Call of Cthulhu

I first read Shadow Innsmouth by HP Lovecraft as a kid in high school. It was an intense and riveting tale of horror, and I finished it in one setting. Since then, I've been a huge fan of HP Lovecraft. He's one of my favorite authors of all time, and I'm not just talking about horror either. His enduring and legendary legacy, the Cthulhu mythos, has far reaching tentacles that spread across all the nethermost regions between time and space, making its unnameable, unspeakable, and horrific presence known in all sorts of pop culture settings. So when I saw the computer game, Call of Cthulhu, at the store, I bought it immediately on impulse. It was published by Bethesda, a company that makes numerous homages to Lovecraft in its games, so I figured it'd be a good purchase.

I was not disappointed. Words cannot describe how ecstatic I was when part way through the game, I realized I was reliving the motel escape sequence described in his short story, Shadow over Innsmouth. I was frantically trying to lock doors and bar them with furniture, all in order to buy time for my escape. Playing through the game, it was obvious that the developers knew their material quite well.

EDIT: This post was made years ago, and abandoned because I was trying to come up with the words to describe what an epic homage this game was. A decade later, I learned to lower expectations and just type whatever :)

Imagine waking up in the middle of the night in your crappy hotel. You are in a backwater town with weird degenerate looking humans that have pale fishlike skin and big bulbous eyes. You get dirty stares and it is made clear you are not welcome. You spend the night in the motel and wake up to hear someone trying to open the door to your room. Panicked, you silently walk over to make sure you aren't hearing things. Realizing there are multiple people outside, you slap the deadbolt on and then slide a book case over to block the entrance. Now your mystery assailants know you are up, and begin pounding down the door. You escape out the side doors, and you can hear them trying those doors as well. You slam some furniture onto the front door of the connecting side room as well. But you realize now that all the rooms are connected via side door, and they are all being broken down. Frantically you see your only hope of escape - out the window. Quickly you make it onto the windowsill and frantically try to find a way down.

This is the heartpounding scene in the short story, Shadow over Innsmouth, and the game version of this delivered. Also in this game are mother hydra, shoggoths, dagon (or one of his spawn), and other Cthulhu mythos monsters.

The best part of this horror game is that it sticks with the feel of a Lovecraft novel. Lovecraft was all about the hopelessness of humanity in an uncaring and insane universe. The bleak atmosphere is captured perfectly, and the frailty of the human mind unequipped to deal with these horrors is modeled via an insanity mechanic. Vision blurs, movement becomes like the slurred speech of a drunkard, and become insane enough and you commit suicide. This is all canon.

The only complaint I had is that I was not able to beat the game, it seemed glitched. There is a final escape sequence but not enough time to complete it. After googling I confirmed that it was buggy, and no patch was released, at least a decade ago. I guess this is a good excuse to replay the game.

Serious Sam 2

History is filled with examples of trilogies that fail. The third in an installment is almost never as good as its predecessors, having lost or diluted what made the originals great. The Matrix Revolutions, Austin Powers in Goldmember, Spiderman 3, the list goes on and on. Serious Sam 2, unforutnately, is an example of a failed trilogy. And despite its misnomer of a name, it actually is the third in the series.

The first two games, Serious Sam First Encounter, and Serious Sam Second Encounter, followed a simple formula. It consisted of non stop killing action with a game engine that specialized in handling dozens upon dozens of enemies on the screen at once. It harkened back to the mindless days of FPS, when all you had to do was point at shit and kill it. The main hero is an amalgamation of Duke Nukem, Ash from Evil Dead, the Doom marine, and the Quake grunt, all rolled up into one. Think of a game of DOOM on nightmare mode, and then think of that game on PCP and crack, and you'll have a rough approximation of Serious Sam. The only thing keeping you from dying at the hands of legions of enemies are some fancy footwork, lightning reflexes, and a fast trigger finger.

Sadly, Serious Sam 2 just doesn't have the same feel as its predecessors. The first red flag occured before I could even start playing: A crappily rendered cut scene with bad acting and horrific dialog involving humanoids with humongous bulbous heads speaking in high pitched shrill voices.



Then the game actually started and things got even worse. I began in a village filled with cutesy looking blue humanoids, who also had humongous bulbous heads and shrill voices.



GAAAAH. And that is one of the unanimous complaints from old fans. The graphics had become cartoonish. Monsters and even bosses were no longer menacing, they were adorable. Levels involve cheerful locales such as fairy tale castles and carnivals. The color pallette used in most stages can best be described as bright and happy. Fuck it, here are but a few atrocious examples:

This is giant land:



This is a happy fairy tale village with an ugly villager:



This gross monstrosity is a boss:

The game engine also looked a lot better but it seems to have sacrificed the ability to render massive amounts of units at once. Most of the fights were lackluster. Perhaps there'd be a dozen units on screen at once, as opposed to the original games, which sometimes had a hundred. As a result, most of the fights lacked intensity. Making things worse, vehicles and turrets scattered throughout the game gave you serious firepower, making moderately difficult battles a walk in the park. There were very few parts in the game that captured the original games' difficulty. A couple of levels toward the end, reminiscent of running man, involved a race to finish the stage under a time limit, all while fighting off bad guys. The final level finally ramps up the difficulty as well, culminating in a ridiculously difficult final boss fight. Well, it is ridiculously difficult unless you hold off using a Serious Damage power up until the very end. If you do, the fight is a breeze. In fact, none of the bosses (save for the final one), presented much of any challenge.

