T w e n t y S i d e d
Warning: The Internet Absurdity Review Board has advised that the following video contains high levels of folly, foolishness, improbability, inanity, irrationality, jive, ludicrousness, ridiculousness, silliness, and flapdoodle. Viewer discretion is advised.
Hello, person from the future. This space used to have an embed from the video hosting site Viddler. The video is gone now. If you want to find out why and laugh at Viddler in the process, you can read the entire silly story for yourself. At any rate, the video is gone. Sorry. On the upside, we're gradually re-posting these old videos to YouTube. Check the Spoiler Warning page to see the full index. |
The No Politics Rule
Here are 6 reasons why I forbid political discussions on this site. #4 will amaze you. Or not.
Dead or Alive 5 Last Round
I'm not surprised a fighting game has an absurd story. I just can't figure out why they bothered with the story at all.
What Does a Robot Want?
No, self-aware robots aren't going to turn on us, Skynet-style. Not unless we designed them to.
In Defense of Crunch
Crunch-mode game development isn't good, but sometimes it happens for good reasons.
Bowlercoaster
Two minutes of fun at the expense of a badly-run theme park.
Well, obviously the Mysterious Stranger was in the huff with you because you blew him up earlier in the grenade spam. (First fight outside Ashur’s office you can see “Sneak Attack Critical on Mysterious Stranger” pop up briefly.)
I had a weird Viddler bug on this episode. Just as Shamus said “I was thinking that you talking to Werhner would end it” Viddler decided to end it for me and cut to the end! Cue two adverts (one at the end, one at the start) and a lot of hopping through the stream to get back to the show. Gah!
I had the same bug during the baby snatching dialogue.
I was wondering if anyone else would catch that, since the guys didn’t comment on it in the video. I was greatly amused by the Stranger making an appearance… to eat a grenade.
For what its worth, same here. Glad to see someone else had issues with it. Clicking past the bug point made it play the rest without issue though.
Yes, odd bugs. I had the same thing happen to me. Advert cut short at the beginning then an advert right before talking to Wernher again than ran choppily then stopped the video completely. I managed to get by it by skipping around on the progress bar until just after the second advert.
okay comment about the baby smuggling thing before it slips my mind:
you were commenting on how bethesda keeps removing choices.
dont you think that the player to smuggle the baby out rather than allowing him to sneak past or attack all the guards is removing a choice?
you can do that without attacking a single person, as josh was doing before he grenaded urvryone.
i dont know, but to me that complaint just seemed out of place.
If /the cure/ really is an item, it’s easy to mod it as ammo for the Rock-It Launcher… hmm. I wonder if the item skin is
also a baby(spoiler for those that haven’t seen this SW yet).Did someone call for baby armour?
http://www.llbbl.com/data/RPG-motivational/target50.html
I loved the “What did I ever do to you?!” death cry from one the raiders. That was hilarious.
“Don’t worry. She’s a plot character. She’ll be fine! … Um. Nevermind.” XD
Maybe she was protected by the “invincible plot armor” up until the point where she wasn’t part of the questline anymore?
…which is kind of ironic, since in that case, she survived a whopping 5 seconds after losing said protection.
I wonder if anyone tried to do this DLC by just shanking Medea when you first meet her. Not really a logical course of action but a curious one.
I tried too on a second playthrough, but my puny hand grenades were no match for her impenetrable plot armor.
Oddly, that means there’s no one to take care of the baby if you kill Midea. I don’t think I would trust Wernher.
oh and as for the slaves not going free when you side with ashur:
he does do some hand-waving in this case, he says that he needs the slaves to fund the cure
doesn’t quite make sense if you think about it too hard, but i imagine it does make sense in his head.
this DLC i think had the most difficult moral choice to make, for me.
you either choose to sacrifice one person to save a bunch of people quickly.
or you potentially sacrifice more people (and keep them as slaves and such) to save one baby.
to me it was a bit “sins of the father”-ish. just because ashur is a bad guy doesnt mean that they get a right to condemn his daughter.
(and ashur isnt even a bad guy! if you talk to him about his story he is, at least to me, one of the most well-written characters in the game.[which isnt saying much, granted] and a well-written character overall. he’s just doing what he thinks is right, even knowing that it wont make him the most popular guy around)
tl;dr
ashur = not really a bad guy.
HE DOESNT EAT BABIES
I always assumed they gathered steel and suchlikes to make solid bullets (because the only thing inside bullets is more metal). They sell these to traders/Raiders for caps.
yeees, therefore they are funding the cure.
that was not a typo.
I don’t see how it doesn’t make a lot of sense myself, is what I was saying; slaves are very cheap labor after all, the raiders/actual paid workers, not so much. Ashur probably believes they ‘need’ the slaves to make the ammo for them thusly (also increases profit -> more money for Science -> faster cure).
Slaves appear to be cheap labour, but there are a multitude of problems in practice.
Firstly, they are unmotivated so will do a poor job or will be slow. Second, they will be unskilled so can only do basic labour. Third, they would be weak and sick so again slow and bad workers. Fourth, may rebel against their oppressors. Five, may be expensive to buy in enough numbers. Six, expensive to guard, guards are not earning you any money at all.
Probably other reasons too.
Not a good environment for hiring the doctors, geneticists, biologists, chemists and whoever else you would need to develop and distribute this cure either.
But perhaps I’ve looked at this a little too closely!
thats… thats what im saying!!
youre agreeing with me and yet it seems like youre dissagreeing?
im confused here.
Well, you did state “doesn't quite make sense if you think about it too hard, but i imagine it does make sense in his head”. I’m disagreeing on the first part.
This is pretty confusing.
oh i see, now i get it. sorry, man.
yes you’re right.
i think what i meant was that it didnt make sense to keep them as slaves, maybe.
im not sure anymore though.
Another main issue is that the mutation rate from human to trog for infants born in the Pitt is 100%. It’s somewhere on one of the terminals in Sandra’s nursery/lab.
Well, I don’t know if you’re sacrificing the baby if you snatch her, just removing her from her parents. (And I can only assume there are a LOT of orphans in the wastes.)
On the flip side of this though, what’s the good in giving her to the slaves? I mean, really? Slaves? Are they going to be better placed to develop the cure? There’s no hints (that I saw) that Ashur would withhold the cure once it was developed into an actual treatment, so you could argue that by freeing the slaves and giving them the baby (to presumably screw up the science on) you’re actually dooming them to die horribly of Trog-itis.
they have someone to do the science and it is heavily implied that she wont survive it, depending on the dialog choices you make.
they say, in a nutshell, we can get the cure fast, but the baby likely wont make it. or rather, wherner says this.
plus if you take a look at the medical tools he has around, theyre not very baby friendly
“Well, I don't know if you're sacrificing the baby if you snatch her”
Seems pretty clear to me. That “crib” didn’t appear to have any air-holes.
Though Midia gives you a quest to bring teddy bears for caps. Which raises the question: why does a baby need so many teddy bears?
Nutrition.
well see, there are no pillows, and teddy bears arent as easy to smother with. you need many
That’s the cure distribution package. Every teddy will get a part of the immune tissue from the baby, and whoever wants a cure will eat the teddy.
My biggest problem with this DLC was that why would anyone choose to even live there should they have the choice to begin with. A working steel mill might be worth something, for sure, but is it really worth the risk of the disease? Even if it doesn’t turn you into a trog, you’ll end up looking like a freak anyway, and god knows what else it would do to your body. I mean, at the least, you’d want to somehow to protect yourself from the contagion before you start making a home in the city, like use some protective hazmat suits or even build somesort of sterile place with proper containment facilities to live in, so you could minimize the exposure to it. Of course assuming you’d even have the proper technology and know-how to do so. There’s maybe one or two factions (that we know of) on the whole continent who could feasibly even pull that off.
Replacing the raiders with the Enclave for example and the cure with something more sensible, it would probably have worked better at any rate and make up for a much more interesting DLC. They would actually have some reasonable motivation to keep the mill running anyway considering what they could produce with their added technology.
People simply don’t always use logic when deciding where to live. There’s all sorts of dangerous and difficult places where people live in real life, just because that’s where they grew up, or for some other reason.
You know, people usually try to live in a place where it’s feasible to make a living. The way they portray the city, you’d think it’s the last place you’d see any sort of succesful colony. You’d have to be an idiot to try to eke out an living where mutations and disease are as rampant as in that city. Not to forget there’s barely any food or clean water to be found anywhere near the city limits. Only other food apparently comes from the raids they make and even that’s reserved for the top of the food chain. You’re either gonna die of thirst/starvation/radiation poisoning or become a mutated freak otherwise. I’d be interest to hear what kind of folk you think would really insist on living there.
Idiots, of course. And Bethesda´s game universe is just full of them!
According to the game, initial settlers of the Pitt didnt know about the disease until it was too late. Basically, Ashur wanted to run the only steel mill in the wasteland but had to resort to bying slaves because the disease rendered what few workers he had sterile.
Its a shaky justification but its better than the stuff they usually come up with.
i dont think it even is that shaky. i mean, the pitt, sure you have trogs and disease.
but like its a lot better elsewhere anyway?
at least they do something to make money, rather than loaf around like all the other settlements
okay, i will point out here.
there is an island in japan where people must live constantly wearing gas masks due to high levels of sulfur.
there are people who make their homes underneath active volcanos.
there are people who live in eartquake prone areas (like me)
i could go on.
what i mean to say is, people live in a place because they have always lived there. people dislike to move.
its not as far-fetched as it seems.
in fact i’d say its not far-fetched at all, since not only is it where they live, their home, its also combine with profit.
what person can resist profit?? (specially when preceded by “???”
Okay so ignoring all the health hazards, that still doesn’t solve the food and water problem they have. The fact is that the only reason the whole settlement seems to exist is because they make raids on caravans etc. on the OUTSIDE of the city, so there’s no real basis for any kind of “normal human community” to survive more than maybe a few years if they decided to live on the local supply of irradiated food and water. Of course there’s always the occasional case where if you’ve really lived your whole life in one place, and don’t really know any better, then you might wanna stick to whatever miserable place you’ve decided to live in. However, the impression given is that most of the people in the town were NOT born in the city, so that excuse is pretty much void for most of them. It could work if it was some crazy cult living there and Ashur was somekind of batshit insane God-figure among them brainwashing everybody to live in the city.. but in this case, it’s just a bunch of idiots who decide to stay in the city nevertheless, though they realize they have to depend on outside sources for basic survival.
That’s where the real question comes in: Is the mill really worth all the trouble?
I don’t think so.
Sure you can “sort of” live there, but just the fact that they needed to abduct people from the outside to have more work force speaks well enough about the general living standards.
When it’s basically a lost cause for anyone who doesn’t even bother to shelter themselves from the disease and radiation (and none of them really do, expect maybe on the food/water part, and even that’s just the raiders), I find it kind of hard to believe anyone new to the area would really want to bother with it enough to want to really live there permanently.
ah, yes but also, the pitt has something that the capital wasteland doesnt which is …
a lack of radiation. they dont have any issues with radiation because the bombs didn’t hit the city, IIRC
so there are plusses.
i mean, a) resources, b) no supermutants, c) no radiation, d)steel mill, e) protection from the outside as for someone to attack they have to come in through the bridge
and the bad parts are a disease that makes some people crazy, or deformed. and no food/water. which is the same as the capital wasteland.
i think that asking that question just doesnt work very well. is there place in fallout that doesn’t have something horrible about it?
megaton: a crater with a bomb
the glow: RADIATION (granted, ghouls dont suffer)
Vault City: … really. REALLY?
NCR: I CANT WALK AROUND TOTING GUNS???
rivet city: surrounded by radiation filled water, in a ship with no way to grow food, the lower quarters filled with mirelurks.
etc. etc.
at this point, im not saying you’re necessarily wrong that it’s silly, but there is, at least, a precedent. several
Junktown was pretty awesome.
Megaton: They had a water refinery
Glow: Nobody lived there
Vault City: Um well.. what about it?
NCR: Yeah so?
Rivet City: They had a hydroponics farm and some small form of water cleaning ability.. mirelurks were a tasty dish too.
Excluding Glow, these places all have at least some means to be self-sufficient. (to a degree anyhow) It makes at least some sense for them to exist. I’m not sure what your point is here.
What I really meant when I was talking about radiation was that the fact that the only apparent food and water sources you come across are irradiated to the point that it’s simply just not feasible to think somebody could try to live off of that and expect to live too many years. The slaves eat the slop (that gives you 25+ rads) and the river under the bridge kills you if you even dip your toe in it.
And for resources: Aside from some metal ingots littered in random places, what do you mean exactly? It’s a city. At best you might find some leftover junk if it wasn’t already stripped clean by scavengers. Not much different from Capital Wasteland in that sense.
So yeah, I guess we can keep arguing about this till the end of days, but I’ll just say it once more:
It’s not a good place to live. And it makes no sense for any reasonable person to dig in there should he have the knowledge of the risks of living in there.
I wouldn’t go there anyway.
@ guy above me:
i wouldn’t either.
but i also wouldn’t live in somalia, so *shrug*
vault city was attacked by raider all the time.
and the water purifier was built there at one point, the thing is, what made them want to settle there in the first place? before the purifier existed. (that is actually explained in game, but its also shaky)
i just dont think that anywhere in the capital wasteland is that nice a place to live.
much nicer to be the mad max style wandering death merchant.
XD
Case in point: Nevada
But with the “Acquired Immunity” Mod (http://planetfallout.gamespy.com/mods/220/Acquired-Immunity-BETA), you can.
But with the “Acquired Immunity” Mod (http://planetfallout.gamespy.com/mods/220/Acquired-Immunity-BETA), you can.
and i forgot to mention:
TROG DOOR joke.
best pun i have heard in a LONG while.
if not ever.
cheers!
I bet he was sitting on that pun for at least two episodes, waiting for the best time to unleash it for the most devastating effect.
You are correct.
worth it
Absolutely worth it.
agreed
What they said.
Indubitably.
Um, if you’re going to start posting that warning (and really, I love it), shouldn’t it be on… well, a WHOLE LOT more things?
:-)
Like on the warning itself, actually.
And the episode was somewhat lacking in jive I thought. More jive, damn it!
So I’ve seriously started to wonder if Josh, Shamus, and Rutskarn are trolling all of us with this Spoiler Warning.
At the very least that Fallout 3 was a bad choice for Spoiler Warning. In order to have any idea what’s going on and why you need to read a lot of text and spend time in the various areas. In order to do a Spoiler Warning of any entertainment value you have to keep the action moving which is obviously not walls of green, blurry text.
At least for me, Spoiler warning isn’t about the game being played (after all, I’ve played it several times). It’s about the commentary.
Indeed. I see a distinct difference between a play-through and Let’s Play sort of thing, obviously there are variations on the theme but Spoiler Warning from the get-go has been presented very much as “Three geeks complain and comment on the game they’re playing while they play it.”
Of course I already know the game they’re playing through and through, so that makes my experience in watching it very different to yours if you’ve not played Fallout 3 or not done the DLC’s they’re doing. I suppose it’d be a bit like playing a game for the first time but having developer commentary on too…
So, er, seems less like trolling and more like just having different expectations from what they’re trying to accomplish here.
Agreed. The reason I commented the way I did is that the commentary and complaining in these last few Spoiler Warnings has revolved around, “Why are we doing this? Who is this guy? Why is he doing what he’s doing?” All questions that arise when you don’t take any time to actually play the game and instead treat it like a sub-par shooter. Same thing would happen in the vaunted Fallout 1 and 2. It’s possible that you can play the games by shooting everybody you see, but you’d have no idea what the hell was going on and it would seem silly. Fallout 3 is just inherently sillier than the first too so the silly factor is extreme.
You know, I have no trouble reading the dialogue text in the stream vid.
A trogdor pun?I did not expect that one.Kudos Rutskarn,well played.
Yoink!
The invincible baby armor sounds cool. Baby armor is actually very common in Dwarf Fortress, because the soldier-mothers carry their babies into battle. Then when a goblin strikes at them, it only mangles the baby, leaving the mother physically unharmed. Success!
but it makes them saaaaad ):
Nothing a great dining room with waterfalls won’t fix, really. Or even just killing things, and that usually takes place in short order. Dwarves are kind of weird.
waterfalls > babies
Also, probably the funniest joke in my book: Midea’s place was too dangerous for “Obvious Reasons”.
heh, you said flapdoodle. also i hope josh realizes that becasue of that subtitle in the credits if they invent a life lengthening vaccine thing that keeps him alive until the apocolyptic wasteland of 2258 he will have to start snatching babies.
He could just step inside a nuclear reactor, get irradiated until he glows and hope his luck stat is high enough to turn into a ghoul.
Now that would be a good mod.
Become a ghoul: Based on having high luck and endurance, and exposure to a vast amount of rads.
Bonuses to radiation resistance, regen health or something. Negative reactions from almost everyone human.
There are a couple of those already, even one that forces you to keep yourself radiated or die.
Surely it’s easy to stay radiated? Especially when eating and drinking gives you rads.
Does your radiation level decrease over time or something?
Hm, I haven’t ever tried one of those mods but if I were to make one I’d definitely have ghouls bleed off rads and have their maximum benefits for being a ghoul only when they’re at a high enough rad count.
Hell, having the rate at which you bleed off radiation increase with how much radiation you have would be interesting too and then giving extra benefits for extra high levels (i.e 1000 rads and you get the rad-blast like a Glowing One has, etc.) so you could stay at mid levels easily enough by just doing your own thing for the most part, but keeping yourself super-irradiated would require you to constantly be carrying around dirty water and anything that boosts the ol’rad count.
Of course there’s no suggestion in any lore that this is how ghouls work, but it’d be — for me at least — and interesting mechanic to play with. Pity changing the whole world to react to you like they should to a ghoul isn’t very feasible (for one the Brotherhood shoots ’em on sight).
I dont know about the radiation mechanics (though they dont sound all that hard to implement), but I know you can play as a ghoul in FWE (or a raider or whatever). Im not sure if the brotherhood is hostile to you, but if you can get the player aligned to one of the ingame “factions”, you can do that too.
Main Plot spoiler warning:
I thought this was how they were going to do brotherhood of steel, the logical explanation for how you survived the ending of the main plot line would have been for you to have been moira’d.
Someone made a mod that allows a character with the Cannibal perk to take the ultimate evil option and eat the kid for a permanent benefit.
Games need more options like this. Too many times, evil is either the lazy option (“I could try to figure out how to solve the problem, or I could kill everyone”) or gives you the pleasure to play as a jerk (wears thin really quickly if you ask me).
You want to give me an agonizing moral choice? Dangle a really sweet in-game reward, like a unique perk. This will make me sit up and notice!
Exactly. The big problem with blowing up Megaton, as was pointed out in the Let’s Play, is that there’s no reward! There’s absolutely nothing that you gain from blowing the bomb up — except perhaps getting a house a few levels earlier if your skills are very incredibly low and you have no mentats to take — but other than that? Nothing!
Eating the baby? Now, not only does that tickle the rotten morbid end of my funny bone but with the perk it gives you? Brilliant!
The only quest I remember where there was this sort of ending to it was the Android one and even there it wasn’t done especially well. The big negative consequence of you being a dick and turning Harkin in was a dollop of negative Karma and not getting his awesome plasma rifle.
Besides which you could play it to the middle, come out with no karma change in either direction, both rewards and you could still pick whether or not Harkin got taken away or you killed whats-his-name from the commonwealth.
And if you felt cheated out of negative or positive karma you could then just go pocket enough knives and forks to feel diabolical or just cram bottles and bottles of purified water into some man outside until the holy light was shining right out of your ass.
For the curious, the mod is called Acquired Immunity and it looks like it’s still up on the Nexus. Everyone in the Pitt turns hostile to you (and of course, you lose a lot of karma), but in exchange you get permanent, 100% rad resistance.
You say “Everyone in the Pitt turns hostile” like it’s a bad thing. Think of the loot!
All this talk of babies, and poor Lulzy is STILL dangling out there with her latest exploits having no link to this site!
I think he’s just embarrassed about the Oakheart mission.
GRAGH FUCK YOU VIDDLER/WHATEVER SITE HOSTS THESE, I DON’T WANT A FUCKING SCION. I ALREADY HAVE ONE!
Also yeah the Pitt is probably the most “Fallout” DLC.
So I’ve noticed you missed pick up a couple Chinese officer swords. Swords that you can be using to repair the schocksword.
I don’t know about you guys, but I was all about keeping the baby with Ashur. Why take a baby from it’s mother and give it to a dick like Wehrner. He didn’t exactly do us any favors.
They wanted to show how horrible he is, since you only get those dialogue options if you take the baby to him.
It´s nice, though, that you can get to him without the baby and he´ll go all “Quickly, put the baby on the cr…wait, where´s the baby?!”. Then you can shoot him in the face several times. So satysfing! The rest of his dialogue tree is pretty much a lot of “You doomed us all!”.
Well, supposedly Ashur and mom Whatshername were slowing down the research due to safety concerns. The slaves wanted to speed it up by using more risky stuff, to save more people, and possibly get a little revenge on their hated tyrant.
Also the slaves lacked proper lab environment, equipment, education and knowledge base, but who cares?
I like to imagine what they would do if the baby died after they subjected it to one of their extreme research methods, only to find out that this particular approach didnt bring the positive results expected.
I´m sure the writers would find a way to make the PC guilty of that. And then there would be, besides Talon Mercs and Regulators, a group called Weirner´s Avengers pursuing you around the wasteland screaming “Good job breaking it, hero!”; Karma Dog would rant about how it´s all your fault somehow; and Daddy Stu would tell you how ashamed he is of you.
Luckily for one of those consequences there’d still be the Karma Dog Removal Procedure. Where you, the intrepid wastelander, employ one high-explosive grenade and your carefully honed stuffing-shit-into-other-peoples-pants skills to rid the capital wasteland of this loud obnoxious microphone wielding moral compass.
Honestly the, ahem, middle road of eating the baby — by way of mod posted about a few comments up — is to my mind a stroke of genius that would have made The Pitt so much more enjoyable. Especially if you could then listen to Karma Dog’s outraged bleating and sputtering.
(Also I think you’re the person I’ve seen calling him Karma Dog and by god I do love that name; I’d been, for so long, reduced to just calling him “that annoying twat on the radio”.)
On one hand eating it would be very dark and very Fallout. On the other hand, Moral Guardians, politicians and journalists would shit their brains out in outrage, starting yet another round of ceremonial gamebashing.
Very true. That’s why when it came out that children wouldn’t be killable in Fallout 3 I was grudgingly accepting of it, I didn’t like it but I understood why and I could be fine with that, not happy, but fine.
Later, I became less happy and distinctly not fine with this.
“I don’t want no shit-butts in my town.”
Bang.
“Mayor MacCready is unconscious.”
Making one of the single most irritating characters in the game unkillable. Bravo Bethesda, bravo. Would you perhaps like to ask for the rights from George Lucas to bring Jar Jar Binks into the universe and make him an essential character as well? Perhaps an “Ambassador to the Wasteland” SPECIAL DLC where both he and McCready are added as permanent followers?
Weirly enough, when I read there was a babyeating mod, first thing that crossed my mind was an image of Mayor Pottymouth roasting above a cozy campfire, with Lone Wanderer sitting beside him, fork and knife in his hands, ready to help himself to some strange steak, medium rare.
Indeed, there seems to be a group of developers within Bethesda, who take great pleasure in taunting that player with that sort of thing.
Its one of the things that make the “capture” scene so unbearably aggravating. If I was stunned by a mine and captured or something along those lines, I probably could have considered the storyline, collecting ingots, making moral choices and all that. As it stands, my sole goal during the whole DLC was finding that smug bastard who trapped me in a cutscene and shooting him in the face until I ran out of bullets or he ran out of face.
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:M%27aiq_the_Liar
That’d be the most blatant example. I keep getting the feeling Bethesda doesn’t really like the people who make up the core of the demographic who buys their games.
And yeah, the capture scenes and such — given all this — get extra irritating because it starts feeling like the developer is smugly thumbing their nose at you.
Funny thing is, I actually thought FABLE was better than Oblivion comparatively. For what it was, it was better than oblivion. And I don’t say that lightly, I liked both games about equally, but Fable takes it simply for the charm, it has the ability to know when it’s getting ridiculous and self-aggrandizes itself at times. If Oblivion had half the ability to laugh at itself, or even the foreknowledge to do so, it would have been a vastly better game. Rather than just a, “Fantasy Adventure Through A Tolkienesque Landscape.” Rather than Fables somewhat original, “Humorous Fantasy Adventure Through a Parody Of A Tolkienesque Landscape”
Indeed. I enjoyed both, but far too often playing Oblivion felt like I was stuck in a over-wrought high-fantasy setting being run by a DM who generally lacked a sense of humour and took himself and his game far too seriously.
Huh. Feels like I’ve read a webcomic based on that very concept somewhere…
Anyway, for all of Molyneux’s hype that disappoints and so forth I like that he doesn’t take himself or his games too seriously and that translates into the slightly twee but enjoyably silly sort of fantasy worlds like Fable which I ultimately enjoy.
Yeah, Fable may not have been the ultimate simulator of an adventurer, but it tackeled some interesting concepts, and had a very charming design.
Oblivion disappointed me, the combat was nice (especially with OOO) but everything else? Mmmmmeeeeeeeeehhhhhhh.
It kind of marks the point when Bethesda fell into blandness, dumbing down and catering to the LCD. The main thing that bothered me was that after the beautifull, unique, fresh and interesting world of Morrowind they managed to make something so incredibly generic, standard, bland and uninspired. It was basically Medieval European Fantasy at its worst, something everyone already saw a thousand times.
I too enjoyed Fable more than Oblivion. Both Fable’s actually. Fable 2’s story can go die in a fire, but everything else had a unique charm and dark sense of humor about it.
Plus I never listen to Moleneux, so I wasn’t affected by the hype. Probably why I love the games so much.
I wonder if Bethesda was secretly hoping to adocrtinate us to unconsciously hate kids in real life or something.
New tagline, in light of Josh’s sneaky grenadiering:
Josh Viel: Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs At Midnight.
A reference to The Tick? Keep being awesome.
(Although now I have to go rewatch the few episodes of the live-action series and mope about it.)
This is now how I will picture Josh, forever.
One issue I’ve had with the kidnapping from day one: maybe I’m just cold-hearted, but honestly I find the choice between a child and a cure for everyone to be pretty easy. Yes, babies are cute, yes, we like to exploit their emotional appeal to us, but at the end of the day if I have to kidnap or even kill a newborn to save a thousand people, I’ll do it in a heartbeat – not to suggest that I’d enjoy it, but the greater good clearly outweighs it. So I’m a “bad guy” because I kidnapped a newborn baby from her slaver parents. Boo hoo.
I’m not a big fan of these sorts of choices; it just smacks of the developer taking the easy road. True to Bethesda form, as well, they could have made things so much more logical with just a few tweaks. It’s already stated that Pittsburgh is a capital of industry in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, and that slave labour is necessary to keep the wheels turning, at least for the time being. Selecting between industry and economy, which are real and tangible things, versus more esoteric, intangible ideals like freedom and liberty, is actually a pretty difficult thing to do provided that the consequences run deep enough, and they easily could have spun the decision this way instead.
I believe Beth actually tried to make both sides morally gray, to set more realistic and cynical tone and show that you dont always have an obvious best course of action. In their own, traditionally hamfisted way(see also: Roy Phillips vs Tenpenny).
Yeah, except this isn’t very morally grey at all. If the cure wasn’t a baby, then I don’t think anyone would even think of hesitating in helping the slaves. It’s almost like they realised there wasn’t sufficient motivation to be an evil jerk (which I admit is unlikely for Bethesda) and decided to come up with a half-assed way of making the decision more difficult.
I think they were operating under the assumption that all life is precious? No it cant be that. I guess Ashur was ultimately well intentioned so his firstborn shouldnt have to suffer while Werner only wanted the baby to take control of the Pitt or something. Maybe unleashing trogs upon the raiders was supposed to be too cruel a punishment (it wasnt if you ask me). Also there were some hints that without Ashur controlling the place everything will fall apart with no discipline and…aaaaah screw it, I cant play the devil’s advocate again, this mess is undefendable.
Ashur´s raiders were jerks, so they deserved to die. Whateverea and Weirmer were jerks to, so they deserved to die. I think Ashur is the onyl one who doesn´t threat you like shit (unless you tell him “I´m here to snatch your baby cure!”).
To make the whole ordeal morally gray, the slavers were supposed to be presented as humans, uneasily sacrificing the human rights of their fellow man and stepping on their own ethics and decency for the good of everybody. However, only Ashur was supposedly presented as such, while his gang of raiders needlessly mistreated, tortured and brutalised the slaves because all raiders are chaotic evil forever with no exceptions. At the end of the day, the game did not convince me Ashur was good, he may have been polite to you but the practices he allowed within his operation were so completely morally unjustifiable, any pretence of caring for the slaves he had displayed felt like nothing more than farce to me, a lie he was using to convince himself that he was a well intentioned extremist forced to do what he did by the circumstances and not just a complete monster whose ambition took more lives than it could have possibly saved. A bit like Dad, really.
You hit the nail there. He´s as good as Daddy Stu is, which in the in-game morality meter means he is a saint. Except He Is Not.
The choice was esay for me too, but because I hated Weirmer excuse for not telling you the cure was a baby is “because you would whinne about it!”. I ended whinning to him with a shotgun blast to the face. So I guess he was actually right. Also, everyone but Ashur threated me like crap, including Midia (Medea? Marea? Whateverea?) so I wasn´t going to make thema ny favors. Which brings me to another problem, and is that the DLC failed miserably to give me the impresion that the slaves were actual people. If I had the sense of “these slaves are people!” I would probably helped Weirner anyway (though with some huge questions that the game wouldn´t let me ask).
The slavers and raiders had names, that was what was supposed to differentiate them from run of the mill “kill on sight” slavers and raiders and supposed to “humanize” them.
It failed miserably.
Hey shamus you couldn’y post a link to Rutskarns let’s play of Morrowwind
could ya?
If you’re looking for them, the first one can be found here.
http://www.chocolatehammer.org/?p=834
Sorry, my navigation’s not as good as his, so you’ll have to slog through the archives the hard way. I really need to do something about that.
Wow that was realy quick… btw you may want to look at my next comment =)(After the airsoft ‘nades.) EDIT: wow ok??? wont let me post it ok ill copy ‘n past it.
Reginald “Obvious Reasons” Cuthbert…
Jet-headed, Anchorage Liberating, Mysterious Stranger ‘nading, Baby Snatching,Mutton chop growing, Bonnet wearing, Invisible, BAD ASS!
Also rutskarn thank for link ive bookmarked your blog/site/tingy and i will be reading/watching your lets plays
Thanks for the link, I think I’ll take a look!
I recommend it. Reminded me of Living In Oblivion at first (which seems to have stopped updating) but the series has a far different tone, style and I suppose in a sense ‘objective’ and has some genuinely hilarious moments in it. The Clod of Cthulhu one is amazingly good as well.
Only downside is the lack of screenshots. Causes much fist shaking; I demand visual stimulation!
On air soft grenades, there cylindrical like a flash bang with port on the top left ‘n bottom right that released the compressede air to spin them while in top right ‘n bottom left it uses a seperatly cotained cylinder of compressed air to shoot out the airsoft pellets (About 80 of them) they hiss loudly and are about 2/3 the size of a house brick
http://www.airsoft-innovations.com/Grenade.html
That seems to be the most common commercial type and most recommended airsoft grenade.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKdy0RjsP3w
There’s a demo of, er, ‘practical’ use. It seems useful and fun, and would scare the crap out of me playing airsoft, but using up that many BBs and the idea of throwing something worth a hundred dollars around just don’t sit right with me.
Edit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5KI5boKbCY Better demo of how it works and shows how the BB’s are fired out of the thing.
Somebody at Airsoft Inovation (peeps who made the airsoft ‘nade) is a portal fan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5d3wwYZnS8
The worst part of Airsoft is always when I have to take the big coosh companion cube and feed it into the big hole marked “incinerator”
Hey Shamus, I just started watching these, but I really have to say they are awesome and really really funny. Thank you for sharing. :)
Trogs? In WoW?
Wow, that game REALLY ripped off EQ.
I remember the trogs, which were humanoid alien cave-dwellers on the moon. They were AWESOME.
I remember trogs when they were in DnD 2e. REMEMBER THE CREATOR.
Really it’s just a passe word for caveman or hermit. But they were in DnD from ADnD1.0 on.
It’s a short term for Troglodyte, which comes from the Greek word Troglodytae, literally meaning ‘cave goers’. They appear in Greek and Roman mythology here and there as primitive caveman archetypes.
So Greek Mythology beats DnD for inventing Troglodytes by a few thousand years.
Look one line down, meng. You’ll notice I mention something to that effect. But thank you for extrapolating for us.
I just thought of something I’ve been meaning to mention for a few videos now but it keeps slipping my mind. While the usual volume levels you guys have are fine, when talking or even when getting loud about something, there is one killer though: laughing.
Now me using headphones might be to blame for it, but the laughing is piercingly loud at times.
I have a little trouble with it too. I’ll set the volume to acceptable for everything, then someone will laugh, and I’ll have to reduce volume again.
Rutskarn, you have earned my respect sir!
Rutskarn I appreciated your Kobolds Ate My Baby! reference. And the Trogdor pun was amazingly well timed.
There’s usually a good option (Which for me was saving the baby, a cure that could make the city habitable was clearly safer in his hands) and a bad option (steal the baby from it’s parents, give it to a psychopath and cause the trogs to invade half of pittsburgh).
Then there’s the rutskarn way: “Can I put the baby in the rock-it launcher?”
Nice.
I thought the explanation for ashur’s situation was needing slaves to pay for raiders who protected him. He just screwed up by hiring dicks because they were the only ones available, who mistreated the slaves, but he couldn’t control them enough to make them stop.
And honestly, other then tenpenny, dukov, crazy nuka-cola girl and the lone wanderer, does anyone in the wasteland have a good time?
Well, if you question Ashur some more during that convo in his office he reveals that he’s SPOILER actually a former BoS left for dead. He first had to fight for himself, then “went soft” and decided to actually help the people around him. As the scope of his efforts grew he couldn’t do all this stuff himself, so he recruited some raider/slavers, often by simply killing them until the remaining guys started calling him boss.
