How Do You Spell Awesome?

With an M and an E.

I beat it. I beat Mile High Club on veteran. I feel great. I am great. I am the man.

Sure I'm not the only one who's ever done it, but if you want a challenge in gaming this is it man. This is the one. And I did it in about 40 min today. I spent probably around 3 hours on it yesterday with no luck. That's always the way it is though isn't it? You have to step back from a problem, come back at it refreshed the next day, with newly grown brain cells specifically designed for the task. Neuropathways mapped out for your eventual success.

This feels like the kind of rush I used to get after a really great race. It feels like setting a new PR in the 800m. It makes me want to go for a run.

So now I have my first 100% complete game.



Technically Borderlands was my first with 1000 GS and 100% of the main game's cheevos (Fallout 3 was my first with 1000). But Xbox doesn't recognize 1000 as 100% if there is any DCL achievements (weather you have the DLC or not!), so it doesn't show up. So I will have to buy two more expansions for Borderlands if I want an official 100%. Which of course is bullshit. Same thing with Fallout 3, but I'm not going to bother playing through with a third character just to get the neutral-alignment achievements anyway so oh-well.

I'm going for a run.



Also, Happy Birthday to my love!

Welcome to the Wasteland

I finished no less than three games this weekend. Red Faction: Guerrilla, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, and Fallout 3 all rolled their credits across my TV before the Monday morning dawn. Coincidentally all three of these games came out around the same time in late 2008, but I bought them at different times, and then finished them within days. Friday night I spent about 6 hours playing Red Faction’s multiplayer with Will and JT. They live in Hawaii now, and being 6 hours behind me actually works out well. Once they went to bed I dug in for end of the campaign. Red Faction was a great game and the last mission was particularly satisfying. You square off against a whole army of baddies, but it’s OK because you get to drive a big ass tank.

The Force Unleashed was a disappointing game only because it was hyped so much. I got it for Christmas and I’ve spent less than 10 hours with it in the intervening 7 months. It’s not that it wasn’t a fun game, it was, it just wasn’t as good as it could have been. I might play through it again on a harder difficulty or mine for achievements… or I might forget about it entirely. I had heard that there were two endings and going into the last stage I fully intended to get the “evil” ending but when the moment of truth came it was unclear what I was supposed to do and I ended up with the “good” ending simply because I walked in the wrong direction.

I’ve been playing Fallout 3 for almost a year now. I had played through to the very end with one character, Ilsa, who I played as a good-guy (or good-gal). I only had one side quest and the last main quest left when I stopped and started a new game with a character named Norman. The side quest was “Strictly Business” where you are tasked with enslaving four denizens of the waste. I had a very clear idea of who Ilsa was at that point and while she’s an opportunistic bitch she’s not a slaver. Slavery is not her bag, baby. Norman is a different animal. He’s a sociopath at best and a homicidal maniac at worst. He had no problem enslaving those people and shooting his way out of Rivet City in the process. I started Norman’s game out with the Operation Anchorage DLC, which I wrote about in a previous post. Anchorage is a very easy campaign made for low level characters and playing it first completely changes the main game. I basically started with a level 8 character, power armor, and advanced weapons. My goal for Norman - his entire purpose really - is completely different from Ilsa. While Ilsa was created to play the game, Norman was created explicitly for evil. I needed him to get the bad karma achievements that Ilsa never could. His story arc has nothing to do with finding his lost father or combating the Enclave. His story is about getting to level 30 as fast as he can, as brutally as he can. As you can imagine this makes for a very different gameplay experience. I don’t usually spend this much time with a game this dynamic, investing myself in multiple playthroughs. I can’t think of another game where I’ve played it twice and played two different games. My hat’s off to Bethesda on this one. All that’s left now is the Broken Steel expansion, and perhaps Mothership Zeta.

