Reviewed on PC. Also available on PS3, Xbox 360. Developed by Obsidian. Published by Bethesda
War never changes and neither, so it seems, does Fallout. Released in what some would say is a ‘broken’ state, it’s been patched numerous times already in the 6 or so weeks it has been on the market, upgrading the games status to be slightly less broken. But when it’s not “forcibly making you spend more quality time with your desktop,” AKA crashing, its great.
Fallout 3 came out in 2008 and proved that the combination of Bethesda’s experience and tech from their acclaimed Oblivion title was the recipe for a great RPG, albeit one with a few rough edges that occasionally conspired to stab you in the eye. New Vegas takes the assets and codebase from F3 and lets the team at Obsidian run amok. NV takes the balls, runs with its, plays a rough and dirty game but ultimately wins. It’s like a genius doctor who keeps dropping his cigarette ash on you while he operates.
Set several years after the events of Fallout 3, New Vegas tells the tale of a Courier who’s attacked by some hoods from New Vegas and left for dead. Revived by a kindly small town doctor, The Courier sets off to find the men who shot him/her down. Along the way, the Courier will carry out several missions for various people, faction and towns. Choice is big in this type of game, and it’s not just the number of choices that can change the story, it’s the breadth of choice that’s available to you. You can be whatever the type of person you want to be from a saint to a sinner to everything in between; up to and including robiality (sex with droids), near-necrophilia, cannibalism, addiction, treason and more. It’s an open minded game when you want it to be. It doesn’t judge you, but I do, you sick puppy.
New Vegas’s fiction is set in a completely different part of the country compared to Fallout 3, so the factions and towns are mostly different, apart from some members of the Brotherhood of Steel hanging around. The big doggies here are the NCR (New California Republic) and the Legion, a group of Roman Empire wannabees with New Vegas as the sandwich filling both sides are looking to control. Of course, the big boys controlling New Vegas aren’t interested in being ‘looked after’ by anyone, though they’re happy to do business with either side. One of these interests is the reclusive Mr House who drives a lot of the action, particularly towards the end of the game. You can do more or less the same missions from two entirely different motivations (ie attack the cannibals, or procure them “raw materials.” Occasionally when I would need to restart a section, I would try a different approach and the story outcomes can vary wildly. It’s undeniably one of the game’s strengths. Also, Obsidian can do this without going on and on about it in interviews (you listening, Lionhead-head?)
Just like the first game, you start by walking around Vegas but once you’ve found landmarks, you will be able to fast travel between them, eliminating the tedium of too-much backtracking. In games like this, I generally spend a large part of the early game ‘mapping’ the world to get those landmarks and then being able to whiz between them quickly to churn out missions. The Mojave Wasteland is full of fun places to visit and things to do, and in hindsight seems a lot more interesting to traverse than the decaying ruins of Washington DC depicted in Fallout 3. There are casinos aplenty, factories, saloon, bars, brothels, prisons, camps, bases and more casinos. And when you’re done you can go play cards with random traders. I actually felt it a little better laid out than Fallout 3 (I spent much too time in the subway tunnels in that game) and apart from having to fight wave after wave of those damn giant flies whenever I ventured across the wasteland, it’s mostly fun.
It looks and controls like an FPS for the most part with a well-presented menu system. You spend lots of time in the menus and Bethesda set up a very good scheme that works well on PC and consoles. From trading, managing your inventory and stats, it shows other games how to manage a fairly complex system with ease. It doesn’t hurt that the Pip-Boy is rather iconic. The speech options are also well handled as are those for combat which can either be shooter style or use Fallout 3‘s VATS targeting system. I found I used it a lot less in NV for some reason, perhaps because I better understood it or maybe I prefer shooter controls. Also, I had a lot of fun playing NV on PC using a 360 controller so you can tell these guys know how varied the audience for this game is these days.
It’s also a game that’s both easy and hard to spoil at the same time. You can’t really describe what the game is without giving away something that may be key in any playthrough, but by the same token, the choices offered by the game are such that no two playthrough will be the same. I found the intrigues in New Vegas to be fascinating, each new twist was like reading a thrilling novel- a page turner in fact. It’s interesting to see how similar it is to F3. New Vegas is a refinement of that and perhaps the more frivolous Las Vegas setting has allowed a stronger humourous streak to come to the fore.
