Only something you love can break your heart. Like, suppose you had a game, and, when you attempted to start playing, it didn't work. It would start up just fine, then crash whenever you attempted to create a new save file. And let us further posit that you searched online for a solution, only to find a recommendation that you fiddle around with .ini files, an activity you found uncomfortable because you don't really understand what you're doing, and thus have no way of knowing whether you could inadvertently harm something. And then suppose that the proposed fix doesn't actually solve the problem, so you spend another hour reinstalling the game and a further two searching more detailed explanations of the problem.
It might occur to you, at some point, to throw in the towel, to write off this five-dollar game as not worth the time, effort, and aggravation you've been forced to endure. It would be a rational course of action, and you'd avoid succumbing to the sunk cost fallacy. But if you did the smart thing here, you would not be me, and the game would not be Fallout 3.
This game is absolutely HUGE. Fallout 2 may have been more of an influence, and I may actually prefer Fallout: New Vegas, but Fallout 3 is . . . Well, it's Fallout 3. It is a game that helped me inaugurate my Xbox 360. It is a game I waited outside in the cold to buy on opening day. I played it for so long and so often that the Capitol Wasteland has come to feel like a second home.
There's no way in hell I was just going to let it drop, but getting this game to work was a nightmare of an experience. The worst part was right after I tried a new solution. There'd be a brief moment when I'd allow myself to feel hope. This time it was going to work. Everything would fall into place and I'd be able to play Fallout 3 again. To have those hopes dashed over and over again was beyond frustrating. It actually inspired in me no small amount of despair.
I did, however, eventually get it to work. It took me four hours, and I haven't really had time to play since, but I did manage to get through the entirety of the opening and out of Vault 101.
Not in 17 minutes, obviously. Sadly, what I wound up having to do is disable the Steam overlay, so my time in-game is no longer tracked. On the one hand, it shouldn't bother me, because the game appears to play perfectly fine without it, and I'll know if I've played it for 20 hours. On the other hand, it does bother me, because now the symmetry will be all messed up. Who is this hypothetical audience who is going to notice that I will forever have a gap in my time-played counter? Do I imagine that my readers are going into my Steam profile and double-checking that I actually played the games for as long as I said I did? And what do I think that these notional busybodies think I'm doing to gather material for the blog if not actually playing these games? Could there be a more pointless hoax? Would faking all these posts not take more time and effort than actually doing them honestly?
Of course I'm going to play this game for 20 hours. I would be surprised if I get it done in less than 50 (the Steam version is the Game of the Year Edition, which has a bunch of DLC I missed out on for the Xbox 360 version). This neurotic little compulsion to have things neat and tidy is not going to matter one bit once I start digging in to the world of Fallout 3.
And I have to say, this game has one of the all-time great openings. It's not as whiz-wow as some of the more action-oriented titles out there (Saints Row the Third, in particular, has not one, but two awesomely over-the-top action set pieces in the first hour of the game), but it succeeds at laying out, from the very first moment, the scope of this game's ambition.
You start as a newborn baby. You are literally just out of the womb when you must come up with your character's name. That, right there, is the philosophy of the game in a nutshell. You are not going to passively witness a story. The plot isn't the thing that will drive you (much in the same way that it is entirely redundant to say of a protagonist "at some point in the past, she was born"). Your motivation will come from the fact that you are this character. Everything notable that happens to her, happens to you. Sidequests (and sitting through a spectacularly lame tenth birthday party or taking a meaningless aptitude test are activities most sidequests would think of as "too pointless to bother with.") are in fact the main point. The path is not straight.
Which is a hard thing to pull of when, in fact, the path is very straight. My character was born. I decided she would be an Asian woman named Lilith. I got to listen to the soothing voice of Liam Neeson guide me through my first steps (and explain a passage from the Book of Revelation that is being taken severely out of context). Then I went to the aforementioned lame birthday party to deal with some punk bully and the obligatory Bethesda sweet roll cameo. And then I flashed forward six years to see a group called the "Tunnel Snakes" (gee, real subtle guys) harass my friend Amata. After beating the crap out of them, I took the G.O.A.T., an "aptitude test" consisting of ten of the most surreally absurd questions imaginable. For some reason, I got to be the vault chaplain. I'd have thought they'd go with someone who believed in god.
After all that's over, you suddenly wake up in bed. You're nineteen years old, and your father has escaped the Vault (according to the intro movie "no one ever enters and no one ever leaves"). The whole place is in complete disarray. The Overseer, a prickly person at the best of times, has gone completely off the deep end, even going so far as to torture his own daughter, Amata (that gal can just not catch a break) for information. You have to fight, sneak, or talk your way out of danger, at one point even saving the life of the bully's mother, until you pass through the Overseer's office and into the Vault entrance. Then, some security guards try and gun you down, chasing you out the door. There, in the cave leading down to Vault 101, the door slams shut, sealing you out. There's only one way to go, so you emerge, blinking, into the light,
And then the rails come off. Up until now, you've been inexorably pushed forward. Now, without warning, the entire world is open to you. You've got a vague goal (find your father) and a map marker (Megaton, in the southwest), but you don't have to follow them. You can go north or east or wherever. Even though you haven't had much choice thus far, everything in the opening hour has been building up to this point. You are your character. Her situation is your situation. You have this huge, unfamiliar world spread out in front of you. What do you do?
It is so good to back at this point, you have no idea. I know the area around Vault 101 like I know my own backyard. It's a crummy world, but the ruins can have a kind of stark beauty. I don't have any particular agenda at the moment. Maybe I'll rush through the main quest. Maybe I'll dick around poking my nose into garbage cans for six hours. It's all up to me, and I love it.
Maybe the pain of getting this game to run was worth it after all.
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
Monday, February 16, 2015
Fallout Tactics - 20/20 hours
Seven hours ago, I made a fateful decision regarding this game - I decided I would treat it as a hostile challenge. Instead of playing it for its own sake, I would grit my teeth and power through until I reached my quota. It's a reaction all out of proportion with Fallout Tactics quality as a game, but I am physically relieved that I don't have to play it any more.
