Be Excellent To Each Other

F-Day minus 22.

Preparations are proceeding well. Calculations of optimum head-shot percentages almost completed. Various Louis Armstrong songs have been procured for background noise.

Routes to various purveyors of videogamery in the environs are being investigated, in order to plot the quickest routes come F-Day.

Minor setbacks are occurring due to an increase in weeing with excitement. While this is currently at a once per hour level (rising to twice per hour if screenshots are viewed), this has not yet become uncontrollable so high hopes that F day can be reached without any accidents.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

SQUEEEEE!

Super-special bobblehead edition ordered a month ago. Since then I have taken huge steps to avoid viewing any previews (apart from, of course, the excellent 'Peace, Freedom and BACON AND EGGS!' one) and will continue to do so as these have a HORRIBLE MOVIE TRAILER-ESQUE HABIT OF, in their fast-paced cuts of numerous scenes, spoiling loads of it.

I'd planned to book a few days off on release to play it... but this coincides with a number of other personal social events, AND my colleague is already booked off on leave, likely precluding me from doing so too! FUCK!

So, the only thing I'm doing, really, is trying to decide what to make my character look like (she will be the third generation of the venerable Sheelagh the Unwashed Vault Dweller family, named in honour of her distant relatives from FO1 and 2 (Sheelagh and Sophie, respectively). So, likely a goth chick-esque piece of perkiness (no pun intended) with night person and small frame (if they're available) who specialises in small arms, long range combat, sneakery and technology.

Ho hum. There's still time to finish Eternal Sonata again AND Arse Effect one and a half more times while I wait...

Quite possibly I'm really hopeful that it can fulfill all my dystopian future needs, given that I personally don't care for Mass Effect, and as STALKER is seemingly still a million years from a 360 release. And I didn't even play the originals that much.

Fact is - Bethseshsedhdha haven't made a bad RPG... ever?

Whuh? I've not spent any money yet myself - is that wise? Last I heard, it was still looking awesome. The intro movie alone made me moist.

I have frequently spent top dollar on shit games. This will not be one of them. Or the world will end in a rain of fiery vengence.

So, what's this game, then? I've not really been paying attention.

It's a sky-diving simulator.

Is it an rpg? I've never played an rpg, as they're usually goblins and dwarfs and stuff, but this seems different?

sell it to me!

It's mad max, basically, but without the cars. It's in a Post Apocomalyptic Holocaustal Landscape populated with the ragged remnants of humankind, dressed in makeshift armour and carrying scavenged guns.

I suspect one may be more excited if one played Fallouts 1 and 2, which, while not perfect in terms of game mechanics, had very involving, very grown up storylines. They also had fantastically brutal combat, which included bits being blown off by shotguns, rather graphically. Location specific damage made for excellent fun in deciding whether to chance an aimed shot at some big fucker's eyes so he couldn't keep spraying you with his minigun.

The ammo and equipment conservation aspect was also pretty good, as it meant that, in random encounters, you needed to consider whether you'd actually be able to afford to barter for more ammo for that particular gun with the proceeds of your scrap. This stays an issue later on, as if you upgrade to bigger and better guns the cost of the ammo goes through the roof - and the more exotic stuff like caseless ammo is fairly scarce.

It's hard to do justice to the briliance of the Fallout series in a post, really. Along with Planescape:Torment, they were the best PC RPGs of, well, ever. And we thoroughly expect #3 to be even better. Well, more hope than expect, but there we are.

do you think that 3 would be a good one to start with, or should I really play the first two first? (I appreciate that this is probably impossible to answer as 3 hasn't been released yet)

Um - the first two are sort of growers, really. I'm not sure how well they stand the test of time for newcomers, either (As they're pretty old), but I'd deffo give 2 a go. Just grit your teeth through the annoying, obligatory "bit in the tunnels" at the start. It takes about half an hour to get going really, but it's worth it. However, you most certainly wouldn't need to play the first two to enjoy the third.

The first two are isometric third person games, and 3 is pretty much using the Oblivion engine as a first person effort, so they'll be pretty different in terms of gameplay. It's the setting, atmosphere and story that should make it a winner, really.

As it's out in 21 DAYS I'd just start with 3, as you can whack it straight in your 360 without pissing about on a PC.

I tried playing the first one a couple of months ago, and didn't get on with it at all. Sadly, I expect you had to be there when it was first released.

I'll give 3 a go once it hits £15~.

