My Fallout Review

NEw VEgas !!

Fallout 3 was a nice game but far from the idea of the previous Fallout games. Fallout New Vegas follows closely in the steps of F3, making some things better, and some worse, result being a not very good game, and not a horrid one either.

The whole decision of making the "new Fallout" series a FPS was genuinely the worst decision possible - expecially if it turned to be your classic unrealistic FPS, and F3 is just that -

why do i say this?

In Fallout 2 you simply could not take down a Brotherhood of Steel NPC with your beginning weapons. Since RPGs ("roll playing" as we munchkins like to call them) are fundamentally based on the acquisition of powerful gear through killing monsters/NPCs, letting a level 1 player character kill a level 20 boss with little effort using the starting weapons makes for a game that has zero challenge, and F3 was like that.

Skills, level, HP, armour matter little when you hand the control directly to the player - the player's character becomes irrelevant.

This is a RPG, remember?

I imagine anyone but the most hopeless was killing Deathclaws on Ultra-Hard for fun by level 12, and that was Fallout 3.

Fallout New Vegas (FNV) is sensibly harder, with the mechanics for Damage Resistance revisited, and the additional difficulty of Hardcore Mode (eat, sleep and drink) are a nice addition - i resent the option of playing without this - and the game is positively hard even on Medium, as all the MOBs have been scaled up, and very well too, not just randomly overpowered.

Weapons also have been tuned down, with the allmighty Combat Shotgun gone, and even though - almost by chance - i already have the Brotherhood power armour, i still have difficulties with mobs. So far, so good.

But the problems inherent to both F3 and FNV remain, and are now more noticeable than ever.
1)the engine is horrid.
i don't think i need to explain this, but for those who havent played it, its pretty much shit. Nothing has changed since Oblivion at all, and it not only looks horrible and extremely repetitive graphics-wise, the phisics and animations are crap.
This is *not* MW2. Nor is it even FEAR, or Clear Sky.

Me, i particularly find irritating how the NPCs seem to have some sort of instant threedimentional teleport, while your own character moves at the pace of a snail.

coming from someone that plays Tier 4 on QuakeLive, its really annoying when i cant f* aim at a mob because it moves faster than my inertia-filled mouse. horrid mouse controls, really.

READ THIS NEXT BIT CAREFULLY

But my aim is not in question here: how is it that if i press V (enters the VATS automatic aim system - an integral part of the Fallout series) now i get to aim at a mob that is attacking me in melee just as he is on my face - 95% hit rate - or if i EITHER press V *less than half a second* before OR AFTER (lets say .. mashing down the V key) i get to aim at him ten feet away, at 45% hit rate ??????????????????

I tell you why.

The engine was implemented so that the NPCs didnt just stand there AS YOU DO and get shot - cuz that would have been to easy.

Instead, they get to move about at supersonic speed, making combat at close-medium range a matter of pure chance.

. horrid, horrid engine.

2)the scope of the game is way beyond what the team can accomplish.
talking to a NPC that hates me (yet devulges nonchalantly a large amount of tactical information about his army, on the backdrop a sign "keep your mouth shut") he growls at me, then turns sweet as sugar when i tell him i have stuff for him. and when the converstaion switches to a different prerecorded voice acting clip, he's angry again.

Guys - more examples to follow - don't write stuff you can't code; How many broken quests have i got? five at the moment. three are main quests, two are side quests, two more broken quests i have purposedly failed, and more quests i have (no idea how i picked them up) in my questlog that i haven't bothered to read as yet. Mind you, this is the patched version of the game..

I have the main quests House Always Wins 1, 2 and 3 at the same time - one tells me to get the chip, one tells me to use the chip i already have (??? what ?) and one.. i dont know. And i angered the people i was supposed to be invided by (the Legion) for killing ONE of their mobs while on a sidequest (quest: kill legion mobs) that i was undertaking to get good faction with the NCR to actually go on with the main quest(House Always Wins).

Glitches?
This game is one big glitch by itself. I don't think i have won a single serious firefight without most of the NPCs being stuck in a position where they could not move or shoot me but i could shoot them.
*angry* it's a fighting-RPG ... how wrong can you get it.

3)development.
first of all (better in FNV than F3) the radioactive desert wasteland is anything but. There is absolutely *Zero* in this game that makes me think desolation. F2 was grim, nF series is as jolly as a day at the beach. Bad ideas, horrid (i like this word) characters, seriously, Narnia has a more believable mythos. And how many ... fucking people are in this radioactive desert?

Where is the "survival" ?? What would i ever need a Survival skill for if the world is 90% made up of gently old guys, kids, hookers, booze and food? Where is the pain, the sufferning, the misery ?
It's harder to survive on the streets of Brixton than it is in FNV.

But besides that, just look at the scripting of the quest line i detailed before.. there seems to be a million different way to play this game, with all the factions and all, but actually, move so slightly from the beaten path and everything will come crashing down on your head.

So in the end, what you have is a
poorly scripted,
horrid 3d FPS,
combat game with so-so weapon/mob balance ( i just ran out of ammo.. an i mean, i ran out of 3 game days worth of ammo trying to get inside Caesar's Legion camp - now that my "invite" script is broken i have to fight my way in - and i am looking foward to spending the day travelling between merchants to way for more to respawn)
with the most confusing, slow, soggy interface ever,
repetitive graphics,
unintersting music,
ridiculous characters,
lame writing,
poor coding,
and barrels of stupid ideas,
but at least t carries the name Fallout. The sequel to Wasteland.

Excuse me, but i have more fun playing Plants VS Zombies. Or Oblivion. Or Quake.

Too Much

short post today (it's 5Am and i'v been writing MIDI crap for two hours):
Too much these days, too much Quake, too much Minecraft, same for Fallout New Vegas, Plants Vs Zombies, and too many more. I guess a piece on Games is in order, listing the good ones for a change, and not the crap ones.

Good Night :)