[If you wear a helmet while riding a Segway, you’re a wanker. For that matter if you ride a Segway at all: You’re a wanker. Just saying.
So that this isn't a COMPLETE waste of space - here is a funny picture I found.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Monday, November 15, 2010
Fallout New Vegas review (spoiler free) [GAMING]
I beat New Vegas this past weekend. After over 61 hours of running and gunning through the Wastelands I finished it. Admittedly the vast majority of this time was spent in side-quests and exploration: which are the main reason I think I like sandbox style play. Just like Fallout 3 there is so much to explore that every time I jump on I stumble across a new location. I almost feel like I’ve barely scraped the surface of this place too, which already has me scheming and plotting for my next play-through.
For those who don’t know anything about the game – you are the Courier, and after being hired to carry an unassuming platinum chip you get beat up and buried alive by that twat, Matthew Perry (voicing the just as douchey character, Benny). You are rescued by a cowboy-faced robot and put back together by a kindly old doctor in the nearby town of Goodspring. From there you get the tutorial and are eventually set free to reap mayhem and reward at your leisure. The main plotline, however, leads you on the trail of that douche-a-palooza all over the wasteland in a very wild-west lone gunslinger kind of adventure.
You can approach this from a lot of ways, and even the side quests seem more open then Fallout 3 even. A friend of mine started playing at about the time I did and used a similar starting build that I did. As the game progressed it seems like our experiences slowly divided with each new choice. Once I finally got to the ending I was gifted with a series of cut scenes that provided the epilogue of all the major factions and how I affected them: along with many of the secondary factions which you have strong effect on. Some prosper, some flounder, some get a cool robot side-kick and run off to become the topic of a series of popular children’s books (apparently).
Mechanically it feels almost identical to Fallout 3 but for some re-arranging of skills and the addition/subtraction of a few. For one: firearms all seem to be filed under ‘Guns’, ‘Energy Weapons’, or ‘Explosives’ for the rare machine gun grenade launcher or missile launcher. They have taken ‘Big Guns’ out of there entirely. There is also the addition of loading benches and campfires which add a new function to the repair skill and the brand-new ‘Survival’ skill.
Loading benches allow you to break down and assemble different types of ammo and even special ammo like hollow-points or armor piercing rounds. As someone who grew up around guns and have been able to at least witness the experience of custom-loading cartridges, it is a really cool thing to see in a video game. It is, however, less and less useful as the game progresses though. At maybe the 70% mark of the game you are pretty fiscally sound (or at least I was for the dumpster full of arms and armor I kept selling), and can afford to just fast-travel to the Gun-runners and some faction dealers and buy up all the .50 ammo you need for the badassness of the Anti-Material Rifle. This might change in hardcore mode, though, which I don’t know since I haven’t played it there yet.
Campfires allow you to mix up booze, food, and drugs with the ‘Survival’ skill. Like the Loading Benches, it is a really awesome thing to see that seems a little less useful as events progress. There are some specialty items that you can only seem to get through the campfires though, which offsets things. You can make Party-time Mentats for interest, which give you a bigger boost to Charisma and Intelligence than normal Mentats. In a game where you are pretty much a survivalist wandering the wastelands, it adds a nice bit of utility and fluff to the game. Everything you stumble across seems to be useful in the construction of some such concoction…even if it’s just a steak or a tanned hide.
There is also the Work Benches that were out there in Fallout 3. It seems like they are much more useful though, as you can re-charge spent energy ammo and make Weapon Repair Kits. The downside? Not as many fun toys L if there are Nuka-Grenades or Railroad Spike Gun formulas, I haven’t seen them yet. The Weapon Repair Kits are probably the most useful thing that any of these can make, since each one will increase the condition of your equipped weapon by 25% (to a max of 100%), this is incredibly useful in a game where repair shops are way fewer and far between…plus they are expensive as hell. Why pay 3000 to fix my custom mini-gun “The Hand of Scaavys” when I can just break in some guys home, steal all his wrenches, glue, and duct tape and put it back together again myself? Other than that, see the last two paragraphs for my feelings on these not-ubiquitous-enough stations.
