T w e n t y S i d e d
You know, when Josh said, “Seriously, I’m not cutting this”, I really thought he was kidding.
We usually record a few episodes at a stretch. When an episode ends we all run off to get coffee, food, bio break, or whatever other problems arose during the last 40 minutes. Then we screw around for a few minutes before we begin the next episode. Or in the case of this one, we continue to screw around for the whole thing.
Project Button Masher
I teach myself music composition by imitating the style of various videogame soundtracks. How did it turn out? Listen for yourself.
Batman: Arkham City
A look back at one of my favorite games. The gameplay was stellar, but the underlying story was clumsy and oddly constructed.
Overused Words in Game Titles
I scoured the Steam database to figure out what words were the most commonly used in game titles.
Object-Oriented Debate
There are two major schools of thought about how you should write software. Here's what they are and why people argue about it.
Quakecon 2012 Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Q: How do you repair a baseball bat?
A: ADD MORE BATS!!
incidentally, the VATS grenade trick is incredibly cheap. I approve.
I think if I collect something, it’s toys. I’ve heard there’s a quest where you turn those in, but I don’t know where it is, not sure if I’ll turn them in or not.
Teddy Bears can be handed over to a woman in the Pitt. She only appears twice, briefly, so I never catch her name. She’s the one who takes care of the cure after you fix the city.
Bats? how about shooting a grenade out of someone’s hands, finding the grenade at 0 condition somewhere after the fight, and using another grenade to repair it? BY DISMANTLING THE SECOND (LIVE) GRENADE TO USE ITS PARTS?!?!?! this nonsense happened quite a few times to me and my brother, and every time is as hilarious as the first.
I collect pool balls. All of them, so you grabbing only that 8 ball kinda pissed me off.
I love collecting the remains of the hardest enemies I defeat. If I can grab my enemies weapon, then I will be very happy. I take it, I store it, and I make a large collection of these things. I don’t repair the weapons, I don’t use the weapons, I don’t even equip it to show my friends or anything. I just keep it. My favorite was a nail board I got from an enemy that NEVER SEEMED TO DIE.
Oh my god that was one of the most genuinely funny moment’s in the game. I walked in looked around “Cheery musak” playing, and then I walked into the room. It actually compelled me to play for around 10 more hours in hopes of finding somewhere half as WTF as that area with the plungers. It’s like the ONLY reason other than mods I even played the game beyond the 5 hours it took me to stumble upon that area. Even now I was wondering if I had hallucinated it. Shamus finally confirmed that I didn’t.
As to what I collected, communist memorabilia.
As to the two hundred year old hunk of iron sledge hammer. It would not break I may crack slightly or chip but wouldn’t out right break. Maybe the handle breaks, in which case why can’t your repair it with other weapons.
50s motorcycle helmet http://cdn3.ioffer.com/img/item/140/545/251/Eymj.jpg .
I collect mines. Its just hilarious for me save and then toss out 40 or 50 mines of various types all around some unsuspecting NPC, then back off a ways, shoot them in the leg or something, and watch the fireworks…
a massive chorus of beeps and then BOOM :D
However, thats really the only thing I collect; theres no useless item I bother with.
In one game I collected as many pool balls as I could find and dropped them all on the table in the lounge at Tenpenny Towers. It got to the point where the physics engine would make them randomly jump off the table every time the room loaded, so I had to keep picking them up. I think that’s why I abandoned that character.
I collect Prewar money as well, I just love having a big pile of the stuff.
Also, about sawed-off shotguns. There is the kneecapper, though it’s not much compared to the other shotguns.
And the chinese pistol should do 4 damage when it’s in pristine condition. Still nothing to write home about as the reguler 10mm does 9 damage and the unique 10mm 13 damage. Then again the unique version of the chinese pistol sets people on fire, that ought to make up for it.
Edit: and I meant to make a new reply, not reply to Hitch. I blame the high concentration of blood in my caffeine for that mistake.
But did you find the “Lucky” 8-Ball?
Re: the plunger room. I think it was supposed to be a room that someone had used to test a plunger gun and the mannequins were targets. Perhaps a Rock-It Launcher.
There’s plungers on the walls and ceiling, and a body on the ground. I think the suggestion is that the guy used them to climb on the ceiling and then fell to his doom.
I love the crazed plunger room. That was a hilarious absurdity. Also fun are the many places where teddy bears and gnomes fight. A couple of the bears are tied to a train track during the Broken Steel quest line. The “easter eggs” in the tunnels are very well done.
