Flash Game Friday: Nuclear Plant

The monsters are coming.

Nuclear Plant is the tale of a war ravaged society trying to nurture the single last plant alive in order to save humanity.  You play an unnamed scientist/badass who must resurrect the plant.  Unfortunately, you are constantly swarmed by mutated creatures who are trying to impede your progress.  Why?  Because it's a flash game!

The game play is half platform-y, half point and shoot.  You control your character by using the arrow keys (or the ASWD), but aim and shoot using the mouse.  Uniterrupted time at the Laboratory is used to build your skills (e.g. more health regeneration, better accuracy) and killing mutated monsters yields cash to buy new guns (from - where?).

It's fun, and short, though it took a couple of game overs until I got the hang of it.  Enjoy!

Fallout: New Vegas Ultimate Edition is Available

My enjoyment of Fallout: New Vegas and its subsequent DLC is fairly well documented on this blog, so I won't go in depth.  But if you haven't played it yourself, it's a pretty good value to get the Ultimate Edition (with all DLC) from Amazon above.

Fallout: New Vegas - Old World Blues Wins DLC of the Year

This really shouldn't come as any surprise, but Fallout: New Vegas' DLC Old World Blues has been named by www.insidegamingdaily.com as DLC of the Year.  I've blogged about this DLC twice now.

The lack of the surprise should come by the fact that even though the game didn't offer tremendously different goals, gameplay, or graphics, it more than delivered on story, dialogue, writing, and voice-acting.  The B-movie backdrop allowed some great over-the-top moments that would be impossible to synthesize in almost any other environment.

Bethesda has a lot to be proud of, and has certainly won this award.  Well done, you!

Nuka Break: Episode 3

This weeks' episode may not be the most exciting, but it sets up what promises to be more entertainment!

Nuka Break: Episode 2

There's not a ton of things going on that are absolutely awesome in my life.  Watching these is one of them.

Nuka Break: Episode One

It's not a secret that I'm sort of in love with Zack Finfrock.  And not just in a lusty way, but also because the man has some talent: acting, designing, writing.  He's like - the Hollywood everyman.  You might also remember that I was super excited about his new project Nuka Break spinning off into a series of webisodes.  Well the first one is ready to go, so check it out!

Fallout: New Vegas DLC - Honest Hearts

I wish I had better things to say about the Fallout: New Vegas DLC Honest Hearts, but - well - the truth of the matter is ... this DLC is okay.  Just okay.

Joshua Graham, the Burned Man.

The story is that of Caesar's former second-in-command, Joshua Graham, now known as The Burned Man.  So named is Graham because after failing Caesar, the ruthless slave leader burned Graham on a pitch, tossed him into the Grand Canyon and commanded his troops to never again speak his name.

But he lived through the experience, and now is the leader of some tribals of the Zion National Park area.  Now he and another tribal group are debating whether to fight or flee from the oppressive White Legs who aim to eliminate the other tribes of Zion and the Burned Man in order to curry favor with Caesar.  Graham seeks a solution of war with the White Legs, while religious leader Daniel wants a peaceful resolution.

So yeah, there's that.  But without exploring the Zion area, the plot goes ridiculously fast.  However, there's plenty of Zion to explore.  And - unlike Dead Money - there is an enjoyable plethora of enemies.  Some of them are direct replicas of those found in the Mojave (we got Geckos and coyotes, etc.), but there are a couple new things (or sort of new, like Yao Guai).

The real fun comes from the hidden journal entries of a man living in the Zion caves called the Survivalist.  Discovery of this story was the most enjoyable part of this DLC for me.

There's some nice tie-in with the main storyline, but all-in-all - it's just okay.

Oh look!  A Giant Spore Plant!

Fallout: New Vegas - Lonesome Road DLC

The final DLC package (or ... final announced DLC package) for Fallout: New Vegas has been delayed, according to the Bethesda Blog.  The DLC supposedly tells of the Courier's past and why he was selected for the job which sparked the events in New Vegas revolving around the diabolical Mr. House.

While the delay certainly isn't good news, any news about a deepening storyline is good news in my book.

Fallout: New Vegas DLC - Dead Money

Old World Blues certainly gave me a run for my money this past week, but today I was able to sit down and plug away at Fallout: New Vegas' first expansion pack Dead Money.  Was it as good as OWB?  Check out the review, after the jump!

Old World Blues Follow-Up

Bethesda's first attempts at a roll out of DLC for smash hit Fallout 3 were pretty ill-received.  I happened to like The Pitt, which brought up some more complicated moral choices, but that can't be everyone's cup of tea, I suppose.

