DJLaoD and JY adventures season 1 episode 1

Publishing on my dead blog that I have not written in for years. Will we make more videos? Will we make at least ten for season 1? Will anyone watch and subscribe?

Nobody knows. But I must try.

In this episode we do a relatively uneventful playthrough of dwarf fortress where I help DJLaoD on his base. Note I am not that much more knowledgeable about dwarf fortress, having only just started recently. Nothing too exciting happens, except for our exciting back and forth banter.

dwarf fortress

I been wanting to play dwarf fortress for years, after having read so much about it. Ten years ago I downloaded it, created a world, tried to follow along with the tutorial on DF wiki. There was a section on how to dig a stairway down into the earth, and a wall of text describing how up/down stairs worked. I couldn't figure it out and promptly gave up for another decade. In retrospect the up/down stairs is not that complicated.

However, after reading the O Reilly dwarf fortress book and the PeridexisErrant's DF Walkthrough, I have no idea why the DF wiki back then started off with up/down stairs. It made way more sense for any tutorials to start off with immediately excavating rooms instead of directing the player to dig down. There's enough to do without having a brand new player figure out that dwarf fortress is a 3D game that you navigate/manage via 2D z-level cross sections.

So after the traumatizing experience, I abandoned dwarf fortress for almost a decade. Since that time, I switched from slinging code on a Microsoft tech stack to Linux, where I grew far more comfortable with a command line interface. I downloaded angband and began to get comfortable and even love ASCII interfaces. But it still seemed too daunting to play. This year though, I decide it was now or never. Especially because my wife was pregnant and if I didn't at least figure out the basics before the kid popped out, it'd probably be another decade before I overcame the dread of overcoming the learning curve.

So while on a vacation to Spain, I purchased the O Reilly Dwarf Fortress guide ebook and read it on the flight there and back.  Upon my return, I felt like I had a solid enough grasp of the starting mechanics and began. I followed the book as close as possible, supplementing it with PeridexisErrant's excellent walkthrough guide. This time around, I downloaded lazy newb pack. The name made it sound like it was optional, however, the online guides made it clear that this was mandatory. I soon learned why.

I found a nice safe area with low savagery, lots of trees, a river, a warm climate, and a nearby hill with which I could start mining out my starting area. Pretty soon I had a dormitory setup, a trade depot, and some basic workshops, a still for booze, a pasture, and some farm plots. For my first playthrough, I didn't use any tileset, and stuck with ASCII so I could revel in all its glory, beauty, and badassery.

A years into the game I had a few dozen migrants. I had expanded below to a second floor housing a tavern, noble quarters, sleeping areas for the common rabble, a kitchen area, temple, library, and bar. The third floor contained stockpiles and metalsmithing workshops. The fourth floor contained what would be the new noble quarters, that contained fancier and bigger rooms.

During this time one of my dwarves entered into a strange mood. But he needed yarn, and I didn't have any! Apparently this needed wool sheared from one of three animal types. An alpaca was an acceptable source of wool, but I only had only just rangled a baby alpaca into my pasture. So my dwarf went mad and left the fortress, gibbering in the wilderness before dying of starvation and dehydration. Sadly, a few months later, his wife had given birth to a baby.

This was one of those emergent moments that Dwarf Fortress was renowned for. It made me feel sad. And then it got worse. A werecoyote appeared and immediately attacked a nearby hunter. He slashed and clawed at the hunter, tearing open a gaping wound in the hunter's leg. By pure luck or desperation, my hunter landed a critical hit headshot on the werecoyote. He was brutally crippled and maimed and could no longer walk. I quickly forgot about him as I hastily began reading the tutorial section on building a military so I would be more prepared in the future.

I suddenly remembered my hunter and began looking up how to construct a hospital to treat his wounds. I began carving out a hospital section on the ground floor. And then he turned feral.

He bit two citizens before being dispatched. At this point after googling frantically I realized that werecoyotes infected dwarves if their bite managed to pierce flesh. CRAP. I had two infected. One was a miner, and the other was a broker. I quickly googled various ways to kill dwarves. I decided I would wall in the miner, who was crippled and unable to move. I did so but then due to how dwarves construct stuff, I realized I had walled him in with another one of my dwarves. This one was a dwarf who had built my first artifact ever in the fortress. I didn't have the heart to sacrifice him, and ordered the walls torn down.