Gear-wise there isn’t too much to talk about. There are still tons of weapons, tons of armor: all are slightly different from the rest, more even than in Fallout 3 I think. For instance, instead of the shotgun, sawed-off, and combat shotgun: in New Vegas there is the single-shot shotgun, the caravan shotgun, the sawed-off shotgun, the combat shotgun, the hunting shotgun, and the list goes on. Power Armor is far less prevalent than in Fallout 3, and the Hunting Rifle doesn’t come in till mid-game (But is WAY the fuck more powerful! Hunting Rifles and ‘This Machine’ FTW!!) There are some cool new additions though, in the gun category you can get a Light Machine Gun, which is in my opinion one of the best options in the game with the combination of rate of fire and stopping power. You won’t bleed through your clip in two seconds like the mini gun, and the LMG seems to have better power-per-hit than a lot of its peers. There is a plasma-gun that fires a shotgun-spread of charges which is pretty brutal when used against ghouls. You can also get a Machine gun grenade launcher (don’t know if this is the actual name or not) that I’m sure would be awesome and amazingly effective if I had a high-enough Explosives skill.
With all the choices and different things you can do with different guns: I ended the game carrying around the final arsenal:
EVEE is an eyebot that isn’t all that impressive in combat, but has decent carrying capacity and a plays high-noon gunslinger music whenever you get detected and drawn into combat. Companions also give you a perk, in EVEE’s case you could detect enemies at longer range and target invisible enemies in VATS. Rex is a cyber-dog that will run off and attack shit like an annoying fleabag.
Of the human companions, Boone, Cass, Raul, and Veronica seem the most useful. Boone is a badass sniper who can bring the pain and causes enemies to flash, which is great when you are running in the dark or fighting yet another mutely-colored enemy on mutely-colored scenery. He seemed ungodly awesome at first, but as I kept going noted he had a propensity to either use weapons you wouldn’t want him to (like grenades while stealthing) or pull a machete out of thin air and hack away at some fools. This is why I switched him with Cass. Cass lets you drink and make booze. Can you think of a more awesome super power? I thought not…she is also great at range and doesn’t go Rambo on anyone when you don’t want her too. Veronica (voiced by Felicia Day of nerdy fame) is a punchy (literally) Brotherhood of Steel scribe who acts as a walking Work Bench (go back to reading about recharging energy ammo and stuff). Raul (voiced by Machete star and all-around Badass Danny Trejo) isn’t much in a fight, but will repair your shit for you.
There are a lot of celebrity voices actually – careful listeners can find that all the companions seem to be voiced by someone famous, as well as all primary and most secondary characters. Renee A-something (I can’t begin to pronounce or spell it) who played Odo on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is the voice of the ominous Mr. House. I’ve already discussed the douchey talents of Matthew Perry. Michael Dorn, who played Worf is sort of a ‘town spokesman’ for a mountainous community of super mutants. Sol from Battlestar Galactica did the voice of Doc Mitchell, who fixes you up after digging you out of the ground at the beginning of the game. I was told Wil Wheaton is in there somewhere, but I haven’t heard him…
The drawbacks of this game? If you are playing it on a 360 or PS3 prepare for it to crash every twenty seconds, losing toiling hours with no immediate promise of a game patch to fix it. If you play it on a PC, there are still a lot of bugs, but I haven’t personally experienced all that many crashes. There have been some pretty big bugs, like when a glitch caused and essential person to my quest disappear or a companion froze and started giving the same line over and over and over and over again. Most have been fixable with Console commands if you want to take the effort of looking them up, but the repeating dialogue one forced me to go to an earlier saved game and lost an hour and a half of game play. So there is that. Developers seem to have been pretty responsive with fixing things in the PC version, though.
So that’s what I think in a nutshell: All in all it is a fantastic game with some errors that I’m sure will be smoothed out in time. Until then I intend to keep playing through with different styles and choices to see how they affect the story.
For those who don’t know anything about the game – you are the Courier, and after being hired to carry an unassuming platinum chip you get beat up and buried alive by that twat, Matthew Perry (voicing the just as douchey character, Benny). You are rescued by a cowboy-faced robot and put back together by a kindly old doctor in the nearby town of Goodspring. From there you get the tutorial and are eventually set free to reap mayhem and reward at your leisure. The main plotline, however, leads you on the trail of that douche-a-palooza all over the wasteland in a very wild-west lone gunslinger kind of adventure.
