samuel kite ate my copy of fallout 3

I've been playing lots of Fallout 3.  I actually had tried it once before, but it crashed on my computer despite my attempts to get around its well known issues with multicore processors.  This time, however, I realized that my workaround failed because I had altered the property files on my giant hard drive, not realizing that the game installed itself on both that drive and my SSD.  Hilarious, Bethesda.  It's a fun game, but not something I really felt worthwhile talking about.

But then I checked actionbutton, and glory be, here is Samuel Kite talking about how much he hates Fallout 3 and Skyrim, even more than he hated Kingdoms of Amalur under the auspices of a review of Dungeon Defenders.  I say "under the auspices" because literally less than 1% of the review is actually about Dungeon Defenders, and the remaining 99% is "god I hate modern video games."  It also, despite being written in June, had exactly one comment (that I couldn't access because maybe they're moving servers).

Maybe it was because of that one comment, but I did something I rarely do for actionbutton articles: I read the entire goddamned thing. Well, the entire thing minus the opening five or so paragraphs talking about the cultural exegesis of game design or something that maybe Ray Kurzweil could translate. And you know what?  It made me think a little.  I mean Kite is a terrible writer, but congrats dude, you compelled me to think for about an hour whether I was actually enjoying Fallout 3 or just being tricked by evil game overlords, ala some fat dude with his over a crystal ball as I kill my three hundredth raider.  The answer is that of course I was being tricked, but...

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Now you may have clicked my link and gone "oh hell no I am not reading all this."  Don't worry, because since this is an article inspired by NEW GAMES JOURNALISM, the points actually presented can be distilled to about a hundred words.  Here's the fivescore for this review:

"I enjoyed older games where I genuinely roleplayed.  However, as gaming has changed into a widespread cultural phenomenon, the notion of gaming, especially rpgs, has become soulless repetitive tasks without a complicated system because it's easier to make money from these.    Skyrim and Fallout are bad because they are particularly emblematic of this problem, going into an infinite series of rooms where you have a chance of getting junk that really doesn't matter.  Instead, please look at Axis and Allies for an example of good games, otherwise we are becoming social media in everything we do, and this is very scary.  vibio gaems." SO.

So the biggest problem I had with this review was his argument that Kingdoms of Amalur was a better role playing game than whatever Bethesda has pumped out (though still shitty, of course).  His reason for this was: "KoAR is exhilarating to run through. It’s a large world but when you head for the horizon and push the sprint button to start trucking, you don’t feel like frustrated like you won’t get where you want to go before you’re bored–you feel excited. Exploring is interesting. Perception of movement speed is a real thing."

When I was growing up in Arkansas, my house had like ten acres of relative wilderness, full of hills and trees and even a stream.  I used to come up with lots of stories and adventures around these things.  My soul died awhile ago so that no longer exists, but I remember enough to say that anyone who thinks that Kingdoms of Amalur was "exhilarating to run through" compared to Fallout 3 is either full of bullshit or lived in a Bioshock style bathysphere until they went to college. His reason (I think) is that the main character in Amalur moves his legs really fast, even if it's just an illusion, and that means that it seems fun.

Really?  This is why "serious" video game criticism is such a gigantic joke.  It's like if Cahiers du Cinema wrote an article on how Patch Adams was a better film than Ms. Doubtfire due to the steadily receeding hairline of Robin Williams providing a simalcrum of empathy with all the balding manchildren of the world.  But I'm digressing, and unlike certain people, I consider this a bad writing habit.

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To be clear, his criticisms of Fallout 3's hollowness aren't wrong.  I felt a sense of shame at his pointing out how incredibly dumb the endless amount of checking every Metal Box, Box of Ammunition, and Medical Box is and how antithetical it is to actual gameplay.    Alot of modern video games have fallen onto this bizarre idea of having a billion little containers in their open world, 1% of which containing stuff actually useful  in your journeys and the rest being utter bullshit items that flaccidly attempt to convey the illusion that a society existed, or once existed, in this random gas station.  Fallout 3 at least has the forethought to make most of the dumb items components in random crafted items, or the means to make money in repeatable quests, but it's still incredibly empty.

On the other hand, isn't that pretty much how all video games are?  Kite really liked Left 4 Dead, and I do too, but what's the meaty substance of that game?  That is to say, aren't these hordes of zombies basically existing in the same distracting, meaningless roles of Fallout 3's containers?  I open a Metal Box and find a piece of scrap metal, I shoot a zombie and watch it explode, maybe with three other people watching in an attempt to create a sense of community.  Kite doesn't even mention V.A.T.S., which is sort of strange since it's the most perfect parody of our facile attempts to "control" video game action ever created.  Video games are by definition stimulus-response, and attacking Fallout 3 and alot of other modern games because they're a little more honest and cynical about their attempts to addict you makes you seem less like being "a shrieker of terrifying holy truths" (an actual quote, jesus christ) and more like an old man who doesn't want to admit that video games have and always will be at their core a gigantic con.