It's a tough feeling to explain, because as far as I can tell, there was nothing concrete that I disliked about this game. I think what happened is that I could not stop playing it wrong. Some mental block, possibly caused by the fact that I just got done playing the first two Fallout games, led to me viewing it as a casual rpg, where combat optimization is not quite so important. This being in spite of the fact that the game is called Fallout Tactics. So I'd do things like move my squad as if it were an adventuring party and pop into abandoned buildings just to explore, and the result would be the ignominious deaths of my characters because what I should have been doing is individually positioning my squad members based on what weapons they used and line of sight considerations while treating the environment as a hostile deathtrap where every bit of unknown scenery is a potential ambush.
It's just that playing the game the "right" way is sooo slooow. You move your character across an insignificant portion of the map, hit the next turn button, and then wait while the computer resolves the actions of one npc after another until it finally gets back to your turn, and if you're lucky, the enemies are finally close enough that you can plink away at them two shots at a time. I was fortunate to get a level every two hours out of this game.
Switching it to continuous mode sped things up considerably, but then you have to split your attention six ways and basically treat the game as the world's most complicated RTS. Or at least you should. I didn't. I just moved my guys as a blob and completely neglected you use any particular "tactics."
Now that I see this written out, I realize it would be pretty cheeky of me to complain about a game I stubbornly refused to engage with. So I won't.
Instead I'll talk about the plot, which at hour 20 was just starting to take shape. As the Brotherhood of Steel continued to expand, it encountered a strange group of telepathic "beastlords" who could control all manner of wasteland creatures, including the fearsome deathclaws. I later discovered that the reason they could control such formidable creatures is because they captured a deathclaw matriarch. Liberating her, I gained the ability (if not the opportunity) to recruit deathclaws into my squad. Nifty.
From there, I was subsequently deployed to the front of a new battle between the Brotherhood of Steel and a contingent of super mutants, whose goals and origin are unknown, but who are apparently kicking the Brotherhood's ass. My elite squadron was sent in to rescue some of my comrades who were in over their heads and find out the fate of the general who was leading the charge.
That mission was fairly easy, due to the fact that they provided me with a pretty beefy vehicle, so I didn't have to worry much about enemy damage. After that, I could finally take the fight to the enemy . . .
In theory. In practice, I died. A lot. And now I'm at 20 hours playtime, and I think this is where I take my bow. I'm actually pretty interested in where the story is going, but not so much that I'm willing to go back to playing the game.
I have to assume, in the end, the Brotherhood triumphs against their enemies and transforms the post-apocalyptic American mid-west into a fascist hell-hole, dominated by an elitist technologically advanced aristocracy that keeps the "primitives" in place with their unstoppable weapons. The mutants are probably related to Vault 0, somehow, but I can't imagine they escape extermination.
What I know for certain is that none of this matters when it comes to one's enjoyment of Fallout 3, which I get to play next. I'm hugely looking forward to it, which could not at all have helped with my ability to enjoy Fallout Tactics on its own merits.
My bad. I never really gave the game a proper chance. It's just so awkward, placed as it is between the two rpg eras. It doesn't really serve as a bridge, its heavy combat emphasis being a disappointment after the freedom of Fallout 2 and its shallow world-building being completely eclipsed by the epic accomplishment that is Fallout 3. As much as I wanted to enjoy this game, due to my natural tendency to sympathize with underdogs and the forgotten, it never became more to me than a speedbump in the middle of the "real" Fallouts.
That is so transparently unfair that I kind of hate admitting it. But what am I going to do? Continuing playing a game I don't enjoy as a form of intellectual penance for the fact that I didn't give it its proper due as a true member of one of my all-time favorite game series? That is too bizarrely sentimental even for me.
It's a tough feeling to explain, because as far as I can tell, there was nothing concrete that I disliked about this game. I think what happened is that I could not stop playing it wrong. Some mental block, possibly caused by the fact that I just got done playing the first two Fallout games, led to me viewing it as a casual rpg, where combat optimization is not quite so important. This being in spite of the fact that the game is called Fallout Tactics. So I'd do things like move my squad as if it were an adventuring party and pop into abandoned buildings just to explore, and the result would be the ignominious deaths of my characters because what I should have been doing is individually positioning my squad members based on what weapons they used and line of sight considerations while treating the environment as a hostile deathtrap where every bit of unknown scenery is a potential ambush.
It's just that playing the game the "right" way is sooo slooow. You move your character across an insignificant portion of the map, hit the next turn button, and then wait while the computer resolves the actions of one npc after another until it finally gets back to your turn, and if you're lucky, the enemies are finally close enough that you can plink away at them two shots at a time. I was fortunate to get a level every two hours out of this game.
Switching it to continuous mode sped things up considerably, but then you have to split your attention six ways and basically treat the game as the world's most complicated RTS. Or at least you should. I didn't. I just moved my guys as a blob and completely neglected you use any particular "tactics."
Now that I see this written out, I realize it would be pretty cheeky of me to complain about a game I stubbornly refused to engage with. So I won't.
Instead I'll talk about the plot, which at hour 20 was just starting to take shape. As the Brotherhood of Steel continued to expand, it encountered a strange group of telepathic "beastlords" who could control all manner of wasteland creatures, including the fearsome deathclaws. I later discovered that the reason they could control such formidable creatures is because they captured a deathclaw matriarch. Liberating her, I gained the ability (if not the opportunity) to recruit deathclaws into my squad. Nifty.
From there, I was subsequently deployed to the front of a new battle between the Brotherhood of Steel and a contingent of super mutants, whose goals and origin are unknown, but who are apparently kicking the Brotherhood's ass. My elite squadron was sent in to rescue some of my comrades who were in over their heads and find out the fate of the general who was leading the charge.
That mission was fairly easy, due to the fact that they provided me with a pretty beefy vehicle, so I didn't have to worry much about enemy damage. After that, I could finally take the fight to the enemy . . .
In theory. In practice, I died. A lot. And now I'm at 20 hours playtime, and I think this is where I take my bow. I'm actually pretty interested in where the story is going, but not so much that I'm willing to go back to playing the game.
I have to assume, in the end, the Brotherhood triumphs against their enemies and transforms the post-apocalyptic American mid-west into a fascist hell-hole, dominated by an elitist technologically advanced aristocracy that keeps the "primitives" in place with their unstoppable weapons. The mutants are probably related to Vault 0, somehow, but I can't imagine they escape extermination.