The bit about the bracketed code is supposedly in the manual (didn’t ever notice it) and one of the miscellaneous tips (which was NICE to find). If you try to get that achievement (50 terminals), it’s incredibly helpful. I HATE the lock picking though. I’ve played through the game 1-30 twice, and still have a terrible time with hard locks, forget the very hard locks. I understand how you’re supposed to do it, but my execution is lacking. I find Josh’s speed amazing.
I’m a little surprised by how many people collect random junk. I only ever hunt down the items needed to make bottlecap mines, for obvious reasons. (I’m running out of lunchboxes!) I do keep my pre-war money, but, instead of piling it, I always hide it in the safe.
I’m confused by the ghouls who carry stuff. I just watched Josh grab 11 10mm rounds and some mole rat meat from a ghoul wearing only a loincloth. Don’t go searching there!
Maybe those bullets got there because some other traveler encountered him.
Yeah, I know it doesn´t make sense, but hey! Bethesda logic!
Ha! I didn’t think of that. Good catch. :P
The 360 version has rumble cues for the lockpicking minigame, which makes it a lot less annoying. Of course it also has no mods. Ahh if only things like the Xbox version of Morrowind accidentally supporting mods happened more often..
Oh hey, my wish came true! I was hoping you’d hear out the scripted conversation between the protectron and the mutants, but maybe that’s not how Reginald rolls.
In case you didn’t do it yet, the unmarked quest rewarding the Xuanlong Rifle starts in the museum. It’s possible to fail it (a puzzle), but if you don’t, the rifle’s excellent, probably alright for a melee character too.
I stumbled on the plunger room too (known as Shelter on the wiki). The plunger-collecting inhabitant had turned into a ghoul, sadly. If you do the Xuanlong quest it brings you near another great place: did you discover Gold Ribbon Grocers?
Last, the question: I’ve never collected a single meaningless junk item, but I have tried collecting one of each.
With a decent Small Guns and Repair score, I find the Xuanlong to be so good that I rarely shoot with anything else. A good shotgun is helpful, but Xuanlong outdoes most of the energy weapons, from what I can tell.
I _love_ the grocers, but it’s easy to get yourself maimed (or killed) if you chase the machine around the room, trying to watch it all.
Yeah. “Grenades? GAS!” The Vault article has a specific warning on mods making explosives volatile, which can mean trouble here, what with the three missiles and a mini-nuke.
And regarding the “Z” key: Dragging is really useful (I didn’t remember to use it my first time through) when bodies overlap but also to pull boxes down off of shelves (which often contained swag). You’d also occasionally find useful items under piles of junk in crates.
I response to your question about what people collected Shamus: Mini Nukes. I don’t think I have ever sold a mini nuke in any play through. I save them up scattered throughout my characters house and sometimes do nothing with them. But occasionally, I go and get the unique Fat Man and launch multiple mini nukes in raider strongholds in the wasteland, like Paradise Falls or Evergreen Mills. Evergreen Mills is my favourite because it has a Super Mutant Behemoth in a cage and you can jump onto the roof of the buildings there to rain down nuclear fire.
I collect mini-nukes, too! I clear out the shelves in the Megaton house and place them one at a time in nice, neat rows, with the fatman launcher leaning against the wall. I also collect one of every regular weapon and armor, repair it to 100%, then place them around the house.
I’ve marveled at your mini-nuke collection before, though I didn’t know about the perfect weapons/armor thing… Now I’m going to do that whan I play again.
Count me in on the mini-nuke collecting too. I must have had close to 40-50 of them in one game. I didn’t do any sort of theme for my megaton house, just got the lab and medical centre, and instead every surfaces was rather neatly littered with mininukes.
Now that I’m playing with a mod that makes explosive ammo… well explosive if you shoot it, I’m a bit nervous about even loading that characters last save.
I used to conserve my mininukes, then I just decided to use them all on the final push to the Jefferson Memorial. It was a case of saving them up all game and then deciding to **** it and just have some fun.
That said, I cursed myself for using them all up and then having to play through the Broken Steel quest with the Presidential tunnel with the Sentry Bots and hordes of Reavers without the mini nukes.
This game could have been improved so much if there were no npcs and no dialogue. Its like Borderlands with 50s retro-futuristic style. The dialogue is easily the most cringeworthy part of the game. Its like they cant bring themselves to fire 1000 tapewriting monkeys after they managed to write Morrowind.
Also, say what you will about Bethesda, they can create interesting areas. They cant tie them together and the whole thing comes off as too themeparky but you constantly find individual pieces telling their own little stories.
