PC Game Fun Time

On Thanksgiving, I arrived at my parents’ home a bit earlier than the rest of the family, so I had quite a bit of free time. I used most of it — four hours worth — to read Cormac McCarthy’s excellent post-apocalyptic novel The Road straight through in one go. It narrates a couple of months in the life of a father and son who have survived an unspecified apocalypse, but every description in the book — from bright flashes on the horizon during the incident, to the dusty, sunless world, to the skyscrapers in city centers whose metal frames were melted and then solidified back into torturedshapes — left me believing that this Armageddon was of the decidedly nuclear variety.

Naturally, on the day after Thanksgiving, I started playing Fallout 3, which is (as if you didn’t know by now) set in a post-nuclear-apocalyptic future. I must say, reading The Road was a great thematic introduction to the environment in Fallout 3, even so much as dealing with the some of the same tropes of cannibalism, scarce resources, and morality in a survivalist world that no longer has a place for it. Walking along decrepit ancient highways in the barren Capital Wasteland, with its gloomy skies and shattered landscapes, and picking through the wreckage of a former civilization, I couldn’t help but feel as if I was walking the same road as the main characters in the novel.

I will give The Road more points for being realistic, because just one decade after the apocalypse pretty much everything scavengeable is gone and the only food remaining is the occasional canned good or fellow human. Fallout 3, despite taking place two centuries further out from the apocalypse, is still full of pre-apocalypse goods, such as the bizarrely ubiquitous Nuka-Cola vending machines that still contain product. Oh, and there’s the mutants. But I’ll let this slide — The Road’s intent is to be a good novel, while Fallout 3’s intent is to be a fun game. Some concessions to gameplay are necessary and acceptable.

I’ve only reached level 5 so far (after quite a bit of time put into the game), but my overall impression is very positive. I pretty much agree with Grokmoo’s take on the game, and could potentially see myself playing it as much as he has. The game is superbly put together, and thanks to auto-travel, there’s never a boring moment (I’m looking at you, Far Cry 2). It’s also not too easy — I’ve had to make use of quick load on quite a few occasions — which is something I appreciate because most of the games I’ve played recently I’ve been able to steamroll through without much of a challenge at all.

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I’m a huge fan of space shooters. I have been ever since I played the first TIE Fighter game on my dad’s 386 when I was still in elementary school. I played that game with a joystick plugged into the computer’s game port (Anyone remember those? The game port was analog). The genre has unfortunately declined since then, though my love for it hasn’t. I even have a modern USB joystick now, which I bought a year ago without even a specific game in mind out of a sheer sense of nostalgia for the genre. Alas, the last great space shooter I think I played was Freelancer, which came out over five years ago.

So you can imagine my excitement when I found out about the X3 series, which is a modern space shooter series created by German developer Egosoft. I decided to give the latest entry in the series, X3: Terran Conflict, a spin. After several hours of playtime, here’s my take.

X3: Terran Conflict is ultimately defined more by its flaws than by its successes. My major reaction to the game is a sense of sorrow over the potential of what could have been, a potential that tries desperately to shine through the game’s thick veneer of buggy execution. I guess we’ll start off on a high note and look at what the game does right.

The graphics are excellent, and really help to set the mood of being in space. I do have one minor quibble though: the asteroids don’t scale up the number of polygons composing them as you approach them, so while they look fine from far away, when you skim along the surface of the bigger ones you’re typically flying over triangles a kilometer to a side — not cool. Considering how detailed all of the rest of the models in the game are, with the exquisitely crafted space stations and the planets with multiple shading layers for atmosphere, terrain, and city lights, this is a very curious oversight.

The music, which I’ll roughly describe as ambient techno, really fits the theme of flying in space, and I enjoyed it a lot not only as a complement to the game but also simply as a fan of the genre. I guess it’s a good thing the developers are German, because it was evidently very easy for them to find talented techno artists to work with. The combination of the graphics and music sets an authentic mood of being in space, and I found I had the most fun when I simply turned down my engines and cruised through the stellar systems at a leisurely pace, taking in the sights and sounds.

But everything else about the game left me feeling a bit disappointed. The plot is so far completely forgettable, seeming to serve as nothing more than a way to introduce one to all of the star systems in an orderly manner. The voice acting is incredibly atrocious (every character sounds like they’re voiced by a German developer who doesn’t quite possess mastery over the English language) and the poorly animated comms portraits don’t help establish connections to the game’s characters in the slightest. The missions are bizarrely paced, with one early mission requiring me to follow an enemy moving at a slow pace through several stellar systems before following him from the terminal jump gate to a pirate ship that was really far away. Even with the game’s built-in time acceleration turned up to its maximum of 1000%, it still took me something like an hour to complete this completely trivial mission. It didn’t help that the autopilot would occasionally drive me right into another spaceship, forcing a reload from the last space station — oh, did I mention that there’s no quicksave/quickload? Gahhh!

