Let me preface this by saying I’ll only dwelve into the game’s negatives in this blog. Everyone else has already covered all the good things it does so why repeat that, what I’m missing are descriptions of the stupid stuff it does.

The way I see it there are three core problems that drag it down, preventing enjoyment:

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First off, my biggest problem is how drenched the game is with unknowable consequences. Right from the start you’re asked to choose between stats you don’t actually know the importance of and the results are often negative. So I would level up, distribute my points, only to come across a door or a terminal moments later that required slightly higher skills than what I had chosen! One extremely frustrating time I was literally around the corner of a terminal that required two more goddamn points in Science. Had I known I would’ve chosen to spend those points no problem. Fuck you for putting me in that position.

NPCs suffer from the same problem. You can say something to a guy that’ll have a permanent, detrimental, effect on your progress, and there’s nothing you can do to foresee it. But, some would argue, it’s exciting and just like real life! If you take away consequences a game becomes meaningless. And indeed they’re right, consequences are good, I’m not complaining about consequences in principle. My problem is with the specific way Fallout does it, when you can’t possibly know how someone might react. Maybe that guy gets angry if you don’t have 100 bottle caps for him now, so next time he asks for 300. Maybe that girl won’t ever talk to you if you say something a bit rude first time you converse. There are many more examples but I won’t bore you with them, suffice to say you just can’t know beforehand. The result is that anyone you meet becomes this unsettling potential bomb of potentialities you might accidentally close off before you even know it. You might want to save before approaching a new NPC just in case they suddenly start shooting at you (I mean c’mon, seriously, I couldn’t even talk my way out of their aggressiveness!)

Ironically, and tragically, all these random consequences have the opposite and catastrophic result of rendering your choices irrelevant. If you can’t know what’ll happen what difference does one choice make over another? If you help a guy will that accomplish anything or make someone else angry? If you shoot him instead will anyone even notice? Sometimes everyone gets mad over a murder, other times they don’t even notice. Choices can be exciting in real life because of the relentless consistency of life, but Fallout is just a game with gaping holes of inconsistencies. <EARLY-STORY SPOILAR!> I certainly couldn’t save my father, though I shot every threat quickly and efficiently. If he had just opened that goddamn glass door I could’ve taken out the people threatening him in a single VATS encounter, argh, why didn’t he just open it? Why couldn’t I break the glass? What could I have done to make the outcome different? Why do I have to accept that as an immutable facet of the story but still be expected to care what happens if I’m rude to some barkeep? </SPOILER>

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On a more practical note there’s another problem with NPCs, how it feels to talk to them. As in, is it a cool experience, are they made well enough for you to sympathize with their problems? Unfortunately no, it’s not very exciting at all. In fact the NPCs are kinda poorly executed. I was quickly reminded of how cool Mass Effect handled their NPC interactions, with superb lively animations and convincing faces and a simple, natural way of choosing between dialog. Fallout on the other hand is incredibly old school, literally pausing the game during conversations and the NPC just standing there staring at you. It’s just like Oblivion, with no animations beyond the eyes blinking and some poor lip-sync. It’s never actually a dialog at all because you never say a word, all you get are the NPCs monologing to you.

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And finally there are problems with the more action-oriented game play aspects. Like, sneaking quickly becomes rote. You’ll sneak up on enemies over and over in the exact same way, because the AI and the environments are simply too static to allow different outcomes. If an enemy actually gets aggressive all they do is rush at you anyway, it’s not exciting the 50th time. I had just played Far Cry 2 the previous week and I have only come to appreciate its level of combat sophistication all the more compared to what we get in Fallout.

I know RPGs aren’t usually expected to have good combat but Fallout is a first person shooter and constantly asks you to make decisions in real-time, so it has to hold up at least a little bit. And while I like its basic flow of using VATS to soften targets and finishing them off in real time it still quickly becomes a stale repetitive affair. The hackable turrets mix things up nicely but I haven’t come across that many places where they’re used.

