Life update and a Fallout 3 review
Dec. 18th, 2008 08:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jeriendhalLife: I must be getting old. My only realy thought about Christmas these days is "God, I wish it were over." It doesn't help that I seem to be finally developing some health problems. My last visit to the doctor he informed me that my colesterol was too high, my Vitamin D levels were way too low and that my heart was skipping beats. So I've got to seriously change my habits (I'm bad about eating my veggies and limiting my caffiene) and go through some new rounds of testing to make sure I'm not getting colesterol building up in my heart. I've got a history of heart problems on my mom's side of the family, so it bears watching, and I'm just shy of forty.
Writing: Not sure if it's the winter blues or what, but I'm creatively dead right now. It's just too much effort to produce something, and I'm not even sure why I should bother doing it any more. My circle of friends (and some family) like my stuff, but I'm not writing anything that's commercial quality, and even if I was my output is too painfully slow to become noticed if I were published. I dread ever putting my stuff before a group of strangers to critique, for fear of seeing it rightfully ripped to shreds. Cowardly I know, but that's the truth.
On the plus side, I finished the main quest in Fallout 3, which verily did rawk.
Summary: You are the Vault Dweller. It's the year 2277, two hundred years after a three way nuclear apocalypse between the United States, Canada and China. You grew up with your father (voiced by Liam Neeson) in the safety of Vault 101, which has remained sealed against the terrors outside in the Capitol Wasteland, which was once upon a time Washington DC. Now your father has broken out of the Vault and run off into the wastes for reasons unknown. Unfortuantely the Vault Overseer's paranoia forces you out to follow him, and discover the secret your father has hidden from you for all nineteen years of your life.
Gameplay: If it makes any sense, this is a turn-based, first person shooter RPG. During a series of vignettes set at various points of your childhood and adolescence, you creat your character's looks (more or less useless, since you rarely see your own face), statistics, skills, and basic personality. Once the action really starts, you can engage in conversations or stealth attacks (like using your pickpocket skill to slip a live grenade in someone's pants) using the FPS POV. For combat you can handle it like a FPS, or at the click of a key switch to a "Vault Assisted Targeting System", using the PDA you're issued that mormally tracks your condition and inventory. The VATS pauses the game, allowing you to individually target an attacker's limbs or weapons, or (more often) just aim for his head and watch it explode in glorious slow motion.
Engaging in combat is easy (indeed, in Easy mode it's usually more effective than stealthy sneaking around) but you don't have to. Play your cards right and design a stealthy character with good Lockpicking, Science and Speech skills and you can talk your way through many of the quests without firing a shot. And there are a lot of quests. I completed thirteen pursuing the main quest, and that's just about 1/4 of the ones you can do.
Environment: Open-ended. Very open-ended. F3 was made by Bethesda Softworks, and it resembles a streamlined, sci-fi version of Elder Scrolls a great deal. Fortunately there's a lot less stumbling around looking for the plot and not as many damned factions to keep track of. While the nuke blasted landscape can get pretty monotonous, there is enough variety in the individual locations (such as Megaton, Tenpenny Towers, Rivet City and downtown DC) to keep from getting bored. Thedungeons subways can get a little repetitive, but then again they're supposed to all look alike. Which is more logical than the generic caves you see in the Elder Scrolls series or WoW. [1]
Karma: Unlike Bioshock's much heralded, and ultimately painfully simplistic morality system, F3's Karma system actually works. Be polite to folks you talk to, don't do evil quests and don't demand payments for your services and your karma shoots up and Three Dog on Galaxy Radio starts singing your praises. Lie, steal, kill innocents and (most importantly) nuke Megaton and your karma drop through the floor. Depending on how white, black or grey your hat is, the ending montage will play out in different ways and you may or may not come out of it alive.
Summary: If you want a good and very immersive sci-fi RPG to play this year, Fallout 3 is pretty much everything you could be looking for that doesn't involve flying spaceships.