Giant Roboscorpion!

Old World Blues was, in comparison, an immaculate example of what I had expected from a $9.99 purchase of DLC.  It added approximately 10 hours of playtime, new enemies, new versions of old enemies, new weapons, new perks, new traits, and an engaging and hilarious story. 

I wrapped up the DLC last night, and have to comment that it stayed true to its foundation of quality deliverables through and through.  The story had poignancy and a twist, but not a twist in the way that the writers sat down and said: "we have to think of a twist so that the story maintains relevance.  All stories have unexpected twists!"  Actually, the "twist" is a natural discovery, and it's the exact kind of fun I wanted from the story add-on, and that I had come to expect from Fallout: New Vegas.

Crashes, of course, were an issue; I can't say I wasn't disappointed by the gripping thrust back into reality by watching my character's weapon half-holstered, frozen in time.  It would have made a nice picture had it not been so frustrating.

My recommendation of grabbing this DLC stands, but if I could enhance it - somehow add flavor to it, I would say this: as a male character with the Confirmed Bachelor (gay) perk, I was able to flirt with my brain in a jar.

Really, where else can you experience that?

Fallout: New Vegas DLC - Old World Blues

Old World Blues is the most recently released DLC package for Fallout: New Vegas, and it's also the only pack I've had any experience with.  After about five hours of play yesterday, I feel like I've got a good enough grasp to give it a review, even if I haven't played the whole thing (this sort of behavior makes me reek of professionalism, right?).

Firstly, there is about a half hour of dialogue at the beginning of the DLC.  Yes, a half hour.  Do you know how long I wanted it to be?

The Balance of Good and Evil

I don't usually play games as an "evil" character.  My natural inclanation is to save people, heal others, and generally be a "do-gooder."  Games like Fallout 3, Bioshock, Fable, and inFAMOUS have greatly featured the morality/Karma/whatever system that can affect gameplay in subtle ways (slight differences in dialogue), to extreme ways (effects powers).  So it should be no surprise that my first playthrough on games like these is that of the good guy (with the exception of Fallout: New Vegas, on which it was difficult to determine the "good guy" path, and I instead treaded into the murky waters of the unknown - and also Fallout 3: The Pitt DLC, which had the same outcome).

Playing inFAMOUS on Evil (and on Hard mode, for trophy's sake) has actually been a bit more fun than my first playthrough.  I can't tell if it's because I'm now more comfortable with the game, or if the evil missions are more enjoyable, or if I truly have molded into a sadistic creep who enjoys zapping pedestrians with electricity before sucking their bio-energy out of their skulls to replenish my health. 

So today, I wanted to look at the ways in which games communicated good and evil, and my take on that dichotomy.  More after the jump...

Nuka Break: The Series - Help Make This Happen!

Listen - no, listen - yes, I am enrapturedly attracted to Zack Finfrock, but I also think that Nuka Break: The Series needs to happen.  This is The Guild worthy, and I want to support it. 

Nuka Break, a short fan film, really captured my heart with its ability to fully encapsulate the Fallout world.  The writing, acting, and production were spot on and AMAZING.  If I had $5,000, I would sponsor this project (a random number selected, certainly not because that is the level of sponsorship for which said sponsor would have a walk-on role and a chance to meet Finfrock and confess my their undying love).

If you're a fan of webseries, creativity, Fallout, or just cute guys, make this happen!  Visit their Indiegogo page and sponsor!  http://www.indiegogo.com/Funding-for-Fallout-Nuka-Break-the-series

Fallout: New Vegas News - Summer DLC Packs

In addition to Dead Money (which I still haven't gotten a spin at) - three new DLC packs are coming out for Fallout: New Vegas which add new environments and expand upon story elements left unfinished.  In true Bethesda style, the level cap will increase and there are new perks, new trophies, and new weapons to bring a more diverse experience to the Mojave Wasteland.

• Honest Hearts - Releases in May 2011 - DLC that gives you more background on the Burned Man, Ceaser's right-hand man who was believed dead.
• Old World Blues - Releases in June 2011 - after the Courier is captured and exposed to laboratory testing, you learn more about how some of the monstrous denizens of the Mojave came to be.
• The Lonesome Road - Releases in July 2011 - finally!  We get to learn more about the courier who turned down the Platinum Chip job and caused the entirety of the events in Fallout: New Vegas.

Each pack rounds up to a $10 price tag, making a $50 gift card to the Playstation Store an obvious choice for my birthday (July 8).