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All told I’ve pumped about twelve hours into the game, so obviously I think there’s a lot of exciting and interesting things it does right. It just doesn’t last; the positive experience wears off and exposes an underlying mess. I would contrast this to Far Cry which has fundamentally fun and varied combat mechanics but is burdened with frustrating meta-game mechanics such as respawning outposts and constant vehicle encounters. But in Far Cry I can go off-road to lessen the negative aspects, I can’t really avoid interacting with NPCs or skip combat…

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So how about another 4X game?

I do remember Ascendancy… Meh. It got really unfun to manage my colonies as time went by, too much jumping into colony view to place buildings. It also made the error of having space-lanes, meaning you had to play retarded 3d connect-the-dots to go anywhere, manually guiding your little ship along to reach a specific destination. I may be forgetting some of the better things about it, I’ll admit it’s been 12 or so years since I played it… but regardless of whatever nuggets of goodness it had it was still marred by that 3d connect-a-dot navigation. And the combat wasn’t good. And the colony building was boring. Yeah I didn’t like it much back then either.

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There was also Master of Orion 2, and it was pretty good. High up on the list. But it also didn’t scale well, building a new colony late in the game was a tiresome chore of placing a lot of buildings. Even with all the governors on you still had to interact with the colony screens a lot right? Was it to build ships maybe? Okay so I can’t clearly remember what the specific problem was with the colony screen, but like so many others it slowed down in the mid- and endgame phases. Also, the combat went downhill fast. Since ships didn’t stack you’d end up with big fleets taking ages to complete a single fight, each little ship having to complete its own separate little turn. Zzzz.

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Master of Orion 1 avoids most of that. Sure it’s not a perfect game, but I think it’s really well streamlined. The interface is simple, with a couple straight-forward editors for Ship design, Diplomacy and Research. And two “database” views, one of your Fleets and one of your Planets. There’s no colony view, no manually placing buildings, the interactions with your colonies is entirely abstracted to a series of sliders. And that’s it really. The endgame doesn’t slow down, if anything it accelerates as increasingly fast drives and sophisticated space sensors become available. It also doesn’t become a burden to make a new colony even late in the game, since it’s all just sliders anyway

For all its virtues it’s still a DOS game though, and even though I think it still looks kinda nice I can understand most people would have trouble getting into it today. This is probably a rare case of me having rose-tinted glasses on. But to this day I’ve yet to come across an equally accessible and balanced 4X.

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But it’s also a frustrating experience, the game ultimately fails to give me the relief I crave. It’s like… it falls prey to its own vastness. Allow me to explain. Once in space the galaxy is so huge, so unbelievably ginormous and teeming with life and possibilities, that the tools you’re provided ends up not cutting it. Like so many make-colonies-on-planets games the level of control you operate your empire with is just way too detailed for when you want to be making more abstract decisions. It’s not a problem at first, in the beginning it’s really rewarding visiting planets manually, seeding them with life or fighting enemy cities. It’s so fun exploring and building up your own colonies. You want to do all these things. But as your empire grows you reach a point where it all starts becoming a lot of tedious work. What the hell planet did I build an orbiting defense gun on? Which ones did I put a biosphere-protection facility on? My God it becomes so unwieldy.

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And you will get a big empire, whether you trade or fight it’s the way it goes. I soooo wish there was, like, a sixth stage, maybe after you reach the center you’d transcend and stop needing to be so hands on. I’d like to point at a starsystem and decide which planets to seed and which ones to destroy, to decide where my empire should go but not actually travel to the star system and release the individual tree into its biosphere. I want to set up an armada so I don’t have to friggin’ fly to every last system that comes under attack to personally deal with the problem. Give me the tools to shape the galaxy as I see fit!

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Because fun and awesome as the game is I’m frustrated by its inefficiencies, of wanting to affect large parts of the galaxy but being unable to enact my vision. The game ends because I don’t want to spend the next four hundred hours manually taking over systems, and that’s a shame. It should end when I can’t think of more fun things to do and try.

