Man... I severely underestimated the time I needed to review Fallout 4. Because Bethesda games aren't meant for one solitary playthrough. It's the 4th or 5th character you roll that let's you know where the game really stands in their pantheon.
So I'm deep into character #2 and I'm so close to finishing just what kind of review (it's fairly positive) I'm going to have here.
There are games I've liked, and then there are games I've loved. And then there are games that helped me out of the darkest parts of my emotional life and let me be the person I am today. Which is someone I'd hang out with.
Psychonauts is one of those games, Psychonauts 2 is something I've been dying to see come to light for nigh on 8 years. I want it to be real, but so many moving parts have to line up for this "FIG" campaign to work. I honestly don't think Double Fine has it in them.
I think this is a Hail Mary to put FIG on the map and it smells too strongly of desperation. 3 million is a huge ask for P2, but I remember when Notch approached Schafer a few years back and 20 million wasn't enough!
"Retaughd." I guess I really was in Boston the whole time! Apologies to anyone who's back bristles at that word but... come on. If someone isn't calling someone "wikid retaughded" it's regionally inaccurate.
After my gal pal made me sit through the first 3 episodes, I was seriously hooked. This is something that the Wachowskis either had barely anything to do with; or it's the best straight creative work of their entire careers.
The dialogue,while occasionally overwrought, always makes a decent point. The story has heart, laughs, bitchin' action choreography, and is just a confidant production across the aboard. The less you know about it the better, too.
I knew it was the Wachowskis' Netflix show, Korean kickboxing would factor in somehow, and that was it. I strongly suggest you give the first 3 a chance. It builds to one hell of a finale.
El Orfanato is the most beautiful movie I've ever seen. It's also the best ghost story too. I love that movie and I've shown it to more people than any other. Juan Antonio Bayona has a children's film coming down the pike and it looks just as extraordinary.
I see them all the time on message boards, those poor bastards that can't even get their game to start! I always felt for them, even if I'd never actually had that problem. Well here we go, this is the third time I've restarted my computer and... yep. that exe. just stalls out 9000k. Worthless.
I mean, I got it free with my 980, but still. This sucks, I heard this one was actually a step forward...
(update) I re-downloaded and re-installed. Yet it's exactly the same and no one else seems to be dealing with this... dammit.
I rather like it. Both the game and the first 5 paragraphs of my review. Lemmie just say that I don't understand all the negativity floating around. Obviously Fallout isn't everyone's bag, but as for all the folks who keep gabbing on about how this essentially the same game as 3 and new vegas?
I'm sorry, I'm confused. It's Fallout. Were you expecting Far Cry 5? Help me out here, guys. Because after emerging bleary eyed and emaciated after my 3 day weekend; all I could think of was that this was the best game I'd played in over 2 years.
So... some jerk broke the Fallout 4 review embargo and had some allegedly nasty things to say about it. I say allegedly, because that shiz went down so fast reddit's head spun. I remember a similar thing happened for New Vegas. The dude only talked about stuff he could have easily gleaned from trailers and was just negative to the point where no professional review was even close to matching.
It was just too cruel to be true and New Vegas went on to be my most favoritist'est' game ever. All was well. Though in this case, the review's title "the danger's of hype" smacks of something a wee more credible. I haven't seen the review... but I have seen the leaks. I'm thinking maybe he has a point. The animation is still god-awful and the acting and dialogue is right back to Bethesda's constant level of "meh." Never bad but always frustratingly inert.
From what I've seen anyway.
But what if this guy was cashing in on being the first review? What would be the way to get the most attention for that sort of thing? By going against the grain and confirming our worst fears. Becoming a critical prophet of doom on the most ravenously in demand RPG in years. We expect to see 9's and 10's not a soul crushing 7.
So this could all be a cynical crock; but given how there's been a practical iron curtain over this game, and how Bethesda didn't let anyone actually play it before the review copies were sent out gives me pause.
If I'm being brutally honest... Knight was the worst game in the series. I've always thought Origins got a bad rep mostly because it felt like too much of a retread. But I'd take O's killer premise and Christmas aesthetic over it's bloated, bored, and undercooked next of kin.