Fallout 3... you know those 1950s comic book/movie/etc visions of the future, which is to say - 1950s optimist atomic age streamlined chrome everything? Cities on the moon, nuclear cars with fins, chromeplated household robtos, but your mother still stays at home and is named 'Doris' and your dad wears a hat and smokes a pipe? Now, imagine that future has a nuclear war.

Your grandparents survived because they'd bought a space in a giant underground self-sufficient bomb shelter. Hundreds of years have passed, your shelter isolated from the desperate remnants of civilization on the surface. Now, you have to leave the shelter, go to the surface, see the sun for the first time in your life.

To call it merely 'Mad Max' is unfair to both Fallout and Mad Max. Fallout is the aforementioned 1950s American techno-uptopia blasted into ashes; Mad Max is the modern world struggling to avoid anarchy with a collapsing economy and rising fuel prices (don't forget, Max is a highway patrolman tasked with stopping biker gangs) in the aftermath of a war over oil.

Fallout 1 originally intrigued me with both the setting of the demo (the first screen of Junktown) and the character creator. Yes, the first bit of it (and the sequel) are horrible excuses for tutorials, and the whole 'tribal' thing in the second one in particular puts loads of people off as they think the whole game is going to be like that.

EXCEPT, IT DOESN'T, DAMMIT. Once you've done the temple of trials in Fallout 2 and left the stupid tribal village, you don't EVER need to go back EVER. EVER. Forget about it, pretend it was a bad dream, get on with your life in the proper world.

I'll post my Fallout fanfics at some point, to keep you slavering lot sustained with Fallout-ness in the run-up to the release.

I've been watching a few videos for this recently:

(spoilers within)
Gameplay Video 1

Gameplay Video 2

Gameplay Video 3

Gameplay Video 4"

Gameplay Video 5

It looks terriffic, and has a bit of a bioshock on land feel to it.

The pause and auto aim thing seems a bit odd. Why would you bother shooting normally, when your guaranteed a easy kill using the auto aim?

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. If you've just cursed the game by saying that, the last thing you'll ever see is your own anus as I shove your head up it.



Constant pausy combat might get annoying... being able to pause at will, however is lovely. Using the VATS doesn't guarantee you a hit any more than using target shots in the original games did, though - it just lets you attempt to get a critical hit on a specific body part.

Trench warfare?

It's a kind of trenchmouth I wouldn't avoid getting.

I've read that quite often, the trenches were right up against each other, and that conditions therein were very moist.

Eurogamer publishing a retrospective on Fallout, on the heels of another one on GameTrailers, reminded me that I never posted this, which is one of the more amusing comment I've ever read on a gaming site:



The last-but-one paragraph kills me every time. "Thanks a lot, bitter Fallout 1 fans!". Heh.

The thing I never understand is if you're not appealing to the existing fan base, what's the point of using the franchise you've paid a ton of money for? Why not call it 'Dark Future'*?






*I expect only Mr Chris to get this.

That would be a great game, though.

Anyway - it's all about the feel and the atmosphere. From repeated watchings of the gameplay demos, they seem to have captured the "spirit" of the Fallout games perfectly. In fact it seems much, much better. My favourite thing (other than the FALLOUT) is that the Pipboy has a radio on it, and the only broadcasting station is a 50s one - it's pretty brave to have the soundtrack for a videogame as entirely stuff like Ella Fitzgerald and Roy Brown.

Also - it's all about the Pipboy Boy, man. He's worth the franchise cost on his own.

fallout is possibly my favorite game ever, and i was a bit disheartened when i heard bethesda bought the copyrights. Yes, fallout 3 by bethesda is better than no fallout at all, but bethesda's strenghts are the complete opposite of what fallout was all about. Fallout was about choices & consequences, characters and good dialogues. Bethesda games all suck in that categories.

Yet, it's hard not to be anticipating this, because if they pull it right with they're strenghts (good exploration) with will be great to wander in the wasteland, even without c&c and good dialogues.

Apart from Bioshock. I was gutted at how shit the 'soundtrack' CD included in the collector's edition was. Perry Como, Bobby Darin, Billie Holiday? Nope... three ghastly remixes by Moby. Fuck off, please.



He's the Vault-tec Vault Man. And the way he 'gives the guns' in the trailer is just WRONG.

I want more Meaty stories.

Did anyone actually read those? I didn't get a response or PM or anything so I assume people looked at the length and balked.

I did. I enjoyed them.

Very well, the third story will go up today, the EPIC FINAL STORY will go up either tomorrow or Thursday.

I skimmed them, but not knowing anything about the Fallout story or series probably didn't help.

They seemed well-written, though.

F-Day minus 3

SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

*wees*