feel like she was there. But I'm constantly forgetting I ever have a team with me. The only advantage to them over normal grunts is that they don't die. Your team in Bad Company 2 was twice as useful. They felt like a team. I was reminded they weren't really people when they'd take a rocket round or something, but otherwise they felt real and I would worry about them getting killed even though I knew they couldn't. I would have thought that Bungie, who has really made some of the best A.I. I've ever seen for normal NPCs and enemies, would have made some decent team A.I.

In the "last" mission, you're helmet screen gets cracked at least twice. I don't know if it's scripted, I'm pretty sure it's done from "damage" you've been dealt. At any rate, I really wish they had done that for the whole game. Fighting through a cracked face plate made me feel like I was really there. And it is something I'd expect to happen in real combat.

I can't give Bungie too much flack on the A.I
I'm a Computer Science major because I want to make that A.I. as perfect as I can. So knowing it has room to improve means I'll still have a job when I get done with college. But also I don't know how to make it better at this point. I can't say that "They should have added *insert variable* into the A.I. loop so they would just know you were doing this." I wish I could, but I'd have to get a look at the source code. And even then, to think that I could do better than them is a bit too arrogant. I really want to look at the source code to fool around with the A.I. though. That would be far too much fun :P

Lighting

2010-11-19T17:21:00.000-08:00

The lighting in New Vegas is a total BITCH to get use to. Which is good for the feel of the game. But it makes navigating, looting etc harder than it should be. Both the Pipboy light and the Cateye just don't do enough. Turning the brightness all the way up works the best, but that ruins the feel of the game a little bit. Since the buildings that are in total disrepair should have no/little lighting. And if you give them full light, it kinda pulls out the immersion. What I'd really like to see is a flash light put into the game. They have binoculars, so why not add a flash light? It could run off ammo or fusion batteries (The latter should make it last "forever" but I'm not 100% sure on that. It could be a good thing either way). It could also become a weapon mod for some of the guns. The 10mm pistol could take a tactical light or a tactical laser. The 10mm SMG could take a tac light as well. The Assault carbine probably could as well. Even the shotguns (hunting shotgun and riot at least) would do well with these. And you'd turn the tac light on or off by having the weapon equipped and turning the pipboy light on and off. This would make looting dark buildings a bit easier, without ruining their destroyed feel. It would make you easier to find but it could also lower the accuracy (or blind, if you will) any close up enemies who are being pointed at. I'd love to see this added in the next DLC. Or just added on for free (maybe even a quest to make one) because they're cool like that. Yes, I'm very hopeful on this matter. If I had the PC version, I'd take the time to learn how to create my own model and working item for this. But seeing as how I have the 360 version, this is an issue that's out of my reach.

A matter I'm not as hopeful on is adding some new guns I was sad to see aren't in the game.(the wiki is very helpful with this. one missing gun is a full auto shotgun. But I won't talk about that here seeing as how I already have). I wanted to see the G3/Assault rifle from Fallout 3 placed into the game. Since it makes sense to have it somewhere. Seeing as how it was made of to be a stockpiled weapon from before the war. (It would deal around the same damage as the Service rifle, have a slower rate of fire than the Assault Carbine, but have a better accuracy and more recoil). I also wanted to see the Chinese assault rifle. Or better yet a Russian Assault rifle. Which would be found somewhere where some Russian soldiers had infiltrated America (my guess would be looking for Area 51. Maybe to steal military secrets, maybe to destroy it) but had died from the bombs falling. I'd like it if the rifle used 7.62x39mm (and looked more like the AK74 (maybe even AKs74u?) but using the 5.56mm would still be "okay" since it's a cool gun. It would have better range and durability than the Chinese counterpart and have a 30 round magazine. I understand why the Chinese assault rifle wasn't put into the game (my thinking is that they didn't want the Chinese to have landed in America on both coasts) but it still really should have been put into the game. It makes sense that both sides would have tried to keep the other side from launching their nuclear missiles (and bombers) for when they launched theirs. M.A.D. stops "working" when the other side can't destroy you as well as you can destroy it.

