Batrock

It looks, my friends, like I have exhausted Fallout 3‘s usefulness. I was enjoying the character interactions – and you’ll get at least one more case study out of me in the form of Tenpenny Tower, which fairly well disembowelled me on Monday – but it seems like all of the missions I now have are in the form of “go to a ruin, fight super mutants, obtain a valuable item”. The exploration aspect of the game was initially charming, but it’s starting to drag.

This is, of course, entirely my fault. I should have paid more and proper attention to the story, rather than wondering why a tiny place like Andale has more interesting characters and stories to tell than the safest place in the world, Rivet City. An open ended game has many devious tools to distract me (and that was ironically my problem with GTA IV: it completely lacked proper or worthy distractions), and distracted I have been.

Basically, what I’m saying is after 35 hours I’m tiring of the experience. It’s all just become so much treasure hunting and I’m going to have to find Liam Neeson and save society so I can go back to watching anime, or playing … Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. That’s right, baby! Set expectation levels to “you’d better not disappoint me, Rare, or else“!

Funny thing is, I was really keen on Oblivion at first, too, and my enthusiasm severely waned when variety gave way to monotonous trips to Hell. At least the people in Fallout 3 don’t have four different voices each. At least I’m not as invested in the whole thing as Shamus. Maybe I really am just terrible at enjoying video games now?

Having suffered a literal crash course in the mythology of Fallout, my play through of the third series is more informed by its spiritual predecessor, Oblivion, than by its more obvious antecedents. Where Oblivion’s environs were samey and boring, with needlessly twisting dungeons and insurmountably steep terrain, Fallout 3 benefits from flat, desolate lands, dotted with interesting locales. What’s more, the whole experiment has character about it, and doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Today we’ll study the case of the tiny town of Andale, proud recipient of the “Best Town” award every year … forever.

Contains spoilers for Andale, a tiny part of the game you’re not likely to see unless you look really hard!

Continue Reading »

I got caught up, as I sometimes do, in a fever. Fallout fever. I had to have it, so I went out and bought it. Paid freakin’ $90 for the thing. I never pay so close to full price for a video game. I am renowned for my collection of unplayed, cut-price video games. I can afford not to play them because they were all cheap enough for there to be many of them. It means I rarely catch the zeitgeist, but if there’s anything I’ve learned from the internet it’s that the zeitgeist is full of flames and crimes against grammar and spelling.

Karma is the universal law of “what goes around comes around”. It’s what got Jason Lee hit by a truck instead of winning $100,000. The problem with karma is it sees everything. It’s even got a precedent in RPGs: I know firsthand that in Ultima V many actions affected your karmic rating (and because I was about seven or something, almost always for the worse). So now it springs at us in Fallout 3.

It goes above and beyond the Paragon and Renegade system of Mass Effect, and I’m not really sure what I think of that. I think it’s perfectly reasonable that you get different receptions from people when you say “Nice to meet you” rather than “Well up yours too, buddy!”, but I’ve got a little problem: why is it that I can’t be nice to someone’s face, and then steal all of their stuff and wreck their shit when they’re not looking without getting penalised? You know, like in real life? I went to a bar, said hello to the family that ran the place, then I went out back and attempted to hack their computer (and another thing: I have no idea how computer hacking works in this game. I wish I was playing Pipe Dream … over and over and over …). I failed, I got negative karma. I reloaded my save.

I mentioned it before when I spoke about being a dick in Mass Effect, that I like being nice to people in video games where I’m given the choice. At the same time, because this game has a different scope, I’m counterbalancing it with my intense desire to steal all of their stuff. These two actions are directly tied to my perception in the game world, so to continue playing as the Post-Nuclear Envoy of Peace and Love, I can’t go around secretly doing evil shit.
In writing that, I just realised I’ve ruined my chances of ever being elected to high office.

There’s no left and right, up and down choice wheel here, though, although the tone of what you’re saying is clear. Your character doesn’t get fully voiced like Shepard did, so the choice of dialogue you make is exactly what the person hears, rather than Shepard’s artistic licence. Unlike in Oblivion, your character is given a history (more accurately, her family is given a history), but Clarabell feels much more impersonal than LL Shepard, my red-headed universe saving avatar, ever did.

Of course, I still don’t want people to think poorly of me, so there must be a level of projection. Certainly more than there ever was in Oblivion, where I essentially spat on everyone I could and they continued to love me unless they were railroaded by the script into hatred of my good self. Thus far I’ve only witnessed one action that had consequences, and I was so unhappy with what I had wrought that I had to reload to wash the blood of the innocent and idealistic off my hands.