The plunger room is an example, as you examine it you realize that it was a custom built nuclear shelter for someone. You find drugs and booze scattered amidst the plungers, giving you some insight on what transpired. I love finding those little gems, they actually tell a lot better story than all the quests and npcs.
Or as another example, the presidential memorial in the basement of the house in Arlington cemetery. It actually looks like someone attempting to preserve some history and I always feel a little bit horrible looting the place.
There is a pulowski preservation shelter near the Capitol Building with a skeleton and a copy of Lying, Congressional Style.
You can catch a broadcast of strange breathing noises when you walk around the wasteland. If you follow it you will find a drainage chamber full of ghouls around a ham radio. Apparentely some people tried to find shelter there but were turned into ghouls due to radiation.
There is a power station somewhere in the western part of the wastes, taken over by raiders. If you look around in it, you will notice that the beds are unusually nice and tidy and there are BoS symbols on the walls with raider graffiti painted over them.
I’d place all of the dialogue in any Bethesda game against those “Claptrap” robots from Borderlands any day of the week. If it wasn’t for getting desperately needed ammo and health, I wouldn’t have repaired a single one of those moronic devices. It was someone’s idea of a joke that failed miserably.
And was it me, or did they make most of the NPCs in Borderlands wear masks so they wouldn’t have to bother with animating mouths?
Heh, I don’t think it was a case of they couldn’t be bothered animating the mouths, I just think they couldn’t. Seriously, watch the mouth of any character without a mask and it’s like they didn’t even try to synch it with the audio…
Oh, and they finally got it that most people don’t like Claptrap, in the third DLC he gives you the missions from the bounty board and that’s it. Granted, it did take them till the thrid DLC, but hey, at least they noticed…
LOOK AT ME EVERYBODY! I’M DANCING! I’M DAAANCING!
The thing about that game is they succeeded at fusing Diablo with Unreal Tournament but then they just had to ruin things by trying to be Final Fantasy as well. 3 people doing the FPS idle dance (jump/crouch/jump) while player 1 gets a 10 minute plotdump about his destiny as the chosen one.
(extend this to Fallout being a succesful Oblivion-with-guns and then ruining it by being called and ostensibly set in the world of- Fallout if you like)
I can certainly see the helve of a 200+ year old sledgehammer breaking, considering I’ve experienced breakage of a sledge helve that was less than 5 years old and hadn’t been abused for smacking around people and people-like beings.
And when I say “experienced”, I mean “was in the wrong place at the wrong time and took a 14lb lump of cast iron full in the chest”. Man, that hurt.
It is all about collecting the plungers.
I once collected each weapon, repaired them fully (on top of the ones I used regularly) and then put them to show in the livingroom, alongside the head of Charon and the supermutant henchmen…Fergus, was it? (I hid their bodies in the closet). Too bad one can´t bring visits to the house.
Its Fawkes.
There’s actually a mod that gives you a fully stockable armory, with a wall container that will display your weapons as you collect them. I don’t think I ever had all the weapons though. Just most of them.
EDIT: I’m not sure how Shamus feels about external links, but its on the Fallout 3 Nexus here: http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=9592
I have hated most of the house mods I’ve tried, but that one turned out to be pretty cool. I wish mod makers would keep “here is a cool place” separate from “here is a game-breaking munchkin item”, but since I’m all energy-weapons based the free guns aren’t a big deal.
Update to anyone tempted to use the above mod after my praise:
The fridge just reset its contents, thus wiping out all of my Nuka-Cola, Quantum, and all of my SUGAR BOMBS!
AAAAAAAAAARG!
My rage is limitless. And my last pre-house save is over two days old.
:(
:( *Hides*
I’m assuming it didn’t just sort them someplace else?
For the record: The only problem I’ve had with that mod was a higher rate of crashes. Which is kinda par for the course for almost any F3 mod that alters exterior cells at all.
Also for quite a few people its par for the course simply with Fallout 3.
But removing Games for Windows Live and installing the unofficial patch stops a vast majority of crashes.
Energy weapons get are so much cooler and more satisfying with the Energy Visuals Enhanced mod.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=8340
It does ’em justice.
I collected pencils and cherry bombs. Primarily because they had a 0 weight, and I could carry hundreds of them. Though I never found many cherry bombs.
I hadn’t really collected anything on my first playthrough. But on my second I decided it would be funny to collect tin cans and bent tin cans, and drop them all over my megaton house.
