New Vegas: Dead Money: an accurate title

I have played and finished the expansion pack for Fallout: New Vegas, "Dead Money".  My initial verdict is that it is terrible.  There is just no way around this.  We are presented with a game that is trying so hard to be "Bioshock" that it hurts.  The Fallout games have always been open-world games where you are given free reign to solve your problems and explore as you see fit, but Dead Money warps the experience into one so linear that you wonder if you're even playing the same game any more.

The first offence the game commits is by trapping the player in a "Plot device" explosive collar.  For some reason you cannot remove it (even if you have the repair skill necessary to remove any other such collar you encounter in the game) and even when it does get removed it's never explained why or how.  You are then tasked with hunting down the three people who will aid you in your quest: to break in to the legendary Sierra Madre ("Mother Mountain" in Spanish) casino. 

The casino was built by an eccentric industrialist (of whom we already have one in New Vegas, apparently they liked Nevada) and is of course hiding all sorts of dirty secrets.  It's also hiding some truly terrible video game clichés.  From invulnerable enemies to atrocious platforming action in an engine so unsuited to platforming it isn't even funny, to arbitrary roadblocks and railroading so obvious I'm surprised there isn't a porter around somewhere.

The characters you are tasked to meet up with are perhaps the only bright spots of the game; the first is a Super-mutant who suffers from severe Dissociative Identity Disorder manifesting as two distinct personalities, Dog and God.  Dog is a savage brute whose intelligence hovers somewhere between Idiot and Low-grade Imbecile, to use the technical terms, while God is intelligent (even erudite) and, while capable of reason, displays deeply antisocial tendencies. 

The second is Dead Domino, a lounge singer from before the war who survived and became a Ghoul -a different type of mutant ravaged by radiation exposure and other bits of flaky but reasonable enough science.  He has a truly hideous appearance but, like all of his kind also has a very long lifespan, hence his survival.  He can provide quite a lot of insight as he actually knew the man who created the Casino, but he's been conspiring to rob it since before the war.

The third is a woman named Christine, found in an Auto-doc, (a kind of automatic surgical appliance).  She may be a normal human but has been mutilated by the same individual who is using the player character to facilitate the robbery of the casino, and suffers severe psychological trauma as well as physiological changes.  She is, however, least annoying of the three as a companion, and perhaps the most useful, although Dean comes in a close second for his special ability.

The abilities of all the companions, as with the companions in vanilla New Vegas, bolster the abilities of the Player Character.  Depending on how you deal with Dog and God, one of the two personalities will be in control while he follows you, and each provides its own benefit.  God's is arguably the most useless, giving the PC a boost to their stealth abilities and helping them avoid traps, but there isn't much point to sneaking around the Sierra Madre nor are the traps especially deadly -the overwhelming bulk of them are rusty old bear traps with the occasional deadfall thrown in for flavour. 

Dog has his own unique trait, which is that he will eat your fallen enemies.  This is useful because the only true enemy you encounter are "ghost people" -former labourers wearing environment suits who have been effected by the toxic fog that envelops the Casino.  They have been granted a regenerative ability by the fog and will rise again if struck down, unless they meet a particularly violent end.  Given the fairly accurate portrayals of the results of combat in the game, it's highly likely that you'll meet this requirement about half the time anyway, and even if not it makes things no more complex than caving the skull of each one with a tire iron as they fall.  They are not particularly interesting enemies, their only sounds are those of laboured breathing through the filters of their environment suits (They have been caked with 200 years' filth!), their blood is a pale green, and they carry only crude melee weapons or heavy IEDs fashioned from fire extinguishers.  In spite of being described as "Hard to kill", their ability to take damage is ultimately capped by the hit points of any given limb, as they are actually so fragile that, unlike anything else, when one limb is depleted of Hit Points, it falls off, killing them.  In all honesty it would have been far more interesting if they survived this limbing and only ultimately gave up their pursuit if they sustained massive cranial trauma or similar organ trauma.  Something that endures tremendous punishment is more believable than something that "dies" only to rise again, at full health.  It should be noted that, while their total hit points are restored if they are allowed to rise, their limbs retain any damage taken before their psedodeath, so killing them is often a matter of shooting them in the foot.