What I know for certain is that none of this matters when it comes to one's enjoyment of Fallout 3, which I get to play next. I'm hugely looking forward to it, which could not at all have helped with my ability to enjoy Fallout Tactics on its own merits.
My bad. I never really gave the game a proper chance. It's just so awkward, placed as it is between the two rpg eras. It doesn't really serve as a bridge, its heavy combat emphasis being a disappointment after the freedom of Fallout 2 and its shallow world-building being completely eclipsed by the epic accomplishment that is Fallout 3. As much as I wanted to enjoy this game, due to my natural tendency to sympathize with underdogs and the forgotten, it never became more to me than a speedbump in the middle of the "real" Fallouts.
That is so transparently unfair that I kind of hate admitting it. But what am I going to do? Continuing playing a game I don't enjoy as a form of intellectual penance for the fact that I didn't give it its proper due as a true member of one of my all-time favorite game series? That is too bizarrely sentimental even for me.
Saturday, February 14, 2015
Fallout Tactics - 13/20 hours
I think I can with confidence that I hate the Brotherhood of Steel. It seems like whenever I finish a mission the general pops up to tell me about the terribly shitty things the Brotherhood has done in the wake of my victory. One minute I'm riding high, tooling around in my cool new vehicle, the next I'm hearing how the Brotherhood swept in after me with an "extermination squad" and plans to put any survivors into forced labor camps. Even when I manage to reach a diplomatic accord with a tribal chieftain and receive an extra fusion battery as a gift, they still cop this incredibly condescending imperialistic attitude.
The non-story portion of the game is getting stronger. I think. When I got the vehicle, it led to a running battle through some city ruins, where I would have to periodically exit the vehicle, kill some bandits, open closed gates and tear down barricades. When I was sent to retrieve fusion batteries from a primitive tribe, I had to dash past some unbeatable turrets, slaughter cockroaches by the dozen, and make a moral decision about whether it was worth disarming an ancient facility's defenses if it meant the destruction of the town (although, perhaps my strategy of refusing to engage the turrets was more a product of me being under-leveled and under-equipped than it was a reasonable military decision - it's hard to tell with these level-based games).
So, there's some nice diversity in the mission goals and circumstances. That is mark in the game's favor. It really forces me to stretch my tactical muscles and not just take for granted that the combat is a solved problem. And the different types of weapons and ammunition are interesting, adding a logistical wrinkle to the strategy that many other similar games lack.
Yet if I'm being perfectly honest, Fallout Tactics still feels like work to me. It's not something that makes a lot of sense. It has all the ingredients of a game I should like - I enjoy turn-based tactical combat, inventory management, rpg-mechanics, exploration, and the Fallout universe. I'm not thrilled about my role in the story, but it seems interesting enough (the Brotherhood is looking for Vault 0, the prototype Vault meant to house all of the pre-war society's greatest geniuses). But for whatever reason, it is not gelling. I face the prospect of starting the game up with no small amount of dread.
In a way, I'm finding finishing harder than an objectively worse game, like Secret of the Magic Crystals. Because it is so close to something I like. Because it feels like something I should like. Because I can't figure out why I don't like it. It's vexing.
I guess it just goes to show the myth of objectivity. As much as I like to think of myself as an enlightened, open-minded person who judges games on their merits, rather than rank prejudice and whimsy, the truth is that it's not like I have some internal list of criteria that I compare to the observed traits of the game and then calibrate my enjoyment accordingly. Chemistry counts for something. As does timing. I played Gat out of Hell at right around the time I started this game. And my Exalted pnp game has recently started heating up. And the wife and I have been watching The Simpsons on DVD. So, when I look at my computer, I can't help but think of all the super-fun things I could be doing instead, and while that hasn't stopped me from playing the game, it has made it seem worse by comparison.
That's obviously not fair to Fallout Tactics. It's not even a reasonable way to feel. But it's what's in my heart. I feel guilty that I don't love this game. It is better than my impression of it. So much better, in fact, that I don't understand why I'm not obsessed. It's tough, sure, but it's not more punishing than Fire Emblem, and I played the hell out of that.
Yet maybe it is absurd to feel guilty about not falling in love. Sometimes things just don't work out, and what can seem on paper, to be the perfect match between player and game, can simply fail to light a spark. I still have, on a gut level, an aversion to thinking of video games as a disposable form of entertainment (growing up, they were so coveted, and so scarce), but empirically speaking, my actual behavior says otherwise. I have the luxury of not having to settle. I have a long line of games just waiting to be played, and so I need not entangle myself with Fallout Tactics for any longer than strictly necessary.
Which I guess is seven more hours, because if it is not a game to make me fall in love, it is also not going to be the game to defeat me. My impression of it is mildly positive. I took a quick peek at the wiki to see how many more missions there are, and I'm certain I won't finish it, but banging out three more of the remaining 17 shouldn't be too much of a problem.
And who knows, maybe something in one of those missions will get me hooked. Though I kind of feel like I've been with the game long enough to take its measure, stranger things have happened.
The non-story portion of the game is getting stronger. I think. When I got the vehicle, it led to a running battle through some city ruins, where I would have to periodically exit the vehicle, kill some bandits, open closed gates and tear down barricades. When I was sent to retrieve fusion batteries from a primitive tribe, I had to dash past some unbeatable turrets, slaughter cockroaches by the dozen, and make a moral decision about whether it was worth disarming an ancient facility's defenses if it meant the destruction of the town (although, perhaps my strategy of refusing to engage the turrets was more a product of me being under-leveled and under-equipped than it was a reasonable military decision - it's hard to tell with these level-based games).
So, there's some nice diversity in the mission goals and circumstances. That is mark in the game's favor. It really forces me to stretch my tactical muscles and not just take for granted that the combat is a solved problem. And the different types of weapons and ammunition are interesting, adding a logistical wrinkle to the strategy that many other similar games lack.
Yet if I'm being perfectly honest, Fallout Tactics still feels like work to me. It's not something that makes a lot of sense. It has all the ingredients of a game I should like - I enjoy turn-based tactical combat, inventory management, rpg-mechanics, exploration, and the Fallout universe. I'm not thrilled about my role in the story, but it seems interesting enough (the Brotherhood is looking for Vault 0, the prototype Vault meant to house all of the pre-war society's greatest geniuses). But for whatever reason, it is not gelling. I face the prospect of starting the game up with no small amount of dread.
