I don’t buy many new games.  If I get a game usually it is a bargin title or from the used bin from Blockbuster or GameStop.  I get a slight discount on new games working where I work, but not enough to justify grabbing every new title that graces the shelves.  Also we must take into account that 80% of stuff out there isn’t new in a complete sense.  A lot are ripoffs or clones of earlier better games.

Strangely enough I picked up one such clone.  But it was a mutated clone.

I was never a big fan of the open world RPG.  At least when it doesn’t have the letters MMO tacked on the front.  So even though they were fine games by all accounts, I have never given the Elder Scrolls series a fare shot.  If I have to fight something from a first person perspective you know I won’t be doing it with a clunky melee weapon if I can help it.  It usually doesn’t end well and looks awkward the whole time.  If I am forced to use a sword I better either be linded up in a row with HP/MP listed near by, or wearing green with an ocarina and boomerang.

A good friend of mine has been preaching the virtues of Marrowind and Oblivion for years now.  And though all the ingredients were there for a good looking game, I wasn’t going to chow down.  Rather than be rude I just say I have an allergy.

Then late last year, they changed the formula.  They removed the tuna center and added bacon.   They made Fallout 3.  A mutated version of Elder Scrolls that replaces all that weak sauce sword and magic work with guns and lasers.    Make that bacon and cheddar.

The game starts out with Ron Pearlman doing narration.  Which justifies $10 of the cost already.  Having his gritty base spouting out thoughtful prose against the backdrop of a torn apart wasteland that once was the sprawling landscape of D.C. just defined the word epic.  Go look it up, I think Websters just added that to the listing.

The tutorial is pretty intelligent.  It starts out like one learns anything in life, through the various stages of development.  You learn to walk as a toddler and how to grab and touch stuff.  Unlike any other game ever I don’t feel like a moron for learning to to walk and touch stuff for the fist time.  When a 1 year old does these things it is monumental, when a 35 year old theoretical physicist needs to learn basic motor skills, ouch.

And all new stuff is learned like this though the progressive stages of childhood and adolescence.  Add in the fact that you are being given a slight sense of claustrophobia and repression the entire time, when you enter the game proper the open world seems liberating.  Which is a good thing for me since the worlds “Open” and “World” fill me with dread at all the divergent paths that could be explored, and how one bad move might deny me some wondrous treasured story arc.

I like linearity, the designers want to tell a specific story, I want to hear that story.  I read books, when those “choose your own adventure” abominations came out I purchased one, and then wanted to burn it.  Because none of the many possibilities were as good as they could have been because the author spent many hours writing 15 possible mediocre story lines, rather than one really good and well developed story.  And there was no logic in what choice to make, it was one trick bad ending after another.

They also did this in CD form as well, same situation but without the ease of undoing a bad choice.  No digital thumb to page back and try the other ridiculous choice.

They manage to mostly avoid this in Fallout though.  Sure I don’t really care about 95% percent of the characters, but I care enough to want to make good decisions and make friends with the right folks.

The combat system isn’t all that earth shattering, either swing at baddies with various blunt objects or shoot them, I prefer the second method.  My largest concern is the lack of clear and decisive  indication of where damage is coming from.  When a grenade is thrown a big indicator appears showing it where it is, but if I am shot in the middle of a field I have to spin around for 7 seconds trying to work out where there are red dots on my radar.  Half life had it right, if my right half is shot, give me a read indicator to the right… clear, easy, and it makes sense.

You can fight one of two ways, regular first person style, or with V.A.T.S.   Which stands for something, and I would look it up if I cared enough to reach 5 feet over and read it off the box.  VATS is pretty much bullet-time with probability.  I see my chances of hitting various areas of the enemy, then decide where to target accordingly.  I usually do this once, then just shoot the everloving stuffing in a burst fire pattern.  For me the most useful application of VATS is to try to avoid ambushes, and there will be a lot of these.  Every time I am wandering around ruins, enter rooms, or generally in one of the thousands of places that an easy ambush on my person,  I find myself just constantly tapping “V”.  I do this all the time because perhaps the computer will sense danger before I can actually see it.

Which is just a gripe I have with the FPS community in general, not just this game.  I realize that post-apocalyptic Washington D.C. will be a mass of grey and brown ruins, they were like that before the bomb dropped.  It isn’t like this was a city known for funky colors or out there building designs, but trying to spot enemies that are typically grey and brown is frustrating in such an enviroment.  Leading to even more ambushes and hence the premature deterioration of my V key.  At least the super mutants have the decency to be slightly yellow, not a nice bright yellow like one would hope irradiated hulks that take 3000 bullets to kill would have, but it is a start.

All in all, Fallout 3 was a good purchase.  I can see myself playing this at a relaxed pace for several months.  Likely it will be unseated when I finally get the kahonies to buy and play Bioshock.  Well, kahonies or a steady supply of valume.  I like creepy atmosphere games, and I like anything referencing vauge Objectivism, but jump shock games and me don’t blend so well.

Oh, and one really big kudo for Fallout 3.  It had an escort mission(so far, only one), and I didn’t hate it.  So good job guys.  I have quit games in story franchises I was loyal to because of horrible escort missions.  Bathesida Software folks are a cut above.

First up, I just renewed the domain, so BinaryIQ is will be up for at least another couple years. Perhaps I will consider something to do with it in that time. Until then it will remain my own little space for self gratification.

But I was just offered, though I was told it has been out there for a while, an invite to go to the Philippines. My friend Ariah and his wife Venus will be heading there next winter for several weeks.

This presents me with a conflict. Though it would be great to actually take a honest-to-goodness vacation, see a portion of the world I have never experience first hand, give me great writing material, and escape the harsh hand of Jack Frost; it would also cost a modest sum and take me away from work for several weeks if not a month.

This presents me with several paths. If I were to pursue this travel opportunity I would need to either ask for a ludicrous amount of time absent from my current job, or line up a new job on the tail end of said vacation and use intermittent time as a mental recovery period. Both options are extremely wrought with complexity and uncertainty. And I am a fan of neither.

I will just chalk this one up to “items to consider”, but not earth shattering.

I recently saw Akira Kurosawa’s “The Hidden Fortress”. It was really quite amazing. I would probably put it up in his top four films. The top three? In order of excellence, “The Seven Samurai” “Yojimbo” and “Sanjuro”. The former of the group being considered for remake. Possibly excellent, but also possibly a profane adaptation of one of the coolest movies ever made. If you can deal with subtitles you should see Seven Samurai it all it’s black and white glory.

To those of you who exist out there on the expansive plane of the internet I have a humble request. Stop conversing like brain damaged speak-and-spell machines. We have these lovely things we call verbs, adjectives, and proper nouns. There are more options out there as well but I don’t want to scare any skiddish newcomers to the wonderful language of English.

There is a vast casm between acronyms for brevity and idiocy. When it takes more thought to type something using inane nonsense chatter than to just write something properly, one has skittered right past efficiency and into the brick wall of unintelligible and/or pointless chatter.

I feel like some folks have taken the venue of online text as an excuse to be lazy in their communication skills. As a result we get drivel and a general lack of manners.

Case in point, World of Warcraft. What happened to the world “Please” when making a request of someone, especially when said request will take time, effort or possibly both. How about when requesting an invitation to a raid group? Are we all to busy to take a second more and ask like a civilized individual?

I propose that everyone try it at least once today. Resist the urge to truncate every statement and just say something properly every so often. Help make the internet just a tad more intelligent.