The fog itself is ill-explained and beggars belief, being designed to fill the need of something by whose agency the designers can herd the player around.  It poisons you if you're in it, and it's often placed in inconvenient areas.  There is no protection against it (although the logs you find suggest the environment suits the ghost people wear were at least once effective against it, no explanation is ever given why you can't strip one of them beyond the suits being "difficult to remove") and as far as I can tell it is the only reason the game suggests you be level 20 to play the module -simply so you'll have a deep reserve of hit points to waste whilst you faff about in it.  Being in the company of Dean Domino allows you to endure the fog briefly, and increases you ability to endure it even when it begins to harm you.

The other major player-herdsman (outside of unpickable locked doors) are simple loudspeakers scattered around the casino, whose activity somehow interferes with the explosive collars.  The explanation given is technobabble so poorly done I was expecting to have to re-calibrate a main deflector dish at some point!  Simply enough, if the player is too near to one, for too long, they die.  The mechanic is very poorly implemented and frustrating, especially since some of the speakers are "Vandal-proof" which somehow enables them to shrug off several rounds of armour-piercing .308 rifle ammunition fired from a military rifle.  In other words they are indestructible, and can only be dealt with the way the designers intended, which is, often enough, not at all. 

The game at times feels like Bioshock, with the mad industrialist villain, his suffering love interest, of whom we are given a holographic vision.  It could only have tried harder to invoke Bioshock if she were a showgirl instead of a singer.  The primary source of resources are vending machines that dispense items endlessly in exchange for the casino chips found scattered about.  Enemies do not drop them but they can be gambled with thanks to the automated gambling facilities (thanks to the holographic staff) so in theory quite a lot of resources could be obtained, especially if you have very high luck.  Even the player being guided by a radio link to a character whose intentions are unclear sparks of Bioshock, a game which was originally accused of ripping off Fallout's aesthetic.  There's even a chance to hijack security turrets to fight on your side!  We've got weirdly durable guys in environment suits, all we need is creepy, unkillable children!  Oh, wait, that's Fallout 3.

One thing Dead Money doesn't borrow from Bioshock is a deep arsenal.  While in Bioshock you had what was basically the bog-standard FPS weapon array of Melee--Pistol--Shotgun--Full-Auto--Sniping Weapon--Rocket Launcher--BFG backed up with a really clever series of psychokinetic and preternatural abilities, Dead Money saddles you with a few uninteresting melee weapons (the best one I ever found was a tire iron!) including a knife you can do things to for no great benefit, and two shameful firearms.  The first is an old Colt police pistol with the rear sights ground off, and a BAR clone so comically inaccurate I ultimately downloaded a mod that let it hit what it was pointing at!  You are also given a powerful energy rifle called the "Holorifle", but as my character did not specialize in Energy Weapons I didn't get much use out of it.  It's possible an Energy-capable character would have found it useful, but combat wasn't that trying even with the shamefully poor choice of weapons.  I eventually found a 9mm pistol but I had long ago broken down all my 9mm ammunition for the powder and primers to make Jacketed  Flat-Point round for my .357 pistol.  Given that combat never takes place at range, it was much better to stick to the harder-hitting Magnum.  The BAR found use once, and then never again had enough ammunition to be a viable option. 

Ultimately Dead Money is a marginally interesting story with some excellent characters (Although you almost certainly kill two of them out of their outright hostility, in one nod to tradition you are allowed to dispatch or not any plot character, even if not immediately), told by way of a bunch of awful gameplay elements  for a mildly interesting reward.  The added items are only mildly interesting, especially if you choose not to modify the BAR to be a useful weapon, do not seem to provide a compelling reward to most players, and the thousands of pounds of gold bars we cannot escape with all of seem to exist to smack us with a heavy-handed lesson about greed in a game set in Las Vegas where your primary occupation is killing people to take their things.

Fallout: New Vegas

I have withheld my opinion on Fallout: New Vegas thus far, so that I might get a proper appreciation for it.  My initial response was overwhelmingly positive, and I wanted to make certain that that response stuck, before I went on about it here.

It is safe to say that it is still quite positive.  It is not without caveats, however, so let us get them out of the way first.  The game is buggy as all Hell.  This is a grand tradition for the Fallout series, and one that is not as appreciated as the over-the-top violence or black humour (which makes a welcome return after the overly dry Fallout 3).  The opening moments of the game, where you build your character, did not progress properly for me.  I had to fight my way through them, but eventually was able to play.  However sounds were not syncing up correctly, a problem for which I found the only remedy at the time was to elevate the New Vegas process to "Above Normal" priority in the Task Manager.  This made the audio behave correctly, but slowed the game down, and caused momentary lock-ups of ten to fifty seconds every five minutes or so.  I am a dedicated enough Fallout fan that I fought through the game this way for several days before I found another fix -involving a patch for a completely different game, from a third party, which, mysteriously, fixed the problem.  I also had to do some other tweaking.  Keep in mind that my computer is a rather old single-core machine, and while it has 4 GB of RAM and a thoroughly modern graphics adapter, there is only so much it can be expected to do.