In a way, I'm finding finishing harder than an objectively worse game, like Secret of the Magic Crystals. Because it is so close to something I like. Because it feels like something I should like. Because I can't figure out why I don't like it. It's vexing.
I guess it just goes to show the myth of objectivity. As much as I like to think of myself as an enlightened, open-minded person who judges games on their merits, rather than rank prejudice and whimsy, the truth is that it's not like I have some internal list of criteria that I compare to the observed traits of the game and then calibrate my enjoyment accordingly. Chemistry counts for something. As does timing. I played Gat out of Hell at right around the time I started this game. And my Exalted pnp game has recently started heating up. And the wife and I have been watching The Simpsons on DVD. So, when I look at my computer, I can't help but think of all the super-fun things I could be doing instead, and while that hasn't stopped me from playing the game, it has made it seem worse by comparison.
That's obviously not fair to Fallout Tactics. It's not even a reasonable way to feel. But it's what's in my heart. I feel guilty that I don't love this game. It is better than my impression of it. So much better, in fact, that I don't understand why I'm not obsessed. It's tough, sure, but it's not more punishing than Fire Emblem, and I played the hell out of that.
Yet maybe it is absurd to feel guilty about not falling in love. Sometimes things just don't work out, and what can seem on paper, to be the perfect match between player and game, can simply fail to light a spark. I still have, on a gut level, an aversion to thinking of video games as a disposable form of entertainment (growing up, they were so coveted, and so scarce), but empirically speaking, my actual behavior says otherwise. I have the luxury of not having to settle. I have a long line of games just waiting to be played, and so I need not entangle myself with Fallout Tactics for any longer than strictly necessary.
Which I guess is seven more hours, because if it is not a game to make me fall in love, it is also not going to be the game to defeat me. My impression of it is mildly positive. I took a quick peek at the wiki to see how many more missions there are, and I'm certain I won't finish it, but banging out three more of the remaining 17 shouldn't be too much of a problem.
And who knows, maybe something in one of those missions will get me hooked. Though I kind of feel like I've been with the game long enough to take its measure, stranger things have happened.
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
Fallout Tactics - 9/20 hours
I think I realize now my problem with this game. I have not gotten into the hardcore mindset. I started playing it just after I finished Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell, and thus came to with a "bust down the front door and kill every mothafucker in the room" sort of attitude, and that only rarely works in a strategy game and is especially ill-considered in an old-school strategy-rpg. I needed to learn to take pleasure in the methodical, to cover all the angles, to fiddle with my inventory, to conserve my ammunition, and to save often.
This last one was especially important. I've played Fallout Tactics for five hours since my last post. Two of those hours were lost to an inopportune death. I have no one to blame but myself, of course, though that doesn't mean I'm mature enough to accept this with good grace.
FUCK!
Ahem. Okay, so I've only actually finished one mission in the last five hours. I managed, at least, to learn a bit of information about the Brotherhood's mysterious rival. They are apparently technologically advanced enough to build cybernetic replacement limbs. So the odds of them being Caesar's Legion are basically nil. I always knew that was the most probable outcome, due to the franchise's long hiatus and change of ownership, but I was kind of hoping to get more backstory on the series most despicable villains.
Although, come to think of it, the Brotherhood of Steel might itself qualify for that honor. Ever since the beginning of the game, they've been condescending to me, but I wrote off their obvious ethnic chauvinism as just a part of their militaristic hazing of new recruits. However, at the end of my most recent mission, I learned that they're planning on crucifying the raiders I defeated as a lesson to any other troublemakers out there. I think once you start breaking out the crucifixions, that's when you cross the line from anti-hero to villain. It was a little ambiguous, though. Seeing as how I only left two or three survivors, it's possible that they meant that they would arrange the corpses of my enemies into crucifixion poses.
That's a little gross and macabre, but it's probably no worse than my killing them in the first place.
. . . And that's pretty much all the plot I have to summarize, because as I said, it took me five hours to beat one level (it is embarrassing how many people I lost to land mines). Fallout Tactics so far has been really stingy with the plot and setting details, informing me of what's going on only during mission briefings and end-of-level summaries. I'm starting to think that the story is only a thin frame to go around the game's missions, and that the real enjoyment comes from being a total tactics nerd inside the Fallout universe (I know, it's almost as if the name of the game was Fallout Tactics).
Ordinarily that wouldn't bother me. I like turn-based strategy games, and one thing I especially like about something like Civilization V is the purity of the board-game like experience. It's less that these things I'm giving orders to are characters in the world whose actions I'm controlling and more like they're game pieces I'm moving around to maximize my chances of victory. That's an approach I normally enjoy.
It's just the feel of things is not quite right. Each member of my squad has their own character sheet and name. They aren't just troopers #1-6, they are Kyle and Farsight and Stitch and Jo and Trevor and Brian. It makes me nervous when they get attacked and just a little sad when they die. Yet I don't really know a lot about them. They are not true rpg companions. I should perhaps view them a little more pragmatically than I do. It's not a totally comfortable dissonance.
On the other hand, it's not a huge deal either. I think as I play this game more and more, my expectations are starting to scale back. I'm starting to view each mission less as a barrier between me and the story (though if I'm being honest, playing Fallout Tactics right after the first two Fallouts and right before the last two does in fact feel like hitting a huge speedbump) and more as a major operation whose points of interest are intrinsic to the activity itself. Moving through the maps, doing house to house searches, and adapting to various tactical situations is in fact the point of the game.
I think when I learn to slow down and really savor what's in front of me is when I'll finally start enjoying the game on its own terms, instead of loading it down with baggage I brought with me from the rest of the series.
This last one was especially important. I've played Fallout Tactics for five hours since my last post. Two of those hours were lost to an inopportune death. I have no one to blame but myself, of course, though that doesn't mean I'm mature enough to accept this with good grace.
FUCK!
