Don't Starve... If You Can.

Browsing the Steam offerings at the beginning of the year, I noticed a new indie looking game called Don't Starve. After a quick glance at the page I see it is labelled as a wilderness survival game developed by Klei Entertainment. OK, sounds like my kind of thing I guess. Scavenge and gather resources, keep the terrors of the world at bay and such. I also see it is still in beta and this is an early release, so expect bugs and an unfinished product. This has not deterred me before, since I found buying Minecraft to be a positive purchase overall.

I have to confess, though. I was not expecting much from it, and not because it was clearly marked as an early access beta. Not that I was expecting bugs from it, simply because I wondered how in depth it could be. Was it purely a Minecraft style game with a different camera perspective? There is something to be said for moderate expectations going into something new.

Crossing the Line, Spec Ops Style

While working through my backlog of games I am also playing some recent titles as well. I figure it is best to stager these in the hopes of keeping the blog relevant to current gaming instead of being totally retro.* I played the demo of Spec Ops: The Line some time back, soon after release, and was impressed with the feel of it. In my opinion this merited a closer look, so here it is.
* Note, not all went as planned here and... yeah this game is now last year's news and I am way behind again... but you can see my intentions were pure so I will keep this ill-fated line in none the less...

Relaunch Inauguration with Just Cause 2

So here I am, finally able to write for my blog again and having also fixed the issues with transfer to my new gmail address. Of course, for now the blog looks near the same as before and nothing much will have changed but... hey, we're back! And we are back with just cause, too. Or should I say Just Cause 2... yeah ok I won't pull too many of those jokes, I promise. They have been done to death already so let me just get into the meat of things. I have a huge backlog so this calls for some speed blogging.

So, Just Cause 2... let me just say first of all that this is a game I had resolved not to play initially. Pre-release I saw trailers and gameplay review podcasts about Just Cause 2 showing some of the gameplay features and, while clearly looking awesome on many levels I found some of the gameplay mechanics to be a little off. Namely the infinite parachute and grapple hook combo. Maybe I was too hard on the game and pre-judging it without giving it a chance? I often thought this but was content to let the game slide by anyway. Then Steam comes along with their awesome summer sale deals and put up the usual publisher packs, set fire to my credit card and dumped a load of games into my library before running off into the night. This is a process I like to call the Game Glomp, and no one does it better than Steam.

Forever waiting for the Duke!

And the Duke is what we got!

OK so this review is way over due and I guess in keeping with the game itself. The production schedule was somewhat akin to that of the great pyramids and, as such, it kind of shows in the game itself. By now a lot of reviews have been out so you have all seen the slightly diverse pool of opinions on the game. I got it on release day and started playing instantly but it has been put down a few times for other game's sake which I have also to review. Kind of like Gearbox, really, developing the game itself. I doubt anyone has been waiting with baited breath for me, though, so hey.

Home is where the Homefront is.

I viewed Homefront from THQ at a slight distance as a curious observer for some time in the build up and post release, not entirely sure what was putting me off about it. I saw podcasts on G4TV about it, online trailers on Steam when it was released and read a couple of articles about it and all I was presented with was another first person shooter and another fantastical story about America being invaded. Maybe I was getting bored with this story after playing Modern Warfare 2 and World in Conflict, so maybe this put me off somewhat but I figured I should give it a fair shake when I saw it on the specials shelf in the store.

I loaded it up, now finding I was looking forward to getting my teeth into it, despite my apprehensions about the storyline.

Be vewy, vewy quiet....

.... I'm hunting merchant ships.

So, having mulled this game over for a long time, I finally bought it. Yes, yes, I know there are some shiny and sparkly new games out there. And I could have put my money to them if I wanted to, and may still. Silent Hunter III is an older game now, the latest in the series being number 5, so it is not current news and I would say that every review that could be written has been written. However, if you are like me and you have not even read those reviews anyway, then this will be a good journey together to the bottom of the sea.

Why did I buy it? Well, because I felt like stretching my horizons when it comes to games, and there are few out there that play like this one, while much of the rest out currently play like everything that came before it.

Another PC build...

This is not so much about games today as I am in a bit of a lull with new games to play. I know gamers out there will wonder what I am talking about though, given the fresh set of releases this last month. Brink, L.A.Noire, Duke Nukem Forever... ohh wait that was delayed again. But anyway I have that on pre-purchase so will be aiming for a post-release review of that one.

I have been a little busy with other stuff, however, and right now this is one of the things I have been working on. Another rebuild of my old PC.

This one has been an adventure, and a couple of things have happened since my last blog on system building. The brief of the last blog is this.

Magicka, Co-op, control systems and ggggrrrah!

Ok so a while back I picked up Magicka on steam when it was being sold off with a bunch of the DLCs. Watching the trailers and a little reading I figured it was worth the price as it looked like my kind of game. Kind of like the good old Cannon Fodder but with magic as well. Especially with the Vietnam DLC where you give your mage a machine gun and go nuts.

Portal 2, worth the wait?