Problems aside, the game improves vastly on Fallout 3.  First of all is the opening.  The tedious Vault sequence is gone, as are the metros and most of the waist-high picket fences that rendered them unavoidable.  It is a vast leap of logic that someone with a sledgehammer and a LAW rocket cannot somehow bypass a wooden fence (such a fence made me give up on the quest in Fallout 3 to reach the National Archives, since it would have required yet another trek into the metro), yet it is not too far a leap of logic for a mountain face to be unclimbable from a certain side.  However many mountains that are unclimbable do not appear as though they should be, although it is not quite as bad as the debris piles in Fallout 3 that were sometimes not even as tall as the player, and covered in convenient handholds.  The unpleasant sting of running into a blatant invisible wall remains.

The weapons are much more realistic and satisfying to use, and there is a greater variety in both weapons and ammunition.  While there are still some gripes, such as .357 and .44 magnum rifles that use pistol rounds, there is nothing along the lines of the absurdity of the Fallout 3 "Hunting Rifle" that used .32 calibre pistol rounds.  The variety is quite refreshing, with several different submachineguns and pistols as well as many different lever- and bolt-action rifles, which makes sense as these are common arms that one would expect ordinary citizens to own and thus be prolific.  The most important thing, however, is that every one of them, from the Browning Hi-Power you are handed at the very start, to the incredibly powerful anti-material rifle you can find, are satisfying to use.  The game now models proper iron sights for most guns, as opposed to Fallout 3's "zoom in a bit" aiming, and each weapon actually has a different sight picture, such that how easily they are aimed becomes a genuine factor in choosing your arms -just as it is in real life.  You can, of course, still shoot from the hip, but you will be less accurate.

Being something of a firearms nerd, I could go on for several more paragraphs, about how the ability to re-load your spent casings is so enjoyable, and about how it's quite satisfying to find that a .45/70 Government round kills most things in one shot -as you'd expect it to, but instead we shall talk about the plot.  Fallout: New Vegas' plot is 180 degrees opposed to Fallout 3's non-plot, which only re-hashed the plots of Fallout 1 and 2 (they quite literally took the plots of both games, shook them up like a cocktail, and called the results a plot -instead of saving your vault from thirst and becoming an exile for doing so, but ultimately saving humanity by ending the mutant threat, you become an exile from your vault to find your father so he can save the wasteland from thirst with the GECK from Fallout 2, and in doing so save humanity by ending the mutant threat, AND saving them from thirst at the same time, even though thirst isn't even a threat when you consider you can build a water filter capable of removing radiation from water out of simple materials) New Vegas' plot has you a courier mixed up in a huge plot for the control of a major civilization centre.  You're shot in the head and left for dead, but a mysterious benefactor saves you.  There are far more possible draws into the story line, especially for those of use who chose to role-play their character as more self interested -if you act in your own self interest, it's quite reasonable to want to find out why you were shot, and quite understandable to seek revenge upon the party who shot you.

In addition to more possible draws, there are more possible outcomes.  While I haven't finished the game yet, it is quite clear I can cast my allegiances with any of several groups who are vying for power, or even shake things up by seizing power for myself.  Another winning moment is the discovery that while one of the groups is clearly more "evil" than the others, amongst the remainder are no clear "good guys" with whom you should side, and that the main plot is only one of several true moral choices that are encountered by the player for their character to make.  In fact even the most "evil" of groups have leaders you can speak to, and stories behind them, that make it clear that be they unwholesome and in some cases despicable, they are still people, not just mindless enemies.

Of dubious use are a few new features that nonetheless serve to deepen the game; you can now disguise yourself as a member of certain factions by wearing their uniforms or signature styles of dress.  This can be useful for certain endeavours, but at other times it can be crippling, as many of these disguises are otherwise useful suits of armour of some sort that you might want to wear sheerly for protection.  It is quite possible to inadvertently provoke violence by wearing the wrong clothes, and, due to the virtue of almost everyone being killable (a quite commendable feature in an open-world game) and your NPCs being competent trigger men,  mung up quite a few quests, in addition to possibly permanently attracting the ire of the faction you wronged.  There is now also a "hardcore" mode that makes certain, subtle changes that aim for a more realistic game -you require food, water, and sleep, almost everything has weight (except the money of all sorts, and certain quest items or items whose weight would be incalculably small such as cigarette ends and hypos of drugs), and if you find yourself crippled it will take more than the jab of a hypo to cure yourself of your condition.  (strangely, if you find empty hypos, they weigh a pound a piece!  They must be glass-and-metal horse-euthanizing antiques to weight that much!)