Ahem. Okay, so I've only actually finished one mission in the last five hours. I managed, at least, to learn a bit of information about the Brotherhood's mysterious rival. They are apparently technologically advanced enough to build cybernetic replacement limbs. So the odds of them being Caesar's Legion are basically nil. I always knew that was the most probable outcome, due to the franchise's long hiatus and change of ownership, but I was kind of hoping to get more backstory on the series most despicable villains.
Although, come to think of it, the Brotherhood of Steel might itself qualify for that honor. Ever since the beginning of the game, they've been condescending to me, but I wrote off their obvious ethnic chauvinism as just a part of their militaristic hazing of new recruits. However, at the end of my most recent mission, I learned that they're planning on crucifying the raiders I defeated as a lesson to any other troublemakers out there. I think once you start breaking out the crucifixions, that's when you cross the line from anti-hero to villain. It was a little ambiguous, though. Seeing as how I only left two or three survivors, it's possible that they meant that they would arrange the corpses of my enemies into crucifixion poses.
That's a little gross and macabre, but it's probably no worse than my killing them in the first place.
. . . And that's pretty much all the plot I have to summarize, because as I said, it took me five hours to beat one level (it is embarrassing how many people I lost to land mines). Fallout Tactics so far has been really stingy with the plot and setting details, informing me of what's going on only during mission briefings and end-of-level summaries. I'm starting to think that the story is only a thin frame to go around the game's missions, and that the real enjoyment comes from being a total tactics nerd inside the Fallout universe (I know, it's almost as if the name of the game was Fallout Tactics).
Ordinarily that wouldn't bother me. I like turn-based strategy games, and one thing I especially like about something like Civilization V is the purity of the board-game like experience. It's less that these things I'm giving orders to are characters in the world whose actions I'm controlling and more like they're game pieces I'm moving around to maximize my chances of victory. That's an approach I normally enjoy.
It's just the feel of things is not quite right. Each member of my squad has their own character sheet and name. They aren't just troopers #1-6, they are Kyle and Farsight and Stitch and Jo and Trevor and Brian. It makes me nervous when they get attacked and just a little sad when they die. Yet I don't really know a lot about them. They are not true rpg companions. I should perhaps view them a little more pragmatically than I do. It's not a totally comfortable dissonance.
On the other hand, it's not a huge deal either. I think as I play this game more and more, my expectations are starting to scale back. I'm starting to view each mission less as a barrier between me and the story (though if I'm being honest, playing Fallout Tactics right after the first two Fallouts and right before the last two does in fact feel like hitting a huge speedbump) and more as a major operation whose points of interest are intrinsic to the activity itself. Moving through the maps, doing house to house searches, and adapting to various tactical situations is in fact the point of the game.
I think when I learn to slow down and really savor what's in front of me is when I'll finally start enjoying the game on its own terms, instead of loading it down with baggage I brought with me from the rest of the series.
Sunday, February 8, 2015
Fallout Tactics - 4/20 hours
Fallout Tactics has yet to set fire to my imagination. In fact, I kind of dread playing it. To be fair, that's not entirely the game's fault. I've been dealing with some unrelated stress that has dampened my enthusiasm for gaming.
However, I don't want to entirely let Fallout Tactics off the hook here. It is an odd game that is not quite one thing or another, and I'm not sure its split identity works to its benefit. A good example is the continuous battle mode, which speeds up combat significantly by turning it into a psuedo-RTS. Yet I discovered, to my dismay, that if you set you posture to aggressive and move your team as a group, it is inevitable that at least one of my squad will be shot by their own teammates because the game simulates line of sight, but does not have a sophisticated enough AI to realize that I probably don't want to hurt my own people just because one of them spotted an enemy.
But you know what, that would be fine, except the game also lacks some basic RTS functionality. There's no way to quickly pause the game to assess the situation and give your squad orders. And despite the importance of positioning, there's also no easy way to move your squad in formation, and without micromanaging, they all tend to clump together. So (at least when it comes to my one-track attention span), the only real way to play the game is in turn based mode, which is fine except that the levels are usually pretty large, and the characterization of your enemies is virtually nonexistent, and you don't really get a clear view of your objectives or enemies. As a result, the game seems to drag on excessively.
I'm probably being too harsh on the game, though. Like I said earlier, I've been kind of distracted recently, so Fallout Tactics' deliberate, detail-oriented gameplay is putting too much of a cognitive load on my already strained mind. I have a feeling if I'd started playing this game a week earlier or a week later, I'd probably be celebrating its depth rather than cursing the fact that it's not a mindless killfest. I guess I'm just going to have to power through it and throw myself at the game until I start to like it.
It's happened before, so I'm not entirely cynical about this plan. Besides, there are parts of the game I like. My commanding officer has told me of rumors of some major force to the west (i.e. between me and the Brotherhood's California HQ - they must have flown over them before the blimps crashed) who is suppressing bandits and may be either a threat or an ally to the Brotherhood. My interest is piqued. From Fallout: New Vegas the obvious candidate is Caesar's Legion, which I would definitely be keen to learn more about, though considering the canon shadow zone occupied by Fallout Tactics my guess is that it's some other force not mentioned in subsequent games. This expansion of the Fallout universe may be the most exciting part of the game so far.
However, I don't want to entirely let Fallout Tactics off the hook here. It is an odd game that is not quite one thing or another, and I'm not sure its split identity works to its benefit. A good example is the continuous battle mode, which speeds up combat significantly by turning it into a psuedo-RTS. Yet I discovered, to my dismay, that if you set you posture to aggressive and move your team as a group, it is inevitable that at least one of my squad will be shot by their own teammates because the game simulates line of sight, but does not have a sophisticated enough AI to realize that I probably don't want to hurt my own people just because one of them spotted an enemy.
But you know what, that would be fine, except the game also lacks some basic RTS functionality. There's no way to quickly pause the game to assess the situation and give your squad orders. And despite the importance of positioning, there's also no easy way to move your squad in formation, and without micromanaging, they all tend to clump together. So (at least when it comes to my one-track attention span), the only real way to play the game is in turn based mode, which is fine except that the levels are usually pretty large, and the characterization of your enemies is virtually nonexistent, and you don't really get a clear view of your objectives or enemies. As a result, the game seems to drag on excessively.