The storyline is dumb and pointless, just as in the previous games. However, the previous games downplayed the plot's importance, and instead, wisely focused on the non stop action. In Serious Sam 2, despite the obvious fact that the story is yet another flimsy excuse to shoot things, every level starts off with yet another painful cutscene that drags the storyline (which nobody cares about) forward. Many of these are just flat out strange. One for example, shows a bunch of Kleers watching the boss, Kleeropolis perform a magic trick. Its completely irrelevant and just weird. The guys at Croteam do have a rather unique sense of humor. One can't help but wonder what kind of drugs they were on when they designed these cutscenes.

In the end, I beat the game, because I am a stubborn fan. I admit I did have some fun. However, I, like many others, had some Serious complaints (hahahaha horrible pun intended). The game feels like its lost its roots and turned into something else. That is never something you want to do with a franchise. What you want to do is mantain the formula so that you still have your old fans, and tweak and modify it to bring in new fans. Instead, this game drastically altered the look and feel, alienating old fans, and ended up with a weird game. I can't even find it in the bargain bin anymore.

Fallout 3 is a fine game; haters can die in a fire

Note I will use OG Fallout to refer to the original Fallout game by Interplay
I remember when I first purchased Oblivion and started browsing the Oblivion General Discussion forum on the official Bethesda site.  I quickly noticed that there were numerous hate threads about how Oblivion was a hideous abomination of a game.  The sheer vitriol and bile contained in those posts was incredible.  You'd think that Bethesda had released Daikatana, as opposed to the game of the year.  So naturally, when it was announced that Bethesda was working on a Fallout 3, the shit hit the fan.  The Oblivion haters were suddenly joined by the rabid old school Fallout fans, fearful that the franchise would be desecrated and ruined.  Everyone feared that Fallout 3 would be nothing more than a heavily modded “Oblivion with guns”.

As a quick aside to anyone who has been living in an underground cave with no contact with the outside world, the original two games, Fallout and Fallout 2, are critically acclaimed RPGs beloved by nerds everywhere. They take place in a post apocalyptic world that was nearly annihilated by a nuclear war in 2077. A few humans manage to take refuge in the Vaults, which are essentially shelters in an underground cave with no contact with the outside world. In OG Fallout, the year is 2161 and you are one of these lucky Vault dwellers living in Vault 13. Unfortunately for you, you are tasked with finding a replacement for the Vault’s water purification chip, which has broken. As you emerge into the outside world, you find that humanity has managed to survive despite the nuclear fallout. Although you ultimately succeed in finding a replacement chip, you are permanently kicked out of the Vault as a reward, and forced to roam the desert that is is Southern California. Fallout 2 picks up the story 80 years later in Northern California, telling the story of the Chosen One, the direct descendant of the original Vault dweller. Fallout 3, on the other hand, takes place in the year 2277, and the protagonist is from Vault 101, which is located all the way over on the east coast, near Washington DC.

Adding to this east coast west coast rivalry is the tone of the games’ respective settings. In the OG fallout, the humans were well on their way in the process of rebuilding civilization. People had jobs, hobbies, and homes and lived in large cities with farms, stores, casinos, and bars. In Fallout 3, the settlements are few and far between, ranging from the bustling city of Megaton, to the occasional wastelander holed up in some irradiated, burned down shack barely eking out an existence.

Housing values have gone down since the nuclear war



Outside these living areas is a grim and hopeless no man's land where its every man/mutant/ghoul fends for himself. Desolation, despair and decay are the norm. Probably the best way to describe the difference in the two games is that Fallout 3 closely resembles a post apocalyptic world set a few years after a nuclear Armageddon, whereas OG Fallout is that same post apocalyptic world a few decades later. Ironic, considering that storyline wise, the situation is the exact opposite.

If land were emo, this is what it'd look like



Before I continue, I want to take this moment to confess that I only just recently beat OG Fallout. This was after I had beaten Fallout 3. I know, I know, talk about putting the cart before the horse. Even worse, I haven’t even played Fallout 2 yet. Its somewhere on my queue of classic-awesome-games-that-I-know-I-should-play-but-haven't-gotten-around-to-yet-because-i'm-a-horrible person. So I have not grown up with these games in the same way that I did with say, Doom, Civilization, or Warcraft. Naturally I don't have any strong opinions about whether or not Bethesda has produced a game that has lived up to its legendary legacy. My off the cuff reaction is that the game seems to be pretty faithful to the originals. At the very least, they got the names of the monsters, weapons, and items right. Deathclaws, radscorpions, ghouls, supermutants, the Brotherhood of Steel, their buddies in the Enclave, mentats, buffout, pip boy, the G.E.C.K and more all grace this game. Hell, everything is rendered correctly as well. In fact, power armor has never looked so good!