Later, this infected dwarf slept in his bedroom with his wife. Again, I had a chance to wall him in forever, but didn't have the heart to sacrifice his wife as well. As I would soon find out, such idealistic decisions would cost my fortress dearly.

Meanwhile the broker was happily frollicking around my fortress and I did not have any answers.

Frantically, I tried to build an "atom smasher". A drawbridge will smash anything beneath it once lowered. Using this mechanic, a death chamber can be built by having a dwarf pull a switch conveniently placed next to the drawbridge on repeat, and then designating only that dwarf to be able to pull the switch. But I struggled ordering my infected dwarves to go and pull the switch. They wanted to get drunk instead (Apparently, utilizing burrows or assigning the dwarf to a squad and using move command is the right way to do it). Before I knew it, it was a full moon again. The miner that I did not wish to wall in with his wife became feral and immediately tore into a baby, ripping it to shreds, bashing it against the floor over and over. The miner was finally taken down, but not before inflicting terrible, terrible damage.

Meanwhile the broker went on a rampage as well. She too targeted a baby, Erush's baby, the widow who had already lost her husband. Erush, a ranger rushed to help, but was helpless as the broker tore into the baby, who cried out for "mama" before its skull was crushed. Erush fought valiantly, but was taken down by the broker's superior grappling skills and then maimed to death. As I read the combat logs (hitting r in the logs) and the list of combat (by hitting a for announcements) i felt sick to my stomach. Multiple dead babies, children, and civilians, and many more infected. Worse, the broker had lived through the carnage and even commented about how awful the carnage was.

I tried and failed again to get the infected under the atom smasher. But before I knew it the full moon came and a horrific nightmare scene unfolded as feral children began tearing into adults. At this point there were too many infected and dead to keep track of. Corpses were strewn about the fortress and dragged to corpse stockpiles outside by dazed and traumatized dwarves. One more full moon cycle and I only had three dwarves left alive, all infected. At this point I toyed with the idea of having a werecoyote only fortress, but decided the logistics of making sure dwarves got infected but not killed was too much trouble. I abandoned the fort in disgust.

There are few times in video games where it was able to elicit such an emotional and visceral response from me. I was sick to the stomach as I read the combat logs of the baby crying out for mom as the werecoyote killed it, the mother being unable to defend her newbown infant. In fact, the few times I had such a strong reaction were during scripted cutscenes in game, never before in a game where everything was procedurally generated.

I understand now firsthand the appeal of the game, but I'm a long way from mastering it. At first, I was pissed off about losing and didn't consider it fun (the game's motto is "Losing is fun"). But then I realized that you can reclaim an abandoned fort and basically resume where you left off (stockpiles are gone and items are strewn about everywhere, but no big deal). Now this was fun! Not wanting to lose my work, I reembarked back to Deepnumber of Weeds. The three surviving infected dwarven werecoyotes were gone! I quickly cleared out all the scattered items, piled up the corpses, and began excavating a vast underground tomb to commemorate the original citizens.

My new dwarves were traumatized by all the gore and limbs and body parts scattered everywhere, but they set about grimly to their task. Ghosts of the fallen dwarves haunted them, horrifying many, but my new settlers were resilient. Pretty soon it became a bustling metropolis again of over a hundred dwarves. Still, I look out to the horizon and await the return of any werecoyotes. This time I will be ready. Or maybe not. Probably not. I think the atom smasher is working now.

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.

Scratches Directors Cut zomg tedious

I suck at adventure games. The second I am stumped by a puzzle I quickly lose interest and give up. As a result, I tend to avoid them. But every so often I like to go to the store and browse the adventure section. I like the shiny boxes (oooh), the intriguing descriptions, and the pretty screenshots. It always captures my imagination. So when I saw Scratches, it seemed like an interesting enough game. Some writer dude named Michael Arthate moves into an old Victorian manor named the Blackwood manor, and begins to hear strange scratching noises at night. Seemed like a great haunted house story. Plus the reviews were fairly positive. I waited about a year for the price to drop to 5$ and finally snagged it in the bargain section, which is where I knew it'd quickly end up. lol

I failed miserably at the game. I'm sure people who grew up on point and click adventure games would love it. The last point and click adventure game that I beat were the Hugo games from the 90s (Hugos house of horrors, Wuhodunit, Jungle of Doom). So I was badly outclassed and out of practice. The game dumps you in the middle of the house with little to no guidance on what to do. The biggest puzzle often times is just figuring out what to do next. I quickly gave up and just used various online walkthroughs.