Will has been cajoling me to get Borderlands for a while now. He and JT have already played through it but he promised me that he would play it again if I jumped on board. I grabbed the game Sunday morning and we spent a couple hours with it. I’m liking it so far. The description “FPS Diablo” was thrown around a lot before it came out. I can’t argue with that. Level grind + loot orgy + guns, that’s Borderlands. Will is out of town all week and I’ve got to work all weekend so the earliest we’ll be able to play it again it next week, probably next weekend. I think it was this kind of agonizing waiting that made me reluctant to get the game. I wasn’t worried that I wouldn’t like it, I was worried that I would like it too much.

I guess in the meantime there’s Midnight Club LA…

The Suck of Anchorage

So I finished Operation: Anchorage. It started off as a fast moving diversion, but the ride was too short and the scenery along the way wasn't that great. Things went down hill when I realized I had missed one of the intel items and upon walking all the way back to get it I realized it was in a section of the map I couldn't get back to. It let me go back to the long section right after it so that I wasted 10 min walking through it, but no, not the section I needed to get to. Why didn't they block off all the past sections so I wouldn't waste my time? Or better yet, not block off sections at all? There was no reason to do it in the first place. Anyway, being the tight-ass completionist that I am, I had to revert to a previous save and wasted yet another hour.

After the opening part of the Anchorage simulation you have all your guns taken from you and you have to requisition equipment kits as if you were playing Battlefield or something. Why??? Carrying a variety of weapons is one of the things that makes Fallout such a fun game! None of the loadouts includes the coolest weapon in O:A, the Gauss rifle. You can get the rifle but only if you pass a speech test which I failed because I was only level 4. Why would you make an expansion with only one interesting new weapon, and then make it really hard to get? I should get to play with it the whole time! That's what I paid five dollars for!!! Stupid.

The coolest part is that you put together a squad of AI companions from a list of the usual soldier archetypes, a mister gutsy, or a sentry bot. I picked the sentry bot. This is cool until you realize that Fallout 3's weakest point is its piss-poor companion AI. You have no control over your team. You tell them when to attack and they do it until the mission is done. They kill things well enough, almost too well. The game is so easy I could have gone without them; there are health and ammo refills all over the place.

It didn't actually get hard until the end when you fight the Chinese general.

**Kinda Spoiler Alert**

The last part of the simulation is a raid against the Chinese stronghold. You run in to this last area together with a few U.S. soldiers in power armor (who's presence makes the game even easier) and in front of you is this general and some elite Chinese soldiers. You exchange some meaningless dialog and then the general attacks you, head on, with a sword. Well hes going to have a hard time against my gun! No, it turns out he's got more hit points than a whole pack of deathclaws. So I start shooting him but I don't have a lot of action points so I'm forced to fire outside of V.A.T.S.. I realize I'm taking a lot of damage but it doesn't look like he's hitting me. Suddenly I'm dead. I figure that maybe the Chinese soldiers are shooting me but when I target them they are green (friendly). I finally realize that it's my own fucking men shooting me! As I attempt to shoot the general they keep running through my line of fire, and when they get hit they turn on me! What kind of STUPIDMOTHERFUCKINGSHIT is that!? WHY ARE THEY EVEN THERE!?!? The Chinese soldiers aren't shooting at me so its not like they are protecting me. The whole thing is just to create the illusion of a battle. Sorry, but the illusion was shattered when a hand full of frag grenades failed to scratch the tiny oriental man who's only protection was a cotton uniform!! In order to beat it I had to run in circles around the battlefield so that the general couldn't hit me, waiting for my AP to recover so I could shoot him in V.A.T.S., so as not to accidentally hit any of my own men. If I were to summarize the experience it would be: Not. Fun. At. All.

Basically Operation: Anchorage takes all the things that makes Fallout 3 great and trows them out while accentuating the few crappy parts. If you think about it, an expansion where you get to go back and fight one of the pivotal battles of the war that destroyed the world should have been Amazing! Instead it's just a big disappointment. Just to make up for it I blew up Megaton three or four times. Awesome. Every. Time.

I'm taking a Fallout break and going back to Final Fantasy 13 for a while.

