Games we are playing consistently this month:
Starcraft 2
Guild Wars: Nightfall
and..
Taddaa! Fallout New Vegas!
The guide just arrived and the game itself is unlocked via Steam, so no physical box. I wasn't originally planning on getting this but looking through the game threads on the game made me cave in.
During this time period three games that I want will be launched: Fable 3 (next week), Vanquish, and Fallout. I could probably buy all 3, but there is no time to properly play them all during the same time period. Fable 3 is at least a 30-40 hour game, Vanquish 12 hours, and Fallout around 100+ hours. I'm going to wait till Vanquish and Fable 3 are $30, but if I had the time I would not mind playing them now.
Originally I was against Fallout New Vegas. It uses the outdated graphics engine that Fallout 3 used and by this time every screenshot that would come out for the game would look dated. The engine is known for being buggy and from the previews and word of mouth by people that got the game early, issues from Fallout 3 did not get fixed (people suspended in the air, between solid objects, polygons gone wild, etc..). Also, the game was created by Obsidian and not Bethesda, the original developer of Fallout 3. Even though Obsidian created the original Fallout 1 and 2, there is no garantee that their writing talent was kept intact after all these years.
But then I remembered why I liked Fallout 3. I liked being put in an open world where I can go anywhere I want. Sometimes I would walk around and see a building in the distance and think ' I want to know what's inside and more imporantly, I want to loot everything that's inside!' and the game would let me do that. I walked into so many random buildings and houses just to see what was around, and that exploration aspect of the game made you feel like a little kid again. A kid with guns though, and with a slave sidekick you bought from a few towns back.
The quests in Fallout 3 also made great use of the environment. My favorite type of quest was the escort, where you had to lead a person or a group of people through dangerous sections to escape to a better life. The fist time I did this was to help some one out of prison in the middle of the night, and with almost zero visibility made our way through to the town. The area you had to cover was vast and it took nearly an hour in real time to get to our destination. In between, we ran and snuck around so many enemies that it was very suspenseful until the end.
In fallout 3, my playthrough was around 106 hours. 64 hours to finish all the side quests and 40 hours of just walking around and looking inside anything I found interesting. I'm hoping there is more of this in Fallout New Vegas. If Fallout Las Vegas just manages to catch a glimpse of how much I had as an explorer in Fallout 3, then this game is well worth the try.
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So first impressions of New Vegas: I'll get back to you on that, someday.
The first two days was spend culling every bit of information out of the strategy guide: Point distribution, perks, side quests, free quests, map locations, weapon locations, crafting materials. It felt like absorbing all this data would never end. But that's also part of the fun in these type of open ended games. I actually have a lot of strategy guides and love going through them. It's much easier sitting down in the couch with a cup of coffee and casually moving through pages in such a way it's impossible to replicate on a computer. I don't have guides for every game, just the games where there are lots of options:
Bayonetta didn't need one.
Mass Effect 2, if I knew how linear it was I would have never gotten one.
Alan Wake is the most impressive strategy guide I've ever read. It's so creatively put together that it's more like a light teen novel than strategy guide. The Art book that came with it was disappointing, but the guide itself is worth every penny.
Red Read Redemption guide is sort of useful. They used a huge font size and lots of pictures to cover up the fact that there wasn't a lot of things to detail on the guide. A 100 page guide would have been enough to cover everything.
Starcraft 2 guide is a very great resource to have for the game. Just about everything is well written and explained. Strategy, unit description, tips from pro players, sample builds, maps, it's all there. It's a great reference guide that I use often.
The New Vegas guide so far is indispensible. For example, to create your character you have to distribute around 40 points into things like strenght, endurance, luck, charisma, science,etc.. It's actually really tough to come out with a build suited to your preferences. Increase science but take a hit to charisma? Make everything even and hope for the best? It's quite hard to decide. I went with a sniper build, sacrafising strenght and endurance for luck and perception.
Eh? How did this post turn into a strategy guide comparison? Oh, it's called not having an outline.
Oh, and for you Starcraft 2 players, here are my stats:
lol. After a few games yesterday I looked over to see if there was a place to detail how many games I've played and it doesn't look very flattering. I usually just custom co-op with friends against the computer. I must be stupid but it never gets old and I really like it.
Starcraft 2 has been out for almost 90 days. If you do the math, it means that we play around 2-3 (2.77 to be exact) games a day.
In terms of ability, I don't play many 1vs the comp, but of the few I've tried, I can beat the computer on Very Hard without a problem. I still haven't beaten the computer 1v1 on insane though, so that's my next goal. Out of the 9 people I play with, I'm probably #4 in terms of ability.
Usually we just co-op with friends on random nights, like 3v3, 4v4, 5v3 against the computer. Right now we have the AI set to all hard and we can barely beat them half the time so that's our level of play right now. It's mostly because we never help each other, or because at least one of us comes up with a crazy build that utterly fails and dooms our game. Fun.
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