The interface is a little difficult, as you have to click to move around a room. That's fine, but sometimes just trying to reach the door is a struggle, because it often takes multiple clicks. The game is strict when it comes to movement: you have to click on a precise spot on the screen to move your character around. Simply clicking somewhere in the general vicinity of where you want to move is not allowed. In fact, it took me an embarassingly long time to figure out how to even enter the house. The game starts you off at the gates to the manor, and I intuitively clicked on the house up front, but it wouldn't move me forward. At first I thought that I had to use some other means to move myself in the game, so I tried to find a manual (the 5$ version had none, and I couldn't find one online either). After giving up and beating all the campaigns in Heroes 3 of might and magic: Armageddon's Blade expansion pack instead, I eventually realized that I needed to click on the side of the screen, which took me to the fountain, and only then could I click on the house, which brought me to the door, which I then needed to click as well, in order to be rewarded with an annoying door opening animation. There is no way to skip the door animation as far as I can tell. The game has a lot of doors. This equals a lot of clicking and animating. It got tedious. Fast.

The puzzles as I said are hard, because like all adventure games, it is incredibly nonlinear and open. Some hints would have been nice. The UI makes it even more difficult. The game changes cursors when you can and cannot interact with an object. Due to the fact that you can NOT interact with most of the items in the game, its easy to miss things. I didn't even realize you could open drawers until I read the walkthrough. Even after I managed to open the drawers, I still missed key items inside certain ones. The game essentially forces you to go through every room with a fine tooth comb to make sure you didn't miss anything important. I guess this is standard fare in adventure games, but in Season 1 of Sam and Max, it didn't feel nearly as tedious and it was much more obvious what I could and could not interact with.

Even after picking up every item, you still have no clue where the hell to go. The game is divided up into "days", and you cannot advance to the next day until you have completed all the specific tasks for that day. I had hints turned on, and I still got zero guidance on what to do next. Every time I entered a new area in the game, I had no idea as to whether or not I was "done" there. Granted I suck at adventure games, but it feels like the game should have had a more logical flow to it. For example, after chatting on the phone with one of the other characters, he tells you its time to leave the house, but you insist on staying. At this point, you are supposed to exit the house through the front door to trigger a scene that progresses the game. But there is no real logical reason to exit the house, because you just spent the last few minutes arguing on the phone about wanting to stay inside and solve the mystery! One could easily have spent the entire time wandering around inside the house trying to figure out what to do next.

The story and atmosphere is the game's strongest plus. After I resorted to using the walkthrough, I still enjoyed playing through the game. It became like watching a movie at this point, since I realized it'd take forever to figure the damn thing out on my own. Sadly, the game was not as scary as I was hoping. Compared to Doom 3, or Clive Barker's Undying, or Call of Cthulhu, this game didn't really get my heart pumping. It does manage to set a chilling mood through its music and dreary atmosphere.



And there are plenty of Lovecraft references, from a copy of the Necronomicon in the study, the De Vermis Mysteriis in the chapel, and a painting of Cthulhu on the second floor, and any game that pays homage to my favorite horror author is good in my book. But the "boo" moments that are intended to scare the player seemed kind of cheesy to me: The game quickly switches to a cutscene and then a "bad guy" will pop out from nowhere. But the awkward switch to cutscene gives it away. This, combined with the grainy quality of the cutscenes and the cheezy accompanying music tend to cheapen the experience. Furthermore, not a whole lot actually happens during your stay. Its relatively uneventful, at least compared with other horror games. However, the story is what made this game worth it for me. And despite the Lovecraft references, this game is not a part of the Cthulhu mythos. It manages to mantain its own uniqueness. It is the tale about a man, James Blackwood, the original owner of the manor, who comes home from a trip to Africa and ends up suddenly murdering his wife of many years. Unravelling the mystery was a treat, and without giving away too much, suffice to say it is both tragic and chilling at the same time.