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More specifically on the actual game though, the early phases are a little hit or miss. You race through the cell phase, it goes by sooo damn fast. I enjoyed settling into a new evolutionary niche, but every time I came to grips with the new order it was all wooosssh and off to the next part. It’s was adorable having my little creature slowly change into the eat-anything shock-stab-bite creature I ended up with, but I never really got the time to play him. On a whim I decided to be an aggressive cell, chomping down on everything that could fit in my mouth.

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The creature stage is more demanding, pitting your herd against other herds. Well, more like lil’ ol’ me against the whole world, so it was a bit of work taking out groups of enemy creatures. But through some fancy kiting and being aware of close by healing nests you can take down creatures quite a bit out of your level range, all in all it was fun in a simplified-WoW-kind-of-way. I think you sing and dance in this phase?, not that I’d know because I carefully killed everything and everyone I came across. Might as well go with that works eh?

The Tribes phase literally went by without me noticing. You’re supposed to deal with these five competing tribes but I murdered the four of them before they even raised as much as a finger on me and the fifth fell maybe two minutes after they repelled my initial attack. Not a lot to do here, but maybe that was a function of my aggressiveness. Killing works though!

Civilization stage is fun, but very simple. Build cities, take over the world. I just build armies of tanks and marched them to enemy cities for some good rape and plundering. At some point I used the option to just nuke whoever was left, leaving me the winner by default. The only thing that killed me in this phase were these gigantic creatures that roamed the countryside. They stomped the shit out of anything but the largest forces I could amass (Actually one of those gigantic animals survived even to the space stage, where it STILL kicked the shit out of me. Mean beasts!).

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And then it was over. Time for space. I loved the space part, but looking back I wouldn’t've minded a bit more of the other stages. But Jesus Christ space is lolhuge. There’s a real sense of exploration and empire building as you make your first colony, fight a little war, explore, and then you zoom out and realize you’re in this tiny tiny quadrant in the lower left of the galaxy. You constantly get new gadgets to play with, their reward system is so robust that I never wanted it to stop. I went at it fighting (of course), why change what works for you? So yeah, I killed everything I came across, squashing the empires in my area and making no friends. I still don’t know how the alliance system works… *shrug*. It was funny actually, I kept finding artifacts hinting of some mysterious evil race that killed everything in their path, clearly they would be a race after my own liking.

It’s a fun and challenging part of the game, I kept having to balance earning money, wanting to explore, going to raid my closest enemies and countering their attacks. Finally everyone in the immediate vicinity were dead, which that stopped the constant attacks on my colonies. I was free to explore. But I was also getting frustrated by my own early missteps. It actually wasn’t until the very end of the game I really got the hang of terraforming or even how to properly produce spice so I had a bunch of colonies that didn’t go anywhere. I could either go back and change everything, but that’d take ages, so I figured fuck that noise this empire is getting too crowded anyway. It was time to strike out on my own, see what was out there. Maybe find that famous Center of the Galaxy everyone kept mentioning. So I loaded up on as much loot and money as I could and set off! In, errr, the wrong direction. Twenty minutes later I passed through my empire en route towards the center, ahem. Holy shit it’s a big fucking galaxy, did I say that already? I eventually met that mysterious evil race, but for a couple reasons I didn’t actually realize who they were at the time. I just thought they were yet another empire I’d race through. If you’ve played Spore you probably know what happens next.