Although many things have remained the same, just as many have changed. The biggest difference of course, is the switch to a first person 3d view (there is a third person view too, but its garbage and not really worth mentioning). I’ve always been a die hard fan of the old school side scrollers and their overhead RPG counterparts. I am saddened by the death of them, but at the same time, there is no denying the powerful feeling of immersion that can be achieved with a first person view. Fallout 3 is an excellent example of this. The game world is epic in scope and breathtaking in its beauty. Nothing captures this better than the moment you first step out of the Vault and your eyes adjust to the sunlight. A barren yet majestic wasteland greets you. Everything is still and silent, save for the lonely howl of the wind. I remember being awestruck and trembling with excitement at the prospect of exploring everything the game had to offer.



The game does not disappoint in this regard. In addition to familiar D.C. landmarks such as the Lincoln Memorial, the White House, and the Washington monument, scattered throughout the land are little vignettes that give a window into the lives of those who lived before the nuclear apocalypse, and insight into the lives of those who currently roam the wasteland.

Here is just one such moment captured in time. At least they died spooning.



It is a treat just to discover them.  Many do not give any reward to the player aside from a good story.     One of the most emotionally moving encounters I had involved a distress signal that I encountered on my wanders across the wasteland.  The signal was weak and I could barely make out the message.  A man and his family had taken refuge in a drainage chamber, and his boy was very sick and needed medical attention.  It took a bit of trail and error trying to home in on the source of the signal, but I finally found the drainage chamber.  Inside were two rooms.     In the first room were two adult skeletons, some rotten food, miscellaneous supplies, and some childrens toys scattered about the floor.     In the other room was the radio transmitter that was playing the distress signal on loop.    The scene was as subtle as it was touching.  It was nothing more than a collection of various items, and yet it told a powerful and moving story.  It also leaves an open ended mystery that may never be resolved.  Why was there no body of the child found by the parents?     What happened to the kid?    Did he manage to make it out alive?  Was he eaten by super mutants?     Judging by the posts of other members on the Bethesda forums, it appears that this scene made an equally strong impression on a number of other players as well.  Encounters such as this one are scattered throughout the capital wasteland and are a real treat to discover.

Familiar landmarks in DC that need no introduction





There are many more such places to discover, too many to mention, but as a fan of HP Lovecraft, I feel I must make special mention of the Dunwich building. It is essentially a tribute to one of the greatest horror authors of all time. Fans of Lovecraft will immediately recognize the name of the building from the short story, the Dunwich Horror. Inside the ruins of this abandoned and derelict building are a set of holotapes which tell the story of a man named Jamie. Jamie is trying to find his father, who went insane and abandoned him after obtaining a strange black leather bound book (the Necronomicon by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred). Each new holotape is nestled deeper within the ruins of the building and contain the increasingly incoherent ramblings of a madman. The light grows dimmer the further in you venture. It’s a subtle change that I didn’t even realize until I noticed that everything was almost pitch dark. Along the way, doors open by themselves, objects move on their own accord, a flashback reveals the past, a legion of feral ghouls attack you, and references to Lovecraft’s mythos are scattered throughout. Unfortunately, you don’t get to fight any elder gods. The whole thing brings to mind one of Oblivion’s quests, Hackdirt, which was yet another homage to Lovecraft (Shadow over Innsmouth). Delightful gems such as the Dunwich building are just waiting to be discovered in one’s wanders across the wasteland.

This brings me one of my biggest gripes about the game – fast travel. Many angry people complained long and hard about this “feature” from Oblivion. To many of us, it detracts from the gameplay. Fast travel is disruptive, and makes it so that you don’t have to experience and explore all that the world has to offer. You can simply skip it. It also makes things considerably easier. Low on health and ammo and deep in hostile territory? No problem! Simply teleport back to the safety of town! Gone are the tough decisions to make about when or if one should turn back, what equipment to jettison to free up space for loot, and how best to ration remaining ammos and supplies. Countless PC RPGs have done better fast travel systems. OG Fallout let you fast travel, but the further you travelled, the greater the likelihood of a random encounter. I see no reason why Fallout 3 did not choose this simple implementation. Most, if not all, Oblivion haters blame Bethesda for pandering to the lowest common denominator, namely console gamers. They accuse Bethesda of dumbing things down for the legions of stupid kids whose ADHD was so bad that they needed the ability to instantly teleport anywhere on the map. These aren’t my words, mind you, I’m simply paraphrasing some of the hate filled interwebz posts I’ve encountered. That isn’t to say that I don’t agree with their assertions. It’s a real shame, considering that the journey in itself is an adventure and a challenge. Why did Bethesda take such great pains to make such a wonderful world to explore when the simple click of an XBOX 360 controller bypasses all of it?

However, Bethesda does manage to get a number of things right. It really does appear the Bethesda has taken a lot of criticism to heart. Probably the number one complaint about Oblivion, one shared by both fans and haters alike, is the broken level scaling system. This system essentially punished players for leveling up. In Fallout 3, these complaints have been addressed. Although the level scaling system still exists, it has been toned down quite significantly. No longer do enemies gain extra hitpoints, better equipment, and deal more damage when you level up. When you reach level 20, there will be little that can stand in your way. Neither will you face weak monsters at level 1, allowing you to just waltz in and complete any quest. Certain areas of the game will be significantly more challenging than others and are best avoided until you are stronger. No longer are dungeons randomly populated by enemies and loot based on your level, making every area feel like it’s the same level with just a different layout.

