Fallout: A Vertiginous Spin Around Oblivion

“My life fades. The vision dims. All that remains are memories. I remember a time of chaos. Ruined dreams... This wasted land.” - The narrator of The Road Warrior

I really had no idea what I was in for.

But after watching the opening sequence to Black Isle Studio's Fallout, I knew it was something special. Actually special may not be the word; I think, perhaps, distinct may be a better choice.

The thing you have to understand about Fallout is that, in a lot of ways, it is a game without precursor. Sure, there was that shitty Mad Max NES game that had you ceaselessly driving around the desert, scrutinizing nearly indecipherable graphics, looking for gasoline and food, and though I really don't know for certain, I'm sure there had to be an apocalyptic MUD of some sort at some point before the release of Fallout. Certainly, an argument could be made that a company like SSI laid the foundation of what would become the modern day western role playing game. But hell, SSI is also responsible for the unmitigated thundershitstorm that was Thunderscape.

The game bears its influences without shame. One instance has you attempting to recruit canine companion named Dogmeat. The requirement for recruiting him as your supporting non-player character requires that you be wearing a piece of armor that is identical to Mel Gibson's one-sleeved leather jacket from The Road Warrior. Whether you're roaming the wastelands with your dog beside you, or investigating the game's underground Vaults, you know the creators have seen the seventies cult classic film A Boy and His Dog. It's clear they played SSI's Advanced Dungeon and Dragons games as well. But that's just it, Fallout blends these the best of these disparate elements, and then subtly fuses them with Raygun Gothic aesthetics into something utterly novel.

Fallout is a game that lives and dies with its ambiance. And fortunately for its creator's, that atmosphere is the game's keynote success. It's like a bolt of lightning when the needle hits that crackling vinyl at the beginning of the game's intro. The titular font starkly fades in, white on black, as The Ink Spots' “Maybe” plays over various propagandist images. Following that, the player is treated to one of the best world introduction videos ever put into a video game, a pitch perfect end-of days voice over tape delivered by Ron Perlman. Seriously, check it out.

After the intro, the player starts a new game. This is followed by a quick character select/create screen in which the player can either choose from a short list of preconstructed, archetypal characters or create their own by going in and modifying base stats. It's worth mentioning here that the character creation and level system are one of the many places that Fallout shines. The stats system is instantly manageable, and is easily manipulated, even by someone new to the genre. Any time you hover the mouse over a stat, you are given as concise and cogent explanation of what that stat is used for, accompanied by a wonderfully quaint hand-drawn cartoon of the game's mascot performing the associated action. By contrast, older games of the genre had oblique and often inscrutable stat leveling systems, that were probably a turn off to those who considered the price of entry too high.

Once finished selecting their character, the game moves into a short third video using prerendered graphics that introduces the game's present conflict. Essentially, generations have passed since the nuclear holocaust that vaporized half the world, and a lucky few people have been hiding underground in self-sustaining, autonomous “Vaults”, yours of which happens to be enumerated “13”. Funny, right? Well, as Vault 13's luck would have it, the water chip needed to produce fresh drinking water for its inhabitants has konked out. Your vault has 150 days worth of water left. The elder, or Overseer, of your group asks you to go out into the world in search of a new water chip, suggesting first stopping by a Vault (15) to the west. The catch is, the vault door hasn't been opened in, oh, maybe just shy of a 100 years. Your avatar has never seen the natural light of day. You agree to go.

After this scene you are quickly whisked away to the cave outside of the vault, at time which the game proper begins. And this is where game quickly becomes erstwhile innovative and just turns into pure fun. The combat, which is turned based and on a hex-grid, is superior, taking only a few rounds to figure out. It's very simple, with six action points alloted per turn. Some actions, like punching or accessing your inventory, take only one or two points, while others like firing a pistol or an automatic weapon take five or six. Needless to say, its a simple point managing system, but the number of permutations available in acting keep it fresh.