I'd also like 40mm buckshot rounds to be added (yes, they area a real round. That's a hell of a lot of buckshot) as well as a 12.7mm assault rifle. Because the 12.7mm round is just that cool. It needs more than a crappy SMG (crappy by ROF and accuracy standards at least) and an awesome pistol.

New Vegas fun

2010-11-17T17:39:00.000-08:00

So I've been playing a lot of new vegas. A lot. I'm on my 3rd playthrough (1st is as I would in real life. 2nd is do everything I can (doing it for the NCR this time) and 3rd is doing everything for Legion/Khans. 4th will be yes man.) and I'm still having fun. This time around I've built my character around melee and unarmed. It adds a lot of fun to the game, I'm not going to lie. I still use guns quite a bit, but being able to just punch something to death is awesome! my next playthrough is going to be explosives. Hello grenade rifle :D

Anyway, I got a laser sight for my 10mm pistol. I preordered through Gamestop so I got the Vault 13 pack (that came with a Weathered 10mm pistol). I've noticed that you can't put weapon mods on "special" weapons. So you can make your Sniper Rifle have less weight, but that rare Gobi (I think that's what its name is. It was on my last playthrough) campaign sniper rifle can't "take" it. This is kinda annoying because I'd like to take the weapons that are already better than normal ones, and make them "1337." Well I figured it was worth a shot to try it on my Weathered 10mm. What's to lose right? If it doesn't work, I'll buy a different one, slap it on and lay it on my desk. Well, this happened.

Yeah. When I'm "holding" the gun, I can only see my hand. As far as I know this is because there is no model for the gun with a laser sight, and they forgot to block it from taking that weapon mod. So the game freaks out and places that huge exclamation mark over the weapon. Which makes sense because, as a debugger, I imagine it would be important to see where a model wasn't loading. And with something that large, it would be easy to find. Holstered the game didn't seem to care (in first person at least) but with it out, it did care. I could still shoot it, just not see it. And the gray of the mark made my view brighter (but blurry). I figured I'd just drop it. Doing this placed the warning over the floor, but there was nothing there. And there was nothing I could find to pick back up. This is the kinda error/glitch I'd expect in a game. Somewhere a person forgot to block the laser sight for that Preorder gift. A pretty simple mistake. The mass of freezing and lagging, is a bit less forgivable. I don't like when a game forces you to save often because it's not stable rather than because it's hard. Edit: Damn, this was already known. Well, it's already in the fallout wiki at least. I hope that means this will be fixed. I really want to put a laser sight and extend the mags on my preorder gift. Make it something I might use

Fallout New Vegas

2010-11-04T16:28:00.000-07:00

I'm sure you've read it already but, if you didn't like Fallout 3, you won't like Fallout New Vegas.

For me Fallout 3 was a very enjoyable game that didn't carry enough from the Black Isle Fallouts. It was still a great game, but I was always wanting more. Example would be when I made a character with an intelligence of 1. i was really looking forward to him trying to communicate with others. In Fallout 1 and 2, if you have too low of an intelligence all you can do is grunt. Which I thought would be funny as hell to do. But you play the game pretty much the same way. You just lose the intelligence buffs, if you will. While I haven't tried this in New Vegas yet (My next playthrough is evil, and then I'll start goofing off) I feel that there is a good chance you'd at least see some changes. It really feels like speech is worth putting points into rather than just putting everything into gun and lockpick stats. Which is how it was in the first ones. You could pretty much beat the game without having to fire a shot. I like this amount of freedom in a sandbox RPG. Each time I can do something different.

What I love about New Vegas:
The Hardcore mode makes it feel more like a simulation and less like a shooting fest. This (to me at least) makes the shooting sections all the more fun and realistic. I will only bother with one playthrough like that, but it was still a lot of fun.

The number of quests. It reminds me of Oblivion where you can just talk to a random person and get a quest. Not always a big one, but a quest. I really enjoy this mass of quests as it gives me something to do apart from the main story line.