So all in all, this is a game that the averange adventure gamer will love. Most of the rest of the population, afflicted as it already is with ADD, will not. I bought the "Directors Cut" version, which added a new game, "The Last Visit", which takes place years later, and is told from the point of view of a reporter trying to figure out what happened. Its quite short , and features roughly two total puzzles (which of course I still needed the help of a walkthrough with). It doesn't really add much to the original storyline so I didn't really get much out of it. However, at 5 dollars, the game is worth it. Even if you just use a walkthrough, it is like reading a well written short story.

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.

RED ALERT 3 GDLK CHEESE

The Command and Conquer series has had a long and illustrious history.    Its trademarks are visceral, mindless, fast paced action combined with cheesy and over the top full motion video cut scenes.   Spamming out units and blowing shit up via weapons of mass destruction is what every C&C game promises.    And boy does it always deliver!    Red Alert 3 carries on the proud tradition of its forefathers with giant robots


ninjas

scantily clad commandos, and war bears.    Yeah, war bears!



   That’s just one step away from bear calvary!    Perhaps in the expansion?     Not only that, you get to build shit ON TOP OF THE WATER!  

 In addition, the game has eschewed its bargain budget B actors in favor of an all star cast.    You’ve got hot babes like Kelly Hu and Jenny McCarthy, joined by legendary actors like George Takei , Andrew Divoff, and JK Simmons.    Yeah that’s right, they got Lieutenant Commander Sulu of the starship Excelsior, the Wishmaster, AND J Jonah Jameson to star in the same game!    Holy shit!    They even threw in UFC champion Randy “The Natural” Couture.   How awesome is that?     The only weak chain in this cast is MMA fighter Gina Carano, who doesn’t say a single word throughout the entire game.   She probably couldn’t figure out how to do a Russian accent.

These legendary actors and models star in the full motion video cutscenes in between levels, and serve as talking heads during the in game cutscenes.    Everything is incredibly sexist and racist, which makes it all the more awesome.  The women are scantily clad in short skirts, high heels, and low cut blouses that expose their cleavage.    To say that they are easy on the eyes is an understatement.    Most of the characters speak in a fake and stereotypical British, Russian, or Japanese accent.   Normally the bane of straight to DVD movies (Hi Mummy 3: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor), these accents are entirely appropriate in this context.   What makes all this campy and tongue-in-cheek dialogue work is that the cast know they are here to have a good time and not take themselves too seriously.   They all went in with the mind-set that nobody would be winning any Oscars.   After all, they probably took one glance at the script and realized what they were in for.

            The single player campaign has your typical forgettable and throw-away story.     It involves the Soviets using a time machine (sans flux capacitor) to travel back in time to assassinate Albert Einstein.   The catastrophic rift in the space time continuum results in Japan becoming a superpower and owning everyone with their giant robots.    In other words, it’s  a thinly veiled excuse to kill things, blow shit up, and introduce a new faction:   The Empire of the Rising Sun.           

Each campaign has a mutually exclusive storyline, meaning that you take each faction to ultimate victory over the others.     There are only nine levels for each faction campaign.    Of course, since the first few levels for each faction consist of your standard “tutorial” fluff that introduce you to your units, this results in each campaign feeling like its over before it even started.    This problem is compounded by the fact that most of the levels themselves feel quite short, and very few of them require longer than an hour to beat, thus missing that epic feel that levels in other C&C games have had.     Of course, since most people play RTS for the multiplayer, this may not be a big problem.   I however, have always been a huge fan of the singe player component of the C&C series, so I was a bit disappointed.   

Luckily, all is not lost.    One of the coolest new features is that the campaigns are designed with co-op in mind.    A co-commander ally will be helping you out on every level.    They are AI controlled by default, but you can find a friend who can play along.     This is a very cool idea, and hopefully more games will offer this feature in the future.    However, the multiplayer implementation isn’t all that good.    Trying to find a stranger to join your game is not easy.     Unlike on battle.net where you create a game and people join, you must manually (and randomly) ask people to join.     It feels like I’m propositioning street hookers in front of the local 7-11.   Not the best user experience.    I definitely like the idea of co-op campaigns though; the idea has plenty of potential.     

Not to mention, playing with an AI ally isn’t so bad.    Of course, once in a blue moon the AI gets into some kind of bad state, where it just sits around and does nothing.    But path finding issues have plagued RTS since the dawn of time, so the fact that your AI ally sometimes ends up getting a lobotomy shouldn’t be that big of a shock (Oh and FYI, path finding issues plague this game as well).   Now, normally the AI ally is quite dependable.    There’s even an interface with which you can command them.     You can order your ally to attack an area immediately with all available forces, or to first build up an army and then attack.  You can also order them to take up position at a specific area, or you can give them autonomy and let them command themselves and do whatever the hell they want (which is usually fairly competent).      