The performance wasn't a deal breaker for me, it ran no worse than Black Flag. But aside from a few new tricks for stealth combat and a couple fun batmoblie puzzles, so much felt shoehorned. We didn't need two face or penguin. They didn't matter and they weren't worth the disk space. And everyone saw the red hood twist coming 10 miles away.
So I returned it. I've never had the opportunity to return a digital game for cash and I'm taking it. I sincerely doubt I'd ever feel compelled to ever play it again.
And no one cares. Nobody cares about Tomb Raider reboot 2 right now! Look, I loved the katniss-esque empowered revision of Tomb Raider. Loved it. But guess what you're not? You're not Fallout 4. I'd bend the knee and move in with Fallout 4. Tomb Raider... you're going to die on the vine on the 10th. You're the only one that doesn't seem to notice.
Becoming an Xbox exclusive was a bold move, but even you knew how stupid that was seeing as how you'll be across all platforms in a year. You can't fight F4 and Call of Duty AND Halo. You. Can't. We all want what's best for you, so why'd you have to jump off a cliff like that?
Did you buy a PC version of Arkham Knight and are still pretty bummed about it's performance? Were the long months of hard work by their QA team ultimately pointless? Is it running worse than it did at launch?
Well... FINE! They didn't need your business anyway. Is is 2016 yet? No? Then HERE. Have your money back. All of it. Will that shut you up? Will that quell the incessant tide of mean comments and emails? Probably not, but I'm in the unique position of getting $60 back on a game I'll probably never play again.
I'm usually on the side of developers having to bow down to ridiculous deadlines set by clueless shareholders... but they really shit the bed on this one. Even my mighty 980 has serious trouble with the nvidea effects in there. Which means only people with cards upwards of $600 can even use them! That can't be more than a 7th of the player base. If the game is designed from the ground up to run at only 30 FPS...
You play a game for 5 years, you think you've seen it all. I was wrong, camelworks's videos found loads of junk I'd never heard about. Did you know that the canon lone wanderer is in new vegas? Possibly?
Nerdist has a peak at Adam Adamowicz, Ray Lederer, Ilya Nazarov, and John Gravato's tremendous work for Fallout 4. There's some clay models in there that just give me the shivers. I had let the air out of my hype tires some time ago, but right now? They're ready to roll.
They have a lovely little Halloween update with more on the way. We got a new secret merchant hiding out in there somewhere and a couple enemy AI tweaks. If you're interested in turn based anything you should take a hard look at this polished little gem. Seriously, a year later they're still globbin' stuff on to it.
Except that I don't. Nobody does. A animated series on the S.P.E.C.I.A.L system? Great. A 15 second teaser for the Big League perk? Fine. Achievement list leak? Pedestrian. The first page of the manual that just describes the button mapping? Desperate.
Bethesda has kept the news stream about this game down to a torturous drip. The thing is... no critic has actually played the game yet. I think they were shown a closed doors expo a while back and everyone loved it, but nobody has kicked it's tires.
We've heard big talk about how ahead of schedule they were, how the game was finished the exact second it was announced. Let's hope this vow of silence is to preserve surprise and nothing else. May your inevitable bugs be cosmetic, Fallout 4. We're all ready for you.
Also the next Tomb Raider is launching the same day. That's just... stupid.
And for the first time in a long time I wasn't at least 30% disappointed in it. The GTX 980 is a knockout. I paid $700 for my 780 two years ago and this $500 number wipes the floor with it. I could fry an egg on the old guard, but this puppy is almost cool to the touch!
Holy crap, you guys. Holy crap. Wanna max out GTA V? This card. Right here.
Remember, turning humanity into a collective hive-mind is a "victory" scenario.
But first things first, lemmie set the mood:
I may have been a early booster for Civ: Beyond Earth, but eventually I came around to the consensus. The folks who claimed it was an overpriced re-skin of Civ V became more right than I wanted them to be. But I really liked the dense and overwhelming tech tree and little things like how your military upgraded itself for free was a huge relief.