It wasn’t as funny as I had originally thought it would be since picking up every tin can you see really fills up your encumbrance quickly. I had to duck out of areas often before I got encumbered to go drop them off at the megaton house.
The payoff was almost worth it, since by the end of it, it had gotten to the point I could barely walk around in the house with about 600 tin cans (REALLY lost count at 200) all laying on the floor, and cascading down the stairs. This as you may imagine HORRIBLY broke the physics engine and every time I walked into the house they would cause the game to slow down to 2 frames per second as they spawned from the ceiling and rained down.
Oh, and about the plunger room; there are also plungers on the wall and leading up to the ceiling in a ladder like fashion with bloody handprints around them AND on the ceiling. Then, directly underneath of the last plunger there’s a skeleton on the floor. Don’t try and climb on the ceiling with plungers, kiddies.
And on the note of strange areas, there is a door somewhere, near a power station I think (not sure). It opens directly into a concrete wall that has the words “Fuck You” written on it in green paint.
[Edit]– Went and looked at the wiki, and there’s even crazier stuff than I thought. These are two areas you guys REALLY have to visit at some point in the show. http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Plunger_Room_of_Death and http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/SatCom_Array_NN-03d
I believe there’s also a door at the end of a difficult-to-reach catwalk in the Mama Dolce factory that just opens onto a wall. There was no graffiti behind it, but perhaps some swears in Chinese would have been appropriate, given who was still occupying the complex. :)
Oh right, the chess set at the latter one was brilliant.
I tended to collect human flesh, Deathclaw hands(I started out making a new gauntlet as a trophy for each kill, but packed that in around the hundred hour mark and collected another fifty or so over the next two hundred hours.) and Outcast power armour, though I had a rule that I couldn’t kill Outcasts, so I’d just scavenge it from patrols that met Enclave camps and the like. With Increased Increased Spawns on, these patrols would be huge, and it was well worth following these patrols just to see them take on some Deathclaws or Enclave.
I also collected guns, even though I was primarily unarmed, though I would often keep a combat shotgun or missile launcher for things I couldn’t be bothered with like rats, raiders and dogs. I especially liked the modded missile launcher that shot four missiles at once, though it was sometimes difficult to find a big enough bit to loot from.
At one point or another I have collected wrenches and the racks for billiard balls. never any balls, just the racks.
my favourite easter egg is a convience store that has a ton of abraxo cleaner set up like dominoes.
“Then the episode ends and we all run off to get coffee, food, bio break, or whatever other problems arose during the last 40 minutes”
Was that Then supposed to be When?
What problem will grenade spamming not solve. It’s like duct tape.
I collect pre-war money for no particular reason. I do have three nuka-cola trucks… I’m tempted to go kill what’s-her-face at Girdershade and steal all her Nuka-cola stuff, though. Maybe live in her house myself. I found her neighbor’s dead body (I Lady-Killer’d him into going to the Nuka-Cola factory to get Quantum for me) just inside the door of the Nuka-Cola factory, so it’s not like I’d have to deal with him trying to kill me for killing his girlfriend…
…
… but I’m playing a chaotic good character, so killing someone for collectibles is sort of out of character.
Isn’t talking someone into killing themselves kinda CE?
The Wright Flier is in the air and space museum. grr.
In the second Air and Space Museum, many miles away no less.
This isn’t the real world, it’s the fallout 3 world. The lunar lander doesn’t look anything like the real one either.
In your response to what people collect, I tend to collect a little of everything. I have at least one of every item, and I constantly search for new stuff. I’m a packrat, and rarely sell stuff. I sell weapons and armor duplicates, but thats about it.
Although I do find myself collecting a [i]lot[/i] of clothes.
Every piece of clothing I have, and I keep any copies. I have lockers full of clothes.
Plus with mods there is a whole lot more for me to collect.
TO THE WASTELAND!
In Morrowind, I collect light sources, like candles and lanterns. It adds a lot of atmosphere whenever I decide to settle down and create a “house.”
Oh man. I collected those paper lantern looking things. I loved decking out my house with them. I also would put huge piles of money everywhere. So when you came in the place was bathed in gold and light.
Good times.
Reminds me of a character I once rolled on Morrowind. He was pretty bad at sneaking/stealing, but he tried to grab every light source that didn’t get him in trouble 100%. He was a ‘good’ character with high Personality, so it turned out okay-ish in most cases.
Probably one of my favorite playthroughs :)
My Morrowind Characters all do that, too – I just like the lightsources in that game as decorations.
In Oblivion, it’s Welkynd and Varla stones – I just love them. I have hundreds of those things, and I all store them, one by one, in my house.