So, I picked up Portal 2 at the release and quickly fired it up to see what it has to offer. And, to answer the title question, yes it was worth the wait. Though by wait, we should first look at Valve's innovative release system using the potato sack. Essentially, you could pre-buy the game bundled with a bunch of Indie game titles selected by Valve from the steam library, and the more people logged into the games the closer Portal 2 would come to being released early.

So, release mechanism aside, players of the first Portal game will know how it plays, and in short I will say to you guys, stop reading here because, honestly, the game is more of the same procedure. It feels and plays the same as before, though the look of it has gotten a little more polish since, as you might expect with the passage of time and Valve's evolving Source engine.

Well, ok there is a little more on Portal 2's table I guess, so keep reading a little longer and I will tell you where to stop.

What happens in New Vegas...

... Stays in New Vegas. Yes, it is time for a new Fallout game review.

Fallout New Vegas is Bethesda Softworks' newest offering in the post-apocalyptic retro scene, served up by Obsidian Entertainment.

Many of you (or rather my three readers, in any case) will know my thoughts on Fallout 3 by now, so this game does have some pretty deep shoes of expectation to fill. The open world format delivered by Fallout games, seeded with well structured deposits of intrigue and backstory supplements to those willing to search for them, made Fallout 3 one of the best games I have played. Mainly because it made free-roaming in an open world worthwhile when you found some small supply cache either guarded by raiders or traders or entirely empty leaving you to wonder when the three bears would be coming home. It always delivered something interesting.

But I will not go on gushing about how excellent FO3 was since I pretty much covered it in my original review. So let us look towards the new mewling baby in the Fallout series, already sporting it's first DLC and a wealthy library of community mods to add more depth (or, if you like this kind of thing, god weapons.) Of course, these are only available to the PC players, sorry console guys but you chose to play an FPS on a kids toy...

Mass Effect 2 brings me hope

Besides my BioShock review I mentioned before that I also bought Mass Effect 2 on the Steam sale over the holidays. In fact, playing Mass Effect 2 took over most of the time instead of BioShock to a point that I was not too sure which game review would hit the blog first. It has been interesting to play two heavily contrasting games side by side, especially as both involve some kind of super powers in their characters and dub themselves as Role Play Games.

I also mentioned before that I replayed the first Mass Effect to import a save game, something that once I got down to trying was fairly difficult. Mainly locating the obscure hidden holders where the save game was from the first Mass Effect so I could select it and import it. Feeling a little flushed about this, though, I started playing and pretty early on realised that there were a couple of perks to importing a game. One was an increase to the starting points I could assign to powers and abilities as well as a starting pot of credits, the other was less useful but might appeal to others in the form of an achievement. So I guess for the starting points and credits it was kind of worth it. I was also able to remap my character details a little to give him Biotic powers, which is something I have never done in the first Mass Effect so I decided this was the time to give it a try.

Still, you do not start with the credits you had at the end of the first game, so if you are yet to get this far do not spend time obsessing over grinding the first game out. There are major differences to the setting, space available, exploration, inventory management, ship, team members and character skill building in ME2. They have not transplanted the first game over a new story so focus only on getting the major story points out of the way if you have done the grind before like me and want to start again from game one. Do all the quests to enjoy the story, pick your romance option, make the hard moral choices near the end and save the galaxy.

So, to start with I might find it a little hard to set the scene, as you know I like to do, without spoiling the beginning. Yes, the beginning is just as easy to spoil as the ending. So you will have to bare with me. All I will say is that over two years have passed since the first game and our hero has found himself in a tough spot. Essentially, Shepard finds himself in the company of a pro-human activist group calling themselves Cerberus. Along the line of a group you encounter in the first game called Terra Firma, but a lot more organised and a lot more secretive. Essentially they are branded terrorists by the Human Alliance and the Citadel and not well loved. However, their current focus is investigating the disappearance of human colonists in the fringes of lawful space. It seems only human settlements are targeted and people just vanish with little sign of a fight. The leader of Cerberus, calling himself the Illusive Man, has pooled together their vast financial clout to get Shepard on his team, equip them and then uses his information sources to point you in the right direction. As for why Shepard is going along with them, again it is hard to say too much without spoiling it but the circumstances leading to him being in the company of Cerberus and the last two years since the original game leaves him with little credibility in the Citadel and the Alliance itself, who are all sitting on their hands and doing nothing to begin with.

So it is a rock and a hard place, but as with the first game, you get to pick your attitudes in conversation with people about how you feel your new affiliation relating to you. You might want to start being cautious and distant but eventually you may well converse with people about Cerberus and hail them as being heroes who are misunderstood. Or you could praise or damn them all the way from start to end, and the story allows you some latitude in the end to either do their ultimate bidding or piss on their party.

You start your new quest having to assemble a team past the initial two people who join you from Cerberus, Miranda Lawson and Jacob. I will spare you their life stories but suffices to say the character depth is there with everyone you meet in game, and BioWare has not short-changed their usual standards of story telling.

