Whose Faulty Vision

Why I’m Impressed by Fallout 3

Why I’m impressed by Fallout 3:

Because I’ve spent at least half an hour exploring the smashed-up, post-apocalyptic version of the Air and Space Museum. I went there to find a quest item, but if I were just in there looking for it, I would have been in and out much quicker. No, I’ve spent all of that time looking at the half-ruined artifacts, reading the informational plaques and learning all kinds of details about the elaborate alternate future history of the Fallout world.

And the whole game’s like that. The world is so detailed, and so carefully thought out, that you can just get lost in it. Fallout 3 would still be fun (not as fun, granted, but still fun) even if there were no storyline, no quests, and no enemies to fight. If you could do nothing but wander around, exploring this elaborate world that the Bethesda team has created. I can’t think of any other game that I would say that about.

Guitar Hero

And as long as I’m on the topic of video games: I wasn’t too excited about the new “Guitar Hero: World Tour”, even though, I have and love “Guitar Hero III”, because the new one is following the trend of being a game about a whole band, rather than just a guitar, and I don’t want to have three friends over every time I want to play, or buy a whole band’s worth of plastic instruments. But then I was looking at the box, and it turns out that it includes “Hotel California”, which has one of the greatest guitar tracks in all of rock and roll.

I don’t know why they’re not making a bigger deal out of this. I think they could sell a lot more copies if they did. I think they should rename the game “Guitar Hero: The One with Hotel California In It.”

So now I may have to buy it at some point. Just the disc, not all of the silly plastic instruments, and I’d still be playing just the one guitar part. But I sure do want to rock out to Hotel California.

Resistance 2 Beta

I got into the Resistance 2 Beta! They sent me my key over the weekend.

Okay, backing up, for people who aren’t immersed in Playstation 3 news: The best game that accompanied the Playstation 3 when it first came out was a first-person shooter called “Resistance: Fall of Man”. The sequel’s coming out soon, with some innovative new multiplayer modes. To test those modes–although, to be honest, I don’t know what they’re testing exactly, maybe server load or something–they released a beta test version of the multiplayer component of the game to a few dedicated people who played the first game.

So far I’ve tried the Deathmatch and Co-Op modes. Deathmatch seems like it’s pretty much the same as the first game (which isn’t a criticism, the first game was really good, but it’s nothing terribly innovative either). Co-Op, on the other hand, impressed me a lot. I wasn’t really expecting to like it–going online just to play against the computer seems like kind of a step backwards, as opposed to playing against other people–but I was wrong. It makes you feel like you’re really in a war, instead of the smaller fights you get when you’re playing by yourself. The fact that you have 6 or 7 teammates means that the scale of the threat can be much higher–hordes of enemies, or super-powerful enemies. And there are a bunch of innovative ways the designers use to encourage teams to stick together, such as shields and the ability to revive dead teammates. So it’s not just 8 people independently wandering around the same level.

So I’m satisfied that Resistance 2 will be a worthy successor to the first one. I’m still planning on picking up Fallout 3 next, though.

Fallout 3

I’m severely looking forward to Fallout 3 on the PS3. I never played any of the previous games, but the game design of Oblivion, set in a post-apocalyptic future: what’s not to like? And the videos look incredible. (Not in terms of graphics, I mean, but in terms of the free-roaming gameplay.)

As a side note, and as long as I’m babbling about technology, I’m really impressed with Chrome, Google’s new browser. To get the link above, I typed “fallout 3″ into the Location bar of Chrome, and the link popped up as a suggestion, down where you’d normally expect your own browsing history. I didn’t even have to do a Google search or anything. This is kind of hard to describe, but try it and you’ll fall in love with it–it seems to know where you want to go before you do.

Great Games: Day of the Tentacle

I haven’t done an entry in my great games list in ages, have I? I need to finish them up at some point.