Subways are the new dungeons in this game:



One unfortunate aspect of city exploration is that a lot of sections in DC are blocked off by rubble, which "force" players to explore areas via connecting subways. It constrains the otherwise open exploration:



Every location will have a distinct set of monsters and loot – some will even have unique weapons. Sure, there is some level scaling, but not enough to remove the desire to explore or to stop your heart from pounding with the nervous anticipation of entering a tough area.

The open ended nature of the gameplay is another one of the key strengths of Bethesda games.     You have considerable leeway in the design of your own character, controlling everything from the physical appearance to his/her actions.  If you want to play a fat black psychotic serial killer who butchers people with a combat knife and then cannibalizes victims, you can!     Here, Bethesda had a chance to address a lot of the criticisms by Oblivion haters.  Many felt Oblivion had far too many linear quests that only offered one possible “solution”.  In the mage guild quests for example, you had to destroy the necromancers.  Joining them was out of the question.  Morrowind on the other hand, had quests which allowed the player to choose sides, and/or resolve things through diplomatic means.     Fallout 3 represents a return to this freedom. Are you a goody two shoes?  You can join the Abolitionist movement and eradicate the slavers.  Or, if your alignment is more lawful evil, you can help capture escaped slaves and find and destroy the Abolitionist hideout.  Or if you are just plain chaotic evil, you can kill everything in sight.  This is but one of the many choices you get to make as you deal death and diplomacy across the wasteland.

Fortunately, you get plenty of chances to engage in the latter.      Speechcraft and charisma, while ultimately no replacement for a good gun at your side, factor into many of your quests.  Gone also is the stupid and asinine speechcraft minigame from Oblivion.     Instead, dialogs with NPCs will occasionally present you with the option to pass some speechcraft checks, succeed, and you will have successfully negotiated a peaceful solution, haggled for better pay, or convinced somebody to give up some information.  Many encounters in the wasteland however, involve enemies attacking you on sight, which leaves you no opportunity to employ your charisma.     Its unfortunate, but then again, it reflect the situation of a post apocalyptic world: People who are tough enough to survive are often going to end up being violent psychopaths (hi raiders!)

The main quest slowly unfolds across multiple missions that involve tracking down your father who has escaped from the Vault.  The game literally starts with you being born. Ewwww. The intro is part character creation and part tutorial, and in this way mirrors the intro for Oblivion.  In fact, they are so similar that both feature highly paid voice actors who disappear after the opening: Liam Nielson plays your father in Fallout 3, whereas Patrick Stewart plays the emperor in Oblivion.    I’m partial to the whole Bethesda style of openings.  On the one hand, certain sections felt long and tedious.  On the other hand it did give me a chance to “grow up” in the Vault, someething that OG Fallout did not do.  I grew a slight emotional attachment to some of the Vault characters.  Unfortunately, these relationships are severed, as the intro ends with you escaping from the Vault.      Sure, you get to return later on in the game, but it’s only for a short while.  As with the rest of the game, the main quest is open ended. Whether or not you even want to pursue the main quest is completely up to you, and you are free to do it at your own pace.  Unfortunately, Bethesda gives the player a little too much leeway here, as it is entirely possible to accidentally large portions of the main storyline by running into the right NPC or stumbling across the right location.     The Brotherhood of Steel and the Enclave both play a huge role in the main quest storyline arc.  For those who have never played the original games, the Brotherhood are the “good” guys, and the Enclave are the “bad” guys, but of course its not so simple.  While you can’t join forces with the Enclave, you can help them achieve one of their goals, the “purification” of all mutants from the wasteland (purification means exactly what you think it does).      This is a slight improvement over Oblivion, where even offering to assist the main villain of the game, Mehrunes Dagon, is an impossibility.  Likewise in Morrowind, a game hailed by many as offering the player more choice, helping the main villain, Dagoth Ur, is simply not an option.  The ending to Fallout 3 however, is probably one of the games weakest points, and many people felt underwhelmed.  After an awesome super duper epic battle where you fight alongside a giant 40 foot robot named Liberty Prime who shouts classic catchphrases such as “COMMUNISM IS DEAD” and “COMMUNISM IS THE VERY DEFINITION OF FAILURE”...

Yeah, this is every bit as amazing as it looks.





You then engage in a wimpy boss fight, engage in some dialogue, and listen to a few seconds of narration.     And then its all over.   Reactions to the end, including mine, involved a combination of the interweb expressions: “LOL”, “WTF”, “BBQ”, and “!!!111”.      It was a bit anticlimactic, IMHO.  Bethesda RPGs usually allow you to continue playing after the main quest is complete.     In Fallout 3, the game ends once you beat it, period.  This is because you die at the end of the game.  There are some endings that don’t involve your death, but even then, the game still ends. Of course, as mentioned previously, you are free to ignore the main quest.     The world is your sandbox, and you are free to play, and kill in it.