That said, one major gripe I had with the game was the NPC companions that are available throughout the game. The man I selected to be my hetero life mate was called Ian. He was a biker jacket clad badass that made poor combat decisions and had a very bad habit of standing in my way. Firstly, when fighting, whether or not I told him to stick close, he would wander towards the nearest enemy. So after we killed an enemy, still in combat but before healing up, he'd wander off, breaking up the group and dying before I could support him. I found no way around this besides trying the fights you knew you had to fight multiple times. Secondly, he could force a restart by moving and blocking in such a way that you couldn't exit an area. In one such instance, I was in an abandoned Vault looking for some phat lootz and I moved into a corner between a bed and a nightstand; he walked up directly behind me, locking me into the square I was standing on forever. I think Ian was trying to tell something. This gripe is somewhat significant for two reasons: first, when the difficulty starts to ramp up, you basically have to recruit a partner, so there's no way around this problem by simply not participating, and second, it would have been easily fixed by letting you walk through your NPC companions. I got stuck and had to restart three times while playing. It's not that big a deal though. If you're going to play, just make sure you use multiple saves and use them often.

But back to fresh combat. After you leave the original cave, you exit into a large world map. Something happens on the world map that I'm fucking shocked I haven't seen in a game since. Here's the thing. The world map includes random battles...

Now hold the fucking moan-train! These random “battles” are one of the bona fide joys of the game, quite often not battles at all, but instead, perhaps, a man wandering the desert looking to sell his wares. Sometimes you'll find wildlife fighting in groups and you can either run, or kill the last one standing and take all the booty. If you're near a city, you may run into its guards who will simply greet you “good day,” or, assuming you don't have a good reputation with them, attack. Or maybe those guards will be fighting a group of bandits come to loot the town, at which time you can pick a side. I really think a lot of Japanese role playing games could benefit from implementing something like this. It keeps random battles fresh because its both realistic and unpredictable.

OK. This ends the gushing part of the review. The are two particular parts to the game that I think are especially deficient. The first I'll say right out. The graphics are terrible. While the concept art and sound design are beyond reproach, the visuals implemented are muddy and basic. This game was released the same month as Final Fantasy VII, with Metal Gear Solid arriving just a few months later. And while I understand that FFVII set a new benchmark as to how games should look, I don't even think it looks as colorful or sharp as some earlier PS1 efforts like Beyond the Beyond and Suikoden. And those games were rough around the edges at best. In fact, if it weren't hex based, I'd almost swear it was an especially good refinement of the same engine X-COM used, which came out four years prior. It's not that significant a quibble, but I personally think they aren't just kinda bad; they are flat out shitty.

My second, more major problem is the lack of focus to the story. That, in and of itself, isn't necessarily a problem. Unlike, I assume, Fallout 2 and Elder Scrolls, the game aspires to have a significant story, first about saving your vault, and then second about stopping a genetically modified mutant attack against humanity. It may seem to the casual observer who just started them game that it is, in fact, a open ended western RPG, but when you couple it with the 150 day time limit imposed at the beginning of the game, it becomes clear that driving story element is finding the water chip. This is the problem. You have a time limit, but the game indulges in numerous story detours, most of which you don't have time for. So while your futzing about, paging through the endless dialogue trees of the world's countless characters, finding where you need to go becomes fuzzy in sea of side quest suggestions. There were a couple of times where I threw up my hands and put the game down. Basically, the game tries to serve two masters. The JRPG narrative, and the open world western RPG approach. I'll admit it; I had to reference a walkthrough a few times, just so I could complete the water chip quest on time. This however, doesn't detract from the overall experience as much as you would expect. The combat, setting, and urgency make the game entertaining despite.

Everything accounted, I'm staggered by how much this game did ahead of its time. I really have to question whether or not Elders Scrolls and its myriad copycats could have been appealing to a wide audience if Fallout hadn't made stat managing easy and fun. I have to ask if Bioshock could have existed, with its retro-futurist trapping, as I'm SURE Ken Levine must have played this game. It really is an illuminating piece of video game history. And while the game contains a few serious flaws, I'd suggest you try it if you get a chance. You really don't know what you're in for.