The Guns of Anchorage

Don't remember if I mentioned this but I grabbed two of the expansion packs for Fallout 3; Broken Steel and Operation: Anchorage. It appeared as though all the expansions were part of the weekly discount on XBLA at %50 off. Believing the discount to be temporary I readily added 1000 MS points to my account and picked two. I think it may be a permanent thing though because I checked the next week and they were still at the discounted price. I hadn't yet beaten the main game (I still haven't) so I put in a few hours with my main character who I plan to use for Broken Steel. If you are not aware it is a continuation of the main game, letting you play past the ending and raising the level cap to 30. For Operation: Anchorage I chose to use my evil character, and go strait the the expanded content right away. Making it across the map to get there was challenging at level 2, especially since I was used to playing at level 20+. It was actually refreshing to have a lone raider with an assault rifle be a credible threat and gingerly negotiating such an obstacle was actually fun. I'm at a point with my main character where I'm more or less moving down a checklist tying up loose ends before the last mission. It can be tedious.

Anyway the little bit of Anchorage that I've played has been fun. The whole thing is a simulation, a game within a game. The mechanics are stripped down for a faster moving experience which again is refreshing. you don't have to mess around with item management as much because it's a "game" so you refill your ammo and health at stations along your path. There are intel items to find as well, and grabbing all ten before the end of the simulation grants you a special perk.

I'd really like to get all the achievements for this game but that puts me in a position to have to buy The Pitt. They did that thing that they sometimes do to games with DLC. They added the achievements to the game whether you have the content or not. So you could get all 1000 points from the normal game and still have an annoying 250 keeping you from %100 completion. I guess most people don't care but I'd like to see %100 for certain games and now I have to pay extra for it. I don't really want to play The Pitt either, out of all five of the expansions it seems to be the least interesting. I'm much more interested in Mothership Zeta since it's the most different, and Point Lookout looks cool because I grew up in roughly that geographic area so it would be like playing in my post-apocalyptic back yard. Whee.

The Price of War

I beat Modern Warfare 2 on veteran yesterday, leaving me with just Fallout 3 to finish before I feel ready for Final Fantasy XIII. It was a satisfying win to be sure but I was surprised that it was not as difficult as I thought it would be. There were certainly some really hard levels. I mentioned Takedown in the last post and I feel I must bring up Contingency and Loose Ends as well. These three levels are exercises in pain. In a lower difficulty Contingency isn't that bad but on veteran you have to finish a certain part in a 3 minute time limit. This negates the essential strategy for beating veteran which is to go slow and take your time. For a level like Takedown it's a strategy you must employ but in Contingency you have to run through as fast as you can and I found myself doing something that bordered on trial and error, running through it 20+ times trying something a little different each time. Loose Ends is a level that just pisses me off, there's no other way to put it. It was a pain in the ass on regular and it was a rage inducing shit-fest on veteran. The whole level is a paper cut and lemon juice festival but the last segment is just one big kick-in-the-balls-cake with a big fuck-you-cherry on top. I'm not going to spoil it for you, if you've played it you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you haven't be prepared. I'm not kidding, the game literally gives you a big fuck-you at the end as a special thanks for playing.

Those three levels aside, it wasn't that hard. My basis for comparison is Call of Duty 2 in which every level is agonizing on hardened and up. I really like MW2 though. It may be the best shooter I've ever played. You feel like you are in a summer blockbuster, every second is a fantastic set-piece battle. Having gone through it twice I was still eager to go back and find all the intel items, which I did on recruit. Let me tell you, recruit is an entirely different game. Parts that on veteran would take you 30 minutes to slog through take 30 seconds as you execute a brisk walk through a raging firefight. The difficulty levels in a Call of Duty game are kind of like a spectrum ranging from arcade to simulation only instead of arcade having more enemies it has less which makes it not as fun. That's what they need for the next game, a mode with recruit level damage but a veteran or more level of enemies. I'd play it.

On a bitter-sweet note I just got 10 great cds for 30 bucks. The bitter sweet part is that it was from a going out of business sale for my favorite used cd store. Damn this recession, damn this recession to hell!