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I’ve been playing around with the Left 4 Dead demo this past week, and I’ve finally reached a conclusion on it: I think I’ll be passing on buying the game. Grokmoo feels much the same way, and we’re pretty much in agreement as to why:

First of all, I feel kind of misled by Left 4 Dead. I went into it expecting a zombie game (which admittedly might just have been me not paying careful attention), but what I got was an infection game. Thus, instead of slow-moving, hard-to-kill cannibalistic reanimated corpses to tango with, you get “infected” people running at you abnormally quickly who go down if you so much as glance them with a round. Maybe that last part is a result of the difficulty level scaling, which seems to cut back on enemy health as well as enemy numbers. But my final take on this matter is that zombies should not run because it goes against all of their history.

Ignoring what I expected the game to be, and just examining the actual game as is, I’m still left unimpressed. I did have a bit of fun playing online, but that was mostly because I teamed up with a Scotsman I met in Team Fortress 2 (thank you, Steam Community feature) who is absolutely hysterical. The weapons aren’t particularly exciting, and ammo is so plentiful that it completely does away with the need for ammo conservation, which is definitely one of the strongest mechanics that games in the survival horror genre have going for them. Not only do the pistols have infinite ammo, but the primary weapons come with such large numbers of rounds (500 for the SMG, 128 for the shotgun) that you rarely even need to worry about swapping down to pistols to save on ammo.

And the weapons are so powerful that it doesn’t feel particularly satisfying killing enemies. You can get headshots, but there isn’t really a reason to bother. Now if we were dealing with the undead in this game, where if you shot off a limb they’d simply keep on coming (albeit a bit more slowly), that’d be a lot more fun, and it would make headshots worthwhile. But as it is you can fire a shotgun blast and pretty much every normal enemy in the cone of fire instantly drops dead, even if they are really far away. The only times enemies pose a threat is when a large number of them come from all sides, or when dealing with one of the game’s several types of special enemies.

Another problem with the game, and this one is really hard to articulate, is that fast-paced combat just sort of feels stuttery, glitchy, and finnicky. I don’t know if the network code isn’t up to par, or I was just frequently connected to lagging servers, or what, but shots didn’t always seem to hit where they should have, enemies were kind of “jumpy” in all the wrong ways, and that oh-so-important FPS “feel” was just imperceptibly off.

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It has been a while since I posted my “final” review of Fallout 3 indicating my disappointment with the game’s ending.  In that time, I have started a new character and brought him up currently about level 10.

Let me just start by saying the second playthrough has been better than the first.  It turns out that on my first time playing, I barely scratched the surface of all the weird and awesome sidequests available.  Since I had scarcely explored the northern half of the map on my first time through, I promptly headed off North on my second attempt.  Almost immediately, I encountered several brilliantly crafted (and also totally bizarre) sidequests.

I won’t spoil the surprise for those of you who are still planning on putting some time into the game.  Suffice it to say, however, that Fallout 3 is a huge game, and sticking even roughly to the main quest throughout will cause you to miss all but a tiny fraction of it.

My second play experience has also proven quite a bit harder than my first.  Instead of pumping tons of points into small guns and turning myself into a sniper rifle wielding head exploding machine, I have been mostly focusing on big guns and energy weapons.  Unfortunately, at this stage of the game I have found almost no energy weapons, and big gun ammo has been scarce.  So, I have been forced to rely on my assault rifle a fair amount.

This has also led me to making some use of explosives and the game’s homemade weapons system.  While it is not particularly robust (there are only a relatively small number of predefined schematics to be found in the game world) it is still a lot of fun.  The homemade bottlecap mines, for example, are incredibly effective, almost ridiculously so.  While your mileage may vary depending on how you distribute your skill points, for me they do about 5 times as much damage as the standard frag mines.

The weapon crafting system seems like an area that should be ripe for modding.  Unfortunately, mum is still the word from Bethesda on the release of an editor like we had for Oblivion.  While smaller mods have sprung up anyway, without a dedicated toolset the chances of a large, successful modding community sustaining itself are pretty slim.

Even without mods, Fallout 3 is offering a lot of replay value rarely found in a game.  But with a large modding community, Fallout 3 could be so much more.  I continue to hope for an official release of an editor from Bethesda.  I am pretty optimistic that this will happen.  I just hope it comes soon enough that there is still interest in using it.

After many an hour and quite a few posts on this blog, I have finally finished the main quest of Fallout 3.  Now, I feel like I finally know what everyone was complaining about.  The main quest ended up being quite short and pretty unsatisfying.  I won’t spoil the game for those who have yet to complete it, but suffice it to say that the game’s ending is not particularly epic.

