Tag Archives: fallout

Fallout 3 and Gears 2 Review Followups

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I made the mistake of reviewing bothFallout 3 andGears of War 2 before I had finished them. I tend to play pretty slowly, and I was afraid that if I waited until I beat the games, then the reviews would be pointless. So I played both games for a few hours, and then threw up my first impressions, and in both cases, my first impression of the game was misleading.

In the case ofFallout, I said that the game was clever, and perfectly captured the feel of the original. I stand by the fact that the game is clever — at one point, you have to rescue your dad from a virtual reality he’s been trapped in — and the scope is quite ambitious. But honestly, the graphics really started bugging me.

Everything in the world, literally everything is the same dull gray-brown color. Everything is dusty and dirty and rusty and falling apart. Even when you get to the last bastions of civilization, the color scheme only shifts from dirty gray-brown to clean gunmetal-gray. Frankly, it’s depressing. I get that they’re modeling their future on the photos of Hiroshima after the bomb, with all the wrecked buildings. But this is set 200 years after the bomb! You need look no further than Chernobyl to see that even radiation-savaged land is eventually reclaimed by nature. And when you combine the never ending monochromatic scenery with theOblivion engine’s soulless faces peering out of the uncanny valley, you end up with a game world that I really wanted to love, but couldn’t quite get into.

I didn’t realize how much this bothered me until I started playingFable 2, with its colorful scenery and its stylized characters. I’ll talk more about this when I reviewFable soon, because while the contrast between these games couldn’t be more dramatic, there’s several key points where they overlap, and in every one of them,Fable comes out on top.

And as forGears, I said that it was good, but basically just more of the same. However, just a bit further than I had progressed when I wrote that, the game gets absolutely crazy. While the gameplay is nothing different, and there were a few points where I got frustrated, the sheer scale and insanity of the boss fights more than redeems the game. Plus, I hate to say it, but as thin as the plot normally is, they managed to drop a pretty interesting twist towards the end that has me looking forward to the next installment.

Fallout 3 First Impressions

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Fallout 3 Washington Monument

I’ve only played for a few hours, and I’ve only made it a few hundred feet outside the Vault so far, but what I’ve seen, I like very much. The character creation system is clever, starting you out as a baby, and learning how to move around and interact with people. Eventually you take an aptitude test which helps determine which skills you start with. Most important though, is I think they nailed the feel of the original games. It feels a little strange bolted onto the Oblivion engine, but they’ve done a good job of adapting it to allow shooting. The shooting is not quite as fluid as a dedicated game like Halo, but it definitely works, and the addition of VATS for RPG-like targeting works well, and the results are often hilarious, just like the original games. I can’t wait to play more.

Fallout

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Power Armor

The teaser trailer for Fallout 3 is like a love letter from Bethesda to the fans of the series. It’s a clear communication that we don’t need to worry. They get it. The music and the post-apocalyptic scene show us that they understand the look and feel of this world. The power armor and the posters with Vaultboy show us that they understand the style of this world. And Ron Perlman’s return for the now famous “War” intro shows us that they still respect the first two games.

When I heard that Bethesda got the license, I was nervous. Most of the guys who made Fallout 1 and 2 great have moved on to Obsidian Entertainment, and while I enjoyed Morrowind and Oblivion, I didn’t love them, and I haven’t really liked anything else Bethesda has done.

But this trailer gives me hope. A new Fallout game, ready to run on modern technology? It’s very exciting.

In fact, it motivated me to reinstall and replay Fallout 1 and 2, which proved to be much more difficult than I would have thought. Turns out that running games from the mid-90s is tricky.

First attempt, I just tried to install the games under XP. With a lot of messing around in the forums, I did finally get it working, but it required that I disable my video card and all my startup items. Not acceptable in the long term.

Next, I tried to install Windows 98 using Virtual PC. That didn’t work either, however. Something about the way Virtual PC emulated things caused the mouse to be completely unusable.

In the end, what I did was install Windows XP on Virtual PC. Then I made a shortcut to the game and set it to run in Windows 95 compatability mode in 640×480 resolution at 256 colors. To avoid the mouse problem, I had to turn off the integrated mouse pointer option. That all worked fine, but when I tried to go full-screen to play the game, my screen went blank. Turns out that Virtual PC tries to adjust the guest system to the host system’s resolution in fullscreen. So I had to manually set my Virtual PC to 640×480/256 by hand, and then tell it to use the guest system’s resolution instead of the host. Once I did all that, everything worked fine, and I was playing Fallout again!

I’m happy, but it was still WAY more work than it should have been. When I told Sean about this, he had a brilliant idea. Just like Xbox Live has the Xbox Live Arcade so you can download classic arcade games like Frogger and Street Fighter, Games for Windows Live should have an arcade where you can download classic PC games and have them run flawlessly. If I could get games like Syndicate, Fallout, and Planescape: Torment working as easily as the games on my Xbox, I would pay for an account in a heartbeat.

A Vacation Before Job Hunting

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Once I got to Portland, I decided to allow myself a vacation before I start seriously job hunting. It’s been pretty nice, just goofing off all day. I’ve been staying up until 2 in the morning and getting up at Noon. My days have consisted of nothing but reading comic books I borrowed from my brother Sean and playing computer games. Since I can’t afford a new game right now, I borrowed Sean’s copy of Fallout, an RPG based in a post-apocalyptic future. It’s a surprisingly cool game considering it’s not very new, and I’ve just about beaten it, which is good, since I’m completely bankrupt. As much as I hate job-hunting, I hate not having money even more, so here I go! Wish me luck finding that perfect web design job, or at least avoiding McDonald’s.