Fallout 3

And so it begins, a mad little adventure in radiation

Stunning, amazing, awe-inspiring. These are words I use to describe myself on a regular basis. But enough about me, let's talk Fallout 3. I won't be using this to reference between Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, but to look at the game purely from the angle of the game itself. It's an intriguing and impressive game given the scope of the development and to bring about what seems to be a sort of 1960's sort of America into a nuclear (don't...) apocalypse and subsequent aftermath of the world.

The concept is this. Nukes were coming and the world was going to radioactive war and the powers that be decided to build a series of underground Vaults to hide people away. It worked to a point. A lot of people were left top-side to burn in the radiation fires and some managed to hide away under the ground to survive and thrive there while at the same time, many other situations arose where the vaults were used as experimentation sites.

Time for VATS, pick your body part and roll the dice to take your chances

YOU! The Hero(ine) are born, literally born from your mother straight into Liam Neeson's arms where upon you're aware of a situation where your mother dies and you're brought up by your father inside of the Vault. Jump forward a bit and it's baby's first steps time where you get to determine all the lovely number-crunchies that equate your stats and perks, a few more jumps give you a quick rundown of gunplay and the VATS system for targeting and attacking enemies, then we've a little situation where you're taking a test... or dodging the test, or just pratting around with the settings. Giving us a lovely little introduction to the idea that you can quite simply talk your way out of various situations and settings.

So you've got yourself a series of ways to play the game. The straight up, brute force method; the negotiator that can out-talk and out-think a ham-sandwich, or the middle ground of being a sneaky little bugger and doing all the naughty things that one would love to do, like planting bombs in people's pockets.

However, invariably the game world decides that shit has to go down, hit the fan and send tits up with a lead balloon before I mix up any more metaphors and launch YOU The Hero(ine) out into the world with a quick pause to double check if you're sure on the things that have happened so far, i.e. This is it, no way back now. Next stop the wide, wide world outside. And dear god it's big out there and very bleak.

The first time I stepped outside I was actually left in awe of the desolation wrought upon the landscape. The damaged buildings, destroyed villages, burnout shells of structures left with the chaos of their scaffolding in place and the dark oppressiveness came crashing down after creeping up like a stalker that stabs people with a knife made of suicidal impulses. It's really THAT bleak looking. Then I happily gallivanted off to go enjoy the world and kill things.

Rundown but stunning to behold, an ugly beauty.

However, this game is HUGE. I can't stress that enough. It's not quite like Huge on the scale of Just Cause 2 scale of games but there's the whole indoors thing going for it instead and a lot more variation in game and plot direction which compensates for the situation somewhat. Trust me when I say it's big, bleak, bad and will happily hand your arse to you on a silver platter and wipe it for you before slamming it back in your face. Because of this size, you get to do whatever you like to do in the game whenever you feel like it, though not as freely open as Daggerfall. If you want to follow the main quest, feel free to do so, if you want to raid some slavers then go do that. If you would like to run around and get into fights with the locals or nearby wildlife, do it! Or just rob the place.

So you're out and about, picking up lead pipes, pistols and getting chased by the nearby gangers while trying to find a place of refuge before realising that maybe you need to go find out what happened, what went wrong at the vault and why you and your father where rushed out of the door faster than Speedy Gonzales with a rocket stuffed up his arse. During this tour of the land you'll meet inhabitants of established towns and be given the chance to help them while levelling up your stats, or hinder them and become a bit of a demonised prick around the wastelands.

This is the sight that greets you upon exiting the vault and it's breath-taking.

There's a lovely little levelling system within the game. Kill something and get experience points, complete a quest for even more. Once you hit the level limit you can then choose a perk and boost some stats depending upon your intelligence and other perks already selected. So you could focus on hacking machines, learning science (which lets you shoot better with lasers...), getting better with light guns, heavy guns, your fists, fixing things, medical stuff to heal yourself and others, bombs and explosives, picking locks and so on. Though it all depends upon what you want to run for and how you want to play the game. Sometimes it's worthwhile going through the game as a smooth-talker and con/lie/cheat/seduce your way up the ladder until you get to the final boss and talk them out of doing whatever they're doing.

On top of this is the karma meter which swings back and forth depending upon a) how you resolve issues and b) how many non-combatant people you kill. Usually. The more of a fuckpig you are, then you'll get roving gangs of do-gooders coming to kill you and claim the bounty while the same is said for the other end of the good/bad spectrum with high level shitbags hunting you down because you're making everyone else look bad by comparison. The hardest way to play the game is be in the middle of it all and remain neutral to all situations. This does mean you can't hire certain people if you're too good/neutral/bad as they won't acknowledge your interests are in tune with their own, or some pseudo-bullshit along those lines.