You can approach this from a lot of ways, and even the side quests seem more open then Fallout 3 even. A friend of mine started playing at about the time I did and used a similar starting build that I did. As the game progressed it seems like our experiences slowly divided with each new choice. Once I finally got to the ending I was gifted with a series of cut scenes that provided the epilogue of all the major factions and how I affected them: along with many of the secondary factions which you have strong effect on. Some prosper, some flounder, some get a cool robot side-kick and run off to become the topic of a series of popular children’s books (apparently).
Mechanically it feels almost identical to Fallout 3 but for some re-arranging of skills and the addition/subtraction of a few. For one: firearms all seem to be filed under ‘Guns’, ‘Energy Weapons’, or ‘Explosives’ for the rare machine gun grenade launcher or missile launcher. They have taken ‘Big Guns’ out of there entirely. There is also the addition of loading benches and campfires which add a new function to the repair skill and the brand-new ‘Survival’ skill.
Loading benches allow you to break down and assemble different types of ammo and even special ammo like hollow-points or armor piercing rounds. As someone who grew up around guns and have been able to at least witness the experience of custom-loading cartridges, it is a really cool thing to see in a video game. It is, however, less and less useful as the game progresses though. At maybe the 70% mark of the game you are pretty fiscally sound (or at least I was for the dumpster full of arms and armor I kept selling), and can afford to just fast-travel to the Gun-runners and some faction dealers and buy up all the .50 ammo you need for the badassness of the Anti-Material Rifle. This might change in hardcore mode, though, which I don’t know since I haven’t played it there yet.
Campfires allow you to mix up booze, food, and drugs with the ‘Survival’ skill. Like the Loading Benches, it is a really awesome thing to see that seems a little less useful as events progress. There are some specialty items that you can only seem to get through the campfires though, which offsets things. You can make Party-time Mentats for interest, which give you a bigger boost to Charisma and Intelligence than normal Mentats. In a game where you are pretty much a survivalist wandering the wastelands, it adds a nice bit of utility and fluff to the game. Everything you stumble across seems to be useful in the construction of some such concoction…even if it’s just a steak or a tanned hide.
There is also the Work Benches that were out there in Fallout 3. It seems like they are much more useful though, as you can re-charge spent energy ammo and make Weapon Repair Kits. The downside? Not as many fun toys L if there are Nuka-Grenades or Railroad Spike Gun formulas, I haven’t seen them yet. The Weapon Repair Kits are probably the most useful thing that any of these can make, since each one will increase the condition of your equipped weapon by 25% (to a max of 100%), this is incredibly useful in a game where repair shops are way fewer and far between…plus they are expensive as hell. Why pay 3000 to fix my custom mini-gun “The Hand of Scaavys” when I can just break in some guys home, steal all his wrenches, glue, and duct tape and put it back together again myself? Other than that, see the last two paragraphs for my feelings on these not-ubiquitous-enough stations.
Gear-wise there isn’t too much to talk about. There are still tons of weapons, tons of armor: all are slightly different from the rest, more even than in Fallout 3 I think. For instance, instead of the shotgun, sawed-off, and combat shotgun: in New Vegas there is the single-shot shotgun, the caravan shotgun, the sawed-off shotgun, the combat shotgun, the hunting shotgun, and the list goes on. Power Armor is far less prevalent than in Fallout 3, and the Hunting Rifle doesn’t come in till mid-game (But is WAY the fuck more powerful! Hunting Rifles and ‘This Machine’ FTW!!) There are some cool new additions though, in the gun category you can get a Light Machine Gun, which is in my opinion one of the best options in the game with the combination of rate of fire and stopping power. You won’t bleed through your clip in two seconds like the mini gun, and the LMG seems to have better power-per-hit than a lot of its peers. There is a plasma-gun that fires a shotgun-spread of charges which is pretty brutal when used against ghouls. You can also get a Machine gun grenade launcher (don’t know if this is the actual name or not) that I’m sure would be awesome and amazingly effective if I had a high-enough Explosives skill.