Though you will find a UFO if you look hard enough... ;)
[1] And while we're at it, after poking a bit more, the subways started creeping me out. Besthesda Softworks is based in Hunt Valley, MD, and while there are signifigant design differences from the actual DC Metro system (particularly in the turnstiles and subway cars) those vaulted ceilings are distinctive. To see them blasted, stained and cracked after two hundred years of desolation is disturbing to this Maryland boy.
Writing: Not sure if it's the winter blues or what, but I'm creatively dead right now. It's just too much effort to produce something, and I'm not even sure why I should bother doing it any more. My circle of friends (and some family) like my stuff, but I'm not writing anything that's commercial quality, and even if I was my output is too painfully slow to become noticed if I were published. I dread ever putting my stuff before a group of strangers to critique, for fear of seeing it rightfully ripped to shreds. Cowardly I know, but that's the truth.
On the plus side, I finished the main quest in Fallout 3, which verily did rawk.
Summary: You are the Vault Dweller. It's the year 2277, two hundred years after a three way nuclear apocalypse between the United States, Canada and China. You grew up with your father (voiced by Liam Neeson) in the safety of Vault 101, which has remained sealed against the terrors outside in the Capitol Wasteland, which was once upon a time Washington DC. Now your father has broken out of the Vault and run off into the wastes for reasons unknown. Unfortuantely the Vault Overseer's paranoia forces you out to follow him, and discover the secret your father has hidden from you for all nineteen years of your life.
Gameplay: If it makes any sense, this is a turn-based, first person shooter RPG. During a series of vignettes set at various points of your childhood and adolescence, you creat your character's looks (more or less useless, since you rarely see your own face), statistics, skills, and basic personality. Once the action really starts, you can engage in conversations or stealth attacks (like using your pickpocket skill to slip a live grenade in someone's pants) using the FPS POV. For combat you can handle it like a FPS, or at the click of a key switch to a "Vault Assisted Targeting System", using the PDA you're issued that mormally tracks your condition and inventory. The VATS pauses the game, allowing you to individually target an attacker's limbs or weapons, or (more often) just aim for his head and watch it explode in glorious slow motion.
Engaging in combat is easy (indeed, in Easy mode it's usually more effective than stealthy sneaking around) but you don't have to. Play your cards right and design a stealthy character with good Lockpicking, Science and Speech skills and you can talk your way through many of the quests without firing a shot. And there are a lot of quests. I completed thirteen pursuing the main quest, and that's just about 1/4 of the ones you can do.
Environment: Open-ended. Very open-ended. F3 was made by Bethesda Softworks, and it resembles a streamlined, sci-fi version of Elder Scrolls a great deal. Fortunately there's a lot less stumbling around looking for the plot and not as many damned factions to keep track of. While the nuke blasted landscape can get pretty monotonous, there is enough variety in the individual locations (such as Megaton, Tenpenny Towers, Rivet City and downtown DC) to keep from getting bored. The
Karma: Unlike Bioshock's much heralded, and ultimately painfully simplistic morality system, F3's Karma system actually works. Be polite to folks you talk to, don't do evil quests and don't demand payments for your services and your karma shoots up and Three Dog on Galaxy Radio starts singing your praises. Lie, steal, kill innocents and (most importantly) nuke Megaton and your karma drop through the floor. Depending on how white, black or grey your hat is, the ending montage will play out in different ways and you may or may not come out of it alive.
Summary: If you want a good and very immersive sci-fi RPG to play this year, Fallout 3 is pretty much everything you could be looking for that doesn't involve flying spaceships.
Though you will find a UFO if you look hard enough... ;)
[1] And while we're at it, after poking a bit more, the subways started creeping me out. Besthesda Softworks is based in Hunt Valley, MD, and while there are signifigant design differences from the actual DC Metro system (particularly in the turnstiles and subway cars) those vaulted ceilings are distinctive. To see them blasted, stained and cracked after two hundred years of desolation is disturbing to this Maryland boy.