Final Score: B+

~James D

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

Developer: LucasArts
Platform: Xbox 360

As some readers may know, I live in Philadelphia. During the summer, sometimes my friends and I like to go to Rittenhouse square, have a few drinks, talk and try and figure out what to do with the rest of our evening. Occasionally during these visits, a group of strange exhibitionist nerds decide that they are going to take over a section of the park and fight each other with plastic Lightsabers. I do admit that I get excited when I see them arrive, duffle bag of armaments in hand, ready to do battle for the enjoyment of the assorted hipsters, dog walkers, tourists and transient drunks milling about. I have been known to move to a better vantage point to see them rehearse. When they fight they are like rare birds in flight, a flurry of JNCO jeans and chain wallets, awkwardly thrashing at each other while I wait for the chubby one's heart to give out. I also have to admit that, while watching, me and my roommate think how awesome it would be to dress as Sith, find them, and, saying nothing, just attack. So, I understand who the Force Unleashed's audience is.

Unleashed follows Starkiller, Darth Vader's apprentice, between episodes III and IV of the Star Wars saga. Starkiller's charge, as Vader's hound, is to travel the galaxy attempting to murder any remaining Jedi. Accompanying him on this are his two sidekicks, an attractive, hotshot, imperial pilot and your goofy, patricidal, shape-shifting droid. The final goal of your murderous romps throughout the galaxy is to kill the Emperor, thus proving that you are the most badass mother-Sith the universe has ever seen. I can get behind that. A friend of mine has often criticized me saying, “You just like (insert badass thing here) because its badass.” What I think he means by this is that I shouldn't like it because it was designed to be “badass.” There is a part of me that agrees with him, but only when its not done well. Really this idea is the base of whether Unleashed works or not.

Let me begin by saying Unleashed, most of the time, is a lot of fun. I enjoy being an almost unstoppable vehicle of murderous rage. A great example appears in the third stage. I saw a Jawa, minding his own business fixing some giant engine thingy, and so, being the heartless bastard I am, I grabbed him with the awesome power of the dark side, threw my Lightsaber into him, electrocuted him, then threw him like some type of makeshift, electric Jawa-bomb into his brethren and the assorted explosive barrels strewn about every part of the game's environments. But, please dear reader, do not this that this title is not just moments like this. Unleashed is extremely front loaded. You start the game as Vader storming the home world of the Wookies. Whilst being Vader, you have a giant arsenal of force related weapons at your disposal, causing you to feel very empowered. After this tutorial stage however, things change quite a bit.

Unleashed is set in three acts. Without giving too many spoilers, at the beginning of the second act things start to take serious turn for the worse. During the first act Starkiller accumulates new force powers at the beginning of every stage, allowing you to feel like your working towards
being the unstoppable force of destruction that was Vader during the first stage. But, for some reason the people at LucasArts thought it was a good idea to start negating your
powers by making many of the enemies immune. Most of time they don't even give a good excuse as to why. Force shields...really? Force shields aside, Unleashed has a few technical
glitches that whisper of a hurried production. I glitched through a few walls spinning to oblivion, and at one point was stuck in the leg of a Rancor. Oh, and let's not forget, this game has quick time events. Now its true, I hate QTE's; they are never difficult and I have never thought that Simon constituted compelling gameplay. Even the boss fights - mostly other Jedi - were almost never fun or even that difficult. The tactic was almost always the same: smack 'em with my Nerf Lightsaber, lightening, then repeat. Oh, until you gotta finish 'em... with a quick time event.

What I kept hearing from people about The Force Unleashed before I played it was, “I heard the story was really good.” My answer to this is, “Yeah, not really.” Much like the gameplay, the story starts with a good base that erodes with time. As I said, Starkiller is a Sith. Not only is he a Sith but he was raised by Darth Vader to be a heartless Sith. So the 180 that the story forces down my throat comes off completely unbelieveable.

Starkiller slaughters any and everything that gets in his general vicinity. I find it hard to swallow when such a character starts showing so much emotion so quickly and with little reason. Speaking of hard to swallow, I'm sorry, but the force doesn't save you from the effects of open space. Nor do people tend to sympathize with or respect homicidal maniacs. While I digress, the story of Unleashed isn't exactly bad. What I think is, is that peoples expectations are just seriously damaged when considering Star Wars as of late. Unleashed is no Empire Strikes Back, but it is much better then The Phantom Menace or any of the new installments for that matter. I think my biggest problem with the story is the ending.

I went through the game feeling and acting like a Sith, gleefully dismembering my foes, without piety. When at the end I was given the choice to finish off Vader or try and kill the Emperor, I thought I was doing the Sith thing by trying to kill the Emperor thus establishing myself as the baddest mother fucker in the galaxy. I was apparently wrong. What this choice really meant is that I was some type of wussy rebel sympathizer trying to save people who probably thought I was a sick bastard. I was confused. Didn't they establish that my goal was to kill the Emperor at the beginning of this whole thing?