And unfortunately, Rising Tide is not the momentous step forward it's biggest detractors want. But it fixes my biggest and most personal problems I had with the game. So if I'm being perfectly honest... two of the best games I've ever had in "Civ" were with Rising Tide.
The most obvious changes are the overhauled diplomacy system and aquatic settling. What's something the original Civ, shackled to human history, could never do? Cities in the ocean! While it is a neat trick and potentially makes the most boring part of Civ worth fighting over, it's no where near as game changing as what happens when your supposed trade ally drags you into a war on two fronts.
Pretty and functional.
But lets get the little stuff out of the way. For one, the tech web is much more user friendly. Stuff like wonders and units are now color coded and there's a handy search bar if you just can't remember what to research to get those handy solar collectors. I always forget those. Also most techs give a little affinity xp instead of large payouts and you can combine affinities to unlock special upgrades and units. Want your gunners to be able to heal automatically every turn? How about a dedicated medic unit? They make defensive builds much more fun
AI players also won't bee line to the easiest victory anymore, resources are much easier to find, and you can mod your leader's traits to upend the vanilla game's draconian restrictions on health. I reached a point where I was sending out three settlers at once with a 40 health level when I was finished! They'll uh... probably patch that out eventually.
It also seemed like I was just making more money (scuse' me,"energy") in each game overall. Even jacked up the difficulty to see if that changed anything. Loosening the purse strings just made the game more fun. Though certainly not any easier. No, my biggest enemy is still not having a plan for the end game. But I haven't even touched upon the best part of this... slightly overpriced expansion.
I say slightly because the soundtrack is honestly worth $20 to me. Two more glorious hours of work from 3 amazing composers. Kirkhope, Knorr, and Cohen completely outdid themselves again. But they still aren't the best thing about RT. That would be the completely overhauled diplomacy system.
Diplomacy is now all about deals. Every Civ generates diplomatic capital that can be spent on deals with other nations. Give Bartra 10 DC per turn and have your outposts grow 30% faster. They'll also ask you for such an arrangement netting you more DC... but possibly giving them a severe advantage. The thing, the brilliant thing, is that these deals get stronger if you ally with that country. There are deals such as "every trade route that nets resources now nets 3 times as many" that are totally worth defending the weakest player in the game from a war on multiple fronts.
Polystralia was single-handedly bankrolling my entire military's supply line. I couldn't support a force half my size without him. The AI felt threatened by a couple players, saw how much the others feared me, declared war, then promptly hid behind my skirt.
I thought I had that game in the bag. For once, the end game became the most interesting part. I made peace with some leaders, bulldozed over others, and that was singularly the best game of Civ I ever played. Rising Tide made that possible.
I'll never forget it.
Though I wish the leaders would text me less in between turns. They're all really clingy.
That was your best work yet.There's nothing to say that hasn't been exhausted by every game critic alive. So here's my spoiler free 2 cents. The cameo I was holding out for happened and the arc of Handsome Jack came to a spectacular close. Then the whole final act happened and that was just super awesome gravy. I couldn't be happier, I don't remember a game that has made me laugh out loud this much. I really can't. Though Witcher 3 got some good jabs in.
You deserve better then what I've been. You may be a metaphor for my creative work ethic but that's no excuse. Two reviews are forthcoming this month and at least 15 posts total. May I loose a finger should this not come to pass.
Bethesda software remembers. And that got more asses in seats than anything they'd ever done, so they went with the same gambit on Fallout 4:
Aaaaaaaaaand... I love it. I love it, love it. That is the entire Fallout experience expressed over one minute of live action. I am all for this to become a launch tradition.
In the beginning, I only liked Beyond Earth. There weren't enough leaders, the draconian health system kept your colony under 7 cities at the best of times, and the trade route system was OP as fuq'. The trade route thing was fixed pretty quickly, but Firaxis needed to take a cold, hard, look at their game and make several changes to it's foundation if it didn't want to just be a re-skin of Civ V.