Naturally, the combat system has been drastically altered, by necessity of the switch from 2D to 3D. In an attempt to emulate the turn based combat system of the first two Fallout games, Fallout 3 introduces the Vault Assisted Targetting System. The same sound that is played when you enter combat in OG fallout is also played when you enter VATS. The idea is similar to that of the original: At any point in time you can freeze the action, and spend a limited number of action points with which to target various body parts on your enemies. Once action points are spent, they slowly regenerate when you exit VATs and return to normal real time combat. The body part targetting system does involve some amount of tactics, tactics that mirror those of the original: Head shots deal a lot more damage, but you have a lower chance to hit. This is in contrast to the torso, which is easy to hit, but does less damage. When an opponents arm is crippled, their aim is worsened and they drop their weapon. When a leg is crippled, they move much more slowly. This is helpful when chasing down pesky bad guys who try and flee.



Boom headshot




The implementation has a few minor issues.     One noticeable problem is that it was obviously designed for consoles, as switching targets cannot be done via mouse click, but rather requires a keyboard press.  You cannot target body parts with meelee attacks, which takes a lot of the fun out of playing a meelee character.  Accessing the inventory does not require any action points, taking away a lot of the tactical depth of the first two Fallout games, where trying to heal yourself with a stimpack while a deathclaw is mauling your face off cost you precious action points that could have otherwise been spent putting some distance between the two of you.  Also, you can’t shoot a guy in the balls, something that you could do in the original.  This is unfortunate because every time you target a specific body part in VATs, the camera pans out and shows the results of your attacks in slow motion; it would have been nice to see a raider doubled over in pain, shrieking shrilly as he grabs what remains of his manhood.

Its also important to note that this “chance to hit” mechanic in VATs also applies to the real time combat; An element of error is introduced when aiming.  This is so that the game feels more like an RPG and less like an FPS.  The higher your skill in the firearm you are using, the less likely your bullets are to stray from your crosshairs.  In Morrowind, this resulted in ridiculous situations where despite hitting a person with a sword, no damage would be dealt because the combat system determined that the attack had "missed".  This "chance to hit" mechanic was removed in Oblivion, and again reintroduced in Fallout 3, with much better results.  It affects only ranged weapons and the disconnect is not nearly as jarring.

In the end, the flexibility of being able to play the game as an FPS (albeit with hidden behind the scenes dice rolls), and then switching into what is essentially bullet time as needed, creates opportunities for many tactical encounters.  It rewards the players for not going in guns blazing, but rather being able to plan ahead and switch between the two modes as needed.  A common tactic is to lay mines at chokepoints, and then engage the enemy at a distance, ducking behind cover to recover action points, and using the mines to prevent flanking maneuvers from bad guys.     This hybrid system is well implemented enough to make up for any shortcomings.  Slow motion kills and rag doll physics is a combination that will never get old.  I don’t think I will ever get tired of slamming my power fist into an Enclave soldier and watching his broken body fly into a nearby wall.
In case you ever need the help, you can recruit an NPC who will join you.      Which NPCs will join is based on your alignment.  You can equip, heal, and give them suggestions on their tactics.      Its kind of like the OG Fallout, except you can only have one follower (you can get one additional follower, a pet dog named Dogmeat, who is from the OG Fallout).  NPCs run into the same pathing issues that have plagued computer games forever, but luckily they “teleport” next to you after being separated for a while.  I found that based on which NPC I picked, I didn’t have to do too much babysitting.  Such is the A.I. in this game.  It isn’t bad but it isn’t spectacular either.     Its merely okay.  I swear that I’d occasionally notice teams of bad guys working together, with ranged units taking cover and laying down suppressing fire, while their meelee units flanked me.  This happens so infrequently though that I could just be imaging the whole thing.  I am behind on my sleep.     And of course, every so often the A.I. will do horrifically stupid things.      I remember one particular battle in the ruins of the White House. A huge free for all involving the Enclave, the Talon company mercenaries, and a Behemoth was going down.     I decided to simply wait it out and kill off the survivors.  My idiotic follower, Star Paladin Cross, decides it’s a good idea to run in guns blazing.  She died almost instantaneously.  Luckily, you can bring up the console using "~" and enter in a code to make certain NPCs invincible, which certainly takes the headache out of that.      Playing on console and can't bring up the console command line?      Too bad, should have gone with the superior PC gaming platform.

The character design system has been streamlined. Many people would argue that it was horribly butchered. Many perks, skills and traits from the originals have been dropped. Even more blasphemous, perks and traits were merged. To cater to noobs, perks are granted at every level up instead of every three levels. Worse, the Intense training perk allows you to raise any one of your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. attributes by 1.