With all the choices and different things you can do with different guns: I ended the game carrying around the final arsenal:
- ‘This Machine’ – A unique and more badass version of the Hunting Rifle.
- Assault Carbine – Bit of a tougher variant of the Service Rifle, which is basically an M4
- Anti-Material Rifle – A sniper’s weapon that sends people flying through the air. It’ll one-shot Deathclaws.
- Light Machine Gun – I’ve already sung this beast’s praises
- ‘Maria’ – the named 9mm pistol you can get off Benny.
- Riot Shotgun – Basically a combat shotgun
- Marksman Carbine – I only had this for half the time, I eventually gave it to my companion, Cass and a fistful of bullets and she brought the law better than I ever could with one of these.
EVEE is an eyebot that isn’t all that impressive in combat, but has decent carrying capacity and a plays high-noon gunslinger music whenever you get detected and drawn into combat. Companions also give you a perk, in EVEE’s case you could detect enemies at longer range and target invisible enemies in VATS. Rex is a cyber-dog that will run off and attack shit like an annoying fleabag.
Of the human companions, Boone, Cass, Raul, and Veronica seem the most useful. Boone is a badass sniper who can bring the pain and causes enemies to flash, which is great when you are running in the dark or fighting yet another mutely-colored enemy on mutely-colored scenery. He seemed ungodly awesome at first, but as I kept going noted he had a propensity to either use weapons you wouldn’t want him to (like grenades while stealthing) or pull a machete out of thin air and hack away at some fools. This is why I switched him with Cass. Cass lets you drink and make booze. Can you think of a more awesome super power? I thought not…she is also great at range and doesn’t go Rambo on anyone when you don’t want her too. Veronica (voiced by Felicia Day of nerdy fame) is a punchy (literally) Brotherhood of Steel scribe who acts as a walking Work Bench (go back to reading about recharging energy ammo and stuff). Raul (voiced by Machete star and all-around Badass Danny Trejo) isn’t much in a fight, but will repair your shit for you.
There are a lot of celebrity voices actually – careful listeners can find that all the companions seem to be voiced by someone famous, as well as all primary and most secondary characters. Renee A-something (I can’t begin to pronounce or spell it) who played Odo on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is the voice of the ominous Mr. House. I’ve already discussed the douchey talents of Matthew Perry. Michael Dorn, who played Worf is sort of a ‘town spokesman’ for a mountainous community of super mutants. Sol from Battlestar Galactica did the voice of Doc Mitchell, who fixes you up after digging you out of the ground at the beginning of the game. I was told Wil Wheaton is in there somewhere, but I haven’t heard him…
The drawbacks of this game? If you are playing it on a 360 or PS3 prepare for it to crash every twenty seconds, losing toiling hours with no immediate promise of a game patch to fix it. If you play it on a PC, there are still a lot of bugs, but I haven’t personally experienced all that many crashes. There have been some pretty big bugs, like when a glitch caused and essential person to my quest disappear or a companion froze and started giving the same line over and over and over and over again. Most have been fixable with Console commands if you want to take the effort of looking them up, but the repeating dialogue one forced me to go to an earlier saved game and lost an hour and a half of game play. So there is that. Developers seem to have been pretty responsive with fixing things in the PC version, though.
So that’s what I think in a nutshell: All in all it is a fantastic game with some errors that I’m sure will be smoothed out in time. Until then I intend to keep playing through with different styles and choices to see how they affect the story.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Why I like Protagonists who get Their Teeth Kicked In (AKA - Why Old Boy is a great movie) [NARRATIVE CONVENTION]
"Pull the switch you fucking pansy"
I have been made more and more aware as of late by the rather fatalistic preferences I have in storytelling.
Maybe it is from reading too much H.P. Lovecraft or Machiavelli, or maybe it’s a natural inclination that is without a cause. Regardless of the reasons, I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I don’t see it as fatalistic or sadistic to see characters in stories fail or suffer. I am of the opinion that that is what helps make a story good.
Or maybe I’m a closet Catholic (I already don’t believe in God and am a slave to several mindless routines, so I’m not ruling it out).
The way I see it is that a story is supposed to be about events traveling from one point to another and the characters involved changing as the story progresses. For good or ill they have to change, along with the world around them.