It really leaves me wondering why Bethesda would spend so much time crafting a wonderful, immersive gameplay experience, but then leave the main quest so lacking.  While I personally put in a ton of hours on other aspects of the game and thoroughly enjoyed it, anyone who just blazed through the main quest will undoubtedly be left disappointed.

Be that as it may, I fully intend to go back into the game with a new character.  My first play through was by and large as a goodie-two shoes, and it will be fun to try out some of the more evil roleplaying options.  Also, I am very hopeful that Fallout 3 will inspire some good mods.  Unfortunately, it remains to be seen whether an official editor will be released.  If Bethesda does get their act together and release a proper editor, there will undoubtedly be a great deal of gameplay left in Fallout 3, both for myself and many others.

After spending about a week with Fallout 3, I think I have experienced enough to write a decent review.  I haven’t spent much time on the main quest, so I won’t be able to talk much about that.  However, I do have a character currently at level 11, and have seen a pretty fair fraction of the game world.

Being a high profile, hyped title, Fallout 3 automatically received glowing reviews from the majority of the mainstream gaming press.  However, there has been a very real concern from much of the fan base that the game suffers from being to much like Oblivion.

It is true, Fallout 3 does feel similar to the previous major title from Bethesda.  If you totally hated Oblivion, you will probably hate Fallout 3.  If, instead, you thought Oblivion was a pretty good game, but marred by some serious flaws, there is a good chance you will love Fallout 3.

First of all, Fallout 3 takes all the strengths of Oblivion and makes them its own.  The immersive nature of a first person game with gorgeous graphics is definitely here.  The annoying stuttering issues with Oblivion while outside are gone as well.  More importantly, Fallout 3 also has an incredible atmosphere going for it.  Everything from the wastelands to the scattered settlements to the Washington D. C. ruins fits beautifully into the game to create a sense of immersion far greater than anything seen in Oblivion.  The use of some of the most recognizable landmarks in the United States, such as the Capitol building and the Washington Monument, creates a sense of awe, something rarely seen in a video game.  (Disclaimer: I live and work in the D. C. area.)

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Unlike Grokmoo, I somehow didn’t end up giving up Far Cry 2 for Fallout 3. Having just beaten it earlier today, I’m ready to give my final impressions, as I won’t be playing it again.

My Far Cry 2 experience was a bit uneven. I wouldn’t say that I genuinely loved the game, but I felt a strange compulsion to keep playing it. I would feel this compulsion even after the game succeeded in frustrating me immensely (like never failing to put objectives on the diametrically opposite side of the map, on the opposite side of many manned guard posts), so it was not uncommon that I’d play the game for a half hour, take a short break, and then end up playing it again in another half hour after the frustration faded. These repeating cycles of frustration and compulsion occurred several times in some days.

It finally hit me what the Far Cry 2 experience feels like: an MMORPG. I wrestled with World of Warcraft around the time that it came out (and haven’t played another MMORPG since finally quitting it). Far Cry 2 shares a lot of the same game mechanics that make an MMORPG so addictive: the free-form roaming, the slow grind of achievement (earning scarce diamonds to purchase/upgrade weapons), and the side missions. I kept playing through Far Cry 2 even when I wasn’t enjoying the experience very much simply because I wanted to keep getting to that next “level”.

But thankfully, unlike World of Warcraft, Far Cry 2 does indeed have an end, an ending left me really dissatisfied because — spoiler alert — like much of the rest of the game, you are given a false choice between two “alternatives” that result in the same outcome. The final outcome of the game? Your suicide (and in one of the options, your completely unnecessary suicide). It’s like, after an entire game full of wanton mercenary killing, the developers want to jam a moral lesson into your head and force you to atone for your sins by paying the ultimate sacrifice. Except it’s not really atonement if you aren’t given a say in the matter.

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It’s finally here.  Fallout 3, the sequel I (and many others) have been awaiting for nearly a decade.  In fact, it has even been four years since Fallout 3 was officially announced.

While I have only barely scratched the surface of this game, it is telling that I found it quite difficult to tear myself away long enough to write this mini review.  Like every high profile title these days, Fallout 3 has received pretty much nothing but glowing praise from the mainstream gaming press.  Unlike many of those other titles, it is looking like Fallout 3 may deserve it.

