split/screen co-op

Word cloud of 5 Fallout intros. Click for larger view.

War, war never changes. It is one of gaming’s best-loved catch-phrases. But what does it mean? In what sense does war never change? Certainly, warfare — the ways in which a war is fought — has changed dramatically in the millennia leading up to Fallout’s fictional 2050s. Weapons, tactics, scale: every aspect of conflict has undergone transformation. Fallout’s world is not that dissimilar to our own and we can safely know as much.

Death and destruction are a staple of war but their scale differs vastly from conflict to conflict. Even the most advanced of energy weapons found in the wasteland is a relic from a past that is being forgotten and a far cry from the nuclear war that caused all the desolation. The game’s primitive, back-to-basics setting also suggests that the presumably constant factor may lie much deeper and closer to the roots of conflict than something as superficial as tools and means.

Why do people go to war? Perhaps there is a single fundamental reason underlining all conflicts.

bottle caps by ~avspoisoner on deviantART

On the surface, Fallout’s bottle-cap currency is a clever gimmick, that seems to lend realism to the world in which the games play out. Dig deeper though and you will find its very existence is logically unjustifiable.

The best science fiction out there has the double trait of being both an engaging piece of literature and a credible prediction for the future. Will currently existing systems and social features endure? How will they be transformed by future circumstances? What will be lost, what will be gained? The Fallout games look like they are attempting to answer those questions. But they ultimately fail to provide persuasive answers, as the example of the flawed monetary system in the game world indicates.

I completed Fallout: New Vegas yesterday and I’m now moving on to World of Warcraft.

I was surprised to discover that finishing the main quest in New Vegas really puts an end to the game. There’s no going back to pick up lose threads. I hadn’t yet reached the level cap and I had several quests I wanted to return to later, so I was not quite done playing it. However, I think 80 hours is as much time as I can give this game right now, so I’m not going to begin a second play-through. It was a decent ride, but nothing in New Vegas makes me want to go through it all again so soon, least of all the bugs that killed at least two quests for me.

This wraps up the final leg of my Fallout marathon but is not yet the end of my blogging about Fallout. I have several posts in mind, including a more elaborate opinion on New Vegas, a recap of the experience of trying to play through all the games in the franchise in a row, a piece of New Vegas fan fiction and a critique of Fallout‘s post-apocalyptic monetary system. I’m writing this here because I hope that now I’ve promised it publicly, I’ll be shamed into not forgetting to write those posts.

I started playing World of Warcraft. Having been a WoW virgin so far (if you don’t count that night many months ago when we almost made it to second base; and I don’t), I’m jumping right into Cataclysm and it is a bit discombobulating. I’m still struggling with how you move around and attack things. I really like the game and I suspect I may be in for the laung haul this time around.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go find where the leveling-up screen is.

About 40 hours in I was seriously considering giving up Fallout: New Vegas, but it managed to win me back. The game is stacked full of content and the quests are numerous, but unfortunately a large proportion seem to be of the deadly boring and repetitive fetch quests variety.

New Vegas is in no way linear but I had the bad luck to take on six or seven of those dispiriting missions in a row and that almost killed the joy of the game for me. But then my luck turned and I happened to do several interesting quests in succession, so now I’m hooked back in.

Overall, I can see why many said this game was worse than Fallout 3 despite the various small improvements Obsidian and Bethesda have tried out. I’ll flesh out my thoughts on the subject in a separate post, but for now let me just say that the hardcore mode is in no way, shape or form nearly as hardcore as its name suggests.

Fallout: New Vegas is known to be annoyingly buggy, but sometimes there’s a funny flipside, like in the case of this frisky dead body.

Slave trader ledger p.2 by Special Collections at Wofford College on Flickr

One of the main features of the Fallout series is its world. The main story arc may often be nothing to write home about, but exploring the post-apocalyptic wasteland, discovering the artifacts left by its pre-war inhabitants and dealing with its current population is fun. True, the fallout in Fallout looks cheerful when compared with the bleak imagery of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or Stephen King’s Dark Tower novels, but its intricate details stick together well enough for it to be convincing.

In Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, this cohesion is easily broken when the player decides to do something the developers have not intended.

Don’t get me wrong. Both games are in no way linear or restrictive and you are free to roam the world and do almost whatever you like. However, it is obvious that the developers have regarded certain behaviours as the default and, should you stray from those pre-defined paths, the world comes undone. It doesn’t brake, because you can still find your way to the “correct” path, but it’s embarrassing.

Spoilers will rear their heads as I get concrete after the jump.

This is a quick update just to let you know that I made it out of Goodsprings without killing anyone, but I had to cheat. Details spoilers follow after the jump.

I started playing Fallout: New Vegas and I’m quite surprised with how similar the game looks to Fallout 3.  It feels more like an expansion rather than a brand new game.

I’m not saying this is a bad thing. Indeed, I think the game delivers exactly the kind of small, but important, improvements to the Fallout 3 deal that I needed to remain interested after hitting the 30 level cap in the previous title.

Fallout first aid kit I by dywa

If I were deterministically minded, I’d be likely to say something along the lines of “it seems as though I wasn’t meant to like the Fallout series”. My big Fallout marathon, which I was looking forward to so much, has been plagued by a number of misfortunes that could have shaken the will of one less committed to success.

But not me. Adamantium is weak compared with my determination to like the Fallout universe and the games set in it. I bandage up after each blow and carry on.

After the jump I recap what I have overcome so far: events that have understandably dampened my role-playing spirits somewhat but not to the point of giving up.

My top three among the new game releases on the European market this week are listed below. To see a full list of the new releases in Europe for the week, you can visit vgchartz.com.

My favorites for this week after the jump