Just like in life, people change over time, and the characters should do the same. Otherwise, there just isn’t really any point in the story. Otherwise, it is just another ‘day in the life’ and the story holds little significance. The characters can be realizing a love interest, discovering something about themselves, or losing/regaining faith in something, all are valid. The more drastic and stressful the events, the more drastic and dynamic the change can be.
To the example I listed earlier – H.P. Lovecraft. The father of modern horror’s story almost has EVERYONE start off as fairly mundane (vaguely anti-Semitic) people who get driven inextricably insane by the horrors they witness. Most have their infectious insanity taken to such a degree that recovery of the old self is impossible. Along the way they seem to all discover something about themselves and realize with horrible consequence the truth in their own desperately bleak place in the universe in the face of eldritch horrors.
To a more common example: One anyone who has been in a high-school lit class can relate to. Anyone out there remember ‘One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest’? (If not, it’s nothing to be embarrassed about, if you don’t have time to read go Netflix the Jack Nicholson movie adaptation. It’s great!) Murphy’s whole story was about his struggle to change his surroundings and break from the suffocating numbness Nurse Ratchet’s regime held the ward in. While he failed, eventually breaking himself on the oppressive surroundings, his actions sparked changes in the surrounding characters. The Chief is a perfect example, eventually being spurred by Murphy’s actions to take action rather than mutely holding up a mop.
That is another thing: the change doesn’t have to be an obvious one. In the ‘One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ example, Murphy didn’t change as much as he changed others. It was also a subtle, slow change in the people around him. It doesn’t appear that there is any direct character development. Brave heart was all about the change that William Wallace affected on others through the story through his efforts and sacrifice.
That is another thing: the change doesn’t have to be an obvious one. In the ‘One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ example, Murphy didn’t change as much as he changed others. It was also a subtle, slow change in the people around him. It doesn’t appear that there is any direct character development. Brave heart was all about the change that William Wallace affected on others through the story through his efforts and sacrifice.
So while a character’s development help makes a story compelling, it isn’t all that interesting unless there is a good story to move them along. No one would have given a shit who Kaiser Soze was if he hadn’t killed Dean Keaton (and if Verbal hadn’t done so well to vilify himself- I mean Soze…er…). I think it is better illustrated in movies where it ISN’T done well. Shitty chick flicks or artsy movies that struggle to be feel-good movies or tear-jerkers can often fit this billet.
I am ashamed to say that I watched ‘Elizabethtown’ on a long flight once. Believe me, it is the last thing I ever want to confess to. It was an AWFUL fucking movie, worse even than the Keanu Reeves remake of ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ (I do stupid things on long flights…like watch the movies). The story revolved around Legolas trying to discover that his daddy loved him and that he can move on in life or some such nonsense. The change over the course of the story was drastic, but none of the events in the story seemed compelling enough to have warranted the change. Legolas just went from ‘boohoo I didn’t know my dad’ to ‘Hey, I think I might have known my dad! Let’s make out Kristen Dunst!’
If events don’t warrant change then it’s all pointless. Maybe that’s a better way of saying it.
So: By setting characters in a very grim circumstance and run them pretty much to death and back is a pretty good excuse for having a lot of shit happen to a person that evokes change. People always seem the most changed by the big (almost traumatic moments) in life. Brushes with Death or Life both seem to be the kicks in the teeth people need to change who they are. Wars haunt veterans for the rest of their lives, the birth of someone’s child is the wake up call to shape up and be more adult, having to declare bankruptcy will make someone skittish about money the rest of their lives.
This is why I like the grimmer stuff. It seems to have more potential. When the main character gets the crap kicked out of him, does he give up or keep going? Does he keep going it alone or seek help? Does the character’s cause inspire or deter others? How WILL he react to the mind-flaying horror waiting in the sleep New England town?
As for seeing characters getting killed, well…that might just be my fatalistic streak. It is too easy to have a hunky-doory happy ending where everyone wins, so I really like and admire stories and writers who aren’t afraid of putting a bullet in the head of the main character. (Case in point, Layer Cake, which is a BADASS movie…, or if I keep going for the classics: anything Shakespeare)
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