 The gameplay itself is quite fun.    However, one of the biggest problems with C&C (or plusses, depending on how you look at it), is that every game quickly degenerated into a contest of who could spam out more units.    Lower tier units such as infantry tended to be worthless and died far too easily.   As a result, strategy and tactics would quickly get thrown out the window in favor of pumping out mammoth tanks.    However, the designers introduced some key changes to make micro and macro more important aspects of multiplayer skirmishes.    

On the micro side, every unit has a special ability that must be manually activated.      In addition, you get a number of support powers that you can deploy on the battlefield.    Some deal direct damage, others serve as buffs.     They each have their own recharge times.    This provides the player with a diverse set of tactical combinations.     

To make macro more important, several changes have been made, the key one being to the economy: resource collection is now done at ore mines, rather than mining ore that was scattered across the map as in previous games.    Only one ore collector is allowed in a mine at a time, so if you build too many collectors they will get bottlenecked.    What this prevents you from doing is spamming out a ton of ore collectors, getting a ton of cash, and spamming out units.     By limiting the rate at which you can mine ore, it makes managing your economy all the more important.    True, it does slow down the pace of the game, but that was the intention.   

 Naval battle also plays a much larger role in this game.     Previous games featured naval yards and naval units.   In Red Alert 3, many buildings, including air fields, construction yards, and static defenses, can now be built on top of the water.    Ore mines can now be found in the ocean as well, which now makes contesting strategic spots on the ocean all that much more important.     As a result, land, sea, and air are now all viable attack vectors.   To capitalize on this, the developers have made a number of units amphibious.    This added flexibility provides the creative player with many strategic and tactical possibilities.

The three new factions are relatively symmetric, at least compared to a game such as Starcraft.     All three feature a vulnerable, slow moving, long range artillery unit.    All three feature a powerful, tier three naval unit with lots of hit points that deals shitloads of damage.   All three have your standard engineer, infantry, and anti vehicle infantry.  All three have war factories, ore refineries, naval yards, barracks, and so on.    There are enough differences between the three to keep things interesting though.   Obviously at higher levels of play, these differences manifest themselves more clearly. As mentioned before, the unique special abilities of every unit help keep them distinct.   The three factions also have different styles of support powers.   The Soviets have more direct damage type powers, such as orbital strikes.     The Allies provide more buffs.   The Aeronautics upgrade improves aircraft units, and the cryshot freezes enemies.    The Japanese provide a mix of direct damage and buffs.

The three factions also have different methods of building as well.   The Allies use your typical C&C deployment method.    You click on the building you want, and after construction is completed, you then click on the map where you want it to appear.    This allows them to do things such as drop a turret on top of an attacking army out of the blue.   Of course, the building must appear within your base.   The Soviets on the other hand, require you to choose where you want to build beforehand.    The building goes up in real time, exposing the building to enemy attack as its being constructed.    The Japanese have the most tedious method of construction.    The construction yard merely produces mobile “cores” that you must manually move and then unpack at the desired location.    These cores are incredibly vulnerable.    However on the flip side, expansion for them is a breeze, as they can literally build anywhere they want to.

    I don’t play Red Alert 3 competitively, but by lurking various forums it sounds like there are still balance issues concerning unit spam, despite all the efforts of the developers.     Of course, no RTS is ever perfect the first time it is released.    Multiple iterations of patches that address glitches and imbalances must be released before a game can “get it right”.    Starcraft, the national sport of Korea and considered to be the best RTS ever made, is still getting patched, and has been for years.  EA however, doesn’t exactly have the best track record for caring about player feedback and making out good games, instead opting crank out sequels from their cash cow franchises.    How unfortunate, especially since Red Alert 3 definitely has the potential to be a great competitive RTS.    The developers put a lot of thought into how to make it less about spam and more about tactics and strategy.    So only time will tell if EA wants to devote the time to make it good.    As it currently stands however, I prefer Tiberium Wars and Kanes Wrath to Red Alert 3 in terms of sheer entertainment value.

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.