I know that there are a lot of negative statements in the previous paragraphs, but Unleashed is not a bad game. It's just not a very good one either. On the one hand, we got a startlingly pretty and fun game, that allows the player to play the role of a superhuman Sith badass. On on the other, you have a game that really just amounts to the result of an old-school beat-em-up and a tech demo having a baby. While Unleashed could have been a really good game, it just isn't. I just wish that this title could have had more time in the oven; I think we could have seen something really good.

But, seriously LucasArts, why couldn't there just have been just one damn Gungan I could have force choked. Though, there is a lot to be said about an electric Jawa bomb.

Final Score: C+

~Aaron R

This Review is dedicated to John M. without you this could not have been possible.

James DeRosa: An Introduction and an Invite

As I sit at my computer desk, cursor bar blinking, I'm slowly realizing how hard it is to find the right words to make this introduction earnest and complete. James and I met through video games, in a small town, a lifetime ago. Our early encounters were filled with debates about who was who's bitch. Respect was metered out begrudgingly, in inches. The years have weathered such harsh sentimentalities which were more like France circa 1916 then a friendship. What broke this? More video games....and some non-Tekken hanging out.

Well, I'm proud to say The Sophist has found another voice. I hope you embrace him as you have me, dear readers. I give you James DeRosa.

~Aaron R

Here's a confession: I have never been a PC gamer. Some of my earliest memories involve video games. I remember being four years old, sitting in my living room, trying to make it as far to the left or to the right as I could in Pitfall - I always swore that the right path was harder. It was a console game. It was always a console game. From the Atari 2600, to the NES, SNES, PS1, PS2, and finally the Wii.

My mother always thought it was important that we had a computer, and our first was an IBM PC that ran DOS and had no hard drive. It's worth noting that around the time Doom was big, my mother bought an IBM Aptiva, running windows 95, with a Pentium, 16 MB of RAM and maybe a 1 gigabyte hard drive. I clearly remember standing in Circuit City, trying to get her to agree to buy the computer with the highest specs possible so that I could use it for games. She was insistent that the computer's primary purposes were the Internet and school work, and that the specs didn't matter. After a while, however, she relented and we took home the best computer on the floor.

She was right. I had an SNES - and in a year or so would have a PS1 - and while I purchased the Doom games, a few LucasArts titles like Sam and Max Hit the Road and Tie Fighter, and, unfortunately for me, Cyberia, I quickly abandoned the PC platform. It was mostly because of how much I liked platformers and the Final Fantasy series. For the next ten or eleven years, I never really touched PC games, outside of ones I would play on my friend's computers. I checked in every now and again making sure to play Half-Life and Counterstrike, but, by and large, I stuck mainly to console gaming, cultivating a palate informed mostly by Japanese developers.

PC games, and further, Americans games, have always seemed, to me, less refined than their Japanese counterparts. I couldn't wrap my head around why any gamer would want to deal with persistent glitches, endless patching, and constantly being forced to upgrade their systems to play the newest games. Eventually, it got so bad that I would disdain anyone who proudly proclaimed themselves a PC gamer, assuming their tastes to be less about refined programming and precise gameplay, and more about bleeding-edge-graphics-whoring and killing shit. This is a trend that I feel is almost, thought not wholly, gone on the PC scene.

With the advent of HD, I have been unable to move into the new generation of consoles because I simply cannot afford it. I refuse to buy an HD console until I have an HD TV to back it up. Granted, I have picked up a Wii – a decision largely attributed to the fact that the system often looks better on an SD TV – and have played one of the best games ever created (Super Mario Galaxy), I won't feel as though I have joined the next generation of console gaming until I move into HD gaming.

So I find myself in a strange place. I haven't owned a PC since I moved out of my mom's house 8 years ago. I haven't bought (or had bought for me) a PC that could play newer games for over ten years.

I recently went back to college, and I needed a computer. So there I was at Best Buy, standing in the same place I had over ten years earlier, convincing myself to break my budget to buy the best PC I could for games. But shouldn't it be for school work and Internet? The answer is still the same.