Fallout 3: Mutated fruit and NukaCola Quantum.
Notice a pattern? I like glowing stuff.
The “location with plungers” seemed to be some kind of a shelter. If you look around enough, the trail of plungers tells a small story about a guy who climbed the wall with them, then part of the ceiling, then fell to his death…:/
That was funny, but it was also another example of the “Bethesda’s Universe of Cool Shit” effect, where they would have lots of novel locations with novel things in them, but all disconnected and never making much sense.
Just like their plots!
I collect unique items. I never sell them, try to get every single one in the game (there’s a few you can’t get each time since they depend on which quest options you choose), and never really use them. I don’t feel like one of my characters is “complete” until he or she has a locker full of them all somewhere.
I tend to hoard stuff in RPGs so in Fallout 3 I basicly collected everything that was of any use at all to a certain point. Weightless stuff always, the heavier stuff on a need-basis. Though I’d almost always come back to an area to mop up and loot the place clean whenever I’d clear it of enemies. If it was a longer dungeon, I’d stop and travel back to my Megaton house to empty my bags then go back… rince and repeat if necessary. It was pretty much it’s own minigame for me, always trying to balance whether I’d go empty now or just keep going and then do the runs later while micromanaging my inventory.
But I did develop a knack for specifically always looting the helmets off any Enclave troops as sort of trophies. I piled them right next to the bobblehead stand. Was fun for a while, but after the ‘nth helmet the pile started to drift under the weight of the helmets all over the floor into a little sea of helmets, so I had to eventually stop piling them.
I liked to collect any clothing that’d look horribly mismatched along with the ghoul mask. My favourite combos were:
Grandma Demon:
Female character with ghoul mask, pink nighty, founding father wig and chainsword
Freddy:
Male character with prewar casual wear, shady hat, ghould mask and deathclaw hand
That’s freaking awesome!
Thief 3 lockpicking was good too.Quite similar to this.But yes,this is better,especially since you can break the pins.
Also,here pins mostly dont have those rubbery tips.Still,Id like to see you pick a lock with one.Its really hard.
I have actually picked a lock with a bobby pin. (Well, technically it was a ‘kirby grip’ as that’s what we call them in the UK.) It was the lock to my own money box to which I had lost the key. It took a long while, probably aggrivated by the fact that I was eight at the time and didn’t understand how locks worked. Nowadays, with a working knowledge of the mechanics of locks, I reckon it would have been much faster.
The little rubber bit on the tip might actually help, oddly. Lock picks come in a variety of shapes and sizes, at least one of which has a rounded tip. I suspect a bobby pin would be a good analogue to one of those.
Anyone interested can find out more at the bizzarely named but very informative MIT Guide to Lockpicking.
The thief 3 lock picking would have been a lot better if it didn’t almost always default to the cardinal directions. It really made it less of a challenge and more of a guessing game.
What Do I Collect?
In any game where there are both items you can “collect” and storage, I collect atleast 1 of everything, guns, armor, items, etc in “pristine” condition. For ammo I will stockpile 5 “clips” of every ammo for every different gun, so say I’ve 5 guns that use 10mm ammo, there will be enough ammo for 5 clips for each of them.
In S.T.A.L.K.E.R. i even had multiple stash spots where I did pretty much the same thing, stashing 1 of every gun, armor, health items, other items, and ammo…
I think it probably increases my playtime by a factor of ten. At a minimum.
I was a little disappointed when Rutskarn didn’t continue on to introduce himself with food in his mouth.
I didn’t really collect one thing so much as I made sure to have one of each type of armor, weapons, clothes, hat, etc. I suppose you could also make the argument I was trying to collect all the bottlecaps….
I almost fell out of my chair laughing when you guys brought up the motorcycle helmet because the first time I played I was wearing the damn thing for most of the game because I couldn’t find anything better and I was constantly going “Oh come on! Please let the next guy I kill have a better hat than this! At this point I don’t care what it looks like as long as it’s not a motorcycle helmet!”
That bit with the grenades was impressive. I think what happened was that your Nerd Rage perk randomly activated. Then you blanked out the event so you wouldn’t have to remember how you wasted a perk on Nerd Rage.
Ironically, Nerd Rage is actually useful for a melee character–though that’s about the only use it has.
And it has the stupid science requirement–totally what every melee-focused character is going to have.
Then again, a nerd is basically a meelee science dude that starts to punch hard (-ish-er) past the limit.. So very good for roleplaying a nerd.
Or so American cheese-movies have told me.