But is it really so bad? People are upset, so the argument goes, because your initial S.P.E.C.I.A.L. (strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility, luck) attribute allocation is meaningless, since its so easy to raise those stats later. The player is not forced to make any difficult decisions about whether or not he wants to play a nerdy (8 intelligence) loser (2 strength and 1 charisma), or vice versa. In other words, the system makes it too easy to make a godlike character without forcing the player to make any serious tradeoffs. Now I understand the complaint, and it has merit, but having min maxed the fuck out of OG Fallout, I found it relatively easy to make a godlike character in that game as well. I set my charisma to 1 which freed up a whole bunch of points, picked the gifted trait, and upgraded my stats at the brotherhood. Presto, I had a badass character. I didn’t need to make any difficult sacrifices except for charisma, which has traditionally been the most expendable attribute for min/maxers ever since Gary Gygax invented D&D. Likewise, the argument that getting a perk every level removes any difficult decision making regarding which perks to take is also rendered irrelevant once you realize that in OG fallout, most perks were completely useless. So at the end of the day, while Fallout 3 might make things a little easier, its not nearly as bad as people make it. Really, it maintains the status quo.

At the end of the day, Fallout 3 is an incredible game. Haters will be haters, and some people will never be satisfied. A quick glance at the Bethesda forums confirms this. Of course, as we all know, the interweb is serious business. Every ancient generation thinks the current generation is going to hell in a handbasket, and long for a return to the good old days. This phenomenon is magnified 100x on the Internets.

This about sums it up



Personally, I don’t think PC games are getting better or worse. Its almost silly to argue either way. What cannot be argued though, is that things are changing. Fallout 3 represents a huge change to the franchise. It has been a huge success, is fun to play, and introduces the classics to fresh blood. Hell, an old gamer like me finally got around to playing Fallout as a result of immensely enjoying the third installment in the series. A quick look at the top selling games on sites like gog.com which sell classic games confirms that I am not alone. So while the bitter old fans can slit their wrists and spew bile all day long, they cannot deny the positive impact Fallout 3 has made on their beloved franchise.

Zombie Panic a fun and FREE Half Life 2 mod that offers an alternative to Left 4 Dead

Its feeding time!



I've never been a big fan of zombie movies. I've always found them so depressing. They're a tale of hopeless and despair as humans futilely try to stave off legions of hungry hordes. Come to think of it, I don't really like most horror movies. I seek entertainment and escape from reality. I like it when good beats evil, not the reverse as is the case for the vast majority of horror movies, since its a too painful reminder of what happens in real life.

So surprisingly, I have loved playing as a zombie in the Half Life 2 mod, Zombie Panic. The premise is simple, yet brilliant. A team of human survivors is pitted against a small handful of zombies. As the humans die off, they return as the living dead, and hunt their old teammates. This has been a tried and true formula in many mods, and its refined in Zombie Panic.

The humans have many advantages. They can run faster than the zombies. They can wield weapons and use items such as first aid kits. They have flashlights to help see in the dark. They start off with superior numbers. Their disadvantages are that ammo is limited and it does not respawn.

The zombies on the other hand, can respawn. They have a feed-o-meter that allows them to sprint. They can regenerate hit points. They have zombie vision that amplifies light to help them see in dark areas. Mobile humans will glow red under zombie vision. Even humans in hiding will glow red after a while.



The carrier zombie, aka whitey, distinguished by its pale white skin, has 50 more hp, and has a 10% chance to infect victims. However, they are much slower than humans and only have a simple meelee attack.

Both humans and zombies can manipulate objects such as beds, sofas, carts, crates, and so on to form barricades. Both can communicate via microphone. Zombies can see a list of whose a zombie and whose not, whereas humans have no clue. This leads to creepy situations where those who are still alive will start to ask "is anyone still out there?" as the human numbers start to dwindle.

And creepiness is a big draw for this game. The levels radiate with menace and are intended to disturb. The power is often out, and even when its on, the lights are dim and flicker. Cars are abandoned in the middle of the street, blood splatter and corpses are strewn across the empty streets. Missions cover a wide variety of areas such as the subway, a biotech lab, a police station, an insane asylum, and even a tanker for good measure.









This is a multiplayer only mod with two types of game play. You have your standard objective based missions. This is exactly what it sounds like. Humans have a set of goals they need to accomplish in a fixed order. Zombies have an unlimited number of respawns to stop them. The other mode is last man standing, which pits humans against zombies (who have a limited number of respawns). In my experience, the objetive missions heavily favor the zombies. The unlimited respawns means they can throw themselves at the humans with reckless abandon, forcing them to use up their ammo. On the other hand, in the last man standing, competent humans who are good with head shots can use up all the zombie respawns quite easily by camping in certain easily defensible areas. For example, the police station level has a great camp site. The ONLY way through this narrow hallway...



is through this boring shooting gallery here.



The dynamics of the game are such that they mirror that of a horror movie. Those who split up and go solo are quickly picked off. Nothing like going out on an ammo hunt only to get brutally taken down. Nothing is scarier than going out with a group of people who fan out, only to realize you've been left behind. Or being the last survivor after a wave of zombies decimated your group. But its not so scary that you can't also laugh at the situation, which is one of the mod's goals. One hilarious moment in the game involved a guy asking for help in the church. Everyone else was camped out by the gas station. One other player commented: "Yeah, that guy's dead". Everyone had a good laugh about that one. The guy was soon killed, as he had no backup.

