T w e n t y S i d e d

Fair warning: This post is going to be talking about nudity and linking to NSFW pages at the Fallout 3 nexus. The vast majority of the 6,424 mods in the database are perfectly safe and are related to changes in gameplay or additional content. I’m going to be talking about the small number which are risqué. Technically the mod database shouldn’t show you anything R-rated unless you create an account there first, but you know how the internet can be sometimes. Be careful what you click if you’re in a place where seeing naked polygonal men and women might cause you employment, relationship, or self-esteem problems.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Fallout 3: The Truth About Boys and Girls”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I guess I overestimated just how much I’d have to say about this game. I probably could have covered it all in one post. It was a candy bar game: Sweet, temporarily satisfying, and gone quickly.

The best part of the game was the elves. The original game had whining emo loser night elves. This game has hippy dippy wood elves. Clad in birkenstocks and rainbow prints, these peace and love saps are a hilariously inappropriate foe for the stoic black Overlord. It’s like Strawberry Shortcake versus Doctor Doom. The Care Bears versus Diablo. The Smurfs versus Tiamat.

One thing that struck me was the music during the jungle section. I kept feeling like I’d heard it before, in another game. It was some sort of ambient… electronic… jungle… synth… thing. Descent? Hmmm. I don’t think so. But something old. Eventually I found myself picturing the jungles of Na Pali. No, not the real Nā Pali. I’m talking about the planet from Unreal. Sure enough, both games have the same composer. I’ve never read the name Michiel Van De Bos before, but his work has always appealed to me on some deep, atavistic level. He’s behind music from Unreal, Unreal Tournament, and Deus Ex. These are all games where I would listen to the soundtrack on its own, and his style is distinctive enough that I was reminded of his work from a decade ago without realizing there was any connection. I think it’s all those synth strings he uses.

Sire, an NPC has requested an audience in order to offer you some plot exposition. Sort of.

I still feel like they’re under-utilizing Rhianna Pratchett here. There is very little to the Overlord 2 story. It’s mostly circular self-justification:

I need to break into the castle to rescue my green minions. Why? Because I’ll need the green minions to get out of the castle. Why am I rescuing the minions? Because I’ll need them to defeat the bad guy. Why am I trying to defeat the bad guy? Because he has my minions.

None of it is really bad. It’s sort of appropriate, given the satirical bent of the game. It’s not stupid or insulting, which puts it above a lot of other videogame plots of late, but it feels like there was a missed opportunity for cleverness here. I felt like the overall plot should have tried to say something. Something silly, even. Or perhaps it would have helped to simply hang a lampshade on it by having an NPC deliberately point out your Quest To Go On A Quest. It needed a hook or an idea to play with along the way, something to liven up the dialog.

I give them full points: Your fortress is much less phallic this time around.

Most of the dialog was from your evil adviser (and in gameplay terms, your teacher and quest-giver) Gnarl, and most of what he had to say was simply explaining your next task. Again, it was serviceable, but hardly the kind of thing for which you need to retain the likes of Pratchett. You don’t hire Alan Moore to storyboard a Mac vs. PC commercial. You can feel when the game moves from “boilerplate game dialog” to “Rhianna Pratchett wrote this” mode, and she doesn’t show up all that often. The twist at the end was good for a laugh though.

It’s also interesting that this game was written by a woman. The “mistresses” you collect in the game are what inspired me to write my most recent Experienced Points column, because the events here don’t just fail to cater to women, but will repel some. Like I said in the article, if you reversed the genders in the game I’d enjoy it a lot less, because building a harem of pliant hunks isn’t very high on my agenda. Perhaps the game is satirizing me in some way that’s too subtle for me to detect. Maybe Pratchett is making fun the male drive to “get girls”. I dunno.

On a completely unrelated note: Mistress Kelda was my favorite.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.