I mentioned differences though, and trust me all of them are for the better, and this is why I said in the title that this game gives me hope. RPGs as of late have had a nack for over complicating and over layering their gameplay with stat building and an endless supply of marginally different from the last weapons and armours. Keeping to that example for now, you no longer have to buy armour or loot it and then compare it and hundreds others ad nausium before finding out which one is slightly better than the last you picked up not ten minutes past and change again. The same goes for weapons too where you don't have to outfit a whole team by buying the weapons repeatedly. You are given your base set of weapons in the form of a pool where there is one for everyone that joins your team, provided their character class will let them play with that weapon. You might find some new ones or even buy them but they are few and far between and overall their have different characteristics setting them apart more clearly than a pistol that does 154 damage instead of 147. Standard issue pistol now has a 15 round clip and lots of spare ammo with a fast re-fire rate. Or you can have the hand cannon when you find it early on, which only has a 9 shot clip and 19 more ammo spare.

'Wait a moment,' keen players of the first game will be saying. 'Ammo?'

Yes, there is now an ammo count in favour of infinite ammo controlled by overheating of guns fired for too long. Overall the principal of how they work is the same, with a metal slug being shaved off and tiny pieces being propelled through mass effect fields, but you now pick up the heat coils for the guns and they need replacing every few shots depending on the weapon.

Anyway, armour is pre-set for all members including Shepard, though you can unlock alternate costumes for the other team members by doing their side quests. As for Shepard, you can change the characteristics of the armour with add-on upgrades you can buy and research, then select them when customising your armour. Such as increased medi-gel capacity or ammo holders, stronger sheilds, heavier fibre weaves and even a different helmet in the form of a visor like Garrus wears to increase headshot damage. The only different armour are pre-set options you get with some DLC content.

Other changes, and anyone who played the first game will hit the roof when they hear this, driving is now dead and buried. No more bouncy driving physics and exploring a tiny patch of a back water planet for new equipment and random encounters. Instead you can scan planets from orbit to locate resources, which I mentioned earlier is a part of blanket upgrading all weapons and their characteristics. You launch probes on hot spots to mine out deposits of Element Zero, Iridium, Palladium and Platinum to make the upgrades you have bought or found. Some of them will also change the outcome of the game's conclusion, and depending on what ship and field kit upgrades you do or don't purchase some members of the team may not make it back in one piece...

Speaking of the team, there is a new cast for the most part. Importing an original ME save, or configuring the starting conditions yourself, means some of the characters who died and outcomes of the final battle in the first game will already be represented in ME2. However, many of them will not be joining Shepard's team this time round. Don't worry, they will all put in an appearance at some time or another, and even some of the smaller characters who you just had a short dealing with in a side mission will be there too and one or two of them take part in a slightly larger role that before. I won't spoil it for you who does and does not join Shepard as one of them is kind of a surprise to learn their true identity and, personally speaking, I loved the way it was delivered and especially when I found out who it was. I will tell you one person who join though, as it leads me onto the next point.

Romance... Yes this is a feature in ME2 as well and I am wondering if it is almost a compulsory requirement for any game pitch to BioWare that they must all come with a romantic sub plot where your main character can engage in love scenes with one of their compatriots. It is all very conventional, as such, with male Shepard having a pick of all female characters, and female Shepard getting her choice of most of the male characters.

While the first game did have the usual pick of Human or Asari as a potential love interest, and the others were left in the cold, ME2 breaks that old mould making all races in your list of travel companions fair game. Imagine my surprise when the one original character I will tell you who joins the team, Tali, started suggesting to Shepard in idle conversation that she always felt she could trust him with one of her people's customs that would most often signify a willingness for intimacy. This character, as pictured to the right, is a species who spends all their time in a sealed environment suit due to their immune systems having become so weak they spend their whole lives in a bubble, even around family, as the smallest germs make them sick. And when one wishes to be with another they spend some time with their suit environment systems linked to become accustomed to each other and develop an immunity to the other.

By this time I had already started my character down a path to follow the romantic plot with Miranda (and why not?) so I let her down gently but had I known ahead of time I would not have, simply to see how this plays out. But some reading on all the choices available seems to suggest there is an option for success.

Anyway, now that is out of the way, I will tell you about how the game plays. As before, it is 3rd person and over the shoulder. While I always felt that the first ME lacked some punch to the combat, with the guns not feeling meaty, ME2 has addressed this with some more feel to drilling bullets into a merc's armour chest plate. With the inventory system being more simplified and the weapon selection trimmed down, you have little else to think about before heading into battle, and no distractions in the form of looting a slightly better gun and feeling tempted to stop fighting to look at it and see if it is worth equipping. The locations are less of the traditional copy/paste of the old game, where all the colony buildings seemed to be exactly the same layout, which might be the case with prefab units, but not when they are built into caves, unless colonial planners were overcome with very bad OCD and everything needed to look the same so they commanded all mines to be drilled out in the same pattern. Since the driving sections are no more you only visit locations you find or are sent to and each one has been designed uniquely from the next, instead of this being an honour reserved purely for the central plot missions. Something I felt might have been a better fix for the first game over the driving segment as the random generated terrain dotted with points of interest, as opposed to some individually sculpted landscape featuring roads and lakes which could have made locations more interesting and less painful.