The number of guns. They have added so many guns into the game! In 3 you had 2 shotguns. The sawed off double barreled and the combat shotgun (which needed a way faster rate of fire). With Point Lookout you got another full sized double barreled, but still. With New Vegas I have gotten a single shot, break action 20 gauge (which seems to shoot a .410 not a 20 gauge, but whatever), a caravan 20 gauge (over under break action shotgun) and a lever action shotgun. Just for 20 gauge. 12 gauge has a hunting shotgun (love it!), the sawed off shotgun and a riot shotgun (drum fed. I've never shot it, just seen it) and I'm sure many others that I just haven't found yet. There are 9mm and 10mm guns, even the 14mm Sig makes a come back (though it shoots the 12.7mm, which is the Metric version of .50 cal. So think of the Desert Eagle. But in this case it's a gun I like). I also cam across the .223 pistol from the first 2. Which is modeled after the gun from Blade Runner. And it's so much cooler in this game than in the first 2 Fallouts. Since you get to see a 3D model of it rather than a sprite on your action bar. A few guns I haven't seen, but I don't expect to. There were a lot of HK guns in Fallout 2, that I think they'd have a harder time putting in than they did in 98. I'm missing some old favorites but I've got a lot of really cool ones in, so I'm happy :D

Weapon mods. You want to put a scope on that hunting rifle? You can. You want a drum mag on your 9mm submachine gun? Go right ahead. Want your LMG to hold 200 rounds instead of 90? Want a longer tube on your shotgun so it holds more shells? I think you see where I'm going. This is just awesome though! I can put a scope on a laser rifle! I can put a suppressor onto my 10mm pistol or my sniper rifle. It really allows you to branch out and make each gun your own. Some mods increase the damage, the magazine size, add scopes, decrease weight (which also reduces the number of action points it uses) and range. The list just seems to go on and on.

Refilling ammo. Now there are reloading benches. So you can break down those 20 gauge shotgun shells and make them into 12 gauge. Rather than just selling them like in Fallout 3. Or using the pitt add on to change them around. And this way works exactly like it would in real life, more or less. From each round broken down you get lead, the casing, the primer (minus the .22 because it's rimfire. Google it if you don't know what that means) and powder. The powder you get from the .22 is small pistol powder. Which you can't put into your .308 cartridge. And the .308 gives you a large rifle primer. Which can't be used in making 10mm rounds. You collect some of the brass from shooting, but you don't pick it all up (when I police my brass, I make sure to pick it all up. But I guess it's a bit different when the targets are shooting back at you). You can buy each part from shops, but not in large amounts. It's not something you'll use a whole lot, but you will use it. You can't reload the 12.7mm casings though. You can collect them, but you can't reload them. I hope this gets fixed, as the 12.7mm is a very rare round.

You no longer need a repair of 100 to repair a weapon to full. You'll "waste" more of whatever you're repairing with, but you don't need to have a repair of 100 anymore. That Assault Carbine can be at 100% so long as you have spares to push into it. Also there are people in the wasteland that have a repair of 100. I hated that about 3. The loss is the cost. You'll spend 5-8 grand repairing your gun OR your armor to full. The reason this is something I love is that it makes money more worth while. I had 36000 caps, 200k+ rounds of 5.56, 30k micro fusion cells, and over 1000 stempaks in Fallout 3. I had nothing to spend my caps on. But now I can keep my power armor at 100% as well as my guns and anything else I want. Making that 36,000 caps dwindle. Or, in other terms, be useful. it would be like if the XBL gamerscore got turned to real money tomorrow. Suddenly this thing that was all but useless (though cool. You can brag about it. If you have nothing else in life going for you) is worth a lot! I have 12000 caps in New Vegas. And if I repair my armor and my guns to full that's all gone. I can barely turn a profit looting. But it makes the game a lot more fun.

Thinks I like:
Weapon repair kits. Kinda like the repair hammer from obilvion they do a little bit on your weapons. You can make them at benches (making the repair skill more useful than before) and are made of easy to find gear. They are only good for one use, but they are a hell of a lot cheaper than repairs done in shops.

The Wasteland. There are plants (but not too many). There are people (an amount that makes it feel real. It felt stupid in Fallout 3. I'm sure I've talked about this already :P But New Vegas (the town) feels pretty close to a real city (all things considered). There should be more people in the casinos, and on the strip, but it's enough to satisfy me. It's not the main city of the NCR or something. It's a tourist trap for the rich.

