Knights of the Cardboard Castle

Believe it or not I’ve never played any of the Tomb Raider games. I hate platformers and reflex-based puzzles anyway. I bought this one because I thought the isometric top-down view looked agreeably retro to me. It reminded me of Crusader: No Remorse.

• I don’t believe I’ve played a game with this control scheme before. On an Xbox 360 controller, left stick to move, right stick to draw weapons and aim, right trigger to fire. It took some getting used to but it works great. Lara’s movements feel fluid and aiming is easy, though there’s an obvious bit of auto-targeting involved. The physics are real too. You don’t stick to surfaces once you activate animations, as you do for example in Prince of Persia, so it’s all too easy to just roll off platforms while trying to dodge an enemy.

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DC Universe Online is the first MMO I’ve played in a very long while. In fact, it’s the first MMO I’ve played since getting a decently fast fixed-line net connection. Being a comics fan I’ve always meant to try this out and the offer of the DLC packs on Steam a while back seemed like the best chance to leap aboard. I wasn’t expecting too much from it. It moved from being a full priced game with the standard MMO subscription rates to being free to play in record time. But I ended up liking it quite a bit and stuck on for a while longer than I thought I would.

• One of its key features is that it’s an action-oriented MMO, even including a rudimentary physics system. There are no auto-attacks. You directly control each of your character’s attacks just like in any other action game. There are many unlockable combos to learn, and learning to block at the right moment or roll out of the way is essential to survive. We’re a long way from the ancient MMO convention of all mobs being able to just walk through one another!

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I’ve heard many good things about Frozen Synapse but after messing about with it for a while I decided that it wasn’t really my cup of tea. It’s seems to be a multiplayer centric game. There’s a pretty extensive single-player campaign, presented using plain text and a perfunctory attempt at a campaign map, but it feels very dry to me.

I can see how it can be engaging in multiplayer and I can certainly dig the appeal of having so much tactical control over your units. But I find it too unforgiving to be much fun. The single-player missions feel like puzzles, except that many elements are randomized and certain permutations of the missions may well be impossible to win. Did your rocket launcher guy spawn right next to an enemy shotgun guy? Kiss him goodbye.

Maybe it’s a good game for people who can spend lots of time obsessing over every detail of their tactical plan and enjoy getting into an opponent’s head to anticipate what he or she will do next. But it’s too cerebral and frustrating for me.

It took 156 hours, according to Steam anyway, but I’m finally done with Fallout: New Vegas. Again, this is a playthrough of the whole game including all DLC on hardcore mode with the J.E. Sawyer mod enabled. I’ll focus my comments on the mod itself and overall comparisons between New Vegas and Bethesda’s Fallout 3.

• Despite using the same engine and being based in the same setting, the two games end up feeling very different. One poster on Broken Forum summarized it best. Fallout 3 was a Bethesda-style sprawling, open-world game focused on exploration and little chunks of quests and story scattered around everywhere. The main quest is optional and there’s no central theme tying it all together. But in New Vegas everything pretty much revolves around the conflict between the NCR and Caesar’s Legion. As such, although you have much more choice about how you want to complete quests, it’s still a more linear game, directed by quest objectives.

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As expected, the last of the Fallout: New Vegas DLC falls some way short of the quality of Old World Blues. As its name indicates, this one is a very linear combat romp down the eponymous road of the title. As such I went through it very quickly as there is little reason to backtrack over the territory to complete quests or explore for the heck of it.

• Story-wise, this DLC is supposed to fill the gaps of the player character, the Courier’s, personal history and his relationship with Ulysses, who could have been Courier Six, but chose not to be. Unfortunately I found all this exposition to be unbelievable and frankly boring. It’s so jarring that the Courier supposedly has all this back story but is completely unaware of any of it at the beginning of the game.

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Finally a Fallout: New Vegas DLC that’s actually worth playing. This one takes you to the blasted remains of a huge research facility, populated by zany scientists and the results of countless mad experiments. It was billed as the funniest of the DLC and it certainly qualifies. It’s solidly entertaining and quite challenging to boot!

• Like the other DLC, the main plot feels contrived, consisting of a series of fetch quests that culminates in a final showdown. Luckily, it is saved by a cast of characters that are actually fun to talk to. It also ties in with the Sierra Madre storyline as you get to retrace the path of Father Elijah and Christine across Big MT.

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The second Fallout: New Vegas DLC takes place entirely outdoors. It’s set in Zion National Park which in the Fallout universe was largely untouched by the nuclear exchange that destroyed most of civilization. This makes it a sunshine and rainbow paradise with clean water and plentiful food, so exploring it is a very different experience from wandering the Mojave Wasteland. My thoughts:

• Playing through Honest Hearts took me much less time than Dead Money. This is mainly because it doesn’t have the environmental hazards introduced in the first DLC so it’s much less challenging. I found the enemies, mainly tribals, fairly easy as well. They may have decent weapons but their almost complete lack of armor makes it easy to kill large numbers of them in short order.

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I bought Fallout: New Vegas ages ago but have only gotten around to playing it recently. Because I loved Fallout 3 so much, I decided to play this game the right way. This means turning Hardcore mode on. This means using the jsawyer mod. This means going through the content of all of the DLCs in the intended order. This means I’m going to need to spend a very, very long time on it.

Rather than wait for the whole month of so that it would likely take me to complete this epic playthough, I think I’ll write a short write-up after going through each of the DLCs. This one covers Dead Money, the first of the DLCs, set in the dead casino of the Sierra Madre.

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