Presentation is Fallout 3 revisited though bear in mind I’m comparing my experience of F3 on the 360 and NV on a PC. The ageing Oblivion/ Fallout 3 version of the hopefully now defunct Gamebryo engine (thanks Scott). I found the voice acting to be mainly good for main characters, less good for lesser characters. There are a few stars in there such as Ron Perlman, Felicia Day, that guy from Battlestar Galactica with poor depth perception and they put the right amount of emotion into their readings. Where it falls down is in some of the lesser characters such as ‘Generic Guard A’ or ’2nd Mutant Whore Father’ who are either flat in their delivery or just plain repetitive. There are lots of lines they can say but for some reason everyone seems to say “Patrolling the Mohave makes you wish for Nuclear Winter” a lot. Obviously Fallout has nice sound effects and the music, used sparingly, is really fitting.
And it breaks a lot. You can’t review the game without talking about bugs. There were small things like some weird animation issues, physics bugs, mesh issues, floating or skating characters, etc. But they don’t stop the game being good. What’s less good ares the sidekicks who stop following you and the constant crashing to the desktop. It crashed a lot. Probably more than any game I can ever recall playing. But the game is so good, I just reloaded the game to continue. F3 may have hung on me three or four times over 40 hours, whereas New Vegas would done likewise on close to thirty occasions over 50 hours of play.
In all, New Vegas is a great title but a game where the only thing wrong with it is the stability. It’s close to being my personal game of the year as I can say I enjoyed it more than nearly everything other than Halo and Mass Effect 2.
Highly recommended but be patient.
Controller1.com rating 3/3
Another duel game show- Batman Arkham Asylum and Wet played for your listening confusion. Would it make more sense with video? Well, we ain’t Giant Bomb so go and get stuffed.
Anyhooo- one of these is highly anticipated and the other was more warmly received
Reviewed on Xbox 360. DLC also available on PC. Fallout 3 game required. Fallout 3 also on PS3, but without DLC.
Developed and published by Bethesda.
Our first DLC review on c1 and its Fallout 3′s first piece of DLC, Operation Anchorage. F3:OA is a side mission for the game based around the Outcasts you may have seen around the map. You agree to use your Pip Boy to interface with an old Virtual Reality pod and voila, you’re transported virtually back to the campaign to oust Chinese Army occupation of Alaska before the Balloon went up.
The DLC is a lot more linear than the rest of the game and more action oriented. Its more Mass Effect than Fallout. You take nothing in and take nothing out, so you can’t loot corpses since your vanquished foes vanish along with any weapons and ammo. You have ammo dispensers and health dispenses dotted around the map, not always where you need one and since you can’t carry meds, it does change how you play fairly significantly. You can’t go into a fight, shoot, heal, shoot heal. You have to heal when you see the dispenser and hope you can make it through the few throttled areas with enemies aplenty without dieing.
There’s a boss encounter at the end but if your speech stats are high enough, you may able to avoid altogether in a rather bizarre way. At the end of the simulation, you unlock some booty that you can return to at any point (though i’m not sure if items respawn- i’d doubt it). There’s nothing in the booty that you can’t get elsewhere but its nice to have it all in once place.
The other thing the DLC does is remove the level cap, so its definitely worth doing if you plan to do everything in the game. The actual F3:OA mission is not all that great and made me stop playing F3 once I was done. I would say its essential only if you are planning on doing EVERYTHING. There two more F3 DLC packs scheduled in the next few months but I think I’m done with this game. The levels here should take around 3-4 hours which is not bad for the price but you just need to know that it doesn’t play like the rest of the game.
Controller1.com rating 2/3
Since Fallout 3 is hard to FT without spoiling it for Clint, who’s just started, we’re playing through a mission of Operation Anchorage, the first DLC for this title.
A shorter than usual podcast for a game that can drain your life faster than a Mana bat with a drinking problem.
Now that Fallout’s done, itrs time to try and finish the remainder of the 2008 games that I never got around to. I was a huge Banjo Kazooie fan back in the day. I found the first game to be more fun than Mario 64 (I was LTTP with both games). I was not a fan of the first Resistance game. It defined blinkered fanboy over appreciation of launch titles and smelt nearly as bad as Perfect Dark Zero (which I found unplayable).