I'm probably being too harsh on the game, though. Like I said earlier, I've been kind of distracted recently, so Fallout Tactics' deliberate, detail-oriented gameplay is putting too much of a cognitive load on my already strained mind. I have a feeling if I'd started playing this game a week earlier or a week later, I'd probably be celebrating its depth rather than cursing the fact that it's not a mindless killfest. I guess I'm just going to have to power through it and throw myself at the game until I start to like it.
It's happened before, so I'm not entirely cynical about this plan. Besides, there are parts of the game I like. My commanding officer has told me of rumors of some major force to the west (i.e. between me and the Brotherhood's California HQ - they must have flown over them before the blimps crashed) who is suppressing bandits and may be either a threat or an ally to the Brotherhood. My interest is piqued. From Fallout: New Vegas the obvious candidate is Caesar's Legion, which I would definitely be keen to learn more about, though considering the canon shadow zone occupied by Fallout Tactics my guess is that it's some other force not mentioned in subsequent games. This expansion of the Fallout universe may be the most exciting part of the game so far.
Thursday, February 5, 2015
Fallout Tactics - 2/20 hours
I had an embarrassing revelation while playing the first level of Fallout Tactics. I've never before finished the first level of Fallout Tactics. It's especially embarrassing because this is one of my first PC games. A decade ago, I bought a two disc set with Fallout and Fallout 2, played them, loved them, and wanted more. So when I saw Fallout Tactics, it was like "score! more Fallout! yoink!" But then I got it home, installed it, and apparently only played the first level.
It's funny the tricks memory plays on you. I knew, going in, that I had not finished the game, but I think I assumed that I'd gotten farther than I had. If I were inclined to search for deeper meaning in this anecdote (and I think, by now, my regular readers will realize that I am), I might speculate that this is part of a larger overall pattern. Clearly, my buying video games for flimsy reasons and then not playing them habit was not, in fact, the novel innovation I thought it was, but in fact something that was part of my gaming makeup from the very beginning. So maybe I shouldn't be so hard on myself (or perhaps I should be harder on my younger self).
However, an alternate explanation presents itself. It could be that Fallout Tactics simply does not put its best foot forward when presenting a new player with the opening level. The story of the game, as told in the intro cinematic, is that the Brotherhood of Steel recently had an ideological dispute between those who wanted to recruit new blood from outside the order and those who wanted to keep the order pure. The purists won, and sent the dissenters out on a shit assignment to the American mid-west to chase down the remnants of the Master's army (though one would think that after a factional dispute regarding the Brotherhood's limited number, the conservative side would be less than eager to sacrifice personnel its own policies made irreplaceable). During the expedition, disaster struck (because of course it did) and the renegades were cut off from communication with the main order, forced to survive on their own, but free to pursue their own vision for the Brotherhood's future.
You, the player, control a squad of new recruits, tribal conscripts straight out of basic training with no particularly special equipment. Your first mission is to take down a bandit leader who has taken over a small village. The hope is that by liberating the villagers, they will come to see the benefits of the Brotherhood's protection, and supply the order with resources and recruits.
However, the village you have to protect is just this huge, mostly empty map. None of the villagers say anything particularly fun or memorable, and the actual combat is slow, yet unpredictable. I was mostly able to cut through the enemy troops with little difficulty, but like the other Fallout games, a single critical hit was enough to ruin my day. So, you have Fallout with none of its characteristic humor or freedom to explore, with a group of blandly generic characters, taking on a deep but swingy combat system that is not exactly newb-friendly. Not an auspicious start to the game.
Yet I'm not willing to simply write off the game after one level. It is possible that after some time customizing my squat (which is modeled with a truncated, by still quite detailed version of the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system) and acquiring high-tech brotherhood weapons that I may come to view them with a proprietary fondness. It's also possible that future missions will be less generic, and that the game's story may have twists and turns that will come to captivate me (the first boss, Horus, seemed to view the Brotherhood as just another wasteland gang, so maybe the game will be a deeply ambiguous meditation on the morality of war, and the useful lies we tell ourselves to be able to countenance the most inhuman violence - or maybe it was just one of those bullshit lines that rpg villains occasionally spew out - only time will tell).
Though I'm a bit miffed at this game (seriously, that opening level was distressingly long), I also feel a kind of sympathy with it. It's the forgotten middle child of the Fallout series. Not as brilliantly ambitious as its predecessors, nor as polished and charismatic as the games to follow. It's just a weird little turn-based strategy game that tries to explore the limits of the Fallout engine (I'm still undecided on the merits of its continuous turn mode - I'll comment more about it in a later post) without (apparently) the same world-building and storytelling as its rpg siblings. Its unfair of me to view it as a roadblock standing in the way of Fallout 3. It is its own thing, and I should treat it accordingly.
(I just worry that I may not like this thing very much).
It's funny the tricks memory plays on you. I knew, going in, that I had not finished the game, but I think I assumed that I'd gotten farther than I had. If I were inclined to search for deeper meaning in this anecdote (and I think, by now, my regular readers will realize that I am), I might speculate that this is part of a larger overall pattern. Clearly, my buying video games for flimsy reasons and then not playing them habit was not, in fact, the novel innovation I thought it was, but in fact something that was part of my gaming makeup from the very beginning. So maybe I shouldn't be so hard on myself (or perhaps I should be harder on my younger self).
However, an alternate explanation presents itself. It could be that Fallout Tactics simply does not put its best foot forward when presenting a new player with the opening level. The story of the game, as told in the intro cinematic, is that the Brotherhood of Steel recently had an ideological dispute between those who wanted to recruit new blood from outside the order and those who wanted to keep the order pure. The purists won, and sent the dissenters out on a shit assignment to the American mid-west to chase down the remnants of the Master's army (though one would think that after a factional dispute regarding the Brotherhood's limited number, the conservative side would be less than eager to sacrifice personnel its own policies made irreplaceable). During the expedition, disaster struck (because of course it did) and the renegades were cut off from communication with the main order, forced to survive on their own, but free to pursue their own vision for the Brotherhood's future.
You, the player, control a squad of new recruits, tribal conscripts straight out of basic training with no particularly special equipment. Your first mission is to take down a bandit leader who has taken over a small village. The hope is that by liberating the villagers, they will come to see the benefits of the Brotherhood's protection, and supply the order with resources and recruits.