Fallout: New Vegas

Fallout 3 had eluded me when it was first released, but now that I was on the fanboy wagon, I sure as hell wasn't getting off.  So when I heard about the next episode in the Fallout universe, I was eager to sink my teeth into its nummy, possibly irradiated flesh.  Not only would it be borrowing stealing completely reusing the engine of Fallout 3 (Fallout fans weren't really big on this, but I liked Fallout 3, and I was more than happy to be getting what some called a really big expansion pack), but it was set in Las Vegas.

Vegas and video games have a nice history about them.  Vegas Stakes, a Super Nintendo game, was my first introduction into gambling.  The game was nearly purposeless (goal: make money), but I still sank a great deal of my childhood into it.

Now I would be able to experience Vegas, set in a post-apocalyptic world!  And as the main character, I'd surely have a goal of some significance to the region (if not the world), so there would be plenty of story to accompany this game's foray into Sin City, even if my inaugural game was somewhat lacking.

The gameplay in Fallout: New Vegas was a big Ctrl-V from Fallout 3 (similar weapons, V.A.T.S., menu screens, etc.), but it did implement a few substantial changes: speech challenges increased in complexity, the small guns and big guns skills that were delineated before were merged into "Guns," and a "Survival" skill was added.  The ssurvival skill was particularly important for those playing the game on "Hardcore Mode," which would require the player to eat, drink, sleep, and recover from injuries in a more realistic way. 

During my first playthrough, I was incredibly nervous.  I still considered myself lucky to point my guns in the correct direction, and decided to play without "Hardcore Mode" engaged.  On the second (and subsequent) playthrough(s), I decided a spice of adventure was just what the game called for. 

I have had trips to the mailbox which I would classify as more hardcore than F:NV's "Hardcore Mode."

Don't get me wrong, the mode created some new complexity to the game, which may or may not have been challenging, but food, water, and places to nap are relatively frequent in the Mojave Wasteland.  But hardcore it was not.  The only substantially upsetting difference was that recruited characters could actually die when you had "Hardcore Mode" engaged, which was somewhat sad, but also somewhat of a relief as they were responsible for violating my stealth protocols to summon Cazadors to come and disembowel me.

The game gets a huge nod from me for being very, very, gay friendly - and not just in a shallow way!  A perk you can take early on, Confirmed Bachelor, gives you unique dialogue options with the same sex.  And while this could have been a token nod to LGBT fans of the series, there is actually some discourse on how gay and lesbian relationships are perceived, which heartily deepens the story.  I initially was predisposed to help the New California Republic (or NCR), which were who I perceived as the "good guys," but when I discovered that they frown on same-sex relationships, which are openly embraced by the slavers of Cesar's Legion, I thought maybe that was the way to go (the Legion transpired to be awfully patriarchal, so I went with the killing everyone strategy; let god sort 'em out).

The game also gets further nodding for its depth of story.  Fallout 3 featured a broad world, but what Fallout: New Vegas lacks in explorable square footage, it more than makes up in depth of its characters, story, and side quests.  There are four ways to beat the game, depending on to whom to pledge your allegiance, and gameplay is unique enough for each playthrough to keep me coming back.  Each faction in the Mojave has their own story to tell (or learn about from picking through the belongings on their bullet-ridden corpses).

The voice acting is pretty excellent, too.  Felicia Day voices a companion with whom I loved having close to me, mostly because it was like the real Felicia Day was sitting next to me, assuring me that everything was going to be okay, before punching the crap out of a Wasteland Raider.

The big problem with this game was glitches.  If I moved while reloading a weapon, or talked to an ally while enemies were approaching us in preparation to hack us to pieces, or I looked at my controller the wrong way, the game would freeze.  A freeze every blue moon is one thing, but it happened all the time.  And for an immersive game like Fallout: New Vegas, a sudden reminder that you are - in fact - alone on the couch and not heading towards the glitzy remnants of Las Vegas, is even more crushing.

All in all, I'd say Fallout: New Vegas is one of my favorite games, in spite of its glaringly frustrating freezes.  If you haven't picked it up and you like this sort of thing, I'd really recommend you do so.

Dead Money DLC Now Available (!?)

Pardon the interrobang, but SERIOUSLY?  How come I have to find out about Fallout: New Vegas DLC: Dead Money from Twitter?  How pedestrian!  Bethesda should just implant a small device at the base of my skull, so there wouldn't be any kind of delay with this sort of thing.