The factions.
Gone are the simple factions of Fallout 3. Raiders are bad. Brotherhood is good. Super mutants are bad. etc.
Now you have Ceasar's legion (which is a lot like Rome. If you look back and see Rome as good, you'll probably like them. I kinda do. They get shit done!) the NCR (which is good. but not at the same time. But they are the most good out of all the factions, if you ask me), the Brotherhood (and these guys are kinda good too. But they hate the NCR. You'll have trouble being "good" with both since their interests conflict at times). The Great Khans (which are bad. But not Raider bad. it's all in how you see them). The fiends (which are bad. They are the raiders. But you could be their friends if you wanted to be evil enough). And then there are a few other gangs out there. but few have the reach and power of the ones I've listed. The reason this isn't something I love is because it makes for some really hard choices. When playing the main quest you have to kill the brotherhood. This was really hard for me to do since I grew up (more or less) loving those guys! It makes for a better game, but hard choices are still hard.

New skills system. They took out big and small guns, and made them guns. They made explosives hold things like the 40mm grenade rifle (I KNOW! I hope it has buckshot rounds. That would be so awesome! It has incendiary though so that's pretty awesome) and grenades (both plasma and normal. They explode. They go here) and Fat Man. Energy weapons holds energy weapons like the Gatling laser and the flamer (fits here better than in Explosives. Since it doesn't blow up, it just sets stuff on fire). And guns holds anything that shoot conventional ammo. Now I can put points into explosives and have it be worth something. before it never held enough to be worth it. This is something they've changed from the original games. But it's a good, no, perfect example of what needed to be done. If people want to play Fallout 1, they'll go play Fallout 1! What you want is a 3D Fallout experience. Which means some stuff has to change. This being one of them. Weapons didn't downgrade over time before, but that needed to change. They also made minimum strength to use some weapons (which was in F1 and F2). So now you need a strength of 10 to use a mini gun right. Anyone can shoot it, but the accuracy will go to shit. Which is pretty realistic.

Things I don't like:
The dialog. some people (Like Veronica) bring great human emotions. Most however fail horribly. The hardest for me is the writing or the dialog though. How many times does a merchant have to say "another satisfied customer"?! They say that in Oblivion! They probably even say it in Morrowind (Elder Scrolls 3, for those who don't know). 3 games! Really? You can't spend a little bit of your budget on new writing! And this isn't like reusing voices (where you can argue it's to save space for cooler things. like more guns). Because a sound clip of this guy saying "another satisfied customer" and this chick saying the same thing doesn't save space! Mix it up, please! It shouldn't be that hard for you guys to come up with new lines.

Things I hate:
The glitches. Black Isle was known for making pretty glitchy games. So maybe they have to keeps these glitches in the game, I really don't know. But when I have the same issues with New Vegas as I did with 3, I get very annoyed! When I'm playing and the game freezes. Sometimes it's for a few seconds and some times you have to hard resit the 360. my friend, who has it for computer, has the same issues. Though less frequent. I think it deals with the amount of memory that running the game for hours uses up. But I really don't know. Either way this NEEDED to be be fixed BEFORE it was launched. You can't tell me this never happened in the alpha and beta testing. You also have characters who fall through the ground (I cam across a spot in a train tunnel where the floor had no collisions, so I couldn't go to another room of it without falling through the floor). These I'm less angry about, because I understand that things can be missed. These are tiny. But the game freezing, under normal playing, is just not right.

All in all, if the worst complaint I have about the game is it freezing at times and the people reusing the same fucking lines, that's a pretty damn good game. If you've followed me on Twitter you'll have seen some of my random updates. Which were awesome, but too short to make a blog post. Kinda like when I found the Laser RCW (it's a laser Tommy Gun. Did you're mind just go to Futurama? Good). The first thing I do is drool, equip it and say out loud "And we can shoot them with this gun" and then point straight up and fire a burst into the air. That would be a short blog post, but it was still awesome! I didn't even know that gun was in the game when I found it on a fiend corpse. Which made it all the better.