We’ll start with Banjo Kazooie. What the fuck is going on here? This game is busier than a brothel across the street from Blizzcon (First time caller, long time watcher). When you first boot thing game up it offers such a visual assault on your senses that you need some aspirin to continue. It does settle down after a bit though anytime you move five steps you get a stonking great “SAVING- DO NOT SWITCH OFF” message. But Rare, you use to make games you could just switch on and play. Why do you insist on making kid-friendly games so complicated? You’d think this was trying to use your PSP to do something weird and esoteric with your PS3. Viva Pinata and Kameo are both in the same boat. When the 360 launched I tried to play cameo with some colleagues and we spent ages wondering what the hell we were meant to be doing before giving up and playing Perfect Dark Zero, which we then gave up on because it was so atrocious. Oh Rare! I am slowly coming to grips with getting some fun out of the game. The building of the cars is quite interesting- so long as your vehicle design is quantized. But I still for the life of me can’t work out how to access my made up car outside of the garage. I kinda wished this was just Banjo 3 with 700 types of collectibles. Oh wait.
Resistance 2 is a hard one to describe. I didn’t like the first one at all. This one is both good and bad as far as I’m concerned. The gameplay is ok, if rather by the numbers but its not a spectacularly good looking game, merely good. Nor is the sound that great compared to say Metal Gear or Uncharted. But the single player has been growing on me somewhat and I’m determined to give it a good stab, if not completing it before Killzone 2 turns up in a week or two. The multiplayer is interesting. I played a one 40-player map and did quite well considering I didn’t really know what to do (apart from shoot the guys with a red arrow over their heads). But the giant map meant half the time I was wandering around trying to find something to shoot at. Big maps with lots of people don’t really work, especially if there are no vehicles. That’s why Team Deathmatch doesn’t work in a Battlefield game, you need focal points otherwise the game’s a mess.
The Fallout 3 DLC Operation Anchorage is now getting a spin. Its the first time I’ve bought SP-only DLC (unless you count Guitar Hero songs). It definitely is more action oriented but I’m having a hard time making up my mind whether I like it or not. I will see it through a bit more but it definitely doesn’t feel as great as the rest of the game. It also feels more scripted. We will be recording a focus test soon covering this DLC. Clint has just started the game on PC so the theory was this would be a good way to do the game without spoiling it for Clint. I’m not so sure its indicative of the rest of the game.
reviewed on Xbox 360 Also on PC, PS3. Developed and published by Bethesda Softworks
There are two versions of this review- the short version and the long version. Short version: Best Game released in 2008
Long Version: Well, I finished this at around 32 hours with half of the game untouched and the DLC still to go. I will try not to spoil it for those who are still to playing it still going through it but there are literally so many possibilities that no one will have played the same game as I did.
We all know of Oblivion, which was THE single-player RPG (particularly for many PC users) of the last few years and Fallout 3 has surpassed that. I thought I loved Mass Effect but that game has nothing on Fallout 3. I’m generally not a big RPG player but of the ones I have loved enough to finish, KotOR 1 and 2, Mass Effect and Fallout 3, ther SF trappings obviously appeal to me a lot more than sub-Tolkien D&D fantasy.
Fallout 3 is set years after the nuclear holocaust in the ravaged wasteland of Washington DC. You star as Vault Boy (or girl), who leaves the fallout shetlter Vault 101, the only home they’ve ever known, in search of their father. Along the way you meet various mutants and factions of humans who you can ally yourself with or fight against, build up a character (to level 20 in the main game, higher if you have the DLC) and try and restore fresh water to the people of the DC area. It’s like DC Cab with more radiation. And no Mr T, Gary Busey or Adam Baldwin from TV’s Firefly.
The gameplay is in first person (or janky 3rd person) mode and you have all the fun of balancing stats with the semblance of an FPS (with similar problems to those in Mass Effect). Here, you at least hve VATS, which is an attack queueing system, expect here you can target individual parts of enemies. As you level up you can select where your stat points go and you gain a perk each level, the likes of which will allow you even more points in specified areas. There are even some strange perks such as becoming a cannibal or growing ears on corpses (all will be explained in game).
The story is superb and while it is the usual wrapper to send you on missions it does work rather well giving you choices along the way to be good or bad. I find that I can’t ever play these games as a douche and usually end up on the good path. So unlike real life but anyhoo. The writing and dialogue are excellent though some performances can seem stilted I’d say a large part of the fault is with the stilted animations rather than most of the acting. Liam Neeson and Malcolm McDowell lend their voices to some of the major characters and McDowell is particularly effective though his character’s animations when you finally meet him don’t need to be particularly dynamic. (SPOILERS- Its heavily motion captured lol)
Graphically, its a mixed bag. It runs very well on 360 (installed on the HDD) and the framerate is fairly solid 99% of the time with high quality textures and little pop in (YMMV on other platforms), but you do have the perfunctory animations that let the side down. When you are witnessing important events you veiw everything from your viewpoint and the important events feel a bit blah as a result. Sound is handled exceptionally well and the music is very well done (though the main theme reminds slightly of the Hellboy theme from the first movie)
If you own a machine capable of playing the game (though I understand PS3 will not be privvy to the DLC and hence the level cap stays in place), you owe it to yourself o play the best game 2008 had to offer. Yes better than Metal Gear, GTA IV, Fable 2, Gears 2, LBP, R2, Burnout or whatever.