Hacking has taken on a new face, instead of the guiding of a small chevron past moving blocks running around 5 layers of rings like a game of frogger with a timer. You can either match up symbols on a circuit board to bypass them and open stuff or hack dataports by finding the right sets of fragmented data in the order you are asked to while avoiding moving through corrupted blocks of data while they scroll up the screen. In short, they are still mini games but their guise feels more along the theme of the game.

Walking around the different locations filled with NPCs, you still pick up on snippets of conversation and happen across random jobs being proposed to you by both sides of the law. News casts echo through the halls, sometimes speaking about stuff you have just done and sometimes about random stuff entirely. Once or twice you will hear about events relating to the last game, such as a foundation for biotics named after Kaiden Alneko from the first game, I guess because I had him set to have perished at the mission to Virmire. I suspect that, had I set Ashley Williams to be the dead one there would have been some kind of military academy scholarship for women in her honour. There is also the chance to drink at the bars and even get drunk and dance if you want, though don't expect Shepard to cut the rug or anything as on the whole the features are kind of useless. One bonus to the locations on offer is that there are not elevators. The first game had them cunningly disguising the long loading sequences between sections of scenery and a quick jog through the Citadel soon became an exercise in frustration.

The controls on the PC version feel substantial enough and up to the task, though I am still not sold on the revisiting of a feature in the first game where your number keys above the keyboard can be mapped to powers and abilities, when every other game uses them to change weapons. In this first play through I selected Shepard to be a Vanguard type with some biotic powers instead of the soldier I played with in the first game, as his circumstances leading into ME2 kind of felt like this change could be justified without breaking continuity and I had not played much as a biotic. I felt like I would miss my assault rifle, as I found that no matter what foe you faced in the first game having enough bullets flying down range would deal with any and all threats without the complications of hurling bodies through the air with my mind. And even then I reached a point in the story where I had an option to train an additional weapon class or improve more on my current skills, and the weapon available to me was an assault rifle so now I feel as complete as before anyway.

There is a nice array of DLC content too, some of them providing some better looking armour suits and new weapons or alternate costumes for the support characters. Others give you new NPC characters and sub-missions to obtain them or other small bonus missions to play through to get some new rewards. As of writing this, I have not really dug deep into many of the missions except for the Hammerhead missions where driving is reintroduced, but this time with a hover tank kind of thing that is meant to be an armed science platform. It is really nothing more than a glorified vacuum cleaner that sucks up the dirt beneath it to extract some Prothean artefacts. There are a few missions in a hub based string leading to a final mission but overall the adventure was just a repeat of the same thing. Drive here, suck this up, kill Geth with missiles and go home with the only plot devices showing up at the beginning and end of the mission string.

Still, some of the new weapons are nice and the armours are pretty good as well, though the Cerberus assault armour would have been better if you could remove the bulky helmet when not needed like the default armour  lets you do.

Overall, I was impressed with the pace of ME2 and the delivery over the first game where some bad features were rejigged for simplicity and a less-is-more feel. ME2 proves that less is indeed more and is well worth picking up at any price. The storyline continues to be compelling leading into the soon-to-arrive ME3 which I shall be sure to grab as soon as I have free time to play once it hits the shelves. I regret it took me this long to get to this game in the first place so I won't be making this mistake again if they continue this winning formula.

BioShock, better late than never

Now then, back to some solid reviewing and I will kick off the new year with BioShock, by 2K Games, followed by Mass Effect 2 in another blog, maybe a poker game blog if I have a sweet game in Poker Night at the Inventory, a review of the XBox Kinect and Fallout New Vegas all in the winds as I find time for them.

Here goes with number one, BioShock.

I have quietly considered this game for a while now and took the plunge in the Steam holiday madness sale getting it for about £3 or something like that. Looking at the past trailers and such the style latched on to me fairly quickly but I never got round to getting the game. It has this film noir thing going on mixed with some classic horror in an art deco steam punk setting underwater.... if that cocktail did not blow a fuse in your brain then keep reading.

As always I start with a quick run down of the setting before moving on to the actual gaming. You start as some unnamed and unknown quantity on an aircraft that quickly runs into some mechanical issues and finds the water below to be suddenly appealing. After the love affair runs its course and the plane is smashed to bits you seem to be the only one alive in the water with burning jet fuel and flight cushions floating in the bobbing seas. As you look around you see, unnerving close to the crash, a kind of light house in the middle of the ocean like a beacon with stairs leading up from a dock. Seeking shelter and maybe some help you climb the stairs and go inside to be greeted by a dilapidated lobby that looks like a welcome suite, and an elevator at the far end. Well, sitting around will not get you help so naturally you pull the lever and it turns into a submarine that goes back under water and heads off on some auto pilot as a slide show plays telling you of some scientist called Dr Ryan who has a dream for a utopian community where people can be whatever they want. This is Rapture.

There is a reason I am giving some emphasis on the 'why' of your character's actions which I will come back to soon. But back to Rapture. You soon realise when you get there that it is becoming a bit of a shit hole and the place is a complete mess. The elevator/sub grinds to a halt in a debarkation room with some kind of freaky thing attacking someone who you heard on the radio in the sub, and then it turns attention to you in the flickering lights and does a good job of being scary before running off again. Then the radio flares up again and a guy called Atlas introduces himself and ask for your help. Naturally he plays the survivor story on you and wants to hook up, but not before you help him and rescue his family. He becomes your constant nagging companion all the way telling you things about Rapture and the people within.

