After my last review of Operation: Anchorage I loaded up The Pitt with some trepidation. I was not looking forward to constant freezes and a rather dull story. But I loaded the game hoping that a new environment with the same basic pallet of colors that the original game had would have less problems.
I tend to play Fallout 3 with a slant toward stealth so that I can sneak up on enemies but it also allows me to slow down and enjoy the level of detail the designers put into each new area that I come across. I really enjoyed the initial crossing of the bridge into The Pitt and was impressed by the varying levels of height that were employed for enemy placement. The initial story wasn't that interesting. Although I have to admit that after spending so many hours looking at and helping ghouls I was defintely grossed out by the new diseased look that the slaves in The Pitt had been given.
Exploring the initial area of The Pitt I was a little disappointed. The new areas are basically just large squared off city blocks so exploration ends quickly. The second quest left me at odds. The quest simply asks you go into an area filled with Trogs (slaves taken over completely by radiation--losing skin and all human instincts) and retrieve 10 steel ingots. The first 10 come relatively quickly, so you can easily return to the quest giver and move on. My dilemma stems from turning the easy 10 or searching for all 100 hidden within the area for a silver trophy. Ah the trophy. Sounds easy right? Well...I've gotten 90 steel ingots and have decided to stop looking (for now). There is only so much time I want to spend in one area.
So I returned the 10 ingots and continued on with the story quest. As I previously stated I wasn't really excited about the quest story up to this point, but once you realize what the "cure" is to help the slaves I was immediately sucked in. This final trophy quest is what really brings out the best in all of the Fallout 3 quests. The ability to give you a choice to help one group or their opposition with an end result that leaves you feeling morally dirty at the end of either choice. This last quest brought me right back to the Tenpenny Tower quest and the Paradise Falls quest from Fallout 3. I don't want to spoil the quest for those who haven't played The Pitt yet but I have to say that the last quest is definitely worth paying for the DLC.
One thing that I have not discussed about The Pitt is whether or not I had any technical difficulties. As I mentioned in the beginning I loaded up The Pitt with some trepidation but found the game to run smooth throughout the entire experience. I had one freeze-up but I'll chock that up to a failure in the Fallout 3 engine and not the DLC specifically. Too many enemies and friends all battling at the same time on multiple planes seem to have choked up the game engine at one point late in the third quest. After a reboot the quest finished without any further problems.
I would definitely give The Pitt a recommendation after the disappointing Operation: Anchorage DLC. I'm still going to hold off on Point Lookout and Mothership Zeta for now, mostly because there are some other good games coming out soon that I'd rather save my money for.
Until those come out, I've rented (against my better judgement) the so far, disappointing Star Wars The Clone Wars: Republic Heroes game. More on that after a thorough play through.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Operation: Broken Anchorage
I can honestly say that I feel ripped off. Both by Bethesda and Sony for allowing Operation: Anchorage to be released with so many problems.
First off the story itself is only minimally interesting. After playing through Fallout 3 for close to 200 hours and seeing the slide during loads saying Alaska Liberated many many times, I was hoping that O:A would be a decent story and adventure. The first leg of the journey was fairly interesting. Traveling up a cliff face with potential enemies coming from above or below was neat. Seeing white rocks and snow was neat. Seeing how an enemy died--a cyber degradation similar to a kill from the Plasma rifle or Alien Blaster--was neat. Being able to heal and restock ammo from a different source was neat. Neat. For the first hour of play.
After that it got boring. Boring because the only enemies the DLC seems to offer are either flame throwers, missile launching troops, or stealth snipers. Any combo of these three could show up and attempt to ambush you, but you also have a companion and VATS. At the time that my character started playing through O:A I was at level 24 and Small Guns, Big Guns, and Energy Weapons are all at 100. Using VATS in O:A seems almost and unfair advantage when combined with the companion who seems to be a crack shot. Boring because there are healing and re-stocking ammo stations too close together.
Maybe that's why Bethesda decided to release a buggy add-on. I had the game freeze up so many times when I entered VATS that I was ready to just give up playing. The worst part of O:A freezing up is that the only that I could get it to unfreeze was to restart the whole PS3. LAME! Of course if you restart your PS3 and then launch the game again any progress you made from your last save up to the freeze is completely gone. The worst part is that you can't really anticipate when your next freeze could happen, so you start to train yourself to save often--too often. This saving often is ridiculous for two reasons. First, the save process is slow and takes up unnecessary hard drive space. Second, the game shouldn't freakin' be this buggy that I have to RESTART my PS3 to unfreeze a game. Seriously how did this get passed through QA checks from Sony? Or is it because the game is set in a different environment that doesn't use the muted grays, greens and browns of the Capital Wasteland, so the rendering engine doesn't know how to handle what it is trying to draw? Or is it because the environments are mostly open areas with long view distances that the render engine is having a hard time trying to render all of the information in the viewing area and keep the AI variables all in check. Yeah. That must be it.
