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.

last lisa foiles post for awhile I promise

When you post a top 5 list of the best licensed music in video games, and you do include some shitty singer-songwriter who did a thing for Alan Wake (seriously I can't believe people actually cared about Alan Wake considering that Deadly Premonitions came out at the same time and basically made all future survival horrors unncessary), and don't include even a mention of the Jet Set Radio series, I don't give a fuck if you included some wacky "for the haters" intro pointing out that "oh I haven't played many games and these lists are just for fun" YOU CANNOT IRONICALLY POINT OUT THAT YOU'RE NOT REALLY A GAMER IF YOU'RE ACTUALLY NOT REALLY A GAMER YOU RACCOON MASCARA CLOWN GHOST

HEY LOOK LISA IT'S GUITAR VADER PLAYING MUSIC THAT CAN LIFT ONE'S SOUL FROM THE BLACKEST DEPTH BUT THE BROTHER TO POE WROTE HOUSE OF LEAVES THAT WAS PRETTY COOL TO READ FRESHMAN YEAR OF COLLEGE LOL

But maybe I'm just overreacting, and you're just writing at the level of your audience, since in 200+ comments not a single person mentioned the Jet Set series and instead argued what the best song in the Black Ops game was. 

:(

But then again, I've gotten like fifteen hits to this blog under the search terms revolving around "lisa foiles xxx," so maybe it's all for the best after all.

:3

so how about the lisa foiles feature for the escapist

Good Christ.  Lisa's columns on Kotaku were pandering, awful shit, but at least I only had to get past the one HEY LOOK AT ME GIRL GAMER picture per article to just laugh at the terrible humor content.  Now, of course, there's her new series on The Escapist, where bad video game humor goes in the hopes that it will get legions of mouthbreathing fanboys like Yahtzee and TGWTG.

Lisa's new video series is, get ready, a weekly Top 5.  On one of the few message boards I go to on a regular basis, there was a former staff contributor from Cracked who quit from the soul-sucking preoccupation that alot of mainstream humor has with Top X humor.  According to him (and it's hard to argue with him with the evidence), nothing text-based can get remotely as much traffic as a Top X list.  Well, except for a Top XXX list that involves breasts.  So, I'd like you to guess what Lisa was wearing, and how often she hopped while slightly bent over in her 5-minute review.

There are only really two mysteries to Lisa at this point.

1) Who are these fucking nerds kidding?  Reading over Escapist comments for Lisa's video was slightly akin to standing next to the aisle of a porn theater that has turned its lights on, mid-feature, to an audience of well-to-do gentlemen.  Nobody is lascivious or perverted, but instead all follow the same basic feature: "Boy, I was worried she was just another pretty face, but instead she was really funny and made me forget how I would tie her up and force her to lick my Limited Edition Master Chief helmet!"  Oops, that last part was my genetic traits picking up pathetic mental energies over the internet.

Maybe you giant babies love lists so much that you would watch them even if it was done by some beard commander enchilada supreme you'd still laugh and go post your feeble comments.  But I cannot, nay, I REFUSE to believe that anyone would have given a shit about Foiles'  video if it had not been presented by an attractive petite.  Ignore Lisa's awkward arm movements, and try to focus your mind towards the actual content.  Every joke is basically just "hey video games."  Lisa can't even sustain a Penny-Arcade HM VIDEO GAMES ARE QUITE DISPARATE FROM REAL LIFE joke.  Hell, even her list was stupid: Only a complete poser would have a "Top Five Sexiest Glasses" and not include Lucca, and sure as hell would not have fucking DUKE NUKEM or WESKER.  Waaaaaaagh.

But no, I'm sure Escapist bootlickers would steadfastly refuse that Foiles's bimbo act would have any part in their enjoyment of this piece of high-class entertainment.  A few tried to argue that Lisa was actually parodying the bimbo/Top 10 aspect, to which I say, "No she didn't, you pathetic liar."

2) How much of this shittyness is planned?  Could Lisa really be a sort of analogue of the female writers of times past, pretending a deference and lower intellect while in reality she is truly a greater wit than us all?  Well, change "truly a greater wit than us all" to "moderately clever," and I'd say it's certainly possible.  Even if she's not really funny, she certainly got the pathetic nerd business landscape down, having formed a fanbase on Kotaku, IGN, and now Escapist.  I'm sure she's already in negotiations with TGWTG (EDIT: whoops, angry joe, truth to say i've never actually seen a thing on tgwtg because i'm not a dick nose, song and dancen).

Now, returning to that Cracked writer, you can see where I'm going.  Lisa could very well be aware that game journalism and humor is ultimately a fucked up horrible thing to begin with, so why not put in minimal effort that, paradoxically will get the most profitable responses?  As I've noted before, the great thing about slutting out for nerds is that you have to show less skin than you would for most other audiences, as long as you can pretend to like Street Fighter.  And again, while I rage about her lack of humor, it's not like there's really any funny video game humor, and columns are apparently a binary choice between "hey do you like games where you can kick really high girls rule ^_^" and "THE SOOTHING DIALECTIC IN A ONE CREDIT CLEAR IN DODONPACHI."  At least there's more honesty in the former, especially within its audience.  I'm not saying she's spoofing the whole game girl bimbo thing, but rather that she refined it into some sort of plutonium powered laser beam that is currently burrowing into the earth's core, where her Amazon wishlist has been chained for a millenia.

Or maybe she's just a dumb idiot.  Either way, this is your New Heaven Salesman, and Eagles of Death Metal sound just a little too much like Led Zeppelin to enjoy it.