My first playthrough I picked Boone to follow me around. For a sniper he shoots way to fast with the sniper rifle (the semi auto one). He eats up .308 like I eat up 5mm in my Assault Carbine. But anyway, I have a hunting rifle with a scope on it and I can drop people that are out of V.A.T.S. (Forever now just typed as VATS, deal with it) range in one shot. Well Boone says "Let me aim that for you next time" in a pissed off tone when you shoot your guns at "nothing." Because they are out of his Perception range he sees me as firing at nothing. So dropping people from a few hundred yards away, with one shot, and hearing the ex-NCR sniper behind me tell me to have him aim the shot next time, is just classic. It gets kinda old (wish he had other lines to say. "What are you aiming at?" "it's your ammo to waste I guess" "Well they know where we are now, nice" would all be other things for him to say too.) but I still love it. The random NPCs (mostly NCR troopers) know he is a sniper too (he still wears his 1st recon beret) and will say things like "I wish I had a 1st recon guy watching over me." it's pretty awesome! Makes it feel less like a game and more like life. Which is an important step for video games to take.

I hope to have more awesome things happen, but we'll just have to wait and see. I hope this didn't feel too reviewy and if it did, I'm sorry. It was really hard not to review this game, because I'm doing it in my head half the time I'm playing. The other half is pulling movie one liners as I kill stuff :P

GGS

2010-09-19T02:00:00.000-07:00

This didn't fit into my last post. And I wanted this one to be its own (note:it's late. Grammar errors are bound to be found. Sorry for that). I'd like to take this time to all talk to you about something that effects a lot of us. It really effects me. It makes school so very hard at times. The same with life. I know I'm not alone, and you don't have to suffer in silence. I am, of course, talking about GGS.
For those who don't know, this is Gravity Gun Syndrome. "But Fluffy, what's a Gravity Gun?"
Go fuck yourself. Or just play Half Life 2. They'll both make me happy. Maybe. Mostly the latter. Go google it while I cut myself if you've never played or heard of Half Life 2. Anyway GGS is often seen after about ten hours of playing HL2. As you walk down the street, or anywhere, you see objects. For me it's pallets and those large blue plastic drums. You see these things and thing "I can pick this up with the gravity gun!" and your mind plays out you switching from the Pulse Rifle to the Gravity gun, picking up said object and flinging it at something. A wall. A car. Just into the air. And then you wake up and you realize (as your putting away that pulse rifle that's in your hands. Or wish was.) that the gravity gun isn't real. That you can't pick up that pallet and just hurl it at the wall for the joy of watching it shatter. The best you can do is beat it with a crowbar (if you don't bring a crowbar everywhere with you, the headcrabs will win long before the 7 hour war) and that's just not the same. I want everyone to know that the next time you see someone look at a pallet and watch their eyes go from "kid in a candy store with more money than he's ever had" to "my life is a pitiful shell" in about 2-3 seconds. That he is suffering from GGS. His world has just told him "that video game isn't real. You aren't a guy with a PHD in theoretical physics who just happens to have an awesome suit and kicks total alien ass. Chances are you'll never even get a PHD, let alone a gravity gun." Just go over and tell him it's okay. He's not alone. HL2 is one of the greatest FPSs of our time. And lots of people have gone through what he's going through. He'll thank you for reaching out to him. If he says that's not what happened, whack him upside the head with that crowbar and pray his short term memory is sapped. Because you just made a fool of yourself!
I'm sure it will be the former though. Also, I don't take any responsibility if you're stupid enough to attack someone with a crowbar. It is a good weapon though.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to tell a quote from my friend Kaylie. "Blades don't need ammo, crowbars don't need to be sharpened." They really are the AK-47 of the melee weapon world.

And these are the blog posts I hope to have more of. I hope you enjoyed this! And I bid you good night!