Wrong!
It's shitty ass coding. You know how I know. Because the game freaking locked up on my when I tried to access a computer terminal in the game too! A freaking computer terminal. What is there to render with a computer terminal? Fill screen with green and black. Run loop for cracking terminal password. It works all the time in the original Fallout 3 so can't it work in O:A?
Seriously. This is completely unacceptable. But Bethesda already got my money. They've also already got my money for Broken Steel and The Pitt. Will they get my money for Point Lookout and Mothership Zeta? That is questionable. If they fix the bugs and offer a patch then sure I'll pick up the last 2 DLC.
I love the environment and the game play that Bethesda has created in Fallout 3, but releasing really crappy code, game breaking code, is completely inexcusable.
If you enjoy Fallout 3 and want more, DON'T waste your money on Operation: Anchorage.
First off the story itself is only minimally interesting. After playing through Fallout 3 for close to 200 hours and seeing the slide during loads saying Alaska Liberated many many times, I was hoping that O:A would be a decent story and adventure. The first leg of the journey was fairly interesting. Traveling up a cliff face with potential enemies coming from above or below was neat. Seeing white rocks and snow was neat. Seeing how an enemy died--a cyber degradation similar to a kill from the Plasma rifle or Alien Blaster--was neat. Being able to heal and restock ammo from a different source was neat. Neat. For the first hour of play.
After that it got boring. Boring because the only enemies the DLC seems to offer are either flame throwers, missile launching troops, or stealth snipers. Any combo of these three could show up and attempt to ambush you, but you also have a companion and VATS. At the time that my character started playing through O:A I was at level 24 and Small Guns, Big Guns, and Energy Weapons are all at 100. Using VATS in O:A seems almost and unfair advantage when combined with the companion who seems to be a crack shot. Boring because there are healing and re-stocking ammo stations too close together.
Maybe that's why Bethesda decided to release a buggy add-on. I had the game freeze up so many times when I entered VATS that I was ready to just give up playing. The worst part of O:A freezing up is that the only that I could get it to unfreeze was to restart the whole PS3. LAME! Of course if you restart your PS3 and then launch the game again any progress you made from your last save up to the freeze is completely gone. The worst part is that you can't really anticipate when your next freeze could happen, so you start to train yourself to save often--too often. This saving often is ridiculous for two reasons. First, the save process is slow and takes up unnecessary hard drive space. Second, the game shouldn't freakin' be this buggy that I have to RESTART my PS3 to unfreeze a game. Seriously how did this get passed through QA checks from Sony? Or is it because the game is set in a different environment that doesn't use the muted grays, greens and browns of the Capital Wasteland, so the rendering engine doesn't know how to handle what it is trying to draw? Or is it because the environments are mostly open areas with long view distances that the render engine is having a hard time trying to render all of the information in the viewing area and keep the AI variables all in check. Yeah. That must be it.
Wrong!
It's shitty ass coding. You know how I know. Because the game freaking locked up on my when I tried to access a computer terminal in the game too! A freaking computer terminal. What is there to render with a computer terminal? Fill screen with green and black. Run loop for cracking terminal password. It works all the time in the original Fallout 3 so can't it work in O:A?
Seriously. This is completely unacceptable. But Bethesda already got my money. They've also already got my money for Broken Steel and The Pitt. Will they get my money for Point Lookout and Mothership Zeta? That is questionable. If they fix the bugs and offer a patch then sure I'll pick up the last 2 DLC.
I love the environment and the game play that Bethesda has created in Fallout 3, but releasing really crappy code, game breaking code, is completely inexcusable.
If you enjoy Fallout 3 and want more, DON'T waste your money on Operation: Anchorage.
Monday, October 5, 2009
Who you gonna call? The Lone Wanderer
This was a gaming weekend.
Some family came to visit and wanted to watch the dreadful U of M, MSU game on the big screen so I ended playing Ghostbusters on the Wii with the boy upstairs. I got Ghostbusters back in July for my birthday. I played it for a day or so on the Wii and enjoyed playing it, but found that the game (at least in my opinion) was much better suited as a single player game than a two player, split screen game. The controls for the Wii aren't bad, in fact if I played the Wii more often with first person POV games I'd say that they were pretty good for the hardware used. You point the Wii-mote at the screen to move your view around, move it too far left or right on the screen and your character turns left or right (or if you veer off to the left or right your character starts to spin in a very fast dizzying fashion--first bad point). You move forward with the nunchuck. Switching between the various Ghostbuster gadgets is handled simply with the D-pad, and pressing either A or B to activate said gadgets.