Essentially, the good doctor who made Rapture found ways to splice people's genes with superpowers available in a convenient injection from handily placed vending machines. Want to throw fireballs? Buy an injection. Want to freeze something by touch or have telekinetic powers? See above. Of course, most of the powers you encounter seem to have some primary application as a weapon, and even the little info vids that pop up when you install a power leave little to the imagination that you are meant to use these against your fellow man. Which I guess is hardly surprising that the place suddenly went to hell in the proverbial hand basket.

I should maybe give you a quick run down on the malodorous denizens of Rapture. For the most part they are citizens who have gone off the deep end in some way and became a raving gang of lunatic killers with their own special talents between them. There are people who like pistols, some who like wrenches, some who are insane medical staff, some are like spiders climbing the walls with hooks on their hands and so on. You also have other residents with an even stranger agenda in the form of the 'little sisters'. And they have a bouncer with them called a 'big daddy' who protects her. The little sister is a creepy thing in a red dress and some kind of hypo-gun in her hand sucking stuff from the dead bodies. It is almost as if they are possessed to do so for some reason I still cannot work out yet, and they have a fairy godmother watching over them with a .44 magnum. Some Doctor who is apparently responsible for unleashing the little sisters on Rapture and now wants to make amends through you by asking you to rescue them from their curse giving you some power of touch that stops them being creepy.

Or you could do as Atlas suggests and just harvest them, which kills them. You see, the one thing they give you is something called Adam which they are extracting from the dead, and I gather is some prime genetic material used for gene splicing that revolutionised the genetics works of the Dr Ryan while in Rapture making all things possible. If you rescue them you get a bit of Adam, if you harvest them you get a lot of Adam. Of course, you have to get them away from the big daddy first by killing it and that is no easy task. They will not let you get near their little sister since they want the Adam anyway. You can use your hard earned Adam as a form of currency at vending machines to buy new powers in a bottle, and unlock more slots to fit them in.

The story itself is delivered in short bursts over the radio with Atlas and a few other voices who chirp in from time to time as well as recordings you find dotted around the place like audio logs. This makes it rather disjointed without the traditional and more true RPG conversation tracks with the NPCs. A quote from Gamespot's BioShock page:

BioShock creates an amazing world that you'll want to explore and a compelling mystery that slowly comes together as you play.

Note the use of the word, 'slowly'. This is an understatement and the way it is presented soon left me confused early on and I eventually had to admit I was lost.

Not just in terms of the plot but also why I was suddenly waving a gun around and doing Atlas' bitch work for him. I cannot figure my character's angle here or even why he is meant to be good at combat. He is not a soldier, spy or other such typical archetype so why he is not cowering in fear wetting himself in a dark corner of Rapture is beyond me. It seems little work is done to integrate the player character into the actual story at all and provide a primary motivation beyond simply letting the player at the keyboard enjoy the ride. And the way the story soon pans out it is a wonder to me why they simply did not just go with a usual angle of investigator checking out the under water colony of Rapture after hearing about some strange ape shit things happening. How can the world not know about this vast underwater kingdom going belly up and send in the marines?

The way this story is delivered seems more fitting to an open world setting where you find random logs of a story in any order you find them while you progress through, and piece it together yourself. In the case of BioShock they put this system into a pretty linear mode of game play and it does not fit well above a normal narrative system they could have adopted, leaving the small radio diary logs you find scattered around to simply add more flesh instead of being the bones as well.

I have also noticed as I play through that the lack of a fully engaging story causes me to be a little sidetracked. Since my Win 7 upgrade I have had to reinstall other games and, as mentioned before, I bought Mass Effect 2 and am replaying the first Mass Effect game to import a save game state. And I seem to be replaying a game I have already played more than BioShock right now. I suspect the story layout of BioShock is to blame here...

Still, with that out of the way, the actual combat is pretty good and has a nice feel with blurred vision and wider properties to the superpowers you get from injecting the plasmids such as electricity having more effect on targets in water, the fire ability igniting standing oil on the ground and melting ice letting you get access to stuff and new areas. Also, soon after I fired the pistol I realised the smoking gun barrel had a nice effect where moving around caused the whisp of smoke to leave a trail, bringing the noir feeling to the forefront every now and then.

The atmosphere created is thick and glorious with moments of blood chilling terror as you see shadows round a corner you know from the map is a dead end, the lights flicker and then they are gone only to jump you from behind later. Or the low drone of a near by Big Daddy as it plods along at a rather sedate pace, each footfall shaking the ground and sending a gout of dust into the air.

There is the ability to hack the vending machines as well as sentry guns and helicopter gun drones to be on your side. Though it takes the form of a mini-game as most seem to do which is a game of connecting pipes. The difficulty increases with the grace period before the water flows being shorter and the grid being smaller and riddled with broken pipes you cannot move. Soon they become tedious and hacking vending machines only gives you a slim discount on goods.