Paying them little attention I continued my journey. In a moment of foreshadowing I did notice an unusual number of the stars ahead had radio signals coming from them, indicating a larger-than-usual empire. But I figured what the hell, I’m a fast clicker, I had navigated through enemy empires before without taking much damage. And actually these guys weren’t even attacking me, so I raced on. I raced on until I was well and truly fucked-up-the-ass neck deep inside their omgwtf-huge empire. It was an endless stretch of systems under their control. And this was when they decided to pounce on me. A thousand fucking ships came screaming from every goddamn star system in the area, and pummeled me regardless of how fast I navigated the stars. With health quickly dropping I had a panicky stroke of genius and dove straight for one of the few unprotected star systems around to made a base and recharge. Well what the fuck can you do?, I certainly couldn’t go back! So I continued this pattern for a while, frantically jumping through their systems vaguely in a direction towards The Center and setting down a base to repair once my health got low. It was a pretty successful tactic actually, had it not been for my cursed too-short-range engine. I kept hitting dead ends and had to retract many of my steps. And, well, I was frustrated that my colonies were so shitty, that my planets were shitty, and I didn’t want the game to end when I had failed so miserably on that account. So the gagglarians, a proud and aggressive bipedal species, ended up.. uh.. somewhere within the central area of the galaxy without truly reaching their goal.

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This is where I started a new race. A mighty race. But that’s another boring story for another boring day. Long story short: I have completed the game using that species, and I didn’t want to play anymore after reaching the center. If I had higher-level tools available I’d want to sculpt the galaxy to my liking, but doing that right now would literally take many months of hard work.

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I’m exhausted and impressed by the game, but also want more. I don’t know how fair that is. If I had to rate it I’d be torn between something really high for its initial impression or something more subdued because it doesn’t quite deliver that overall long-term brilliant experience.

I’m surprised to find I really quite liked this book. Unlike the last books of his I’ve read this one involves a much less fanciful scifi universe. Instead of a far-flung future full of Z-rays and Ultradrives this takes place in homely 2040, it’s a world that’s much easier to relate to. It’s also delightfully free of American swagger, focusing instead on Europe. Well, England at any rate.

It’s all about the characters, just a handful of them this time around. The effects of the basic set-up, of the first person to undergo Rejuvenation, has an immediate impact on the people involved, there’s none of the thousand-page-introductions I’m used to from Hamilton. The themes running throughout is a mix of coming-of-age, finding yourself, regret and fucking things up, set to the backdrop of a politically unstable Europe.

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At first I was a bit taken aback at its strong whiff of teen-drama, plenty of sex and brooding quickly ensues. I’m of two minds about it, because on the one hand it sometimes feel like reading juvenile pop literature, but on the other hand it really does fit the themes of the book. What’s the point of being young again if sex isn’t included? Still though, flip to the wrong couple of paragraphs and it could sound like the worst kind of chick lit.

Ultimately what I found most enjoyable was how it managed to make me care for each of the primary characters. They’re all flawed and do stupid things, but in a human way. In the end I was left with a lovely ambivalent feeling, neither elated nor depressed. But in a good way. I’ll cherish this strong feeling of hopelessness and happiness for the rest of the day.

I didn’t expect the series to turn out this way. When I read the first and second books I thought it was a bit of an odd messy experience… the two first books barely relate to one another. Time’s Eye in particular is more of a What If scenario of an Earth chronologically sliced together to allow Alexander The Great and Ghengis Khan the opportunity to meet. It’s not bad, it’s just not the kind of science fiction I was expecting. Sunstorm was great though, it felt to me like a very Clarke-esque realistic take on humanity facing a huge problem. And, as it turns out, Firstborn ties the two books together rather wonderfully.

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It’s set in the near future, along the lines of the 2040-60ties, and it’s all about our first small steps into space. There are no Ultradrives or whatever, about as complicated as it gets are sentient and semi-sentient AI networks. This is a world all about the pioneering spirit and how difficult it is to survive anywhere outside our own little stable environment. It’s not just the harshness of space, it also touches on the hardships humans and prehumans have gone through before us. Crossing the Atlantic is no small feat in a world of superstitious Greeks and Mammoths.

So I liked it plenty. Sure it’s necessarily the second coming of Christ, but it was a damn good trilology nevertheless… I really started empathizing with all the struggles of overcoming the hostile environments. If only more books could be written, but in a way maybe it’s best to leave it where it ends.

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The Dreaming Void is a new trilogy, and it was mostly fun and good. But good lord is it ever the first in a series, there’s not a lot of closure to be found anywhere. You’re left with, like, three distinct gigantic cliffhangers. Thank Christ the next book comes out in a month.