Fuck no.

Not when I haven't played Bioshock yet. So I purchased a AMD triple core with 4 gigabytes of RAM and instantly modified it with a new power supply and an expensive graphics card. I also bought a pretty sick 22” screen panel to go with it. To be fair, I could have done a lot more; getting a quad core, a 10000 rpm hard drive, or hell, building the thing from the ground up would all have yielded something a bit stronger, but as it is, I can play every game I have bought so far at full spec.

And it's strange. This is where I am now... for the first time in my life, I'm a PC gamer.

I NEVER thought I'd say that.

Which leads me to why I am here explaining this to you. With the imminent release of Fallout 3, I have taken it as my charge to do The Sophist's first retro review. Fallout. I am about halfway through it currently, and I thought I'd introduce myself, mostly for the purpose of making it clear that there is now someone contributing to Aaron's brainchild.

So, it should be up within the week, and I invite you to check it out.

~James D

Warhammer Online Part Two : A Difference of Design

Now that you understand my perspective for Warhammer Online, by reading part one, I can delve into more complex issues involving this title. Though, let me preface this article with a few statements. I understand that people can get very touchy when games, or more accurately, MMORPG's get compared with World of Warcraft. Don't believe me ask the guys at Rock, Paper, Shotgun. While, I can sympathize with some of the more even tempered reactionaries, that is where my support ends. The Fact is there are obvious similarities in the interface and basic structure of these games that can not be ignored. I'm not implying that Relic was being lazy by not creating a drastically different structure. This decision was intentional and grants many advantages, chief among them a preexistent knowledge of the basic interface. By giving the player this familiar base, it allows Relic to make, more important, design choices without forcing the player to relearn strange and new basic mechanics. While I will be referencing WOW in this article, the purpose of such will be to show differences in design and how these choices affect the end product.

If WOW is, in most core design, a game of player versus environment; WAR is a game of player versus player. This core difference of design principles shows itself in almost every aspect of these games. In WAR the enemy is the opposing faction, not some dragon enjoying a nap while waiting for some group of adventurers to try and steal her phat lootz. Yes, both titles have PVP but unlike WOW, it is the main focus of the experience in WAR. This difference of focus spiderwebs to permeate the entirety of the experiences enjoyed. This is most apparent in career abilities and gear optimization. By choosing a PVP focus, WAR must make a sacrifice on the PVE front.

WAR does not have PVE instances instead it ops to have “public quests.” These act as scripted events that require players to work together, much like in an instance environment, without the necessity to recruit a viable and competent group. If you want to participate in such a quest all you have to do is go to the part of the zone where it is located and start helping out. The game calculates how much you have done throughout the three phases of the event and upon completion tallies these points which get added onto a roll that decides who gets loot. Also, this loot is handled in a much less frustrating manner. When you win such a loot roll, you are awarded a bag which contains a choice of about four to five pieces of loot which are all viable for your career. This circumvents the Mage running around with a purple bow yelling “Look guys, I'm a Hunter...Pew Pew.” And even if you don't find an upgrade through this means, you gain influence by just participating, which can be used in town for three more loot choices.

What I'm trying to provide by bringing up Public Quests is to reinforce this difference of ideals. In WOW, for most people, the war between the Alliance and Horde isn't much of a war at all. Most of the time this “war” is an annoyance when questing or a way to blow off steam between “more important” raids. For WAR this conflict is what is important, it is the end game. I don't mean to sound redundant, but all of the design choices focus on this fact, case and point: sometimes when you slay a member of the opposing faction you can get gear loot drops. I'm just waiting for someone to ask where I got my new helmet, “I shot some dude in the face for it.”

So, should you play this game? Have you ever tried to infiltrate and murder people in Ironforge? Have you tried to burn South shore to the ground? Have you ever felt disdain if your guild asks you to switch to a raiding build? Have you ever yelled at a friend when a noob went un-pwned? You get the idea. But, I think Conan the barbarian said it best when asked, “what is the best in life.”

PS: I realize that this post could have gone on a lot further but I really didn't want to have a giant four page, or more spread. So, If you have any questions feel free to E-mail me or comment. If I have some demand for more on this I will add another post on those subjects.

Oh, and stay tuned for the final installment.