Actually. Has anyone role-played a nerd in F3? The setting would actually be good for this.
You´d probably end up meleeing and grenading everything anyway.
You go around complaining how nothing these people do makes sense. And then you kill yourself. Its like the Frank Grimes episode of Simpsons.
So… because we did silly things while playing for an audience, games don’t have to make sense for any player, ever?
What? I didnt imply that.
I didn’t get what you were saying and read it as “You guys act silly so you have no right to complain about how dumb the game is”.
No. I just thought it would be amusing to imagine what would an intellegent sane and rational person do if said person was living in the Fallout 3 world.
They would go crazy. :)
Crazy like telling people to go on suicide missions by themselves for little to no reward or crazy like actually trying to do those missions?
If I were the Lone wanderer for real, and I somehow made it out of the vault alive. When I got to megaton. I’d stay there, for the rest of my life. That’s what a sane person would do.
Really?A sane person would willingly live near an unexploded,still active nuclear bomb?
Assuming you disarm the bomb first.
And a sane, average person would know how to disarm it and would even approach it without a stick?
Not to mention that it is also leaking dangerous amounts of radiation,so just approaching it without protection would be insane,let alone tinkering with it.
Well the towns been there for I don’t even know how long. Plus, I’m sure Mister Burke would have asked me to blow it up for him, after which i would have told the Sheriff. Honestly, I might try to accompany one of the caravans to Rivet city or Canterbury commons. But all I know is that settling down in what remains of civilization is the most sane thing to do.
Yeah I ended up collecting quite a few things. The main thing was the undamaged Garden Gnomes. I had 2 of them standing guard outside the Megaton House, and one inside had Lincoln’s Top Hat on. Fun Fact about Gnomes: They’ll stand perfectly upright without needing to balance on anything even when upside down.
Can’t quite remember where it is, but there’s a chessboard with a ton of tiny Gnomes used instead of chess pieces somewhere. Think it might be in one of the Satellite Array’s… I spent a good half hour trying to set that up again.
Other than that, I collected one of every armour, piece of clothing and every unique weapon I could find.
There’s also the time I challenged myself to not use stimpacks and try to just eat my way through the game. Without buying a single stimpack I ended up with over 400.
It’s almost sad, when I think about it, but it seemed rather easy to me to eat through the game instead of using stimpacks. If you can get a good supply of water or Nuka-Cola (and later maybe something like Punga fruit), then you don’t even need to scavenge much food. You’d think that stimpacks would be perhaps a little more rare at this point, and help more than regular food. FWIW, I went on a “food-only” play because I noticed that the game tracks how many stimpacks you’ve used. It was my own loony version of golf.
It also tracks how many corpses you’ve eaten. What sport would that be? :)
the donner party
Love the comment about the dumb A.I. I just saw a post tonight at Awesomeduck.com about that very thing. Just piles of bodies and the A.I. keeps coming after you.
Mart’s Mutant Mod actually adds a bit of sensibility to the AI, They will run if things aren’t looking good for them. (Ghouls won’t, but they are mindless zombies. I’m not sure about super muties.)
Oddly enough, I never really collected anything in any of my plays. Might have to start with the current one, though. I also never furnished my house, either.
All this talk of collecting reminds me of an old game, Anachronox. The game actually had an item called a TACO: Totally Arbitrary Collectible Object. They were scattered throughout the game in very odd places at times. Good fun trying to get them all.
Shamus, you mentioned you played with a hunger/thirst/sleep mod. Got a link for the mod you’re using? I’ve tried several mods like that, but the ones I’ve found were buggy, unfinished messes that were long since abandoned by its creators.
The one I was using was also pretty messy. Bad spelling, bugs, etc. I’ll look and see if I can figure out which one.
Found it:
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3661
The interface is pretty screwy. When you exit the vault it asks you if you want to use regeneration or not. I favor regeneration mode. You burn more calories when healing and food doesn’t insta-heal you. If you get hurt too much, you’ll go through food faster.
Stimpacks heal quickly, but they also deplete calories and dehydrate you.
It’s fun for the first ten levels, but after that you do start to get ahead of the curve and stockpile food & water.
In my game, I avoided using the house robot for water, because that would break the game more or less instantly.
Thanks. Sadly that is of the mods I’ve already tried and found to be buggy (radiation levels won’t decrease).
*sigh* I really wish the toolset for Fallout 3 was a bit more user friendly.