It was an example of how vital teamwork is in this game. Teams who coordinate their moves and actions do far better than those who don't. Sharing of ammo and weapons is encouraged. The more weapons and items you take, the slower you walk. Its an invitation for zombies to feast on your brains. Luckily, a useful "panic" button drops all your stuff and lets you run faster. Good for when you need to run for your life. Different weapons take different ammo, and its relatively easy to drop ammo for others to use. Hence you have teammates asking via the mic coordinating who needs what ammo.

Playing as the zombies is fun too. You are here to reenact a horror movie, but from the point of view of the blood thirsty horde. Your job is give a good challenge to the humans that ai could never do. Because of the speed and reach disadvantage, a different set of tactics must be employed. A zombie must master is to bait the humans into wasting ammo. Zig zagging, darting in and out of hallways, feinting a rush, all induce trigger happy fools to expend those precious clips. In addition, zombies can hit objects, which sends them flying. This includes weapon and ammo. Zombies who "hide" weapons and items in this manner make life that much harder for humans. After a while, a party of survivors holed up in an area must eventually leave to forage for new ammo. That leads to the next tactic - ambushing. Most head on attacks will fail miserably to head shots. The best way to score kills is to hide in various areas, block off the retreat of the humans, and attacks from multiple angles. On well designed maps, there are multiple entrances to a given position, making it hard for the humans to hold. I remember one time when we all assaulted a cabin, pouring in from the front door and all the windows. It was just like a scene from the movies. The humans shit themselves and we ate them.

This is a great game that still has some balance issues. The zombies are pretty weak in the last man standing and fall prey to camping. There are a couple of things that I think should be improved. Zombies should be rewarded damage bonuses for ambushes. An attack from behind should do more than a frontal charge for example. Ideas being thrown around in the forums include giving the carrier zombie a short ranged attack (that could infect humans) that would help discourage camping. Then again, the humans are pretty weak in objective missions and fall prey to endless rushing. The unlimited respawns are what gets them here. One good suggestion thrown out is that the next objectives are always displayed, even for the zombies. This makes it all too easy for zombies to set up ambushes in the next objective area. For example, in the bio lab level, one of the objectives is to restore power down in the basement. Humans are usually too scared to go down and for good reason. By the time they get there, there's a zombie infestation. A good change to make would be to display the next objectives only to humans. The scoring system also needs work. It is still entirely kills based. Zombies and humans however, should get at least partial credit for kill assists. Zombies who regenerate wounds should be rewarded some points for their patience. Humans who give ammo to one another should be given some points for their teamwork. And so on.

The mod will obviously need further tweaking. After seeing how fun the premise is though, I can't wait to try Left 4 Dead.

In the mean time, here's some advice for newbies who want to play as the survivors. Finding ammo and weapons is critical in this game. If you want to learn where they spawn, its good to play a couple of practice rounds on your own. Here are the simple steps to do so:

1. Go to options, and click the box for enabling console commands.
2. Create a server
3. Pick a map you want to learn
4. Once it loads, bring up the console (hit the tilde ~ key)
5. Type "sv_testmode 1" (without the " ")
6. Press F1 to join Survivors.
7. Learn where all the weapons and ammo spawn

Quake 4 - Just like it did with Hexen and Heretic, Raven manages to improve on Doom engine

Since the first Doom game, Id and Raven have always had a special relationship. Id would come out with a new game engine, and Raven would make some improvements to it and release a game of its own. When Doom was released, Raven made Heretic and gave players the ability to fly, use items, power up their weapons, and look up and down. Doom 2 brought Hexen, which had doors that could open sideways, inward, and outward, moving walls, rotating objects, and destroyable objects. Quake -> Hexen 2, and Quake 2 -> Soldier of Fortune and so on. So it was only natural that when the Doom 3 engine was released, Raven would work on Quake 4.

The biggest criticism of Doom 3 was that it was essentially the world's longest linear and indoor corridor. True, the game did create a scary atmosphere that was straight out of a hellish nightmare, but it didn't really showcase the engine, nor was the gameplay terribly revolutionary.

So, the goal with Quake 4 was to show off what the Doom engine was truly capable of. The game would involve waging an epic war with your fellow Marines against the Strogg in vast open terrain complete complete with tanks, walkers, space ships, and gigantic monsters. At least, that's what I remember reading years ago when the game was first announced.

Years later, as I get around to finally playing all these games and crossing them off my list, I found Quake 4 to be an enjoyable single player FPS, albeit with a forgettable and completely un-noteworthy multiplayer (death match only). I guess if QuakeWars had a single player campaign, it would be Quake 4. I thought that the game did start out capturing the feeling of fighting in a war really well. But then as the levels progressed it would often degenerate into Doom 3 solo corridor crawls. I thought, "damn, if only they had stuck to keeping this as a squad based FPS with vehicles". But they didn't and its a shame. Hell, I remember feeling the exact same thing when I played Command and Conquer Renegade back in the day. The entire game feels like its struggling to figure out what it's supposed to be.

Sometimes I feel like I'm playing a horror game. In the Strogg medical facilities, I fought off hordes of zombies in a dimly lit blood drenched medical waste processing facility that store the mutilated corpses of the botched Strogg experiments. My heart was pounding and I was having some serious Doom 3 flashbacks.



