Belated Retort of Modern Significance and Cultural Reference

To sum up Stephen Spielberg's creation, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, "Rosebud must have fallen off the wall."

Demoing the New

Okay, after seeing all the good articles about Left 4 Dead on its fansite, I simply couldn't resist but buy it. Generally, I hate online games, but I get the feeling that I'll love this. I've got my demo all preloaded and ready for playing tomorrow, and I can't wait! I mean, look at this Valve genius:



Hopefully EA doesn't mess it up in some way. I love Valve, and have learned to hate EA. What happens when they combine?

Another game that looks like a buttload of fun, but unfortunately hasn't so far released a demo for PC (I hate it when consoles get special treatment) is Mirror's Edge. Just look:



Again, EA's tag. Let's hope that they don't screw things up like they seemed to with Spore.

UPDATE: Apparently, EA Games is only attached to Left 4 Dead because they sell the retail games, as opposed to the fully Steam-based online-purchased version (which is the one I preordered). Hopefully that means the fat slob known as EA won't get its greasy fingers all over a beautiful product.

See The Falls... In Fall

So I had a project in my Photoshop class that calls for us making a travel poster about a local community, using our own pictures. I'm no photographer, and, after the fact, I was very disappointed to discover that my pictures weren't nearly large enough to fill the background of a 11 by 17 inch, 150 dpi poster. As much as it hurt me to scale up an image to fit, which is a HUGE no-no, I've managed to draw attention away (thanks to darkening the background, adding saturation, and blurring the result to make it look intentional), and, I must say, the final result turned out surprisingly well. I'm fairly pleased, considering I went in with no idea what I was doing and made it in about an hour.

Design Counts

Obama wins. As I said, it's all in the website design.

Post-Nuclear FPSRPG

Though I've not yet played Fallout 3 all the way through (due to a combination of generally disliking the completely open-world style, family visiting, and faffing about in said open world), I can say from what I've seen thus far that it's certainly an entertaining little chip. Now, while I have been overly critical about it in the past, saying that the graphics are downright bad, in hindsight, I think that's a bit too harsh. Sure, some textures look like pixelated, blurry messes when you get up close, some walls/ceilings have odd texture mapping errors where a grain of metal, wood, or rust suddenly stops and continues on in a completely different direction, and the characters look about as lifeless and unrealistic as they can be in this video game generation, but overall, it's not bad. Hell, I have to admit that the wasteland looks amazing, and some of the effects (spoiler: like the destruction of Megaton) just make my mouth water.

On the other hand, thus far the game has mostly been about battles upon battles upon battles, which I suppose is the point. However, if I recall, most every battle in Fallout and Fallout 2 could be avoided if you said the right thing, had the right skills, or just ran fast enough, but here, combat is inevitable. At the best, your skills will help you activate a robot to assist you in clearing an area, but the robot can't handle it all on its own, it's just a weak assistant (in particular, I'm thinking of a certain Super-Mart level). Additionally, I was very disappointed with how little a lot of characters had to say, and, for those who did speak, how little of what they said was interesting or important. In Fallout 1 and 2, the world was populated by NPCs who would say little, if anything, with a few scattered important NPCs who had a lot of say, and usually a reason to say it (as in, it related to some quest or another). In Fallout 3, everyone has a few lines to jabber, but barely anyone has anything important to say, at least not directly.

Something that I'm not sure if I like or not would be the way that skills often don't guarantee success, like they seemed to in Fallout 1 and 2. For instance, if you have speech skill, it will give you a percentile roll. Even if you've got insane speech skill, unless your opponent is extremely weak-willed, it's not guaranteed to work. I guess this adds the same sense of urgency as, say, rolling 1 in Dungeons and Dragons, except that skill checks don't have auto-failures in D&D. I believe that, in Fallout 1 and 2, if you didn't have the necessary percent chance of success from a high enough skill, the option simply didn't show (though I could be wrong, and it could have been working with the percentile thing behind the scenes all along). What it amounts to is me saving before talking to an NPC, then reloading and reloading until I get the roll. Basically, it makes it pointless to crank up the skill, unless maybe it "unlocks" some options.

