Fallout (PC)

10/27/08 - All the hype around Fallout 3 coming out this week got me feeling that I should really go back and finally take a decent shot at Fallout 1. My relationship with this game goes way back to the one that inspired it. There are a few games I've played in my 2 or 3 decades of gaming that stand out as memorable milestones. Two of them were Dungeon Master on the Atari ST and Starflight on the PC. (Just typing these titles still gives me shivers!) The third was a little game from Electronic Arts called Wasteland. It ran on 2 360K floppy disks on a 4MHz PC with CGA graphics running MS-DOS 2.1. I don't think it even used a mouse. But the story was simply magnificent. You started with a party of post-apocalyptic adventures kitted out in nothing more than leather jackets and pistols. Over the course of the game, we (Di played too) took our party to the radiated corners of the South West, upgrading finally to suits of power armor. Battles in this game were contests of vast inventories of guns of all types, rocket launchers, and particle beams. (I'll never forget the image in my mind of our little party, running desperately low on ammo, most of its members severely injured, finally killing a giant mechanized scorpion in the streets of a nuked Las Vegas with our last LAWS rocket.)

When I heard that Fallout was sort of a sequel/upgraded version of Wasteland, I was thrilled! But, when I found out it was a single character afair, I lost interest immediately. The party dynamic was what had really captured my interest in Wasteland and here it was gone. So, I never got into it or the next one, Fallout 2. But now that Fallout 3 is being hailed as GotY material (or the second coming, depending on who you read), I figured it was time to let bygones be bygones and see what it has to offer.

First off, I forgot how rudimentary the old games seem by today's standards. I've gotten so used to the first 1/2 hour of the game being a tutorial that I just jumped right in. Little did I know the tutorial was in the manual. Also, this is almost as old-school as you can get. The game is not "real-time", but turn-based even though you can move with the mouse. It's going to take some getting used to, but I think it is going to be fun - or at least a good experience.

Dead Rising (Xbox 360)

10/27/08 - If ever there was a game to give die-hard fans of (the original) "Dawn of the Dead" wet dreams, THIS is that game! I've only started to get into this one and I'm loving it already. It's zombie madness meets "Groundhog Day". The sheer quantity of the undead is staggering. And the detail on the zombies is unreal - I caught a picture of a zombie boy and it looked like a still from a movie. I'll admit that the criticisms leveled at it are understandable - only 1 save slot, few "save" locations, and having to restart if you die. But in a weird way, it's ok. The single save and, especially, having to restart if you die, gives the game a sense of danger that you miss in a game where you can just quick-save every few feet. Here, if you mess up, your are toast - end of story and it all starts over, like you are trapped in a hell of the undead. But, it's not totally without mercy - you get to keep your upgraded abilities from game to game. I can see that if I stay with it for a long time, I'll try to figure out some way of keeping it from resetting my character if I'm getting close to the end. Also, while I haven't heard much about the Wii version of this, I don't expect it will be well received. It will have to have fewer zombies, less detail, and (I fear) nerfed game mechanics.

Halo (XBox)

10/16/08 - The day Halo 3 came out, I decided it was time that I got my butt in gear and actually played through Halo 1. As of this writing, that was over a year ago. I played the beginning of the game a few times before; a couple of starts on the Xbox and one on the PC version. In both instances, I remember having a terrible time controlling the vehicles. Ultimately, I think that's what made me stop playing it. It's not a difficult game, thanks to plenty of available ammo and frequent check/save points.

For some reason, I didn't have any problems with the Warthogs this time. Maybe I'm getting better at handling gamepads. As I got deeper into the game, I remember feeling a bit chagrined when I got to the point in the game where Cortana says the structure is called *gasp* Halo! Sad that I hadn't ever even gotten to that point on my previous runs.

If I have any criticisms of the game, it's that at this point, I'd have liked to see more outdoor environments. I've been cooped up in concrete structures for what seems like forever. I want to see more of the "Ringworld". However, I did have one cool point fighting in the "bunkers": I was in one of the hanger looking areas, coming around a storage box, when 3 or 4 Covenant's started firing at me from behind two shields. At first, I thought they were piled in a doorway, so I lobbed a grenade toward the door. But it was actually a wall. The grenade ricocheted off the wall, landed behind the shields, and blew all of them up! Bodies flew everywhere! It reminded me of the first time in I put a rocket through window in Doom. Ah, good times!

I just got to the point in the game where I'm finding out that the Covenant is being attacked by something on Halo too. Those sort of walking fleshy, creepy things are disturbing, as are the little floor crabs. (What? Silent Halo? Halo-Life?) At the start of this area, there was one of those instances where you're not really sure what you should do. You open a door and sitting against a wall is a soldier (I think he was, anyway) who is clearly nuts. He shouts that he doesn't want to "become one of those things" and warns you to stay back or he'll shoot. Well, you have to go past him and, true to his threat, he starts firing. Now, Master Chief is a "good guy", this dope is not in his right mind, and the bullets aren't exactly doing any damage since you have the power armor. So, what do you do? And does it make any difference later? Who knows? Well, I decided to leave him alone. Chances were pretty good, I figured, that he was going to be killed and/or eaten by something running around there. These are not the kind of moral decisions you had to make back in the days of Berzerk.

Lego Indiana Jones (DS)

10/16/08 - I got into Lego games in the same way a lot of folks did - the first Star Wars one. Who would have thought that a crappy franchise like Lego (good toys, lousy games) would turn out such a winner? I loved both Star Wars games (and played through them too!) and started playing the Lego Indy game for the Wii with John on his last visit. However, handheld success hasn't been so forthcoming. I tried to play both GBA Lego Star Wars games and couldn't really keep with either. I was either getting killed constantly (not a real setback, but annoying), getting lost, or just got tired of seeing the same boring scenery. When I saw this one, I figured I'd give it a try. At first I was a little apprehensive that it would just recycle the same levels from the Wii/PS2/etc versions. Well, it does use parts of the same cut-scenes, but the levels, from what I've seen so far, are all different - and in some cases, more enjoyable IMHO.

Truthfully, it's a very simple game. I've already gotten through the first "movie" and am half-way through the second. But, unlike it's mini-ancestors, this one has really fun levels. It really shows how much more powerful the DS is over the GBA. I will say that the touch screen didn't get used much in the design. Almost all the things you need to do other than fight and jump, can be done with a press of the Action button (A?). When I first started playing, I would use the stylus to "draw" Indy's whip. Something of a pain that breaks the flow of the action. Now I just press the A button. You can do that for lots of other actions, but not for anything that involves the microphone (ie, blowing) or turning cranks. Neither happen too often and I like blowing out torches. ;) One interesting change is that you can have more than 2 characters at your disposal during missions. During the second movie, I have the chick, the kid and Indy, but I can only have 2 out at a time. If I need a different one, I just have to select him/her from the bottom screen. The other thing I didn't expect happened during the end fight of the first movie. I'd seen red platforms during the game before, but I didn't know that you could stand on them and change the character to a monkey so you could access areas via vines. I thought you needed to bring in a character with a monkey at another time (like when you come back to try to get more secret items). This taught me, although I wish I had caught on sooner, to keep an eye on the bottom screen for context sensitive options.