Or maybe he thinks that.  I can't tell, because despite what some people will try to tell you, writing like this isn't stream of consciousness, it's a sirocco of fearfulness, specifically the fear of having genuine opinions about things as opposed to coy blase whining about everything.

While thinking about all this, I loaded up Fallout 3 to explore a little more of Washington DC.  It's easily the worst area of the game, since it's filled with obnoxious Super Mutants that take a million hits to kill for little reward.  Also, rather than just letting you just walk around the streets and admire the landmarks, almost every intersection has unpassable debris, forcing you to use the subway, which is a linear series of the same three rooms filled with zombies and more Super Mutants.  Eventually, I figured out how to reach the destination I was trying to find to turn in a quest reward, and while I was trying to find the entrance, some guy with a loudspeaker started yelling at me about worms and the sun influencing John 3:16.  I wandered into an alley, where suddenly everything exploded and I died.  I tried the other end, where some random guy was hiding from the same dude, and telling me he couldn't move because he would blow up the alley.  Thanks to my incredible charisma (6 out of 10), I convinced him to run into the alley and talk to him.  Both people promptly exploded.

I still like Fallout 3.

Overthinking Terrible: Aliens vs. Predator (2009)

Aliens vs. Predator, released by Sega and Rocksteady in 2009, is the literal embodiment of disappointment.  It's hard to understand how the developers took what was a pretty basic and nonshitty formula from the past games in the series, and then somehow manage to fuck up each faction's scenario in completely different ways.  So let's go at this from each campaign, from relative best to absolute worst.

ALIEN:  This is the best character to play as, bar none.  You get to crawl on anything you want, and while the control is pretty fucking weird to get used to (sometimes you just automatically transition, sometimes you have to press the middle mouse button or you're just grinding your carapace on the intersection), it's fun.  The game's best bits, gameplay wise, are when it's you versus six marines in a wide open area, with them steadily freaking out as you take out lights and slowly wittle down their forces, performing various stealth kills, then scrambling away before an organized response can be made.  It also helps that, unlike the original AvP, there's some effort to orientate the character as opposed to your viewpoint going absolutely berserk the moment you climbed on a wall.

Some areas are better designed for this than others; one of the many hallmarks of the fact that Sega and Rocksteady clearly Just Didn't Care about this game is that the main areas are recycled among each campaign, and no, there was not much effort made to have something for every race to enjoy.  So for every spooky parking garage where you can hide under a walkway and feel like badass prime, there's an outdoor area where you will be seen no matter what, and your own hope is that the terrible AI gets stuck behind a turret, which happened to me no less than three times.

This sounds pretty fun, right?  No doubt, and you'll start to feel pretty good about yourself about an hour into the game.  Guess how long this campaign is!

That's right, just about the time games designed for the NORMALS would be kicking things into high gear, you fight some Predators (which demonstrate how fucking awful melee combat is in this game, more on that later), and then a SUPER PREDATOR that demands the strategy of kiting around the boss arena for ten minutes and goddamn don't even try to fight him, dude is like Rugal from KoF in his ability to ruin you in a second flat.  Then the game ends.

Let me put this another way: the most fun campaign in the game is easily, easily the shortest.  It's even weirder when you consider the fact that there were plenty more settings to recycle from the other campaigns.    Did they run out of time to put three marines in each room?  Was there a bug where climbing up a room in the giant pyramid crashed your game and reset your bank account to zero?  I don't understand.

MARINE: Okay so this is easier to understand.  The first two thirds of the game are you versus roughly three to seven aliens at a time, occasionally accented by lame jump scares that would make Doom 3 embarrassed (true story: doom 3 is the only horror video game that ever scared me thanks to a part where a ceiling tile fell onto a desk).  At first this was pretty challenging, as I was having to kite aliens who were faster than me and fairly decent at climbing around walls to flank me.  Then, in a moment of desperation as an alien was about to claw me to death, I hit the middle mouse button.  My wimpy pistol flung out, disrupting the alien strike.  What.

To say the least, the Marine campaign got alot easier when I discovered that I had a spammable move that not only knocked away baddies, but also interrupted ANY ATTACK.  Suddenly, I was no longer vaguely worried, but just but on my Benny Hill techno mix (feat. XRAPTOR DEUS) and proceeded to turn into some sort of schoolyard bully against all xenomorphs everywhere.  By the end I was sort of embarrassed, especially thanks to the plethora of audio diary pickups that consist of the development staff trying and failing to immerse you in the MASSIVE THREAT that the aliens represent on a metaphysical scale.  The best audio logs are those where the aliens are attacking, since they were clearly to cheap to dub in sound effects, so you just get some guy going "oh no they're coming through the walls auuuugh" in total silence.  I never thought I'd say it, but I miss the retarded chubby british dude from AvP 2000.