controller1.com rating 3/3
PS- I never found the dog
Here are some clips from the Now Playing blog during our playthrough
“Fallout 3 has been started. Yes I envisage myself getting about 25% of the way through this game before I give up but since this game is so huge, I don’t think that will be a huge problem. It’s already more fun than Oblivion but that’s possibly down to the more SF backdrop. Cyrodil was a nice place to visit but I woouldn’t want to live there. Washington DC doesn’t look that much better but at least there’s no ‘Wayne’s World’ style zoom-ins everytime I talk to an NPC.”
“Fallout 3 is definitely not a hopeful game. You can’t save the world because its already been mostly destroyed. So there’s often a hint of sadness in a lot of your wanderings. If emo teens ever discover this game, there’d be a severe razor blade shortage worldwide.”
“So after a while I decided I would just map the thing. I literally spent about 3 hours walking around the map so that I can now fast travel anywhere and get to a location with a minute or two. I really want to go onto another game but F3 just does everything that Mass Effect didn’t.
One thing still bothers me about Fallout 3. There are many places where people make homes in various places that are still habitable. But no one has cleaned up. The war was years earlier yes people have lost many things: love ones, their homes and it seems their brooms.”
Two system exclusive demoes were released onto their respective systems late last week. One was for the first big 360 only game of 2009, Halo Wars and the other was for Sony’s Great White Hope, Killzone 2. Halo Wars demo we will Focus Test soon, but since I plan to buy the full KZ2 game, we aren’t go FT the demo. Here are some impressions of the Killzone 2 demo. Let’s preface this by saying I played 2/3 of the original game was unimpressed to say the least which is why I’ve not boarded the hype machine for the sequel. Good looking doesn’t mean great games, especially when the developers, Guerrilla Games, have yet to prove they can make something fun.
The demo starts off with you attacking a beach held by Helgast troops, then you move inside. Then some slo mo opera happens and you see a video trumpeting the high review scores the game has received so far (the game’s been in the can for a while, possibly held back so to avoid cannibalising sales from Resistance 2). See the picture below for a taster
More about the actual demo, though.
The good: Its pretty. Its got some very nice lighting effects. The score is magnificent and the sounds mostly great (if a little muted).
The bad: People laughed at Gears 2′s “10 shitloads” dialogue and it looks like KZ2 is trying to go down the same path. It’s just generic .
Gameplay: the demo doesn’t do anything you have seen a bazillion times before but I think it does it ok. It’s just not very responsive to control though.I’m actually less enthusiastic about the game since playing the demo but I hear its mostly good and I think I need a shooter. Fallout 3 is kinda shooter but not quite.
Fallout 3 got a good going over this past weekend (up to level 11 and around the 22 hour mark- not counting many many restarts. I had a few issues where I would find a new area, went exploring and then found i wasted two hours on an area where I have to trigger a mission elsewhere first. So after a while I decided I would just map the thing. I literally spent about 3 hours walking around the map so that I can now fast travel anywhere and get to a location with a minute or two. I really want to go onto another game but F3 just does everything that Mass Effect didn’t.
One thing still bothers me about Fallout 3. There are many places where people make homes in various places that are still habitable. But no one has cleaned up. The war was years earlier yes people have lost many things: love ones, their homes and it seems their brooms.
Left 4 Dead left me non-plussed a few weeks ago when I last wrote about it. I have kept at it a little longer- still in the single player mode. I’m finding it a lot more fun than the Singple player of some other PC FPS’s I’ve played in my time. So much that I think the single player is a greatly overlooked part of the game. I’m not even sure I really want to play multiplayer all that much.
Years ago, my first taste of PC multiplayer was the coop mode Terrorist Hunt on Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield. I had skipped Quake, Unreal and BF 1942 for various reasons but I got heavily hooked on that MP game for months on end, playing at night on our work LAN. We played the games maps as well as custom maps and we never played adversarial modes. Why? Because my friend who mostly hosted hated playing against other people. This was before co-op was a major selling feature of most shooters. He probably would have loved left for dead. I don’t know I’ve not seen him in a while since he’s gone off games.
