Tag Archives: RPG

Real life Fallout

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Remember how I gushed about Fallout 3 in this blog? Well, my fanboyishness pales in comparison to these intrepid fans from Russia. Check out this site for more cool photos. I’m not sure what they mean by playing the game for real. I sure hope they aren’t shooting at each other!

Actually to tell the truth, I haven’t been much of a Fallout 3 fanboy lately because so far I haven’t bought a single one of the DLCs for it. The first of the DLCs available didn’t seem that interesting to me, and when I actually tried to buy them, I was put off by the complicated process of buying them for the PC on the Games for Windows website. I keep telling myself that I’ll just buy them when they eventually get collected onto a DVD, but I have so many games to go through at the moment that I’m not sure if I’ll even get to that.

Currently looking forward to our CarcaSean session on Saturday when we’re scheduled to play a game of Battlestar Galactica with Sean and his other invitees. My wife is panicking at the thought of being chosen to be a Cylon!

Monster Hunter is awesome

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I have a confession to make. Until now, I’ve generally detested Japanese games.

I suppose it doesn’t help their case that the Japanese games that are most likely to appeal to me, such as Dead Rising, Shadow of the Colossus or Demon’s Souls, never get ported to the PC which is my preferred platform. Still, the fact remains that many aspects of Japanese games turn me off: cutesy anime art, ridiculous hair styles, emo characters, overwrought and melodramatic plots, grindy gameplay. What’s more, the big name Japanese titles, such as Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid, tend to be the worst offenders. That they’re widely held up as the most famous icons of gaming culture constantly infuriates me to no end.

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A Game: Grand Theft Auto IV (PC)

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Once upon a time, the Grand Theft Auto series was held up as the gold standard of open world games. True, the series never actually invented the genre, and if you want to be pedantic about it, early games like Elite were way more open and far larger in scope than any of the GTA titles. But it’s inarguable that the concept only really took off with the release of Grand Theft Auto III in 2001, so much so that similar games like Crackdown, Saint’s Row and Mercenaries were known as GTA clones.

In many ways, the open world genre can be regarded as the apogee of video games. It is after all the ultimate realization of the fantasy of entering a fictional and yet realistic world with its own set of internally consistent rules, densely populated with autonomous AI-controlled agents that you can interact with, and being set completely free to do as you will with the sandbox you’re given. So it is especially sad that despite its illustrous pedigree, Grand Theft Auto IV isn’t much of an open world game and at times even risks forgetting that it is a game at all.

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An interlude in Middle Earth

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Since I’m done with Empire for a while, I’ve been looking for something a bit more action-oriented. I’d already decided that it would either be Grand Theft Auto IV or Saint’s Row 2, and I’m slightly embarrassed that I ended up choosing GTA after having written this post. It seems that the PC ports of both of these games are awful, but Saint’s Row 2 is an order of magnitude worse, so GTA it is.

It’s going to take some time to get to me however because it’s backordered over at Pcgame.com.my so in the meantime, I thought I’d take advantage of the free trial of Lord of the Rings Online, one of the MMOs I’ve always been curious about. I’d always pictured LotRO as a sort of World of Warcraft 2.0 set in Middle Earth and I’ve heard good things about the Shire starting area for hobbits so I went ahead and downloaded the client and made myself a trial account.

No surprise that the game looks and feels a lot like WOW. Yes, instead of exclamation and question marks on top of the heads of quest givers, you have rings instead. Cute. What was surprising to me was that despite being able to copy so much from WOW, how unpolished it still is. Everything from the launcher, to the little icons for skills and abilities to how the UI doesn’t scale to your resolution, just reminds of how much better WOW does things. Of course, LotRO has a leg up on WOW in that its graphical engine is visibly superior, especially when looking at the landscape, but I found myself missing WOW‘s art direction.

As for world building, while I can agree that the Shire does indeed look superbly realized, I can’t help but roll my eyes at how the game breaks the lore in so many ways. Hobbits fighting men and even dwarves in the Shire? Traders in Michel Delving selling weapons to hobbits? I know that all this is pretty much necessary in an MMO, but it still induces severe nerd rage in me.

Anyway, I enjoyed my brief stay in Middle Earth and made it a point to visit some particular places of interest that I remember from the books, such as the Party Tree, but I don’t really see the long-term appeal in playing this. It actually made me WOW for a while. Still, it was free so I can’t complain too much and I got a good couple of days’ entertainment out of it.

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Space Rangers 2 AAR Part 4

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Yay, finally done with Space Rangers 2 in the year 3330. The only way to defeat the Dominators once and for all is to eliminate the three bosses: Keller, Blazer and Terron. The main way to do that seems to be researching them by gathering parts from destroyed Dominator ships and handing them in to a scientific base. The more materials you hand in, the faster the research rate will be. The other way is to confront the bosses directly and defeat them in combat. As you’d expect, this is pretty hard as each of them has a ton of hit points, and the Dominator-controlled planets nearby will spawn an infinite stream of Dominators to protect the bosses.

As seen from the screenshot above, I’d managed to climb to the top of the rangers rating chart by 3324 after concentrating heavily on hunting and destroying Dominators, also becoming the most Distinguished Fighter in the process. It was also at around this time that the Coalition forces managed to whittle down the area controlled by the Dominators to just the three systems occupied by each of the bosses. I made a conscious decision to target the Keller boss first. This was because while the other bosses could only launch attacks against systems adjacent to their own, Keller has the ability to attack systems through black holes, allowing its forces to strike behind the Coalition’s lines, so to speak. This made it very annoying to have to constantly travel away from the front lines against Blazer and Terron to rescue a system attacked by Keller.

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Space Rangers 2 AAR Part 3

Lots of combat in my ongoing Space Rangers 2 game from 3307 to 3312. I’d finally managed to join a proper military operation to liberate a system in the game, but while it was success, taught me to pay attention to which system is actually being liberated. You see, these operations start by docking with the military base organizing the expedition. When you agree to join in, you’re placed in suspended animation until the date and time of the attack, and then the entire base warps into the target system held by the Dominators. Then everyone undocks from the station and proceeds to kick Dominator ass.

The battle itself went well enough, as by that point I’d upgraded to a great combat ship with max weapons slots and a special +15 to shields, which means any incoming damage is reduced by a further 15% in addition to the base defense of my shield generator. I did need to redock with the station for repairs once, but overall, destroying all of the Dominators garrisoning the system was fairly easy, and I happily hopped over to one of populated planets to be properly congratulated and feted.

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Space Rangers 2 AAR Part 2

Just a quick update on my Space Rangers 2 game from the year 3303 to 3306. As I noted in my previous post, I’ve been meaning to get more involved in combat, and this I did. Combat in this game isn’t terribly involved. Each ship has a limited number of weapons slots, from 1 to 6, and basically the more weapons you mount, the more firepower your ship can muster. Your accuracy and mobility skills make a big difference of course, and your defensive options including armour which blocks a fixed amount of damage and shields which block a percentage of all damage, but in actual play, it’s a simple matter of choosing a target and shooting it until either one of you dies or someone runs away.

This process is prolonged by the fact than any combatants can always dock at a friendly planet or base to make repairs. This means that very often, actually destroying an enemy can involve chasing it down, shooting it until it’s smoking at which point it’ll run to get repaired and you’ll need to wait until it takes off again. Repeat until you destroy the enemy or it runs out of money for repairs.

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