They've done it. They've really done it. I'd like to finish a few more games before my formal review, but I am having a god. Damn. Blast.
I've recently been paying way too much for internet. I figured paying a little more each month beat waiting 8 hours to play GTAV again. But that's stupid. $77 a month just wasn't worth 4 MB's a second.
Now, magically, it's idling between 15-20 MB's a second. Holy fudgeballs.
They didn't loosen the faucet. They knocked the faucet clear off with a monkey wrench. Bravo, Time Warner. Never thought I'd type those words.
I willed it... and it happened! Armikrog has made it to market and while I have no idea if it's any good; I still stand by Pencil Test's* open and jovial relationship with us backers through the mildly tumultuous development.
Still, the fact they finished a stop-motion anything in just under 2 and a half years is cause for applause. The soundtrack is already got my toe a' tappin' and that sucker can't download fast enough.
*Douglas Tennaple has had almost nothing to do with the studio outside of preliminary design work. So if you're boycotting the game to boycott him... you're spitting on the wrong artists. Though I in no way find your desire to do so unreasonable. Not in the slightest.
Since the last update, web browsing has become a consistent pain in the ass. I used to let flash player run free, sucking up all the memory it's digital little heart desired. No longer. Every other tab would freeze Firefox and demand I open task manager and disable it, least I loose my precious downloads. Sadly, uninstalling and reinstalling both my browsers and flash have given me the exact same results.
Come to think of it, it's been like this for a while now. If I had a problem with firefox, disabling flash would fix it 99.9% of the time. For now, I'll only run it on Hulu and it's a shame I have to end it like this. We've got along famously for years.
But you've changed Flash. I feel like I don't know you anymore.
It ain't Fallout 4 news, but damn if it didn't put a smile on my face. Zur is the Hans Zimmer of gaming, which is kind of a back handed compliment. They both kinda fade into the background for years only to snap out of their funk after a while with something truly original. His work on Fallout hits the brass ring of theme writing. Something simple, yet effective. Something that can handle bombastic swells, yet can also scale back to something quieter and intimate.
The best ideas seem obvious only in retrospect and The Martian is a phenomenal idea. It's a survival story, it's a ticking clock story, it's got an ensemble, and it's also a one man show. If ever there was an opportunity to have cake and eat it it's now.
Rotten Tomatoes thinks it does. That praise is so glowing you could read by it. I'm so fuggin' pumped.
I haven't picked up MGSV in earnest for over a week. I really think I'm done with it. Maybe it's because I work 50 hours a week now. Maybe it's because my love life turned around (finally) or maybe it's because turning metal gear solid into an open world completely diluted what I personally liked about it most.
The physical freedom adds too much tedium to be worth it. Taking out enemy checkpoints nets you paltry experience and they re-staff to quickly to ever be worth it. I'm sick of scrounging for supplies, I'm tired of the exponential cost of staff upgrades. I want some goddamn story progression! It's been 20 hours and I've hit a single (creepily sexist) story beat.
They also clearly couldn't get Kiefer to sit in on most of the facial capture stuff because Snake has characters talk at him 8 times out of 10 while he just sorta stares at the ceiling. Completely stone faced. It gets really hard to watch.
I don't know, I'll get to the end eventually. I won't let myself buy Fallout 4 until I do. That oughta to light a fire under my ass.
But then, they say, that's exactly when you should. The Movie/TV/Gaming front isn't piquing my interest of late. Sure, Colbert's back, and sure, he's amazing but why write what everyone else is writing about him?
Guuuuh. I can do this! Let's see... a court ruled in favor of the backers in a shady kickstarter campaign. That's pretty legally awesome, now those KS'ers will have to at least try to make their product first.
M. Night returned to form with The Visit, or did he? BMD says yes, Movie Bob says hellllllll no. After Lady in the Water that man isn't getting another penny out of me for less than 87% on rotten tomatoes. No less!
Tod Howard promised Fallout 4 would have little animated shorts explaining the game's relationship with the special system, but damn... I didn't expect a style parody this good:
