T w e n t y S i d e d
I neglected to link to Stolen Pixels #38 last Friday, which was about the classic “War Never Changes” intro to the Fallout games. Allow me to do so now. And no, I’d never seen that particular Perry Bible Fellowship and this was not a reference to that. I was just trying to throw in some quasi-50’s lingo, in keeping with the style of the game.
Now, moving on to current events: Today we have yet another Fallout comic. This is more fantasy than parody, I’m afraid.
Comments are open for this one. Knock yourselves out.
(Also, for what it’s worth: This is post #2000. Yay base ten.)
Could Have Been Great
Here are four games that could have been much better with just a little more work.
Resident Evil 4
Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?
Mass Effect 3 Ending Deconstruction
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
id Software Coding Style
When the source code for Doom 3 was released, we got a look at some of the style conventions used by the developers. Here I analyze this style and explain what it all means.
Rage 2
The game was a dud, and I'm convinced a big part of that is due to the way the game leaned into its story. Its terrible, cringe-inducing story.
“yet another Fallout comic” links to a listing of all of your comics and #38 – Untenable is the most recent.
Does this mean you will be doing a write-up of the game as well?
Yeah, doesn’t look like the newest one has been made available yet.
Yep, it still seems unavailable. But in unrelated news, I just spotted this: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20998
It looks like Stardock was not only trying to get the rights to MOM, but also to Star Control. Unfortunately, it seems they failed on both fronts. I wonder what the hitch was.
Stardock would have been a great choice for a Starcon sequel, but Toys For Bob is also still trying to get the OK to make a sequel to it, and they would probably be the best choice.
I love Brad Wardell’s quote from the article: “If you’re making a game that ends with ‘3,’ or Something: The Sequel, it should be similar to the original game”. “Don’t go off and say, ‘I have my own artistic vision.’ Okay, good — so call it something else. Don’t ride the coattails of the people who came before you to launch your own artistic vision.”
Amen, brother!
Wardell also talks about making an old-school Baldur’s Gate-style party-oriented RPG and points out people’s desire for Minsc type character party interaction.
Now that the comic’s up, I agree. My girlfriend and I are playing it (fighting over the same computer) and our choices are pretty much the same, even though we chose fairly different characters. It’s a fun game, but I don’t see a lot of opportunity to experience a different game if I roll a different person.
One thing you can definitely do is cut off quests by being snarky. My current character isn’t “good” as such, but he’s happy to flatter in order to get what he wants. As a result, he is getting more quests and more information than my girlfriend’s character, who is often snarky and cuts off quest options left and right.
It’s a fun game and exploring it has taken up 30 hours of my life already. It was well worth the $50 spent.
LintMan, when you said “MOM”, I immediately thought of Mail Order Monsters, not Master of Magic. I was so excited. I miss my lionbear.
I also went for high Perception and 1 Charisma, but I was a nice guy, so I didn’t pick horribly-mean dialogue choices. Except for Butch, that guy totally deserved getting his face smashed in. XD
Speaking of smashing Butch’s face in (and the rest of his gang of morons) I found the limits of the AI system pretty quickly. Which is a shame. Still, it was a nice surprise when my Very Evil Pirate of the Waste character was bounty hunted, much later on in the game. I don’t think thats connected, though lol
Huh. And here I thought you were talking about this PBF.
Only 48 more to 2048, or 100,000,000,000 in base 2!