Other times, it felt like more of a feel good shoot em up, ie serious sam. On the tram rail level, I'm riding a tram car outside in a big bright canyon and mowing down legions of pursuing enemy Strogg with a mounted turret. A casual, fun and mindless shoot em up mission! The general trend appeared to be that anytime there was indoor fighting, there would be very little lighting and plenty of tense and scary moments, and anytime the fighting was outdoors or when it involved vehicles, it was a lot less frightening.

Not surprisingly, the story is pretty forgettable, but that's ok. Its a sequel to Quake 2 and a simple tale of good (Humans) vs evil (Strogg). Sadly, you do not get to play the hero from Quake 2 who destroyed the Big Gun and defeated the Makron. Instead you are Matthew Kane, of the elite Rhino Squad. Neither Kane nor Rhino squad are mentioned in Quake 2, but soldiers seem to be in awe and reverence of you for your past exploits - kinda like how everyone kissed Gordon Freeman's ass in Half Life 2 - except you have no idea what these exploits are. The opening scene starts off with a zoomed in view of a marine's face. It slowly starts to pan out and you realize the marine is missing half his face. After some more panning you see he's missing the lower half of his body as well. This lovely scene is a taste of the gore to follow. A bunch of drop ships then begin their descent to the Strogg homeworld, only to get shot down by the anti air defenses, a scene that has played out before in Quake 2 and its various mission packs before. Those silly humans never learn.

After crash landing on the planet, you receive your first objective from Sergeant Morris, who tells you to rendezvous with the rest of the squad. From here on out, you will be assigned missions in game from various people. The more epic missions are explained via cutscenes, but the large majority of them unravel in real time, which is great for pacing. I'm not a big fan of cutscenes advancing the story anyway, especially after playing the Half Life series and seeing how it could be done without any at all. Anyway, everything is just a thinly veiled excuse to start killing stuff. Hey, no complaints here!

There is plenty to kill. You've got all your standard enemy types in an FPS. In addition to the standard humanoid Strogg soldier armed with a machine gun, you've got short, fast and heavily armored grunts that engage in meelee. These are joined by tall, fast and heavily armored berserkers that engage in meelee. Their slower counterpart, the gladiator, are tall and heavily armored as well, armed with a shoulder mounted railgun and protected by an energy shield. There are quite a few more baddies in the game, and they will all give you a run for your money, to speak nothing of the boss fights. These involve epic battles against giant monstrosities that tower above you.      




The harvester is a giant arachnid robot that shoots homing missiles at you.     Ouch.



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The Network Monstrosity is a hideously deformed beast that stalks you for the last levels in the game, before engaging in a final showdown with you on the top of the Strogg processing towers.

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And the Markon, who was defeated in Quake 2, reprises his role as one of the final bosses. Good times!


Luckiy, you will have the same bread and butter weapons from Quake 2 to help you defeat the bad guys. You even get access to the lightning gun from the original Quake! Better yet, at certain points in the game, various squad mates will mod your weapons for you. For example, you are able to lock on to targets with your nailgun after a technician upgrades it. Taking a cue from the complaints about Doom 3 about having to switch between the flash light and the weapon, your standard machine gun has a duct tape mod - no more fumbling about in the darkness for a light.
Unfortunately, the BFG does not make an appearance in this game. A shame. Its replaced by an anti matter gun which shoots out this black ball that sucks in surrounding enemies and then explodes.

Squad mates surprisingly are useful. I did not play at the hardest difficulty, so they seemed to be fairly resilient. Hell, they even know how to use cover. Medics even heal you and technicians repair your armor. Perhaps they die quicker in the harder difficulty levels, but I did not have any issues. Hence the escort missions are actually enjoyable, instead of becoming the horrifying babysitting nightmares they become in other games. I would have liked it, however if I had squad mates with me for most of the game. As is, you spend more time alone than you do in a team. Your buddies will often be separated from you for a number of contrived reasons: they are recalled back, you are recalled back, they need you to go off on your own to investigate something, etc. It seems kind of silly that with a major war going on, that they'd let soldiers go solo. I mean, I'll go through all this effort in an escort mission, and then they'll recall me back, and leave him there all by himself? and this is after we had just fought through a legion of bad guys, indicating that this is an unsafe area with a large number of hostiles? WTF?

The vehicles in the game are great and give the levels variety. Its definitely a nice change of pace. There is a set of back to back levels where you get to use the tank, and a set of levels where you get to use the mech. Both have regenerating shields and hit points. In other missions, you ride in vehicles such as an APC or a tram car and control the mounted gun turret, and get to blast away with impunity at the bad guys. Unfortunately, you don't get to control any flying vehicles, but given the restrictive feel of the levels, I'm not surprised.

After playing the game, I'm not really convinced the Doom 3 engine is good at large outside areas. The outdoor levels still felt confined and small, and you can't help but notice all the boundaries and borders that restrict exploration. This is due in part to the linearity of the level design. You're presented with very few choices in terms of places to explore or how to beat a mission: there is only one path from point A to point B. However, because the game is so enjoyable, it really isn't really an issue here. So at the end of the day, it was a great game, but its not something I would probably play again anytime soon. The replay value is especially limited given the lackluster and unimaginative multiplayer.