There is an almost non-existent inventory management which I feel is a big minus for the game. Whatever you find food wise, you consume there and then to keep healthy otherwise you are wasting your time. And no one has a desire to backtrack over the level to find that snack bar you left earlier now you need it. Once again, I find myself holding a game up to Fallout 3 to compare features, and while I have resisted mainly due to the mode of game play adopted here being substantially different to Bethesda's contribution to my crippled social life, an inventory system and the reasons for needing one are pretty much relevant to BioShock. Stocking up food for later consumption seems to me like something an unlikely hero in a tight spot would do.

I will leave my review here, though, as I have lingered too long on this one and not feeling an impulse to play the game as much as I would have expected and I am sure I have seen a decent dose of it to render a verdict.

BioShock can stand on its own as a shooter game, with a few features and nicely done combat and utility powers, an upgrade system and no level grinding you see too much of in most shooters today where the developers feel the need to bog a player down with mindless busywork trying to get another fractional sum of damage out of their weapons. And there is a simple arsenal of weapons, in the form of one of each kind of weapon and nothing more, something not really seen much past the days of Duke Nukem 3D. It is atmospheric and uncomplicated as far as game play goes, but unless you really pay attention to every scrap of story, don't expect to have a clue what is going on at first. I expect the conclusion of the game will shed a lot of light on stuff that has been going on, so if I have some second thoughts, expect to see a follow up blog in the future. But for now I got a bigger list of games to get through.

Back to gaming, Christmas and other stuff. (Short blog)

OK, hello there guys. Just a quick rundown on what else I got planned game review wise. Since my last blog was more about my PC rebuilds and such. Ohh yeah, Windows 7 installed on the old XP desktop and working ok now, and repopulated it with a few games here and there as well as some new purchases from the Steam holiday sale. I have been ill with flu the last week as well so this blog should have come out soon after Christmas and before the new year so.... Happy New Year!

Anyway, I take you back (again) to a previous blog with a wish list on it of what I want to review. And with the Steam holiday sales planning to ruin my life as much as possible I have grabbed a couple of the cheap and small games.

First of all I do recommend the Flight Control HD game from steam if it is still under a fiver. You will be surprised how addictive it is, but I would recommend it more for either touchscreen users or for iPads and other tablet PCs. I had a cut down version on my Droid phone and it was good but limited to two airfields and less actual kinds of aircraft in the free version.

But there were some mad offers on large titles too and I have a couple of them on my backlog list I wish to trim down and try to stay current. One being BioShock (and BioShock 2 as well but first things first) and the other being Mass Effect 2, which I know a friend I have in the states will be finally relieved to hear I purchased for £7 on the one day offer for the 23rd. (She nags me constantly about getting it...)

I plan to review both, but I wish to replay the first Mass Effect as well so I can import a save game and profile from there to the new one and see how that works out for me. My old save was wiped in the update to Win 7 anyway but getting back to grips with the storyline again (and the crappy driving sections) is not a bad thing.

Also, as I write this I notice Back to the Future game is on steam... ohh yes I shall have to be getting this!

Fallout NV is on the list still, and in my crosshairs for the next blog after the two above, and now the first DLCs are out for it, and it seems the mod community has kicked in high gear already, it might be worth waiting for a Game of the Year edition with some extra content shipped included. I will most likely not buy this from steam, though, as I hear that the ~ key used to open the console will pretty much shaft achievements for the game forever, even on new games. That little key, while used to cheat in some cases, was also useful for keeping a handle on the bugs in FO3 as well as being required for mod controls in some instances so I don't think I can live without it.

Finally I downloaded, and have been enjoying Poker Night at the Inventory. Since I played Red Dead Redemption, and liked the cards mini-games such as Texas hold 'em, I have developed a taste for little games featuring this contest of cards. And what better company than Heavy Weapons Guy from TF2, Tycho from Penny Arcade, Strong Bad from Homestar Runner and.... welll, Max from Sam and Max is kind of annoying... But you can win his gun from him so that's ok when he puts the damn thing on the table.

I might actually devote a little time to recording a single blog post diary when playing a tournament as it is moments like this when you want to share your triumphs with the world. Such as tonight as I write this, I resolved to go all in if anyone holds in the first hand, as I usually see others do this and everyone has to fold. After all, no one wants to be out on the first hand... My turn to do this I think. Everyone folded except Strong Bad, who went all in. I had a couple of diamonds, like a 4 and a 9 or something. Strong Bad had a pair of queens so naturally I thing I am screwed and ready to get my coat. But the first three table cards needed playing and what drops out? Another three diamonds! Flush, baby! So he was screwed as no other cards hit the table that could beat a flush and was out on hand one. After this we had maybe another 9 hands of back and forth with the last three, I put chips down eventually and lost all but $4,000 from a headway of nearly $30,000. Last hand they all go all in and I have a choice to make, end it now or fold and hang on by the fingernails. I was getting bored of the endless up and down so I go all in and the cards are dealt. I have a queen in hand, and another two flop on the table. As the last two are drawn I see they all have either one or two pairs... and no chips between them making me the winner with three of a kind and all three players kicked off the table in one hand.