Now the game will let you play the story mode in single player and two player mode. I was all for playing in single player because you get the chance to see the whole world filling the entire screen. The kids of course wanted nothing to do with my gamer wishes and insisted that we play in two player mode. The second bad point to the game is playing in two player mode. Split screen forces both players to view the entire world in half the space on the screen, which makes for squinted viewing. After a day of playing two player mode back in July I had had enough. So I stopped playing. The story was decent and the replay is worthwhile--ghosts and other objects to scan, art to find, but a combination of the split screen and the constant pointing of the Wii-mote at the screen was just enough to keep me from going back.
So back to this weekend.
The boy wanted help with a section in game and since I didn't have any real interest in the U of M game after the first quarter I went up stairs to help if I could. Coming into the story after not playing for several months I found it easy to catch up without feeling like I'd missed anything important. The voice acting is definitely great, the art style on the Wii is fun and after a few minutes of re-acquainting myself with the controls I was enjoying the game quite a lot. We got through the area that the boy had been stuck on and then found another section that had us both literally ready to throw our Wii-motes at the screen. Both of us wanted to kick the TV, the Wii, anything to help us get out our frustrations with a section in the game that felt completely broken when using the Wii-mote. As described above you move forward with the nunchuck and view by moving the Wii-mote pointer off to the left or right. The section in question required four different chains to be pulled down with the Ghostbuster beam, which in turn would then raise a platform for you to walk across. The problem is that the platforms drop after a few seconds so you have keep moving. Aiming with the Wii-mote exasperates the experience because if you move too quickly with the Wii-mote, your target zooms off the screen and you can't pull the next lever to raise the next platform so that you can keep moving. We were both ready to just give up. The worst part about this section we were stuck in is that it was just a few paces further along from where my son was stuck before. My first thought was if the rest of the game is this broken-hard, we'd never see the end. Fortunately after many tries one of us was able to cross the four death platforms and move around the corner. Another plus to the game design is that if one player moves to a section in the game that moves the story forward both players get moved along. Finally we ended up playing through that horrendous level to find that the rest of the game, while challenging, had a satisfying ending.
Overall I'd say Ghostbusters on the Wii is worthwhile in short bursts.
After the kids went to bed I fell back into my old routine with Fallout 3. I'm a sucker for that story and environment and now that Bethesda has finally released the DLC for the PS3, I had to try out Broken Steel. Loading up my Good Karma save from March (or so) I finished the original story sacrificing myself but letting Project Purity run to clean up the Wasteland water, watched the endgame narration and then found myself waking up with the Brotherhood back at the Citadel. So much time away from the game but everything felt so right and good to be back.
At the end of my good karma save I had Fawkes as my companion. Running through the Broken Steel missions with Fawkes almost felt like cheating, but at the same time felt like it was my way of allowing that great Super Mutant his moment to exact retribution on those that would otherwise slaughter him. I ended up playing through the 3 trophy missions from Broken Steel in roughly half a day even with a few glitches to the game. The first major glitch was early on where a fast travel from one location to another which hard locked the PS3 and I had to power off the console altogether. The second major glitch involved a VATS battle near the end of the 3rd mission in which the game never came out of VATS even though all the enemies were dead. Another full reboot of the console was required. Sadly I had to restart the console, fortunately I was never far into an area without saving where I'd have to restart the console.
Of course after finishing the missions from Broken Steel I've become hooked again by the Lone Wanderer. I've picked up Operation Anchorage and The Pitt and I'll post my thoughts on those soon.
"Thanks for listening children....this is Three Dog....AAAWWWWHHHHH"
Some family came to visit and wanted to watch the dreadful U of M, MSU game on the big screen so I ended playing Ghostbusters on the Wii with the boy upstairs. I got Ghostbusters back in July for my birthday. I played it for a day or so on the Wii and enjoyed playing it, but found that the game (at least in my opinion) was much better suited as a single player game than a two player, split screen game. The controls for the Wii aren't bad, in fact if I played the Wii more often with first person POV games I'd say that they were pretty good for the hardware used. You point the Wii-mote at the screen to move your view around, move it too far left or right on the screen and your character turns left or right (or if you veer off to the left or right your character starts to spin in a very fast dizzying fashion--first bad point). You move forward with the nunchuck. Switching between the various Ghostbuster gadgets is handled simply with the D-pad, and pressing either A or B to activate said gadgets.
Now the game will let you play the story mode in single player and two player mode. I was all for playing in single player because you get the chance to see the whole world filling the entire screen. The kids of course wanted nothing to do with my gamer wishes and insisted that we play in two player mode. The second bad point to the game is playing in two player mode. Split screen forces both players to view the entire world in half the space on the screen, which makes for squinted viewing. After a day of playing two player mode back in July I had had enough. So I stopped playing. The story was decent and the replay is worthwhile--ghosts and other objects to scan, art to find, but a combination of the split screen and the constant pointing of the Wii-mote at the screen was just enough to keep me from going back.