Preorder

A few days ago I preordered Final Fantasy XIII along with the collector’s edition guide book. I know this goes contrary to my normal practice of buying games more than a year after they come out and at a fraction of the price but part of the reason I do that is so every few years I can afford to buy the newest Final Fantasy game. The total between the game and the book will be over $90. Well worth it (hey I could have spent $120 on Tony Hawk Ride). Final Fantasy is the exception to my rule. Which rule? All of them. I am not the kind of person who gets excited easily. Things that get most people worked up to a frothing frenzy of joyous anticipation usually only manage to induce from me a shrug and a muttered "meh". But for Final Fantasy I am what could be modestly described as a fanboy. And to be a Final Fantasy Fanboy (or F3 if you will) you pretty much have to be unimpressed by things. You have to have an unhealthy amount of patience and the uncanny ability to distract yourself from diabolically long development times. FF13 has been in development since before 12 came out. That was in 2006. That was four years ago. It's a good thing the games are so long you can spend at least some of that time hooked up to the Final Fantasy intravenous drip, a few precious months where the black muddy cloud of life can be diluted by a water-color rainbow. When you're chasing the dragon the rest of the grime smeared world fades away behind you, your vision tunnels as if approaching the speed of light, and the ground falls away beneath you while you float without effort suspended by naught but your neurons in the humming syrupy aether. At this point the existence of self is barely credible, an argument held aloft by a chorus of laughing sub atomic particles mankind will forever lack the fortitude of spirit to discover.
So yeah, March 9th, woo-hoo.

My task now is to complete all of my other self imposed gaming obligations so that my plate will be squeaky clean for the advent. This will mostly consist of trying to finish Fallout 3 to a satisfactory extent. That last sentence is a fool’s errand in and of itself. Epic poems could be written about "finishing" a game like Fallout 3. The word "sisyphean" comes to mind. On top of that I've decided to try and beat Modern Warfare 2 on veteran. If you've read previous posts you have an idea of my relationship with Infinity Ward and their venerable franchise. Challenging their dreaded hard mode is an act of suicidal self destruction that has produced in me fits of rage so pure they result in memory loss and permanent increases in blood pressure. These are periods of my life where I can only recall the aftermath; as if I awoke to stumble from my basement storm shelter and found that my home was no longer there. They call it "veteran" instead of "hard" because you come out the other side with post-traumatic stress disorder; like you've lived through something that will be read about in textbooks by bored school children. No man knows how he will die, but for me I would put money on a Call of Duty-induced heart attack or stroke. The description for veteran says, "You will not survive". They are not talking about the game.

I'm optimistic though. I'm already half way through it and the hardest level of the game, "Takedown" is behind me. As for Fallout 3, if I just concentrate on completing the official missions I could feasibly be finished by the end of the month. But then there are the expansions and the temptation to play through again as an evil character... and then again as a neutral one...

Murder Simulator

So I've had time to log some hours on Fallout 3. I'm not going to speak about it from a review standpoint. It's enough to say that the game is more than sufficiently awesome. It is totally worth buying and playing. The only complaint I can think of is the jumping seems a little glitchy. But jumping really isn't an integral part of the game to the point where you could probably get through it without ever hitting the Y button. I guess I could also say that item collecting has become annoyingly repetitious. To explain, there is a lot of junk lying around for you to pick up and either use or sell. However, you have a limit to how much you can carry. This limit can be increased by raising your strength but ultimately it's still a limit. So really this boils down to a decision: do you take the time to run back and forth between the site where all of the items are and home base or do you grab only what you need and press on? Of course if you pass up the extra swag you may find yourself short on something vital later on, and if you do take the time you may find yourself at the end of a game session not much further than when you started. All of this just seems to add to the realism though. So I guess I have to go with "no complaints".