Ultimately Fallout: New Vegas is an exceedingly good time; it is what Fallout 3 should have been and feels connected to the Fallout universe in a way Fallout 3 only tried too hard to be.  It is not without flaws, but it is a worthwhile experience.  The flaws do not immediately strike you, nor are they glaring (technical flaws aside -they can be overcome), and things happen much more naturally.  If you're a fan of the series, or of FPS and RPG games, or post-apocalyptic media, you should definitely purchase it; it will be an enjoyable experience. 

I have played Minecraft!

I have played Minecraft.  I would have to say it is some of the best gaming dollars I ever laid out; up there with the likes of Doom and the Fallout games.  It is ingenious in its concept and execution, and it is only in an alpha stage.  I do have to wonder if it is the sort of game that will end up in perpetual alpha stage.  It is after all, largely the work of one man, and while the depths of genius are more or less untenable, there are hard and fast limits on how much work one man can do.

All concerns aside, however, what we have on our hands is a sheerly brilliant game.  It is one part Dwarf Fortress, one part Garry's Mod, and one part Lego.  The graphics are a mix of rudimentary and refined, with true 3-D environments to explore, albeit simple ones made of uniform square blocks bearing the crudest of sprite art.  That art, however, shares functional brilliance with other severely limited games, such as the early Super Mario games, where smart character design led to a recognizable, proportionate sprite that became a cultural icon.

Unlike Dwarf Fortress, which rivals Ashton-Tate's Dbase for command complexity, Input in Minecraft is streamlined to such an extent that it becomes a game one can quickly play with muscle memory; any task the player may need his avatar to perform are performed with either a right or a left click, and a simple inventory.  For such limited means, the player has an extreme degree of control over his environment.  With a few exceptions, everything in view can be demolished, and nearly all of it can be placed again, according to the player's whim and the few simple rules of physics the game imposes on it.  For instance "solid" materials do not obey the laws of physics, and remain where they are placed indefinitely, unless destroyed, while fluids and loose materials such as sand will spill and fall. 

A recent update to the game introduced some simple items that vastly expand upon what can be done, all without adding complexity to the interface.  A new type of material allows simple electric circuits to be made, which can be as simple as turning on a light or detonating dynamite, to as complex as the creation of a full arithmetic unit -the basic building block of the modern, multi-purpose computer.  What remains to be seen is how deep these simple materials will eventually be able to affect the core game-play of exploration and construction, for while the circuitry is ingenious, besides creating elaborate display pieces, the circuits do not immediately make easier the tasks the player undertakes, as do most of the other discoveries.  For instance the first discoveries are the most meaningful -the shapes of tools, the first stones to make strong tools, uses for coal, smelting, and the higher metals.  All these things greatly increase the ability of the player to explore more efficiently and gain more resources.  The circuitry, however, as it stands, remains a fascinating, yet not immediately useful toy.  That said, ingenious players have done impressive things with it, and new uses are being discovered.  It doesn't detract from the game in any way, however, as the "Lego" element in the game encourages creation for its own sake, and the more materials available to do so with increase the enjoyment to be had in such creations.

Minecraft is hours of good fun, and, at press time, costs a scant ten Euro.  The purchase of such a license is indefinite, and entitles the purchaser to full rights for the final release, which will cost more.  So it is worth it to buy it now.  I would even say with conviction, that, at present, even if the game never passes the beta stage, it is worth your money.  The potential for fun that exists in the game as it is now is so high that the price of admission is agreeable, and the discount for the eventual retail product is simply icing on an excellent cake.

What Became of Build Quality?

I love technology, new and old.  However I love the old and the new for decidedly different reasons.  Once upon a time, almost everything was very well built.  Old VCRs and home audio equipment had metal cases -often quite thick, and the controls were built to take a lifetime of use.  Now most video disc players (and VCRs if you can find them) are made of flimsy plastic.  If you are lucky and find a unit with a decent housing, the controls will probably be cheap microswitches, and the internals will certainly be nothing compared to those of just twenty-five years ago. 