You could try with the Wanderer´s Edition mod. It adds a bunch of new gameplay elements (ammo weight, neccesities, no fast travel, more dangerous combat, different stat mechanics, etc) in one comfortable package. It also lets you configure (in game) which of the new elements you want. You can, for instance, leave everything like vanilla but add the hunger/thirst/sleep.
By my experience, I can say I found no bugs regarding necessities, so you may want to try that. But also by my experience, the game tends to crash more often (though that happens everytime I use any mod, really).
Thanks, I’ll check that mod out. It’s still being supported by it’s creators, that’s already a big plus.
At the start of every single episode, you guys go on about not understanding why you’re looking for your father; why on earth would you not go looking for him? He’s your dad! Since he left abruptly without giving any explanation, you’re going to be feeling hurt and needing answers from him. In any case, you don’t know anyone else in the outside world, and you’re still a teenager; you’d want the security of your own family.
I think you guys are a little too determined to criticise the game.
Compare:
“I would like to find my dad.”
vs.
“I need to find my dad SO BAD that I will go to the most dangerous place in the world and fight dozens of immense supermutants.”
The game just doesn’t give you a really strong justification for the latter other than, “That’s your quest. Shut up and do it.”
It gets better once you meet up with him and he lets you know what the stakes are, but the first third of the game is the story of a grown man who is looking for his daddy.
I actually prefer this to a strong justification, because here I can justify either starting on the main quest immediately, or randomly wandering through side quests, depending on the character.
In Oblivion, I always feel a little weird thinking I was supposed to ride this horse to Kvatch to stop a daedric invasion. Instead, I’m doing some random little thing to enter the Mages Guild.
I think this is what Bethesda was going for too. As they put it in the introduction in the manual: “– you’re completely free to make your own destiny. Follow after dear old Dad… or forget he even exists.”
Sure, you can forget that he exists. And then you lose the ability to use the best armors in the game, unless you are willing to pay for a DLC. The power armors are hostages!
Your Dad IS LIAM NEESON!!Isn’t that enough?! He would do the same for you! Clearly you guys have not seen Taken. He kills sooo many people just for his daughter. the story is just as poorly written as Fallout 3 is. half of it doesn’t make much sense. Just him running around and shooting at people.
Why would you go look for him?Hes a jerk that left you to be captured/killed in the vault while he strolls out to safety(you dont know what it is like outside when he leaves,so why assume danger 200 years after the war).He doesnt even warn you.Some dad he turned out to be.Really,the most sensible solution here would be to go to the overseer and work with him.The game shows you your birth,and one birthday,and expect you to form such a strong bond with your father because of that,and for some(me)it doesnt work.This guy doesnt strike me as a father,but just as some guy who was there during my childhood.
Now if he warned you what he was about to do,asked you to forget about him,told you how dangerous it is outside,etc,then it would make sense to go look for him.Hed be just wrong judge of overseers personality then,and thats it.It wouldnt have been his fault that the idiot ordered you attacked on sight.This way,it is his fault.
Now,compare this with alyx vance.The first time you two meet,she saves your life.Then,you have some playful interactions with her and her pet.Then she digs you out of rubble,saving your life again.Then you two spend a whole episode fighting side by side.And then after all that,she finally gets in trouble and you can repay the favors.Hell yes youre gonna help her.This is someone you know,this is someone youve talked to(well,listened to),this is someone who saved your life numerous times.This is a well established character.She is alive.She is not just some plot hook,she is your friend.
So half life makes you spend hours with a person just so you could consider her your friend,and here we are expected to connect even more intimately with a guy we see for less than half an hour?That doesnt work.
good point, but you’re comparing Fallout 3 to the modern Epic that is Half-life 2 (a poem, not a MW2 scene). How about a comparison with the unfunny, uber-serious characters of Battlefield Bad Company 2?
One of my play-throughs of Fallout 3, my character’s main goal was to catch up and kill her father for being such a douche, though by the time I actually got to him, I wasn’t interested in following through (and the game wouldn’t let me, of course).
Some of that stuff is actually said on the holodisk your father left to Jonas to deliver. He tells he doesn’t want you to follow. He believes you’ll be safe in the vault, as long as the Overseer can blame everything on him, so he didn’t tell you anything in advance. You have to take the thing from Jonas’ corpse, because James indeed judged the Overseer’s personality wrong.
Wouldn´t have it been better if he had left the holodisk in, I dunno, the player´s room? Why use Jonas? The answer is simple: the writers wanted to show the overseer was nuts, so he solely exists as a sacrifice to him.