The cool thing about the game is what it lets you do. The Fallout series has always been great about giving you a lot of options in a world with plenty to do. Number 3 takes it to a whole new level. I could go on and on about all the nifty little things you can do, but instead I'm going to talk about killin'. Fallout is not a game about killing people. It certainly has a lot of features designed around killing and you can't really avoid it but that's not what the game is about. "Murder simulator" is a term I recently heard (read) used to describe Prototype, an action game that recently came out. From what I've seen, Prototype is about killing stuff, it's at the center of everything you do. In Fallout it's simply a means to an end. However, if your end happens to be killing people then you are in luck. The game can be converted from RPG to "murder simulator" with disturbing celerity.

I had been playing about 10 hours when I came upon a little house in a burned out neighborhood. Up until this point I had been playing "seriously", staying focused on the objectives and not really messing around. The house was the home of this woman who was living alone. I saw a knife sitting on the counter in the kitchen and thought, "I wounder if she'll get pissed if I pick it up?" She didn't do anything about it so I thought, "I wonder if she'll get pissed if I stab her to death with it?" Yeah, she didn't like that very much. Oh, she fought back of course but she was no match for my hit points and I just slashed away until she slumped to the floor dead. I searched her for loot and realized with surprise that if I stole her clothes it would leave her model lying in her underwear. A bit taken aback by this I did the only thing a decent person would... I stabed her a few more times. What happened? SHE KEPT ON BLEEDING! Even after being dead the models in this game continue to render damage and in gory detail. After a few more cuts her freaking arm came off!!!

Now I don't have a problem with this. In fact I think it's awesome. My question though is where is the public outcry over this game? Remember back when some guy made a big deal over the romantic elements of Mass Effect? I think he made up some bull shit about creating your own whore or something, and parents everywhere flipped their shit... and it wasn't even true! I have heard nothing about Fallout 3 being overly violent yet this is a game where you can murder someone, strip them to their underwear, and carve them up until they are nuggets! This is several steps beyond GTA. Has Jack Thomson seen this game? Am I just late to the party?

Anyway, great game. I look forward to logging a couple hundred hours on it and then playing through the game again as an "evil" person just so I can KILL EVERY BODY.

Update: Ultimate Sapphire Edition!

Time for some updates! That title was supposed to be a play on the Pokemon naming scheme and not have anything to do with the actual post but I just realized that it does:

A couple weeks ago I finally bought that new video card I wanted. The Radeon HD4650 as manufactured by... Sapphire! How do you like that? Anyway it works great although I've had some problems getting it to work with one of my monitors. The other half of the story is that I finally played Unreal 3. It looks awesome, I'm able to run it on the highest settings just fine. That's about the best thing I can say about the game though. It looks great and beyond that it's pretty much the old Unreal with maybe a few tweaks. there is a single player story now, but I couldn't bring myself to care about it though. A game like that doesn't really need a story. Before each match you are looking at a map of the planet with icons that represent the different battle locations. This suggests some sort of strategic campaign but disappointingly there really isn't one. Occasionally you get to choose to do an extra mission but other than that the progression is completely linear. Still, it's fun to play and I'm looking forward to creating some maps for it.

I found a copy of the Castlevania Double Pack for GBA... and this time I actually bought it. The Double Pack is a reissue of the hard-to-find Harmony of Dissonance and Aria of Sorrow. I justified the purchase buy telling myself I needed something for an upcoming trip I was taking. I responded by saying that I already have some GBA games I haven't spent enough time with. I responded to that by saying fuck you I'm buying it because I want it I don't need a good reason you jackass!

A few weeks later I used a remarkably similar justification (the "fuck you I want it" one) to buy Fallout 3. I may have mentioned that I tend to be about a year behind on new games. I don't like to drop $60 on a new release and I'm happy to play all the older (cheaper) games until the blockbusters come down in price. Speaking of Blockbuster, that's where I got it. Surprised? I was, when I saw it there for $40 used. I waited about a month before I actually picked it up, but once I saw that it was $15 cheaper there than it was at GameStop I was sold and it wouldn't be long until I found my way back there clutching a wad of bills.

That's it for now. I'll write up my impressions of Fallout 3 next time.