The book itself is charming enough.. I have no technical disparities to point out; the characters are swell and follow more or less reasonable arcs, the universe is well envisioned and certain people run around with sufficiently highgrade weaponry to destroy a small planet. What’s not to love. I gotta say though, I had the strangest feeling along the way that I was missing the bigger picture. There’s a city called Makathran2, where the Living Dream resides. The followers of Living Dream want nothing more than to accomplish the dreams of their prophet, who dreams of another universe.. Uh sorry, the who? The what now? And that’s just ten minutes in. Once you’re done you can sort of piece it all together, but along the way I was actually uncertain if this was really the second book in the series.

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My opinion is still in flux of course, the series won’t even be over until 2010 or something, but so far I’m going to rate this only sort of good. Maybe (and I really mean hopefully) that’ll change as all the pieces are revealed and the bigger plot starts churning. I guess he’s a notorious slow starter, much of the first Night’s Dawn book was naught but character-introductions and it certainly sprang to life. It’s just that with each book being longer than the Lord of the Rings trilogy combined you’d think his characters could get somewhere within the span of a single book…

Still though, Void features all the highpowered weaponry and human foibles and, uh, telekinesis, that I care for, even if the events haven’t really truly grabbed a strong hold of me yet. His previous work, the Commonwealth Saga, had an inherently more.. enthralling universe I think. Commonwealth was full of trains of all things, which actually worked superbly well despite sounding odd. Also, the saga’s antagonist left a big impact on me. Whereas Void Trilogy so far is more of a meandering trip towards… something. I just hope it’s worth it.

Left to right: Lightning, Poison, Fire, Ice knight

Wow, I just played Castle Crashers non-stop for… just about seventeen hours straight!

Went at it with a friend, local coop, all day and night. I haven’t binged on a game like that in years. It felt good. The game’s way beyond excellent, it’s a wild and frothing torrent of beautiful art and incredible gameplay. Both of us felt our characters were awesome unstoppable forces of destruction, and yet teamwork was required throughout. That’s a pretty delicate balance to strike, but it heightened the experience exponentially. I had the lightning guy, he can keep a whole row of people in perpetual shock for a good amount of seconds, doing hellish damage in the process. My friend got the fire knight, he fully covered the screen in an inferno of fire and death. Awesome!

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Furthermore, the game does everything in its power to just give you a good time. There’s no stupid shit like penalizing you for dying, and you don’t have to carry every item back home or anything. It just provides a bunch of missions to progress through, level up in, get loot from, and a whole slew of laugh-out-loud moments as the silly but well-told plot unfolds. It’s one long orgasm, essentially..

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This is pretty much the best coop game I’ve played in years. Actually I’m debating whether or not its the best coop game ever. Like, of all time. It certainly sits comfortably amongst the very best coop games ever made, and it is a nobrainer that other rpg titles needs to do at least this good from now on. That includes Blizzard with Diablo 3, I hope they’re paying well and good attention to this gem because they sure got their work cut out for them to outshine this one. Yes, it’s that good.

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That’s not to say the game is perfect, I know the game has some bugs for example. They range from harmless to annoying to actual showstoppingly bad. Like, before yesterday my friend’s game wouldn’t friggin’ save his progress, so that’s some serious shit in an RPG… Also, there are some minor nitpicks to the game itself, but c’mon, what game is absolutely perfect? If you can play without bugs though (like we did, after we solved the no-saving thing) this is a game that fully deserves 10/10’s and perfect A ’s. Hell it should get higher scores than that. Does scoring to go to 11?