Today’s game is LucasArts’ “Day of the Tentacle.” Now, LucasArts released a whole series of really wonderful point-and-click adventure games, and I could easily have put other games, like “Sam and Max Hit the Road” in this spot. Their games all had clever puzzle solving, a great sense of humor, cute animation and entertaining storylines. But the time travel puzzles really elevated “Day of the Tentacle” to a higher level.

Through most of the game, you’re controlling three characters. They’re all in the same place, but one is in the past (George Washington’s era), one is in the present, and one is in a dystopian future ruled by evil tentacles. Since the characters are hundreds of years apart, they can’t interact directly, but you can pass items back and forth between them, and (rather more importantly) changes made in the past affect the future.

Let me give you an example. Just after the characters get spread out through time, the one in the future is stuck high up in an old, gnarled kumquat tree. She can’t reach anything, so there’s nothing she can do to get herself down. The solution is to have the character in the past find a bucket of red paint, go to the same tree (which is just a little sapling at the time) and paint the kumquats red. He then shows George Washington the kumquat tree. George Washington mistakes the red kumquats for cherries, and goes running out with an axe to chop down the cherry tree. And poof, the tree in the future disappears, and the character is freed.

It’s goofy, it’s ridiculous, but it makes a certain kind of sense. The puzzles in this game are always clever and rarely arbitrary, which was often a big problem for these point-and-click adventure games.

Day of the Tentacle is still fun today. Its excellent hand-drawn animation doesn’t rely on graphics that get out-of-date, the voice acting is great, and the puzzles are fun. Definitely worthy of a spot on my great games list.

(See the full list here.)

Beyond Good & Evil 2

There’s a new Beyond Good & Evil game coming out! The first one didn’t sell very well, but it was an excellent game, with some of the best writing I’ve seen in a video game. Hope the sequel holds up that standard.

Assassin’s Creed

My latest Playstation 3 game is “Assassin’s Creed”, and despite the mixed reviews, I’m loving it. There’s a trend in video games recently to be more open–games that allow you to decide how to solve a particular problem, instead of having to guess how the programmers intended you to solve the problem–and AC really exemplifies that trend.

Let’s take an (admittedly extreme) example. A little background: Assassin’s Creed is set in the Holy Land in the era of Richard the Lionheart’s crusade. The protagonist is an Assassin, in the original meaning of the word (although hashish is never mentioned–guess killing people is ok, but drugs are evil), who’s sent to kill various evil men. An unrelated piece of background: Before picking up Assassin’s Creed, I played through a chunk of Half-Life 2, which is a game that everyone raved about, claimed it was one of the best video games ever, and so on.

Now, imagine a gate that you need to get past, that’s guarded by a bunch of armed guards.

In Half-Life 2, there would be exactly one way to get past that gate. Probably just by killing all of the guards, but possibly by finding a lever somewhere to pull to make a machine come out and kill them all for you, or some such nonsense. Either way, there would only be one solution, and you’d have to find it.

In Assassin’s Creed, here are the ways at your disposal to get past that gate:

• Just kill all of the guards.
• Run past the guards, lose them in the crowds, and hide in a haystack (or some other hiding place) until they stop searching for you.
• Find a way around the gate, such as by climbing a nearby building and leaping to the top of the wall.
• Find a group of scholars, who the guards will allow to pass unmolested. Disguise yourself as one of them, blend into the group and simply walk past the guards.
• (And this one really impresses me) Find another nearby guard who’s by himself. Stick a knife in his back. When a civilian finds his body, they’ll raise a ruckus, and the guards will come and investigate. Sneak through the gate while they’re away from it.

As I said, that’s an extreme case, but the whole game’s like that–for any given problem, there are a bunch of different possible solutions. You never feel like you’re stuck trying to read the programmer’s mind, as you do in games like HL2. It’s a real breath of fresh air.

Also, the game is gorgeous. There are three Crusades-era cities modeled in the game, and they’re incredibly detailed and realistic. And the protagonist looks incredible–very detailed model, and his movements are so fluid you’d swear you’re watching a real person move. But I’d play it even if it didn’t look so good, just because it’s so open.