Act effectively, because THIS one, will end you quickly.

It's a little broken in one regard, I blew up a town and slaughtered hundreds but were still considered to be a bastion of purity because of all the other tasks I'd done on the way there. Thankfully, there are some real brain-benders of situations where it's not so clear-cut as to the best way to resolve a situation. Namely, the Ghouls (intelligent... sometimes... zombie looking people) getting into a well-preserved, prestigious establishment. You could go on and try to change people’s ideas on the racism between one human and radiated one, you could wipe out all the ghouls, you could negotiate or attack the people with/without the help of the ghouls. But whatever is the outcome, it's never good. Situations like this need to be encouraged more often, force players into taking difficult paths with no clear outcome and even going into things with the best of intentions, can all backfire and blow up in your face.

Just a shame these happen so rarely in gaming.

Combat is a bit of a mixed bag, in that you can run in and take the usual first person perspective approach and go in guns blazing, or throwing explosives, or punching anyone out for it. Or there's the VATS system which seems to try to be something akin to Turn Based Combat in Real-time. You get to freeze time, pick a body part and see the % chance to hit the area and the resulting damage it could cause before applying the effect and seeing if it comes true and kill the target. All of these things can be improved and hampered by things like your arms being damaged (affects accuracy) using a weapon you're unskilled in (lowers damage effectively and/or accuracy) or being very familiar with such weapons which boosts your accuracy and damage to 95% and high hitting powers.

"After the last house party, we decided the riot wasn't worth the costs..."

Or blow them up into pieces if you're using the explosive perk that turns enemies into chunky dog chow. The added bonus of VATS gives you a lovely slow-motion effect of the fight while it plays out and if you kill the enemy, you get to watch them ragdoll it to their demise, best done with several rockets and send them sailing over the horizon. It's an interesting addition and comes in very hand in some of the more intense fights, or when sniping something over long distance... with a rocket. The bottom line is that for the most part, aside from the occasional odd camera angles, it is very fun.

I won't be reviewing the DLC for now as the overall gameplay doesn't change for the most part so the reviews I'll bring in another session on the blog as it'll be going over the story and missions and whatever little extras there are but the gameplay remains the same for the most part throughout all the DLCs.

Water water everywhere, and all of it to drink. But you won't want to.

Looking at the core game though, it's fun; it's shocking in the right doses and will happily draw you in with the effective pacing and engrossing gameplay and storylines, marred only by the game forcing you into a final choice that can be utterly pointless and stupid in the end-game if you've characters with you that can survive radiation. THAT aside, you'll spend a long time exploring, getting sidetracked to explore some more, explore and keep going until you've found ALMOST everything.

Then you'll play again to be an absolute shit to the world and become the evil bastard you rightly should be.

Rage

Now for a more modern, more recent, First Person Shooter. ID software seems to fall into a trap of their own making in which each game they make looks nice, looks lovely in fact, is developed on a very impressive engine (aesthetically impressive at least) and falls down with the game in so far as plot/story and the delivery of which. Doom was a wonderful little game with atmospheric delivery, doom 2 was very similar and became and much more action orientated game with cut scenes/text plots. Quake was more of the same but in full 3D mapping and modelling. Quake 2 had the same with more detail and animations in models; Quake 3 was a fast and fluid multiplayer experience of dropping the single-player mode in favour of bots in multiplayer. Doom 3 was a wonderful experience in a technical engine but still falling flat with the delivery of storyline and plot development. Quake 4 was a more open Doom 3. I'm Not going to touch Daikatana, for now... I'll suffer that one another time.

So what's RAGE got to offer? More of the same. But at least there's an attempt at doing something with some plot beyond "Turn up and shoot stuff until everything's dead". Doesn't sound like fun but works well in Doom and Quake, in this case there's more than that available to everyone playing.

The game kicks off with you, Captain Anonymous, unrecognised regenerating hit-point wonder with an affinity for carrying lots of weapons and ammo types, making things from scrap (if you've the blueprints) and mad driver extraordinaire from buggies to quad bikes, cars and more, including able to operate guns, rockets/missiles and weapons from the future (by your perspective). The Buck Rogers of this game, waking up in the future and being attacked by assholes and then in turned saved by John Goodman. (Genuine Celebrity Voice).