Here are a few of the things I have found notable so far:

• Quest design is damn good.  I haven’t really gone anywhere with the main quest yet, but I have done a couple of the larger side quests.  Both have been very well written and engaging.  They have been a mix of exploration, dialog, combat, and a tad of puzzle solving.
• Dialog options are vastly greater than in Oblivion.  This game has a ton of dialog - I have spent a significant fraction of my time so far just talking to people.  You tend to have several interesting responses to choose from in most situations, as well.
• VATS is a lot of fun.  The much vaunted VATS combat system is actually pretty cool.  Not only is it useful for carefully planning out tougher encounters, it is also quite cinematic.  Watching heads get blown off and then roll down hills has never been so much fun.
• Real time combat is fine, but not amazing.  It does feel very fast and somewhat hard to control.  In the end, it just not of the same quality as a good shooter.  I personally don’t have a problem with this.  Fallout 3 is not a shooter, and if you want to experience some fun combat, just make use of VATS.
• Visuals are great.  Graphics quality is very high and everything looks just like it should.  If I had one word to describe the game’s visuals, it would be “immersive”.
• The game does not hold your hand nearly as much as Oblivion.  It is hard to find a good balance between hand holding and being frustratingly non-specific.  So far, I have found Fallout 3 to do this exceptionally well.

While my impressions are pretty much strictly positive so far, your mileage could vary.  Note that I (obviously) loved the original Fallout games, and also had quite a good time with Oblivion.  I ultimately spent an inordinate amount of time working with mods for Oblivion to fix various flaws.  Many of these were not all that apparent until I had spent quite a bit of time with the game.  So, while my first impressions have been good, I am not completely sold on Fallout 3 yet.

I fear that all the buzz over Far Cry 2 in recent days has crowded out other PC games that are no less worthy of mention, so allow me to take a step back and cover some of the PC games that I enjoyed immensely over the past two years or so. If you’re looking for a game to play that’s just as fun as what’s coming out now, but won’t run you the full $50 price tag, look no further than these games.

Team Fortress 2. Yeah, we’re still playing the ol’ Teef regularly in this household. Grokmoo wrote quite extensively about the parts of the game we enjoy, so I’ll just give the bottom line here: the game has been out for a little while yet still enjoys a thriving community. The nine classes seem deceptively simple (only three weapons each, one of which is a melee weapon), but each require completely different strategies, so that mastering even one takes awhile and mastering them all is quite the feat. Add to that the number of different gameplay modes and all the custom maps that are available, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that you can easily get hundreds of hours of playtime out of Team Fortress 2.

Crysis (and its expansion pack Warhead) offers one of the best single player FPS experiences in recent memory. The graphics are simply amazing and will definitely put your high-end video card through its paces. Frustrated by the slowness and general aimlessness of the story missions in Far Cry 2? Then Crysis is the cure. And despite it being over a year older, its engine is definitely better (probably because it wasn’t compromised by having to work on consoles). All it takes to realize the superiority of the engine is to level a copse of trees — full of enemies attempting to hide — with a mounted machine gun. There’s nothing else quite so satisfying as to take out not just all of your enemies, but also all of the trees.

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I have now completed the vast majority of the missions in Far Cry 2, and given that Fallout 3 is out today, I am unlikely to come back to Far Cry 2 for quite a while.  So, now is a good time for a full review!

The bulk of this review is going to be pretty negative, so let me just start out by saying this:  Far Cry 2 is a pretty decent game.  Not fantastically great, as many of the professional reviews would have you believe, but decent.  Indeed, the last time I checked, metacritic had the various review sites giving it an average of 88 out of 100, while the user score was a slightly less impressive 6.5 out of 10.

Ultimately, Far Cry 2 suffers from its own scope.  It is just too large.  The game world is to big, and getting through all the main quests takes too long.  While there are some genuinely fun moments, much of the game is just a drag, and there just isn’t enough interesting stuff to do to merit the 30 or 40 hours of gameplay.  I feel like they could have taken out a lot of the “filler” and been left with maybe 10 hours of actual decently fun gameplay.  Unfortunately, even these parts can be very formulaic.  Virtually all the missions boil down to “go there, kill that guy or blow that thing up”.  The Buddy missions are presumably supposed to add some variety, but they instead feel even more run of the mill (not to mention pointless).  At first, the Buddy missions tend to have something to do with the main mission that they are branching off of.  Later on, however, it feels like the developers just got lazy.  One mission in particular I remember involved going to a village and blowing up some medicine production.  For some bizarre reason, the Buddy “sidebar” to the mission was to go to a completely different village and kill everybody so my Buddy could get some drugs!

While the “kill that guy” part of the missions is usually fun, the “go there” part is almost always boring.  Driving is not very engaging, and you will do a lot of it.  Also, a lot of the time you spend just trying to get somewhere will actually be taken up by traveling through guardposts.  These little annoyances never take more than a minute or two to clear, but you can’t just drive through them, because enemies inevitably come after you and they will take out your vehicle quickly if you ignore them.

So, the fun parts are usually the battles at the various mission locations throughout the world.  However, even these sequences generally only take a few minutes to complete.  The ones that are longer are the most fun, but these are unfortunately very rare.  What this game really needs are some nice “dungeons”: longer, more linear combat sequences, where the developers can lead you through the action.  The open ended combat sequences are just not enough.

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