But then suddenly, the game decides that aliens are no longer fun to massacre, and we get COMBAT ANDROIDS.  If you raised your eyebrow at the notion at gun fights in an aliens vs predator game, rest assured, so did the person assigned to integrate it, because goddamn is it fucking awful.  Let's break this down:

• Combat androids are so fucking annoying to kill.  See, because they're androids, they don't care if you shoot them in the head.  It just comes right off, and yet they still seem fully capable of murdering you in half a second on hard mode.  Torso shots are similarly useless.  The game helpfully suggests SHOOT THEIR LIMBS ROOKIE, which means you have to shoot them in the legs, but this makes them fall down, usually behind cover, so now you have to dart back and forth to the side shooting the other leg because of course the android is still happy to kill you and aggggh.
• Did I mention how easy it is to die?  Androids either have the accuracy of your average saturday morning cartoon evil minion or a Navy SEAL who was just told that his target ate his girlfriend's breasts on a plate made out of orphans' bones.  If it's the latter, expect to reload that checkpoint.  
• Now, I know what you're thinking:  why not just use cover yourself?  That would be a good idea except, unlike the androids, your character has a religious problem with crouching.  Let that sit in your brain for a second: in a fps released in 2009 with traditional gunfights, YOU COULD NOT CROUCH.  In my first fight with an android, there was a piece of debris directly between me and the android, leading me to mashing on my keyboard desperately trying to find the GET IN COVER GODDAMNIT button, all the while the android slowly whittling my health down while constantly getting into cover himself.  I'd say this was an example of AI mocking me, but:
• There is no AI, and this is the only reason I was able to finish the marine section.  Well, that and the incredibly overpowered sniper rifle/carbine, which had a handy scope highlighting any baddies.  As a result, alot of fights consisted of running to the other side of the room, then waiting for an android to peek out of cover, shooting him once, waiting for him to peek out of cover again, so on and god this game is fucking garbage.

This culminates in the final boss fight where you fight Bishop Weyland who is actually an android or something??  It doesn't matter because he has a shotgun that can kill you from any distance with a single shot, and if you're like me, the game checkpointed right after the prior fight with CLOAKING androids so you have to spend a minute refilling health and ammo just so you can get splattered again.  My eventual winning strategy was kiting him around two columns so his AI would glitch out and he'd take the long way around to get at me.  ARE YOU STARTING TO NOTICE A PATTERN WITH FINAL BOSSES?

PREDATOR:  Ughhhh.  So in the original AvP, as I vaguely recall, the Predator's entire arsenal was either energy based (the shoulder cannon, plasma pistol, stealth, and medicomp) or limited in use (speargun and disc).  Thus, the fun of playing the predator was learning to use the best weapon at the best time, with it being impossible to simple use the same attack over and over.

You can probably guess what I'm about to say about how they handled the Predator in this game.  The theme here is "incremental upgrades, each stupidly better than the last."  You initially start off with just your melee (which is incredibly awful, akin to playing rock paper scissors with hands that have been stung by a hundred hornets) and shoulder launcher (also awful, using about a third of your energy if you fully charge it).  So in the beginning, things were pretty tough.  I'd have to sneak up, engage cloak at the last minute since I had to save energy, sneak up behind, have the marine freak out FOR NO GODDAMNED REASON, re-engage cloak and run like a baby, so on and so forth.

It was about the fourth time this happened that I noticed something disturbing.  I had forgotten to turn off cloak, and yet my suit's power was exactly the same.  That's right, I could cloak as long as I wanted.  Suddenly, the game opened up, or rather, for the next half of the campaign I just ran as fast I could through the various corridors I had seen two times already.  Jesus, this fucking game.

Eventually I ran into the throwing discs, which were clunky as shit to use, but could knock down enemies so whatever.  Then I ran into the spears.  In the original, spears were hell of powerful, but also took you out of cloak and were limited in numbers.  Thankfully, the developers of AvP 2009 were like "waaah pooopy" so both of those unfortunate drawback were removed.  I guess it was sort of cathartic to be able to waste the combat androids so easily after the Marine campaign, but it was also pretty pathetic that my predator was closer to some hyper steroid quill rat from diablo 2 than a literal embodiment of mankind's uncomfortable place at the top of the food chain.

Then I ran into the final boss, yet another fucking PREDALIEN, and beat him by (get ready) kiting him around and using proximity mines (which I never used before because they depleted energy, but the developers got around this issue by making your energy infinite in the boss arena).

So that's the game.  There's multiplayer, but I have no doubt that the single person still playing it now is some horrible techno-mutant that will upload his consciousness into my body the moment I join a server.  Everything in single player is just so dumb and lazy and poorly thought out, I can't think of a single idea that wasn't run into the ground so hard that any semblence of "neat" was extinguished.

A good example of this comes in the middle of the Marine campaign.  Eventually you come across an alien hive with all the bizarre organic structure that the movies have never explained.  Going through a corridor, I came across a MIGHTY SUSPICIOUS looking part of the wall.  I've seen Aliens about 20 times, so I immediately knew that it was an alien and opened fire.  What I didn't notice that doing so awoke another alien much closer to me.  I was pleasantly surprised.  Maybe this game wasn't total shit!

This opinion changed after the sixth time they did this.