Which brings me nicely to my second point: skill ranks that just "unlock" minigames. In Fallout 3, your skill rank in things such as science and lockpicking simply determines whether or not you'll get a chance to pick a lock. In Fallout 1 and 2, your skill was represented as a percent chance of success, modified by the difficulty of the lock. Here, having one of the necessary tiers (25, 50, 85, etc.) will unlock your ability to play a minigame. In the case of lockpicking, you try to jimmy the lock with a bobby pin and screwdriver. At least that takes some concentration and can be done easily if you figure it out--if you start to jimmy and it doesn't look like it's working, stop right away and try another spot before the pin breaks off. It teaches you to use a light touch, which is nice.

However, when hacking a terminal, you have to guess what word is the password. Well, that's actually not correct, as none of the words are the REAL password, it's just a word randomly chosen when you enter the terminal. When you select a word, the terminal will tell you how many of the letters in that word are in the correct sequence. For instance, if the correct password is "boar" and I pick "four", it will tell me that 2 of 4 letters are correct. However, often the correct letters are something shared by most, if not all, of the words (like an "ing" ending), and you save time merely by guessing randomly. There's no real skill involved in this one, it's just blind luck, and it's annoying. Fortunately, you can exit out of the terminal before all four attempts are used, and it will give you another four chances, but with a whole new randomly generated series of words. Therefore, you never actually guess the real password (which would be helpful and fun, as you could do some guessing based on location, who own the terminal, etc.), but rather some word that may or may not be actually relevant.

Maybe it's a bit ironic that I like random chance rolls with skills, but not with persuasion, and, honestly, I don't mind the speech percent chance so badly. It's that damn hacking screen that really annoys me. And, on top of that, more often than not, most of the options on the terminal are useless (you get some error from the terminal, which I suppose is meant to make things seem realistically broken down, but it's just disappointing after all that work hacking it).

Another problem with the open-ended world is, like Oblivion, there are a lot of places which are essentially useless. Sure, there's usually something of some interest, but I feel like I'd rather have less areas with more detail and worth, rather than more areas that are basically good for nothing. Granted, it's not nearly as bad as Oblivion.

Speaking of not being as bad as Oblivion, I'm SO HAPPY that Bethesda finally removed that crappy stealing system from the engine! In Oblivion, if you steal something, anyone in the vicinity knows you've stolen, regardless of whether or not they saw you, and the generic item is tagged as stolen, so you can only sell it to special fences. Not in Fallout 3. Here, you can rob a store owner blind when they have their back turned, then sell the entire stock back. That is, until they run out of their limited supply of bottle caps (which apparently take forever to come back). You can do this without sneaking at all, as long as they didn't see you, and no one's the wiser. Maybe that's scaling their thief-awareness back a bit TOO far.

If I had to sum up my complaints with Fallout 3, I'd say that the game feels unfinished. There are a lot of loose ends, pointless crap, and boring bumbling about. At least there's a fast-travel system, but, like Oblivion, you have to find the place on foot first. What was wrong with a map system like Fallout 1 and 2, where, when told where someplace is, you'll get a pip on your map, which you travel to on the map screen, but there's a chance you'll hit some resistance along the way, or find a special area? I admire Bethesda's efforts in emulating the authentic "Fallout" feel, and in some ways they succeeded (in the same way that the newest Star Wars trilogy "kind of" feels like the classic one), but, overall, I'd say the game is overhyped and deserving of a 75 to 80% at most.

Don't get me wrong. Neither Fallout 1 nor Fallout 2 were perfect, but they had great atmosphere and fantastic interaction. Fallout 3, however, while it has some atmosphere, tries to make up for its lack of interaction with a lot of plain action. Sorry, Bethesda, but there's a limit to how sweet a death animation can be, particularly when all that happens is the limbs and head separate from the body. Besides, it's totally been done before. Look at The Suffering, to name just one.