Fallout 2

2010-08-31T02:34:00.000-07:00

I've let a friend borrow Fallout 3 (hyping him up for Fallout : New Vegas) so I decided now was a good time to get back to playing Fallout 2. Fallout 1 was a challenging game to play but it was still fun. I died so freakin' much! But once I got down that you need to save as often as you can (and use all the save slots. So if you mess up but don't find out for 5 saves you're safe) the game was a blast. Even dieing was fun. Because it was always in some other manner. And it was normally through either my stupidity in combat or my team member with an SMG. Which is annoying but funny to thing of somebody so bad at aiming they hit the guy next to them with a full auto burst. I've had the problem (and it's an issue in both Fallouts. But not Fallout 3) of too much loot. I'll kill a group of slavers and I'll get 7 guns that I already have. Then I have to try and find somebody with enough caps (or gear I want. Even rarer, ammo I can use) to trade in all the crap. Well this last time I found a casino (that I normally just ignore in the Fallout games) and I noticed a guy in another room that had a barred window. Sure enough i could barter with him and he was loaded. over 2000 caps (and this area of the game it's rare for somebody to have more than 300). Thusly (Can Webster please make that a word? it's too awesome to not be one) I was able to trade all my crap and get a nice (over 10k) pile of caps. I checked online for a map (I wanted to go somewhere new, hopefully NCR, but I didn't want to wonder around the wastes too much. Good way to die). I had never thought of it before hand but the guid showed the trade routs and said you could travel with them as a guard (I knew this. But I never though "Hey, that's a safe way to get from point A to point B and make some money!"). After a number of tries (between centaurs and aliens it was hard to get down there alive. The time I finally made it we ran into nothing. I'm not complaining) I finally got there and was able to start trading. Things weren't as rich as I wanted but I did learn where Vault 15 was (and vault 15's computer knows where vault 13 is. And they have a GECK). While running around the town a girl screamed at me (I.E. she pulled me into a conversation as I passed) about some guy with a bomb in the power plant. Sure enough some cop was going to blow himself up. He wouldn't listen to reason I had to kill him (he killed me twice. And one time he just blew himself up). he had good loot and nobody got me in trouble so I'm not complaining. Anyway, I left NCR and was bartering with the people outside (mostly the bar) and a speech option was "Your name is *Her name*? This cop *his name* was saying something about you*" She says yes and asks why. You tell her that you killed him and she acts like she's going to kill you but then says kiss you. And said she was going to higher somebody to kill the prick (her words, not mine) anyway. So she gave me the reward instead. I was all happy "I saved the town's power system and I got some more caps" and so I went into town again to buy some stem packs. As i went to trade I saw the new gun in the top of my inventory and nearly cried. An HK P90c (Note: The real P90 is made my FN, not HK) and had a nerd-gasm. (If you don't know what a nerd-gasm is then my blog must be very boring for you). I had another when i saw that it did 12-20 damage. Not only is that way better than the HK MP9 SMG (8-12) it's also better than the assault rifle (lacks the range, but range is rarely used in these games). The only downside is that now I need to stockpile more 10mm (yes, I know the real P90 shoots 5.7x um 28mm cartridge) and that my partner is the SMG skilled one (but like hell I'm giving up my P90!). A small price to pay for one of the hottest guns ever!

So that story brings me to a point. I love Fallout! :P But really, the amount of weapons in Fallout 2 is amazing! Fallout 1 was a lot like Fallout 3. Short game, but a lot to explore. A fair number of weapons, but they were mostly "good gun that shoots this ammo type. best gun that shoots this ammo type. Some rare special gun that shoots this ammo type" where Fallout 2 has a lot of weapon choices (like the FN FAL and the 14mm pistol ("made" by SIG Sauer)) that are the only guns that shoot a particular ammo type. The 14mm pistol is awesome, but its ammo is really rare. The FN FAL isn't amazing, but it's a good assault rifle. Ammo is just really rare. So here I am praying that Fallout : New Vegas is like Fallout 2. Same style of game, but the world is larger, has more travel points, has more to explore, has more to do and has more things to use. As it's been said before (I think IGN said it when Fallout 2 came out. When a lot of places were being critical about the lack of changes) "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." And Black Isle really only fixed what was broken and kept the rest of the engine the same. I could go on and on about all of this, and I will, just at a later date :P

For those of you new to my blog I welcome you. To those of you who have been reading my blog I thank you. And I want to remind you to bookmark me. Scroll through when you're bored. It's better than doing nothing right? :D And lastly I want to remind you that, come November, this blog will update a lot more. And with shorter posts. I'll be playing Fallout : New Vegas and I want to take that chance to really use this thing. Posting all the fun stuff I do as well as how I'm feeling about the game and all of that.