Certainly there is some advantage to the modern viewpoint that every corner should be cut; you can buy DVD players for less than the price of a nice meal for two, but the unit itself may not last very long.  Good luck getting it serviced, too.  Sure, you can pick up another cheap unit, probably for not much more (Or even less) than the cost of that service, but what if you liked that particular unit's feature set, or look (some modern electronics are incomparably ugly).  You've no choice but to bin it and start over, since such cheap units aren't made to be serviced in the traditional sense.  The case isn't much better even for brand name merchandise, for which the service literature is often unavailable, and when it is, the parts the technician needs to set it to rights are either unavailable, or represent such a large fraction of the price of a new unit that it's not likely to be worth your time or his.

Take for instance my old Sony Betamax VCR.  It's got all the signs of good quality -it's metal, heavy, and name-brand.  There are some compromises for cost, but they work out well, since the particular model was lauded by Consumer Reports as the best consumer VCR they ever tested.  If you want to service it, the individual circuit boards tilt out on hinges, and everything that is adjustable has a label.  If an individual component has failed, it can be replaced as a module, whereas the last modern VCR I tried to service had everything, including the head drum, on the same PCB, and there were no internal adjustments to tweak if the mechanism got out of alignment or wore down with age. 

Now I have a VCR even older than that, from the first generation of consumer VCRs from the early 1970s, and it represents the other end of the spectrum.  It's mind-numbingly complex and unfathomably heavy, but it's so easy to work on, partly because everything is so large and can be observed in operation.  It's circuit cards are edged with metal for strength, and tilt out on wire hinges that have hold-opens like trunk lids, so they don't swing around while you work on them.  It was, however, also so expensive that few people bought them for home use, and they were relegated to industry and to people with specific need (The main character in the TV show "Coach" has such a VCR; very useful in his profession).  The Betamax and its kin, however, found their way into thousands of homes and supported a thriving industry of cassette sales, rental, duplicating, and stimulated other industries, such as amateur movie-making, pornography and other niche markets, as well as boosting Hollywood itself with a new source of revenue. 

What I'm driving at here is that somewhere between the throwaway merchandise of today, and that 70-pound bulletproof U-Matic deck that cost more than a used car is a compromise.  A piece of merchandise that can be serviced properly and economically, can withstand years of use, and yet is cheap enough that anyone who wants one can reasonably expect to buy one.  Unfortunately the mass market that drives technological innovation doesn't want to attain this balance right now, even though with modern design techniques and assembly it would be even easier than when Sony took a decent stab at it with their Betamax decks. 

There is something telling in the fact that I've seen three modern air conditioners come and go in the past five or so years, but the two I have that I bought secondhand, one from the 50s and the other the 70s, continue to operate flawlessly and deliver more satisfying results than the modern units did, and none of them, not even the ridiculous Kenmore with its sold-state thermostatic control, are anywhere near as complex as a video recorder. 

Let's Talk Tech

In case you haven't guessed from the title, this post is about technology and my opinions on it.  Some of these are pretty subjective, but such is the nature of opinion. 

We've come a long way in a short time.  My grandmother was born just seven years after the Wright brothers flew their clumsy, underpowered aeroplane on the dunes of Kitty Hawk, and she died having seen men use what was learned on those dunes to circumnavigate the Earth, fight several wars, unleash the fiery power of the atom, travel into space and to the moon, and launch satellites that allow us to communicate as we do here now, and to perform a myriad of other useful tasks.  I'm not particularly old but I'm already seeing what was the science fiction of my childhood become the reality I live in. 

A man can lose an arm and have it put back on again, or, should it be lost or damaged beyond repair, he can be fitted with a replacement that can take signals from his nerves and even give him feedback like his natural limb did, all while being insensitive to discomfort and untiring.  My nation's Navy recently deployed laser weapons to defend against missiles -laser weapons!  This does the heart of the Sci-Fi fan good.  While these are minority cases, they show just how far we have come, and let us wonder wide-eyed how far we will go. 

Will the latest "Flying Car", newly approved, finally give us what so many of us, numb to the tiny portable phones that let us call anyone on the planet and the massive, Gibsonian computer network we use right now, what has always seemed the symbol of "The Future"?  Or perhaps will they simply prove an amusing novelty for the few who can truly use them, and peter out after a few hundred are made, just like all the previous attempts at blending the automobile and the aeroplane?  We shall see.