I’m currently on the last mission of the Airport level (or the third of four campaigns). Even though its the equivalent of playing BF1942 with bots, its still a highly agreeable single player game. But even though I love PC multiplayer shooters, well CoD at least, I don’t know if I will want to play much more multi of this. Something about Valve games that attracts the rather unforgiving hardcore. In SP, if you shoot your team mates by accident, you get a warning. In MP, if you shoot your teammates you get a smack on the head. One of the single best features of CoD WaW is the one-level zombie mode that is unlocked once you beat single player. I hope Treyarch can turn that success into something a little meatier in future iterations or even DLC.
Fallout 3 is one of those games that you know will just eat your time. I’ve been slack and am still only three hours in but I’ve only had time to play the game on weekends recently so my progress is slower than a Trabant on an economy run. I’m liking it far more than Oblivion. I made it 10 hours into oblivion before losing interest but I hate later had pangs of regret in selling it. Actually wait, I gave it to Clint and he wiped his ass on it, or something. Or he got a dirty disc error. Something like that. I like the setting but obviously in a game that can take 100+ hours, I’m only going to see a limited version of all the game has to offer. And that’s OK. I need an ending to games and if one isn’t in sight, boredom takes over, quality or no. Probably F3′s shooter presentation is what is making it more palatable to player over something set in another fantasy realm. F3 is SF which has always been more my cup of tea. Irish Breakfast, if I’m not mistaken. Mine’s strong with milk, no sugar.
Lastly I played a teensy bit of Rock Band ACDC. For various reasons, including a ridiculously cheap price tag (not RRP), I bought thsi rather than the full version. I am disappointed that you can’t use it to buy DLC, but it is weird for someone who’s played Guitar ero for so long to suddenly play exactly the same game with such a different look- despite it being exactly the same.
Well the storm begins this week with Little Big Planet and Fable II and next week, Fallout 3. Its not possible to play all of the big games coming out at once. So far this month I have already cut out of my ‘To Do’ list, the following big titles: Dead Space, Far Cry 2, Mercenaries 2, Fracture, Wii Music and Saint’s Row 2.
Why?
Dead Space: Because its a horror game and I can live without horror. Yes I’m a big scaredy cat.
Far Cry 2: I played a bit of the PC original and about 99.9% of Far Cry Instincts on the original Xbox. I though the PC one played a bit ‘meh’ but the console version (a completely different game) was really quite nice. Apart from that cheating bitch of a final boss who never ever died. I liked the game a lot and all I can remember is trying to beat that final boss over and over until he got stuck in the mesh and I stopped caring.
Mercenaries 2: More sandbox and no compelling reason to play. The demo promised much and delivered little. I wasn’t a huge fan of the original.
Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway: I did beat the first game in the series but never played the second, despite my professed love of WWII shooters. Its not really a shooter and its not Full Spectrum Warrior either. I played the demo and was unimpressed. I was unmoved.
Fracture: Another demo that showed off all you need to know in 5 minutes. Generic story and gameplay built around an overused gimmick.
Wii Music: If I wanted to play a music game where all the songs sounded like a Casiotone, I would have bought Casiotone Hero.
Saint’s Row 2: I played the first one even though I wasn’t impressed by that demo. I think I’m just not that keen on sandbox games per se and having played GTA IV, I think I’m done with the genre. SR1 did do some stuff that GTA IV either stole (or should have stolen) but it’s not so great and I’m not that keen to pop caps in people’s asses anymore. I was keen once, but they say you can never go back.
So what do I want to play?
Little Big Planet. One of its major selling points is completely lost on me. I was quite happy to leave all of my spore creations untextured. I do not wish to gain employment as a level designer. I do not wish to make maps for TF2. I just want a platformer. And really, there’s this and Banjo and that’s really it for this year.
Fable II. I must one of the few people who doesn’t hang on Peter Molyneaux’s every word. And hence I wasn’t disappointed in Fable- I was able to ignore the hyperbole and just enjoy what was a very finely crafted game. I only had two minor complaints against Fable 1- you could beat enemies by running circles around them, and you were likley overpowered by the time you reached the final boss. The rest of that game was so much fun I am very much looking forward to number II.
Fallout 3. I have never, ever played a Fallout game. Somehow, this looks like I might enjoy it.
So I’ll get it.
So it looks life Fable II and Fallout 3 on Xbox 360, and Little Big Planet for PS3. Wii and PC go home empty handed.