So, you can see how I would like to blog such stuff so maybe I make a small journal and do a single blog on it one day if I am bored.

So, that's about all I got for now and I will see where BioShock takes me, followed by ME2, and get some reviews done on them so I can step up to some newer stuff again this year.

The big PC rebuild project of 2011

So, I wanted to take a little break from reviewing to talk about my upcoming projects to rebuild a couple of my desktops.

I have an old Compaq that I got about 5 years back now with Windows XP, two 160gb hard drives and some old vid card, an Nvidia 7600 GT I think, with 256mb power and the rig has 2 gb of DDR memory and the CPU is an old AMD Athalon 64 3400+. So it is pretty old and served me well as a games machine for a long time, but had limited upgrade potential and as the years wore on I saw little point as it would mean a total rebuild anyway. And the base itself is not really big enough to accommodate many of the monster GFX cards of modern times. With my usual approach of 'Go big or go home' when it comes to computers I would naturally be going for one of these, so tat meant a full ATX-E capable case.

This happened around summer last year when I finally assembled the pieces and a fresh copy of Windows XP, going for a 64 bit version of XP pro to work with the 8gb of DDR 2 gaming memory and a massive 1gb Nvidia 285 GTX card the size of a house brick. Married to a gaming board by Gigabyte with much upgrade potential straddled by a sexy Intel Core 2 Duo 8400 with 3ghz of speed and a heat sink putting my house's radiators to shame.

I relegated my old Compaq, thumping on strong like a faithful old terrier getting past its better years but with a strong heart still, to media work now where I store movies and TV series files and such. But having an old version of XP home, and the hardware not liking SP3 causing a crash and roll-back when upgrading, means it is going to drop off the map eventually. And it limits my media steaming capabilities not having Media Centre on board and I cannot convince my XBox 360 or PS3 to access the shared folders on the network to play stuff on my TV downstairs.

My TV has a USB input and plays nearly all media files save for WMV/A files, so sticking an external hard drive into it and playing the files from there is no major issue. It just means I connect my Win 7 laptop to the hard drive and move files through the network from the Compaq upstairs onto the folders on the hard drive.

This can be tiresome at times though and I long for a more holistic solution. One would be a wifi external network hard drive connected to my TV downstairs that I can view as a network location on any PC in the house and move files to it. This would mean I could send them from the desktop upstairs using some kind of synch software on a schedule or manually activated. This would free up my laptop from the task as I need to perch it near the TV to connect it so it is not convenient to use as a social networking machine in my living room while moving files. I could also access the drive from the laptop or elsewhere to reorganise the folders as needed and rename them if required.

I am still looking at this as an option for the media PC but nothing seems to be on the market right now that would do this for me. Possibly the Seagate range of GoFlex stuff might introduce something but short of getting a very expensive Linksys NAS media hub the size of a compact PC tower I likely going to be waiting a while. And as I use my PS3 mainly for BluRay to begin with I would like to use the streaming capability more effectively. So this means rebuilding the media PC into something better.

Sure I could just install a copy of Win 7 on there anyway but if the hardware does not like SP3 to begin with it does not bode well. So a hardware upgrade and full rebuild is still on the cards.

I am not sure what I will go with yet, and I might get myself an Intel i3, or a mid range i5. It would not need more than 4gb of RAM anyway as it is only streaming to one device and I am happy with the download speeds on just 2gb of RAM to begin with. And this is old DDR standards too, so when I get an i-series in there it will need DDR3 as a standard anyway which is blistering by any standard. And since you get both 32 bit and 64 bit on an Win 7 disk anyway I have it for if I need to unlock it so I might as well install the 64 bit version off the bat. I am contemplating a fast hard disk too, like a 10k rpm disk, but only if there is any point to it for the usage I will put it to. Some might suggest a Solid State Disk for total speed, but they have limited read/write lifespans and if I am watching stuff and streaming it that will be a lot of read/write cycles and most likely I will wear out the disk in short order. Plus they are expensive to buy compared to conventional HDD technology where you could get 2tb of space now for the same price as a 100gb SSD.

So, there is much research to be done, and this is just for one PC rebuild. The main dilemma I have is that I might want to upgrade the CPU, and by necessary extension the motherboard, of my new games rig to an i7 in the future when they become more reasonably priced. But in this age of austerity and such I look at the long term savings I could get from this. While the hardware is not a priority right now, doing such an upgrade would need a new version of Windows installing as switching out the CPU and motherboard can de-authorise an install of Windows. So where does the dilemma come in?

Well, Windows XP 64 has some issues too, namely not accepting SP3 since they do not make it for XP Pro 64 to begin with. This is now an issue for my gaming since a few things are dropping support for SP2 like Windows Live Games marketplace where I tried to download a DLC for FO3 and was told I could no longer do this. So this is forcing my hand to upgrade to Win 7 now. I do not mind this as I wanted Win 7 on the game rig anyway but it was not released at the time so I settled for XP Pro 64. If I now upgrade to Win 7 then when I want to update the backbone of the hardware I will need to reactivate Windows anyway.