Hopefully I’ll be able to play the game as I see fit, if there are instances when a response that would garner a positive karmic reaction seems inappropriate. Heck, diplomacy could only take me so far in Mass Effect before I got angry at the people trying to take my guns and I actively threatened them. A nuclear wasteland is rather different to intergalactic peace missions and incredibly boring dune-buggy travels, so maybe Clarabell will have to harden up and bust some skulls.

Side note: Fallout 3 features perks at every second level, that up certain stats or abilities and what have you. One of these is “Nerd Rage!”, described thusly:

You’ve been pushed around long enough! With the Nerd Rage! perk, your Strength is raised to 10 and you gain 50% to damage resistance whenever your Health drops to 20% or below.

Not naming any names, but that’s hilarious not just to the industry in general, but to the Fallout scene in particular. I may have laughed out loud when I read it in the manual on the train.

I’ve fallen on that old mainstay: the bait and switch. Thing is, Fallout might be a great game, but there’s no way I can know. I refuse to play it, because the damn thing won’t let me save. When big games like Fallout 3 are released, sometimes it’s the done thing to rerelease the ancient IP of the franchise in a cheap fashion.

So there I was, with my $18 collection of Fallouts 1, 2 & Tactics. I started up the game, and was impressed by the opening. It was very much like Bioshock, albeit eleven years ago. A fifties styled post-apocalypse is an effective apocalypse indeed: just ask Indiana Jones and his fridge.

I played the game for an hour, and cursed the days when there was no sort of configuration instructions held within the game, firing up the PDF manual and frequently consulting it (but still taking a year to figure out how to run). Then I saved it and went to bed.

The following day, I returned to the good people of Dark Sand, or wherever they lived (wherever it was, they were plagued by radscorpions, who wore hypercolour shirts). Being an obsessive saver, I went and talked to a few people, then attempted to save.

No dice.

Error Saving Game! You cannot save your game.

Yeah, well, this is an RPG, and I can’t rocket propel any grenade unless I can save the damned thing first. There seems to be a lack of documentation as to how to solve this problem, short of uninstalling and reinstalling.

I did that.

No dice.

Over the weekend, I might reattempt to fix the accursed game, and once again become a spunky Soviet gymnast spy girl. I’m telling you, if I can’t do that, what chance do I ever have of becoming a dog killa?

In honour of my graduation tomorrow, and the discovery of everything that is good and bad about the internet, I present Rock-afire Explosion‘s “cover” of Arcade Fire’s “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)”:

Yeah, uh … yeah. Strangely hypnotic and also, of course, terrifying. Thanks(?) to Bob Mackey for this knowledge.

Believe it or not, this is not simply laziness in place of something real (laziness is not posting anything for the majority of a month). I think that this video represents what the internet is designed for: sometimes you see something so simply, incredibly weird that it has to be passed along. A lot of the things that I look at on the internet are “discovered” by other people; I lead a second or third hand existence on the computer because I don’t have the patience to sift through all of the noise to get to the crux of the matter. Most of the time, I don’t even see what other people have brought to my attention.
Youtube, to me, represents time, and while I can devote hours to a video game, a movie, a TV series, somehow giving just five or six minutes to a video on the internet seems just like so much effort. Still, singing bears with soulless eyes can somehow pierce me to the core.

In one presidential term’s time, the economy has failed completely. With massive inflation, many have turned to lives of crime, and the prison system is now an overloaded and privatised industry where the inmates are forced to race each other to the death for their freedom. Man, that’s one angry homo.

Continue Reading »

Congratulations, America, for putting in the man I thought was right for the job. The wind was taken out of my sails with the news that Proposition 8 passed, but I’ll get over it. Maybe by the time I want to get gay married, it will be a possibility.

One more time, America: don’t forget to vote today, and to vote no on Proposition 8.

It is your civic duty, and I will be very angry with you if you don’t honour it.

It would be a bad idea for Batrock.net to suddenly become some sort of political platform but, as I’ve said, this is a pretty dang important week in American politics. This being the case, I’d like to take the opportunity to suggest that, if you’re Californian, you vote “no” on Proposition 8.
That’s the proposition that was originally called the “California Marriage Protection Act”. Marriage is in trouble? From what? Dolphins, no doubt. Yeah, I’d vote yes on that, it’s a valuable institution. That title was a bit vague, so it’s been renamed: Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry.