Edit: By the gists of the review I just read, I added the want tag to this DLC.  It sounds buggy as hell, but I hadn't expected anything different.

Fallout 3

This weekend, we did quite a bit of spring cleaning. It was reminiscent of my last bout with spring-ish cleaning (it might have been winter-break-ish), that had me taking quite a haul into the local GameStop for trade-in credit. I ended up having an absurd amount of money, and I preordered Bioshock 2 with it, but I also picked up a couple games, and among them Fallout 3.

I'm not really a huge first-person-shooter (FPS) kind of guy. In general, it scares the crap out of me when all of a sudden there's a huge monster on my side eating me, and I move the wrong way and end up wasting a clip of hard-to-find bullets into the ceiling. My only real experience in the genre was Goldeneye for N64, and I'm afraid I never really played another since... However, after picking up, and playing the hell out of, Bioshock, I was willing to give another one a shot.

Fallout 3 had received rave reviews, and was even the Game of the Year. I was only a couple years late to the party (typical, actually, for my gaming habits).

The Fallout series is set in a distopian future, wherein conflict over resources between the United States and China culminates in nuclear conflict. Fallout 3 is set in the Washington, DC Metroplex, now called The Capital Wasteland, which has been savaged by nuclear fallout. Those that survived the rain of atomic fire did so in underground vaults.

I was immediately impressed by the immersion. I felt part of this unknown world, and had a lot of drive to explore every nook and cranny of my "home," Vault 101. The game sends you eventually out of the vault, and the Wasteland is magnificently huge, and overwhelming. The game certainly gives me some options on where to go and why (there is a general, large story arc), but it's entirely possible to do almost whatever you want. This is a great deal different from most of the games I'd played to this point, where you could take two hallways down to the same path, but didn't have an entire world to distract you between objectives.

Unfortunately, my first playthrough was slightly downhill from there. My inexperience with basic concepts of aiming, and over-utilization of V.A.T.S. (a system in which the game will aim at, and shoot, enemies for you; but is limited by your Action Points), led to early death at the hands - or rather, the mandibles of a town-full of fire breathing, giant, radiated ants.

I gave up on the game from there, and resigned to play other games in my queue. However, the draw of the initial immersion, stilted by ant-death, still tugged at my core. I put Fallout 3 back in, turned the difficulty down to psychotically easy, and gave it another go.

I'm really glad I gave Fallout 3 a second chance, which it richly deserved. My own ineptitude was really no reason not to play what a lot of people had agreed was an awesome game. While not granting you to shoot lightning out of your non-dominant hand, this FPS did have quite a few RPG elements: as you best enemies, or complete quests, you gain experience which increases your proficiency with weapons, or stealth, or communication, or ability to maintain armor. Before long, I started getting the knack of the system and was able to mow through the previously feared Fire Ants with a Minigun.

You can develop into quite a badass in the game as well. This only makes sense, seeing as your father is voiced by Liam Fucking Neeson. Your proficiencies are never really game breakers, but the basic travel and exploration become a little less terrifying when you know you can riddle a Super Mutant full of bullets before he even gets within swinging distance.

The game has a system of Karma. Doing good things, like saving slaves, increases your Karma, whereas stealing things or massacring an entire town-full of people. Karma does determine which ending is revealed to you, as well as trophy acquisition. I have been conditioned by society to play nice and not murder and steal from every NPC I come across, so getting the "evil path" trophy was a bit of a challenge.

Fallout 3 has great replayability. I have long since received a platinum trophy in the game. It's my fifth playthrough, and I'm still noticing aspects I hadn't before. A lot of the initial "what's over this hill" exploration fantasy is done, but it's still just as exciting to play through the main story and myriad of side quests.

The Game: Fallout 3.

The Cost: Available for XBox360 and the PS3, used for about $15. But do yourself a favor and go ahead and get the Game of the Year edition, which has all of the DLC included. It'll only set you back a couple extra dollars.

Worth It? I've played the game all-the-way through four times. Each playthrough probably took between 30 and 40 hours. The net result is about $0.15/hour of entertainment.

Best Parts: The replay value is astronomical, and the game is incredibly immersive and engaging.

Worst Parts: It can kick your ass if you're as green to FPS games as I am. Consider turning down the difficutly until you get the hang of things.

Overall: Fallout 3 continues to reign as one of my favorite games, if you have any interest at all in exploring the war-torn D.C. ruins, be sure and grab this gem and give it at least one playthrough.

Bonus! Zack Finfrock, who I find to be amazingly attractive, did a fan video set in the Fallout universe, which is great for a chuckle.