However, the village you have to protect is just this huge, mostly empty map. None of the villagers say anything particularly fun or memorable, and the actual combat is slow, yet unpredictable. I was mostly able to cut through the enemy troops with little difficulty, but like the other Fallout games, a single critical hit was enough to ruin my day. So, you have Fallout with none of its characteristic humor or freedom to explore, with a group of blandly generic characters, taking on a deep but swingy combat system that is not exactly newb-friendly. Not an auspicious start to the game.
Yet I'm not willing to simply write off the game after one level. It is possible that after some time customizing my squat (which is modeled with a truncated, by still quite detailed version of the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system) and acquiring high-tech brotherhood weapons that I may come to view them with a proprietary fondness. It's also possible that future missions will be less generic, and that the game's story may have twists and turns that will come to captivate me (the first boss, Horus, seemed to view the Brotherhood as just another wasteland gang, so maybe the game will be a deeply ambiguous meditation on the morality of war, and the useful lies we tell ourselves to be able to countenance the most inhuman violence - or maybe it was just one of those bullshit lines that rpg villains occasionally spew out - only time will tell).
Though I'm a bit miffed at this game (seriously, that opening level was distressingly long), I also feel a kind of sympathy with it. It's the forgotten middle child of the Fallout series. Not as brilliantly ambitious as its predecessors, nor as polished and charismatic as the games to follow. It's just a weird little turn-based strategy game that tries to explore the limits of the Fallout engine (I'm still undecided on the merits of its continuous turn mode - I'll comment more about it in a later post) without (apparently) the same world-building and storytelling as its rpg siblings. Its unfair of me to view it as a roadblock standing in the way of Fallout 3. It is its own thing, and I should treat it accordingly.
(I just worry that I may not like this thing very much).
Sunday, February 1, 2015
Fallout 2 - Wrap Up
I'm finding it difficult to get a handle on the Fallout 2 experience. It is a game that looms large in my personal history, and there's always the danger that instead of talking about the game, I will wind up talking about the reputation of the game.
Even though I haven't played it in more than ten years, and thus experienced it with ostensibly fresh eyes, I can't help viewing Fallout 2 as an artifact out of its time. There is greatness there, undeniably so, but that greatness comes at you from a remove. You have to appreciate the game for its context in the history of the genre, because so many of its individual choices are dictated by the technological limitations, prejudices, and peculiar obsessions of the era in which it was created.
I would liken it to reading an ancient epic. You know that situation where the text is clearly setting up for a massive battle scene, and you're like "this is going to be awesome," and then it just swerves off to the side and starts describing everyone's shields for ten pages. Or some character says something utterly inexplicable, and only years later do you learn that it was in fact a somewhat funny and violently racist joke that slandered a culture which has been extinct for three thousand years.
From the perspective of a contemporary audience, these are flaws, but you can't really say "get this thing an editor and update it for modern times," because that would be a desecration. You have to take the bad with the good, because it's the work's status as an original that makes it important, but when the rubber hits the road, you'd probably get more pure enjoyment out of something a bit more polished (breathtaking originality only counts if you haven't already experienced the myriad of inevitable copycats).
Which is to say that Fallout 2 hasn't aged especially well. I'm old enough to know who Monica Lewinsky is, and so the obvious parody in the Enclave President's secretary makes sense to me, but it was definitely a joke that's confined to a particular historical moment. And I'm pretty sure that even in 1998, referring to your Asian characters as "wearing funny pajamas" and having them call the player "round-eyes" was probably not acceptable behavior.
Yet the part of the game that has aged the least well is arguably its best feature - Fallout 2 is insanely ambitious. There's an item, the Super Stimpack, that heals you for a massive amount, but then does a smaller amount of damage to you after a set amount of time. It is possible, if you are not careful, to kill yourself this way, by stacking up too much of a hit point deficit. It is also possible to use this method to assassinate the president of the Enclave. Somebody thought of that loophole and then included it in the game.
They also thought of allowing you to infiltrate Enclave facilities by wearing power armor. This benefit even extends to your companions. As long as they are wearing the armor, no one will bother them. It's some great attention to detail that makes the world feel more vital and real. Yet that also leads into the game's downside. Though every human character is fooled by your companion's disguise, Enclave robots are not. And if you're thinking "oh wow, so robots are harder to fool, neat," you're probably wrong. The robots are fooled by your disguise, and will let you pass unmolested so long as you're alone. The fact that they attack your companions is almost certainly an oversight. (An oversight, by the way, that I discovered only after I'd gotten deep into the Enclave Oil Rig and was unable to retreat without facing more than a dozen power-armored troops, who also become hostile when the robots start attacking you).
Now, open-world game = bugs, obviously, but I feel like we've gotten to a point where our big games are a bit more functional. When it was released, Fallout 2 could coast on the jubilant sense of freedom it provided, because there was nothing else like it out there (the original Baldur's Gate wouldn't come out for another three months - early 1999 must have been a great time to be a PC roleplaying fan). Yet coming at it a decade and a half too late, I was somewhat underwhelmed by my ability to choose between the Hubologists and the Shi. I feel like, in a world where Alpha Protocol and Fallout: New Vegas exist, I'd have gotten the option to somehow acquire fuel for the tanker without having to engage in political assassination for people whose motives I don't really understand.
(Slight Tangent - when I first played this game, I had no idea what Scientology even was, so the Hubologists came off to me as just a kooky sci-fi religion, not particularly out of place in this wacky post-apocalyptic world where aliens were, in fact, a verifiable reality infesting an oil tanker not three screens away, and thus I had no idea why the game was so down on them, particularly since all of their shady actions happen off-screen and are relayed to you by their mortal enemies, and made especially cruel by the fact that going along with their weirdness can potentially boost your Luck by as much as 3 points)
I don't really want to complain about the game, though. Because it really is fantastic. There is just so much to do packed into this tiny little package. I think the original Fallout probably aged better as a pure gameplay experience, primarily because it is a tighter story with a more straightforward critical path, and fewer goofy pop-culture references (though nothing beats finding the Bride of Death from Monty Python's Holy Grail while wandering randomly through the desert). However, Fallout 2 is arguably the greater achievement. It is animated by an incredible sense of fun, and it rewards poking your nose into random corners of the map, creating this beautifully weird world that you just want to explore and inhabit.