The way I imagine it is that as Ashur’s gang grew he sort of became disconnected from the base of the community he’s created. He first offed raiders, than he recruited them to help him off other raiders as he couldn’t handle that many, then he needed to support his little community, so those who couldn’t fight had to work to provide the fighters with food, equipment… and things sort of spiralled from there. You can see it in the conversation between Ashur and the raider that was featured in the vid. Ashur insists on calling the slaves “workers” while the slaver is like “yeah sure, whatever humours you boss”. I think most of the slavers don’t honestly care about Ashur’s whole community building ideal, they’re fed, clothed, they get guns and ammo, they have a leader who’s (let’s work with Bethesda here) a good strategist. So what if he’s a little weird?
In a sense Ashur is delusional and Werner (sp?) probably mistook it for being soft and thought he could take over. Giving the baby to Werner probably means that the entire Pitt operation is going to be that much more efficient from now on as he’ll probably start by creating a new “raider caste” from some of the slaves (if you DON’T give him the baby he’s like “bah, screw the slaves, I’m leaving this place). Not kidnapping the baby, or giving it back to Ashur, pretty much means he’s going to continue on his delusional “everything to maintain this community” scheme as even with the cure the problems aren’t going to just go away and raiders are unlikely to just welcome the slaves as their brothers (and vice versa).
The actual goodie-two-shoes option would be to kidnap the baby, forcing Ashur to do something like “come here unarmed” into downtown and in the process opening his eyes to the slave’s plight. This would be followed by some heartwrenching, poor writing along the lines of “I never realised” and “I became as evil as the men I thought” after which he would either go away or, after a speech-check from the player would “swear to work to fix it” or something to that effect. Also, the irony? SPOILER We are meant to understand that Ashur is part of the BoS force that trekked from the West to the East coast. In other words: Lyons’ BoS. In other words if he caught up to his force he’d have the whole “BoS that cares about people”. Also, Lyons totally forgot about Pitt.
Edit: Ok, I suck. Which tags are those “cover the text with red” spoiler tags and how do I use them? I typed in huge words “SPOILER” in the post to mark it somehow cause I can’t get the proper thing to work…
I agree with your interpretation of Ashur, however, I seem to recall some raiders and slaves saying he was basically regarded as local god, someone everybody obeyed without question, so this might not have been the intent of the writers. The game contradicts itself on this one.
Come to think of it, the real “good” option, would be to destroy the steel mill. What good is it to the people of American wastes if its used to boost the slave trade and supply raiders. Even if the cure was found, the raiders and slaves probably wouldnt start living in harmony, peace and mutual respect all of a sudden. If Ashur effectively lost control over his thugs and Werner is one of the raider lieutenants just seeking to gain control, I dont see anything good coming out of the situation in the future.
I´d say that, once “free” the slaves would use the steelyard to rocket their little society, trading other settlements with ammo in exchange of supplies. Or that is what I´d think is the most logical use of that place, slavers or no slavers. However, I´m inclined to think that the writer´s idea (can they have those, I wonder?) was that you must help them because they let you convert ammo to different kinds of ammo absolutely free and…that´s all about it, really.
Perhaps im reading Werner wrong, but I was under the impression that with his leadership, former slaves would pretty quickly turn into another raider group. Then again, I dont really remember the character all that well so I might be wrong.
I also keep wondering whether a steel mill is worth all this trouble. Even if we assume that bullets of all calibers are made out of chunks of nondescript “metal”, they dont seem to be all that rare.
We also have to remember that the only reason mr W is doing what he is doing is that he wanted to ursurp Ashur and failed. He is using the whole “freeing the slaves” gig as a mean to an end, not because he really cares for them. Unlike Midea.
About Ashur being ex-BoS: I thought that was the case, but hadn’t done the quest in a long while so not entirely sure… I do remember that he did make an issue of the situation only being temporary til he had a cure…
I thought the entire point of the DLC was that there was no good option, like with Roy Phillips, in some situations, there just isn’t a right thing to do.
Flapdoodle? I’m not sure I want to have anything to do with any flapping of any doodle.
Just to make the whole Project Purity thing more amazing…
Here’s a little spiel from the original Fallout, about Vault 12…
“Much like all other Vaults, Vault 12 has been fitted with the newest in Vault Water Purification Systems. Able to take even the waste located in the sewers of Bakersfield, this system is able to deliver over 15,000 gallons of pure, refreshing drinking water every day.”
And with, what, four vaults (that we know of) in the DC wastelands… That’s quite a bit of water.
The vault wiki even seems on to this
“In Fallout 3, water availability is the underlying theme of the game, though portrayed in an inconsistent and counterfactual way (such as radiated water being impossible to treat, even though it’s just a question of filtering it through uncontaminated sand).”
Ironic isn’t it?
no one cares anymore, but Troggs in World of Warcraft are actually Dwarves that were altered during the transition from Earthen to Dwarves during the first shattering 10.000 years ago.
irradiated gnomes are Leper Gnomes