With Mr Goodman's guidance, he'll help you as long as you go and slaughter locations filled with fuck-heads. John kills 2 mutants and in exchange for helping you, he wants you to (as a one man army) kill an entire tower block of ass-hats with a crusty old pistol and some of those bladed boomerangs from Mad Max 2. It's in this first area that a rather interesting element of the game comes to the fore in the form of your regeneration and health. Not only do you have the red-mist of damage descending over your screen, but in being taken down, you can force your heart to restart itself with a small mini-game of push the analogues in the right place, then hitting a button. The more you get right, the higher the health regeneration will be and the more powerful the output, meaning you can electrocute people with your own personal defibrillation kit.

After a while it'll regenerate sufficiently enough to let you do it again. Though oddly, getting blown up with a rocket sometimes bypasses this. But a shotgun round to the face won't bypass the heart restart. At the risk of becoming far more cardiologically focused, I'm going to move on to the game again.

The first act of the game is John Goodman asking you for help, getting you new weapons, medical supplies and opening up routes and access points where everything is very 'by the numbers' in the form of gaming, go to point a, do mission, go to point b, do mission, go to hub b and do missions c and d, get cards, shoot guys with bad accents in the face. It's not until the big breakthrough into the 2nd area that the game opens up a little more (not entirely free range but sufficient enough a step up from Doom games) where players can visit a lot of locations and do very little until they're supposed to be there on specific missions.

Eventually you'll become saviour of a town, move on to another town, save that one too and then go fight the big bad group that has a lot of futuristic tech and beat them at their own game. In the meantime you'll get to play an odd form of cards akin to battle cards, racing cars and upgrading cars (limited options in the form of engines, wheels, armour etc, and very limited in that there's an obvious BEST to have and you'll just use that), stab your own fingers in reflex games, play duelling banjos and do a few missions consisting of turn up to a place and kill dudes. One particular mission is to turn up to a place, grab the things someone stole and kill everyone, the mission provider doesn't even want those things back and you can sell them. So basically you turn up to slaughter a load of people on the whim of some guy who could easily have said that inside location X is a Thing that was stolen.

Great. Freedom to kill based on generic bullshit. But at least it's more of a reason than some other games provide.

The driving in the game is simply a means to get from one location to another because doing it by foot will get you killed quickly when the first cars turn up and either run you over or cheese grate you out of existence quickly and regenerating will get you stomped shortly after again. Though at one point I was successful in running myself over and having to regenerate back into my own car, score 1 for Twit Of The Year. There are races against other players in the online mode or races against the AI which thankfully doesn't do the whole rubber band difficulty thing and if you're a big distance ahead, you'll STAY a big distance ahead unless you just stop still like a prick. All of which gains you tickets to buy more things so you're forced to win races if you want upgrades and forced even more to win races to progress the plot at various points too.

This is never fun. "You must do this before you can kill more dudes!" makes me wonder why there isn't a response of "....fuck off" and then smacking him over the head and stealing all the fun toys before driving off into the sunset laughing like a nutcase.

There's an odd duality in the game too, there's this fun side of the game that's rather jumpy and fun, light hearted despite being about killing things mercilessly and then there's the darker more foreboding side of having to wander through derelict cities and being attacked by the dying remnants of the world's infected/mutated individuals. Some of the settings and scenery really conveys the sense of depression and hopelessness while you're scavenging through a dead city. Given that until a few moments ago you were running around a town pissing off the Mayor and playing games of "my card kills your card", it's rather a sudden twist and the shock can come a little too suddenly, breaking you out of the atmosphere and plunging you into another one.

In fact that's this game, two halves that are one side light and peppy despite the apocalypse and the other just full of doom, gloom and depression and the switch between the two is an express elevator to hell. Almost immediate switches with little build up between and as the game goes on, becoming further and further apart from each other with the darker side of the game taking almost the forefront until you're saving the day up to the cliff-hanger that few will expect to happen.

Yes it ends on NO closure at all. Pods open, you're stood atop a light-barrier tower and ... that's it. No final boss, just a final gauntlet. I'm tired of seeing shit like this in games, where designers couldn't find a suitable ending point so they just don't use one. It's annoying. When the first few games did it, it became edgy, but when it becomes the standard it becomes fucking stupid and unfulfilling. Try cooking a meal, the best meal you'll ever taste, you get to sample the ingredients, slap it in the oven and cook it to the point you open the oven, smell the finished dish and slice it perfectly to place onto a plate and then you leave the shop after paying and not eating it. That's how these kinds of endings feel. Anticlimactic and I really shouldn't write a review just before dinner.

The game looks impressive, not great because we've gone the route of the doomed world in brown and grey, which is a great reason to NOT throw in lush green fields, flowers bursting into colour and instead pretend everything is doom and gloom and slap a few brown filters atop the lenses to make it murky and dank. Movement in the game seems to suffer the Doom experience of feeling like you're running slightly too fast but that could just be down to not having faster movement in other recent FPS games, I'm not going to criticise there on being different, it just takes a little period of adjustment.

Co-operative mode is entirely disjointed from the game, which is disappointing, it'd be nice to run through the game with a colleague/partner but instead you get a series of 'legends' about events that happened before the proper game takes place. Rather than having to bring in experience or setups from the players, the level itself determines the weapon load out, and inventory load out (and places things in different places on the quickslots... Left on D-Pad will be bandages in one level and sentry bots on another, with similar for the weapons too!). Players will have to work together to kill lots of dudes and score points and multipliers to boost themselves up onto higher echelons of video game scoring.

I'd rather have had a colleague with me in the main game, because once the levels are over, there's only the harder difficulty to try and that's it. Co-Op done, dusted, finished and completed. Thanks for playing, sod off, now drive cars at each other for hours. It's a lacklustre addition and while there is the possibility of using DLC I shouldn't have to wait for someone to add it when they feel the need to later on, just so I can get the full experience once someone gets off their fat arse and types a few keys on a keyboard.

I'm done here, now to drive off into the sunset, laughing... for some reason...

PC S.T.A.L.K.E.R

"My Ideal Holiday" by Bodster. Thousands of square miles of overgrown, unkempt, woodland; cities and villages turned ghost towns by the lack of involvement of humanity for at least 30 years; a military presence to execute interlopers on sight; wild and chaotic, sometimes psychic, monsters and mutants; helicopter patrols primed and ready to fire at a moment’s notice; obscure random events liable to kill people at a moment’s notice often unseen to the untrained eye; a blown out nuclear reactor that is working once again.

Yep, I want to be a STALKER.

There was much hype built up around this game "Shadows of Chernobyl" for a game set in and around Chernobyl and Pripyat, mapped and modelled after the real locations and having suffered much of the events of the location but also tying in with an relatively obscure piece of fiction at the time, Roadside Picnic, which I heartily recommend to any avid science-fiction fan looking for a short story.

Plot wise, you are Mr Memory Loss (so obviously you're a fuck up somewhere along the lines, why people can't just be Captain Bland, I'll never know) who has awoken with a burned tattoo on his arm earning the nick name Marked One like it's the biggest and cleverest joke of the century, given the local population, it's understandable. After a brief "What you got no memory? Go do X, Y and Z to learn the layouts and I'll tell you what I remember" sets you up for the big events in the game and readies you in getting and gathering weapons, scavenging in buildings, avoiding radiation zones and the infamous anomalies.

Or... it would have done. But I'll rip into that later.

Your amnesiac self has to travel the "Zone" a cordoned off military are around the Chernobyl Reactor to stop people getting close and meeting death from the anomalies. These being ghostly things that can travel the landscape and cause things and people to die suddenly, bloodily, excessively or cause horrific damage for no real reason. In the book they're described as being the remnants of a picnic left over from aliens (as a metaphor) and it's just the debris from their littering doing what it usually does. You however get to avoid the nasty ones, find items affected by the reactor's blowouts and trade them for bigger and better guns and items or keep them for the bonus factors they provide (Until someone gets smart and gets enough bullet protection to HEAL each time they get shot...nice one for working that out). While trying to do various things like not pissing off the local factions of fighters and survivors, raiding groups of glory hunters, mutants and monsters spread liberally around the countryside, finding out whom you were or trying to get into the reactor to find the grand prize.

That grand prize being a single wish, but the wish granter is a prick, so it'll back-fire hilariously. If you've ever seen Wish Master films, you'll know what I'm talking about. "I wish to no longer see this world in pain and suffering" Bye, bye, eyeballs. It's that kind of wish granting little bastard.

It takes the story from Roadside Picnic and combines it with the real world events that happened in Chernobyl, the anomalies and odd items in the zone, the STALKERS and scavengers that would aid people in finding and selling items while skipping military cordons but the story and film had a lot more suspense and potential than the game does in storytelling, but wouldn't make as much fun to be a game. The overall package however of the first STALKER game takes the more interesting aspects for action and story and combines them to create this game.

You'll travel from place to place, trade your items and weapons for other items and ammo, armour and the usual survival items like med kits, radiation cure and equipment to give you lights, grenade launchers and other such fun things. You'll explore derelict buildings avoiding traps and radiation in the cities and complexes while negating the military turning up to stop you here and there because as far as they're concerned, nobody should be making wishes as it can't be controlled so there's a nice little pro-anarchy notion for your political bullshit comparisons. You'll have to explore how to shut down defences to let you get closer to the big prize and suffer the hallucinations accompanying it while skipping back and forth and fighting almost every step of the way.

The physics engine is gorgeous, if a little clunky in places. Bullets punch through as far as they would through wood, metal and concrete so seeing a guy taking cover behind wood you can machinegun his body into a ragdoll through the barrier he's hidden behind. Bounce grenades off the walls nearby to land near him to flush him out or charge in with a double barrel shotgun and unload your pseudo-penis into his face. Breaking parts of buildings can cause other parts to topple and fall upon opponents and launching barrels via explosions into people to kill them is always rewarding to observe. The anomalies play with the physics even further by occasionally launching you into the air if you wander into one, dragging you into the sky and ripping you apart or electrocuting you with high damage shocks (or heal if you're immune to shocks and electrics).

The story is played through in finding PDAs of dead people you're sent to find or follow a path towards the main goal of working out whom you are and the truth behind the wish maker, which side of the conflict to take and ultimately determine whether to be a shitbag or a saint in the very obvious moral choice system of "nice guy" vs. "scumbagbastard guy". You can entertain yourself with various side quests to kill other STALKERs in the zone, hunt wildlife (and it's VERY wild in some places) beat the arbitrary arena fights that seem to litter free-roam games these days to become king-dong of the arena. There's little here that hasn't been done before in say other games but the stylish presentation and grotty feeling really sells the environment and emersion is... where it falls down.

Originally the game was going to be full roaming, huge area with exploration akin to Morrowind, Skyrim, fallout etc. Vehicles could be commandeered and driven, anomalies would be randomly moved around when blow outs happened (you get only one, it's scripted and you have to be indoors to survive radiation death day), other STALKERS could finish quests for you or even beat the game and make their own wishes. Most of this was scrapped and now you get key "areas" and upon reaching the end of such an area, you get "would you like to move on" and it RIPS you out of the story and game's immersive properties. That said, the game is fantastic at the setup of suspense and horror when scavenging inside the bigger installations and being attacked out of seemingly nowhere by creatures that turn invisible or can rip your consciousness from your mind and throw it back with psychic blasts. Moving around the towns and the city itself is sadly limited by the usual debris that blocks all doors and windows you could get inside had it not been there while hyper-powerful and super-armed enemies are hitting you with death from above, a little one-sided but knock one down and steal the gun for a BIG boost in your fight back.

The attention to detail is lavished lovingly in this game and it shows, even when running around the reactor buildings themselves in the final fights and being teleported through anomalies left and right while combating the same people that tried to sell you down the road with bullshit, gets intense in the final moments and feels more like a fulfilling payoff than the wish making itself (yep, those are bad endings). The final product is so trimmed down from what was originally promised and moved back from the grand ideas and story we were all sold, I can imagine that through the effort put in, the decision to do so couldn't have been taken lightly and would have been a huge blow the actual designers and programmers. You can feel the dedication in the game and the fact it's a fraction of what they wanted to deliver (and videos and demos show that there WAS those things in there) would have been soul destroying to have to do.

What STALKER falls down on is variation. You'll enter a new area, kill a few people, take their guns and ammo and trade off your older guns and ammo, and repeat this with each new area. Once the bigger more powerful guns come into play, you'll stick with those and load up on ammo, of which there is plenty, and keep running and gunning to find new items and scavenge further. There are a few different monsters in the game from large mutants, to stealthy ninja monsters that turn translucent, to psychic attacking gnome/dwarf things to dogs and blink dogs which generate fake dogs. In the bosses, there are a few more ethereal creatures but not all that many altogether. Humans range from military with high power guns and usually difficult to take on, scavengers with lower guns, clan members aligned with their respective groups that will have their own weapons, some will be armed in exosuits making them walking tanks most people will fear but still die from a headshot from event the crappiest pea-shooter. If you're accurate with a rifle and scope, no human enemy will be a threat. Add in a rocket launcher for yourself and it's easy street until sheer numbers MIGHT overwhelm you. Take your time and use cover and there's little challenge here at all.

That said, it's a good game with great potential that was sadly cut short either by meddling from the executives or skipped deadlines. I have heard that various mods can be installed for people to play the game closer to how it was originally envisioned but that takes a little trust on the part of others to deliver that and not to bollocks up your game in the process. Well worth a look however just to see how an apocalyptic survival game could and should be done.

I'd wish you to stop reading but likely my hands will fall off to stop anything else I write ever to be written aga...