What annoys the heck out of me is when you finally meet him, he shouts you about how you left the vault and how you were suppoused to stay; but you can´t tell him how the overseer went psycho or how his actions led to the death of certain people (roach invasion + happy trigger guards).
I really like the addition of Rutskarn. I think he adds a lot to the show, plus it’s nice to hear a little variety in terms of vocal qualities.
One thing I hated about this game that this video made me remember, is that any lockpicking or science skill between 25 and 50 is useless. A character with level 37 lockpicking is functionally equivalent to a character with level 25 lockpicking. My characters always end up terrible lockpicks and hackers because I end up thinking “do I choose something that’ll benefit me in maybe three levels, or something I can use right now?”
Can someone please find a screenshot of that plunger area, I’m curious what it looks like?
Here ya go:
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Shelter
I enjoy watching… but if you guys could try and equalize the sound level of your voices it would really help.
If I’m watching with my speakers on I have to turn it up to hear Shamus and Rutskarn, then Josh will talk loudly and it’s really jarringly loud, like action film in a movie theater sort of loud. It’s even worse with headphones, it really hurts my ears to have it up high enough to hear anyone other than Josh clearly.
It… might also help if Josh simply didn’t shout into the mic, though.
I’m enjoying watching, but that one problem makes it kind of frustrating. I get stuck juggling the volume up and down for the whole episode.
Ahem blackmail?! Why is it always blackmail? That’s so racially insensitive. You should have cut it. ;)
I collected nuclear explosions.
so far I only have 3 (Megaton, the satelite array, and the ICBM. Maybe the laser explosion from Mothership Zeta counts too), but I’m always looking for more, and they’ve been very satisfying. :)
oh, and I horded as many different types of weapons and cloathing as I could (even to the point of considering cold-bloodedly murdering the characters of Mothership Zeta for their weapons/armor).
Food for thought:
Nuclear warheads have only just enough fissile material in them to be put just past the critical mass limit when their firing mechanism goes off… but this is when they are newly made. The fissile fuel has a limited lifetime.
After 200 years past its’ intended date of use, I think perhaps a “Fat Man” style nuke would no longer have enough high-purity fissile material in its’ warhead for it to be detonated by the implosion lenses. It might no longer be capable of attaining critical mass.
If you did blow the megaton nuke up it might just be a dirty bomb. It would be bountifully radioactive, but might not be potent enough to actually have a nuclear explosion.
All the nukes in the world today are only decades old and already there is some concern about whether some of them would even detonate anymore.
This is reasonable, but you’ve got to remember that all the Fallout games long ago abandoned the “science” part of “science fiction,” which is fine; “Gamma World” would just be “roll up a character, then throw it away because you died after your first few years of life from malnutrition and radiation poisoning” if you stuck to science.
As for “Fallout,” you could also ask how Radscorpions manage to actually move, much less how they survived, since they should be crushed under their own weight.
There have been fossilized prehistoric scorpion tracks found in geological strata, which suggest scorpions whose size is approximately that of the larger radscorpions :)
Though yeah, Fallout is very very loose science fiction… which fits with the science fiction of the (cultural) era it’s set in, come to think of it. “How meta…”
If you find out were your dad is from someone other then Three Dog he will give you a key to a room with all kinds of items as a reward instead of telling you where your dad is.
Also I collect clipboards and pencils.
I was trying to remember if I ever actually collected anything. I remember spending a few hours arranging stuff in my megaton house, but I couldn’t remember what. Apparently, I collect Prewar money and swords. Had a big pile of thme on my table. But I never really went out searching for them. Prewar money was to common and swords to rare.
Really enjoying the series, so thanks guys.
Haven’t collected one single item but have decorated my house with toy cars, nuka cola trucks and other odds and ends. Also a garden gnome standing on either side of the door.
I collect teddy bears but I don’t actively search for them.
The collection effort I put the most work towards is probably trying to get one of every weapon and apparel completely repaired. I also never sell aid items, even the stuff you don't use in the late game, I just like to think that if food suddenly starts to run out my guy will have a fully stocked fridge and will be able to whole up in his house for as long as it takes.
I try to collect one of each and every single different type of item, including clothing, food, and drugs, as well as at least one of every different armor and weapons, basically ANYTHING that can ever be used by anyone.AND any normal item of unusual size. then I go out and hunt every single unique item ever and put them on display everywhere in my house. I always run out of containers to sort my stuff, and all my houses always run out of display-worthy square feet loooong before I am ever done
… I am a maniac.
pool balls, and cues. As well as lab coats and Sunglasses. Then I wear, and fight in them. Like death claws. very fun.