Oh, right. I’m a bit less certain about eliminating that right. This would appear to be another partisan issue, but we all know there are some secret and not so secret gay republicans. One of the most amusing parts of this campaign was the co-founder of “dating” site Manhunt resigning over the revelation that he had donated to McCain’s campaign.
Anyway, that’s why I’m surprised (but also pleased) to find that Arnold Schwarzenegger is against the proposition. If it takes celebrity endorsements to convince you of something, then they can tell you that Proposition 8 is far and away from the right direction for America and, by extension, the world.

Certainly, there’s a slippery slope argument: “if we allow gays to marry each other, what next? We’ll allow people to marry their pets! Paedophiles to marry their prey! Brothers to marry their sisters! Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!” (This is also known as the “Katy Perry Effect”)
I’m almost positive that society does not actually work that way, and that such people are far larger statistical anomalies and could certainly recognise the stigma of their actions. There are forms of self-loathing that nothing can scrub away, and I’m not convinced that homosexuality is either one of them or a floodgate for legitimately repugnant activities.

Tonight I made the mistake of going into the internet moral dead zone of conservative blogs, which is something that I used to subject myself to all the time a scant eighteen months ago. You know why we shouldn’t let gay people marry? It just ain’t right. I’m sold. I actually saw one argument against gay marriage being that one politician had proposed easier access to tests for STDs. Clearly, people shouldn’t be getting STDs at all, so there’s no need to test for them: if they get them, it’s their own dang fault.

Seriously, in reality: gay people, except for those at the Folsom Street Fair, are exactly the same as everyone else. Maybe I don’t personally want to get married at this very moment, but why not let others? How does allowing them to marry affect you? It seems to me that a lot of “concerned parents” want their children to live sheltered lifestyles, where sex of any kind won’t occur to them until their wedding night – and if they find out that their partner is actually the wrong gender for them, too late! They’re already bound in the unbreakable contract of marriage, ’til death do they part. This is essentially not how the world operates at all: these sorts of things are going to happen, whether it is liked or not, whether or not the behaviour is taught, and a society conducive to people not hating themselves and praying for suicide is the kind of society that I approve of.

This is not simply about eliminating the right of same-sex couples to marry: it is another kind of slippery slope into a deep and scary “don’t ask, don’t tell” world, where children grow up knowing nothing of reality. If they hear of these mythical “homosexuals”, they will only know them as horrid beasts who conduct immoral lifestyles. All of these worries about schools “teaching” gay marriage are illogical: a school should not make a moral judgement in the imparting of knowledge. I do not recall any of my history teachers explicitly labelling Hitler “evil”. Gay marriage existing will lead to the acknowledgement that gay marriage exists, which of course leads to the acknowledgement that gay people exist. For whatever reason, we can’t be having with that.
In typing that, I realised that America is also the country where evolution is also a term that’s not allowed within fifty feet of so many schools. Education may be condemned as a Godless liberal pursuit, but sometimes I’m inclined to think that the Christian Right is winning. Religion has no place in government, but I’m not going to condemn its very existence. Proposition 8 encroaches on my livelihood, and countless other people like me, who are almost certainly better at maintaining that livelihood than I am. This is playing with people, here, and it’s not an acceptable way to conduct a nation.

I forgot to mention that several churches have publicly opposed Proposition 8 because of its denigration of humanity. I salute these organisations.

Always useful resource Towleroad has collected much information on Proposition 8 in this handy post, including PSAs by Samuel L. Jackson, Kathy Griffin, and the aforementioned Republicans Against 8 ad. Proposition 8 may be a California only Proposition, but it has wider reaching implications. I’m making an appeal to humanity here.

If this is incoherent, it’s because I’m tired, but it’s important that you vote No on Proposition 8 if the responsibility is in your hands.

It’s difficult for me to maintain interest in many games long enough to finish them. It’s difficult for me to maintain interest in many games to take them beyond the point of having bought them, honestly. Yet some games, they unlock a power within me. A power I bring upon myself: the power of the masochist.
Bully is one such game – even though it got marvellous reviews when it came out, to me it was Grand Theft Auto without most of the fun, style or coherence.

I played the “Scholarship Edition” for 360, which is probably the first time anyone in Australia bothered to play it because when it came out as Canis Canem Edit for PS2, noone knew what it was and it was almost immediately discounted. Even as a 360 game it was released at cut price, and I got it for $40. Does that make it eight times better than Condemned? Heck no.

Continue Reading »