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Basically all the game asks of you is to perform a series of precise jumps. I’ve included a screenshot of one such level, your goal is simply to execute a series of perfect jumps to traverse the middle. But I kept dying after half a minute, about as long as I could apparently concentrate. It was like I could literally feel my focus slipping, and I’d realize I wasn’t focused because I was suddenly thinking that I wasn’t focused!, and realizing that invariably meant my death a few seconds later. I knew the lack of focus would make me mess up, and in the process of blocking out all those thoughts I would invariably mis-jump and hit a mine. A hilariously sad recursive way of dying…

Anything and everything made me lose focus though. Random songs popped into my head, a car starting outside distracted me,  at one point I suddenly got to thinking about writing this post and of course that also made me die.

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Weird brain I’ve got, very finicky. There’d be no limits to the things I could accomplish if I could stay focused for more than 30 seconds, but maybe n+ can help me…

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Today’s example will be that of sending an SMS. Obviously launching the SMS application incurs a wait, but that’s okay, it has to take some time to open an application. It’s almost instantanous anyway, maybe half a second. But while the interface pops up very quickly there’s an additional delay of half a second until the New Message button responds to tapping. Waiting for an application to open is fine, but an unresponsive interface is just frustrating. I’d prefer it designed so the interface wouldn’t even show until the button worked. Then the new message window appears, and another there’s a delay before the button to add a recipient responds. This is a serious wait, over a seconds worth. Reasonably annoying. Now the contact list appears, and a delay of several seconds before it responds to swiping. Then when I click a name there’s another delay before it registers, though it’s only little less than a second. At this point I get to start typing my message.

So that’s like four, five seconds to start typing a message, most of that waiting spent trying to get the interface to react to the finger-mashing. In comparison my old cell phone took maybe half a second to launch the SMS functionality and all its delay was up front. Waiting for an interface is more frustrating than a simple delay until you have access to the functionality you desire.

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I know this sounds more negative than the iPhone deserves, because all told it’s really not a terrible source of frustration at all, and it does so many other amazing things that it’s forgiven. It’s just one of those things I can’t help but notice.

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Like, take the missions. The missions suck. You don’t see it at first, but they never break free from being these uninspired, tepid little linear exercises in movie-making, with more exceptions to the core mechanics than I thought possible. Once a while you get to shoot a guy as he’s driving away, but more often your rocket explodes harmlessly on their vehicle because they’re scripted to survive a little longer. If only the stories were good at least, but some of them are just outright goddamn atrocities, incapable of even providing a basic reason to complete the mission! Like this stupid fucking cliched idiot gay guy who drags me out to to his boat all panicky to ask me… to join him for a relaxing time of fun! I almost exploded in rage at this point; I’m busy barely surviving against gangsters and shit and I’m trying to enact my revenge on my life-long enemy and this guy fails to comprehend any of that?? He can go fuck himself!! But no, Niko ends up convinced that fun would in fact be appropriate. I promptly firebombed that dipshit and his boat, but of course the whole thing resets and there’s no way out of doing it.

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What really got to me was how absurdly the game outstays its welcome. The levels drone on and on, people are in soooo much need of help for reasons I really couldn’t give a shit about, but the game never reacts to what I want. It’s too busy playing this sub-sub-sub par cheesefest of a movie, where suddenly, somehow, I’m in love with a girl. A girl I’ve barely seen outside a couple cutscenes. Oh I did meet her once, to shoot her in the face with a shotgun for calling me all the time. That was not a date she particularly liked I might add. And I never even took those calls from her, I literally had no interest or clue about her personality. But no we’re in love, and the story trundles onwards to a comically bad ending.

An ending, at least the ending I got, that had Niko feeling heartbroken and wretched. They say a good story makes you feel as the actors on screen, and in this at least I must give kudos to Rockstar. I truly felt heartbroken and wretched as the credits came about, almost teared up at their simpleminded and frankly offensive attempt at storytelling. The game starts off so good, Niko is a great character!, but then they spend twenty hours fucking hammering you with stupid scripted linear bullshit over and over again.

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There are many amazing things about the game but completing it will drain all that joy from your body. It never ever deserved the 10/10’s it got in reviews (deduct a point for lack of checkpoints alone!), but after completing it I’d score it around the 6.5 area. Maybe 7 if I concentrate on the good times.