So back to this weekend.
The boy wanted help with a section in game and since I didn't have any real interest in the U of M game after the first quarter I went up stairs to help if I could. Coming into the story after not playing for several months I found it easy to catch up without feeling like I'd missed anything important. The voice acting is definitely great, the art style on the Wii is fun and after a few minutes of re-acquainting myself with the controls I was enjoying the game quite a lot. We got through the area that the boy had been stuck on and then found another section that had us both literally ready to throw our Wii-motes at the screen. Both of us wanted to kick the TV, the Wii, anything to help us get out our frustrations with a section in the game that felt completely broken when using the Wii-mote. As described above you move forward with the nunchuck and view by moving the Wii-mote pointer off to the left or right. The section in question required four different chains to be pulled down with the Ghostbuster beam, which in turn would then raise a platform for you to walk across. The problem is that the platforms drop after a few seconds so you have keep moving. Aiming with the Wii-mote exasperates the experience because if you move too quickly with the Wii-mote, your target zooms off the screen and you can't pull the next lever to raise the next platform so that you can keep moving. We were both ready to just give up. The worst part about this section we were stuck in is that it was just a few paces further along from where my son was stuck before. My first thought was if the rest of the game is this broken-hard, we'd never see the end. Fortunately after many tries one of us was able to cross the four death platforms and move around the corner. Another plus to the game design is that if one player moves to a section in the game that moves the story forward both players get moved along. Finally we ended up playing through that horrendous level to find that the rest of the game, while challenging, had a satisfying ending.
Overall I'd say Ghostbusters on the Wii is worthwhile in short bursts.
After the kids went to bed I fell back into my old routine with Fallout 3. I'm a sucker for that story and environment and now that Bethesda has finally released the DLC for the PS3, I had to try out Broken Steel. Loading up my Good Karma save from March (or so) I finished the original story sacrificing myself but letting Project Purity run to clean up the Wasteland water, watched the endgame narration and then found myself waking up with the Brotherhood back at the Citadel. So much time away from the game but everything felt so right and good to be back.
At the end of my good karma save I had Fawkes as my companion. Running through the Broken Steel missions with Fawkes almost felt like cheating, but at the same time felt like it was my way of allowing that great Super Mutant his moment to exact retribution on those that would otherwise slaughter him. I ended up playing through the 3 trophy missions from Broken Steel in roughly half a day even with a few glitches to the game. The first major glitch was early on where a fast travel from one location to another which hard locked the PS3 and I had to power off the console altogether. The second major glitch involved a VATS battle near the end of the 3rd mission in which the game never came out of VATS even though all the enemies were dead. Another full reboot of the console was required. Sadly I had to restart the console, fortunately I was never far into an area without saving where I'd have to restart the console.
Of course after finishing the missions from Broken Steel I've become hooked again by the Lone Wanderer. I've picked up Operation Anchorage and The Pitt and I'll post my thoughts on those soon.
"Thanks for listening children....this is Three Dog....AAAWWWWHHHHH"
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
FIFA 10
I played the demo for FIFA 10 over the weekend. This game is going to be awesome. I have a bit of a bias for soccer since 2 of the kids play. We played the demo for FIFA 09 earlier this summer and the kids really got into the game, but when we realized that 10 would be out just around the corner I told them we should wait.
Now that we have waited and I've had a chance to play the demo I'm glad that we've saved off for now.
The control of the ball has been improved from 09. The online features to the game are amazing. The ability to import your picture to create your own players is something I'm sure the kids will enjoy. The other online feature that I think is slick but I'm not sure if we would pay for is the My Live Season which will update weekly the real world stats to the local game play. As real world players improve or get injured then the games players will improve or get injured as well.
If we got better world soccer sports coverage on TV then I could see us paying for the My Live Season, but I'm still not totally sold on that. Check out more of the new features for FIFA 10 and enjoy the trailer below.
Now that we have waited and I've had a chance to play the demo I'm glad that we've saved off for now.
The control of the ball has been improved from 09. The online features to the game are amazing. The ability to import your picture to create your own players is something I'm sure the kids will enjoy. The other online feature that I think is slick but I'm not sure if we would pay for is the My Live Season which will update weekly the real world stats to the local game play. As real world players improve or get injured then the games players will improve or get injured as well.
If we got better world soccer sports coverage on TV then I could see us paying for the My Live Season, but I'm still not totally sold on that. Check out more of the new features for FIFA 10 and enjoy the trailer below.
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