I'm aware of the fact that I'm probably too keen to attribute great influence and innovation to this game. It is undoubtedly a branch of the rpg tree, and that if later games seem inspired by its formula, it's probably because both derived from a common source. However, in my personal canon, Fallout 2 holds an immensely important place. It was my first (okay, if you want to get technical, second) open world rpg. Due to the bundle I bought it in, Fallout came before, but it was in many ways a more conventional narrative. This game gave you a wide open map and then dared you to find the story. I now view this as a flaw, but at the time it blew my mind. You could just wander off and have adventures in areas completely unrelated to the main story! Why would it let you do that? You could join the evil factions! You could get gay-married (if, unlike my current character, you have the Charisma for it)! It changed my perspective on gaming, and what was possible to expect from the roleplaying genre.
So, if I come back to the game a bit more jaded, I am the way I am due in no small part to Fallout 2. If I want more, it's because this game gave me the audacity to demand it. That, I think, is worth remembering.
Even though I haven't played it in more than ten years, and thus experienced it with ostensibly fresh eyes, I can't help viewing Fallout 2 as an artifact out of its time. There is greatness there, undeniably so, but that greatness comes at you from a remove. You have to appreciate the game for its context in the history of the genre, because so many of its individual choices are dictated by the technological limitations, prejudices, and peculiar obsessions of the era in which it was created.
I would liken it to reading an ancient epic. You know that situation where the text is clearly setting up for a massive battle scene, and you're like "this is going to be awesome," and then it just swerves off to the side and starts describing everyone's shields for ten pages. Or some character says something utterly inexplicable, and only years later do you learn that it was in fact a somewhat funny and violently racist joke that slandered a culture which has been extinct for three thousand years.
From the perspective of a contemporary audience, these are flaws, but you can't really say "get this thing an editor and update it for modern times," because that would be a desecration. You have to take the bad with the good, because it's the work's status as an original that makes it important, but when the rubber hits the road, you'd probably get more pure enjoyment out of something a bit more polished (breathtaking originality only counts if you haven't already experienced the myriad of inevitable copycats).
Which is to say that Fallout 2 hasn't aged especially well. I'm old enough to know who Monica Lewinsky is, and so the obvious parody in the Enclave President's secretary makes sense to me, but it was definitely a joke that's confined to a particular historical moment. And I'm pretty sure that even in 1998, referring to your Asian characters as "wearing funny pajamas" and having them call the player "round-eyes" was probably not acceptable behavior.
Yet the part of the game that has aged the least well is arguably its best feature - Fallout 2 is insanely ambitious. There's an item, the Super Stimpack, that heals you for a massive amount, but then does a smaller amount of damage to you after a set amount of time. It is possible, if you are not careful, to kill yourself this way, by stacking up too much of a hit point deficit. It is also possible to use this method to assassinate the president of the Enclave. Somebody thought of that loophole and then included it in the game.
They also thought of allowing you to infiltrate Enclave facilities by wearing power armor. This benefit even extends to your companions. As long as they are wearing the armor, no one will bother them. It's some great attention to detail that makes the world feel more vital and real. Yet that also leads into the game's downside. Though every human character is fooled by your companion's disguise, Enclave robots are not. And if you're thinking "oh wow, so robots are harder to fool, neat," you're probably wrong. The robots are fooled by your disguise, and will let you pass unmolested so long as you're alone. The fact that they attack your companions is almost certainly an oversight. (An oversight, by the way, that I discovered only after I'd gotten deep into the Enclave Oil Rig and was unable to retreat without facing more than a dozen power-armored troops, who also become hostile when the robots start attacking you).
Now, open-world game = bugs, obviously, but I feel like we've gotten to a point where our big games are a bit more functional. When it was released, Fallout 2 could coast on the jubilant sense of freedom it provided, because there was nothing else like it out there (the original Baldur's Gate wouldn't come out for another three months - early 1999 must have been a great time to be a PC roleplaying fan). Yet coming at it a decade and a half too late, I was somewhat underwhelmed by my ability to choose between the Hubologists and the Shi. I feel like, in a world where Alpha Protocol and Fallout: New Vegas exist, I'd have gotten the option to somehow acquire fuel for the tanker without having to engage in political assassination for people whose motives I don't really understand.
(Slight Tangent - when I first played this game, I had no idea what Scientology even was, so the Hubologists came off to me as just a kooky sci-fi religion, not particularly out of place in this wacky post-apocalyptic world where aliens were, in fact, a verifiable reality infesting an oil tanker not three screens away, and thus I had no idea why the game was so down on them, particularly since all of their shady actions happen off-screen and are relayed to you by their mortal enemies, and made especially cruel by the fact that going along with their weirdness can potentially boost your Luck by as much as 3 points)
I don't really want to complain about the game, though. Because it really is fantastic. There is just so much to do packed into this tiny little package. I think the original Fallout probably aged better as a pure gameplay experience, primarily because it is a tighter story with a more straightforward critical path, and fewer goofy pop-culture references (though nothing beats finding the Bride of Death from Monty Python's Holy Grail while wandering randomly through the desert). However, Fallout 2 is arguably the greater achievement. It is animated by an incredible sense of fun, and it rewards poking your nose into random corners of the map, creating this beautifully weird world that you just want to explore and inhabit.
I'm aware of the fact that I'm probably too keen to attribute great influence and innovation to this game. It is undoubtedly a branch of the rpg tree, and that if later games seem inspired by its formula, it's probably because both derived from a common source. However, in my personal canon, Fallout 2 holds an immensely important place. It was my first (okay, if you want to get technical, second) open world rpg. Due to the bundle I bought it in, Fallout came before, but it was in many ways a more conventional narrative. This game gave you a wide open map and then dared you to find the story. I now view this as a flaw, but at the time it blew my mind. You could just wander off and have adventures in areas completely unrelated to the main story! Why would it let you do that? You could join the evil factions! You could get gay-married (if, unlike my current character, you have the Charisma for it)! It changed my perspective on gaming, and what was possible to expect from the roleplaying genre.
So, if I come back to the game a bit more jaded, I am the way I am due in no small part to Fallout 2. If I want more, it's because this game gave me the audacity to demand it. That, I think, is worth remembering.
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