I hear, though, that you can ask Microsoft nicely over the phone to do this without charge if you tell them you have upgraded the computer and it is the same machine. So getting the cheaper upgrade copy of Win 7 might not be a total waste of money but I want to see if I can do this first. And since I want to put a new version of Win 7 on my media PC I will rebuild then a 3 user 'Family Pack' would be nice to have. They sold them last year when Win 7 was released and then they stopped printing them. However they are back on the market again but they are only upgrade versions. While this is a good thing for my games PC, it is not for the media PC as I will be putting in a totally fresh hard drive as stated earlier. Even if I do not go for a 10k rpm + disk I will put a new hard drive in to upgrade to the latest SATA version as the old ones are the original version and there is no sense doing anything half arsed.

The issue here is that you cannot install an upgrade version onto a blank disk because it will not let you unless you have a fully active copy of Windows XP or higher already installed. So a 3 user upgrade for Win 7 is pointless... or is it?

You see, in my stupidity I ordered two copies of XP Pro 64 last year and one of them is still in the box, unused... Since it is of no use I can always install this on the media PC and then install Win 7 over it. And I will still have one copy of Win 7 upgrade to spare should I need it.

I am not sure what I will do with that one yet since I have no other computers I could put it on and no old versions of Windows to play with, except maybe the one on the old disks I will no longer have on my Compaq. Not that it will be a Compaq any more by then but anyway. The other thought I have is that both my XP Pro 64's are OEM versions. I am not sure what impact this will have on upgrading them or reinstaling them on different machines but if I am able to do both with little fuss then I could always save the spare license of Win 7 for when I need it to overwrite the XP Pro 64 disks in the future.

So this is the prospect on my mind right now and I have some research to do before I start saving up and buying stuff. I have already secured a Win 7 family pack since even if I only use two of the licenses it is cheaper than buying one upgrade and one full version for my needs. Looking forward to backing up my folder of files and stuff... Well maybe not. Theoretically I should be able to run the update disk, do a fresh install of Win 7 64 bit, and reinstall the driver disk for the motherboard. Everything else after that should go as seamless... The update advisor says there are a couple of unknown issues and most of them are unimportant.

So I am getting into this today. Wish me luck, people.

Minecraft: Adventures in block form.

Sorry about the lack of blogging lately. It has been a little busy for me and I have not had much time on this game since the update came out. It has been written for a while but needed a few details padding out with the newly introduced content and such and I had not much time to explore them all. Anyway here goes...

In my last blog I said I was going to introduce people to Minecraft. Some people at work have heard me speak of this game and others who know me on the net are most likely already playing it with the same level of addiction as I am.

Minecraft has grabbed my soul with a kind of very basic gameplay could in itself be a study on game design. Minecraft is the core of open-world gameplay with little fluff and fancy graphics that seem like they were torn from an old NES game and converted into basic 3D. It is a simple sandbox with no story and no premiss to the setting, as open-world games usually are.

I would direct you to the official website of Minecraft, produced by Mojang Specifications. But this would give you little information on the actul game and I guess you need to see someone play it or be introduced to it in person to fully grasp it. The only footage you will see on the main Minecraft page right now will be a mine car on rails going round like a roller-coaster and it initially looks like some kind of novelty physics demo with construction involved. Think Garry's Mod for Half Life 2...

But it is more than that. Not much more but more. Anyway, stop reading for a while and watch the video here.

X's Adventures in Minecraft on YouTube.

There are a lot of vids on his channel, about Minecraft and it describes the essentials of the gameplay better than I can in words, but I will try anyway and give you my own interpretation of the game, for the sake of people who skipped the vid link. No.... actually, if you did then go back and watch it!

Minecraft randomly generates a world made of blocks around you as you move around the map. It is not pre-set, and is different for everyone who plays, except in Multiplayer which is not quite finished yet compared to single player. But more on that later. I will just say that the game is still in Alpha and in development constantly. The world generated will be six (yes, six, as in 6) times larger than the real world. Each block is 1 meter cubed in size, to give you an idea of scale.

There are trees that grow, and leaves that vanish as you take down the main trunk. You can replant saplings that fall from them as you harvest and they will regrow after a time. There are animals that roam the lands, like sheep, cows, pigs and chickens. You can kill them for different resources like wool, ham, leather and feathers. They all have some uses. The same with the wood you collect which you use for crafting things like shovels to move dirt, sand and gravel blocks, picks that are better at breaking down stone blocks and harvesting resource bocks like iron and stone used to make even better tools and swords to defend yourself.

Against what? Rabid blood thirsty sheep? Well, no. You see, there is also a day and night cycle. In the day you are pretty safe (but not 100%). Outdoors is safer than underground or in dark places, because at night several monsters will spawn. There are zombies who deal damage by touching you, same with giant spiders that are fast and have a jumping lunge they can catch you out with if you're not watching. There are skeletons who fire arrows at you and finally creepers who explode if you let them get close. To be even more evil, all the monsters have a unique sound they make like the screech of the spiders or rattling of skeleton bones, but the only sound a creeper makes is a short hissing noise when they get close to you just before they explode! When the sun rises, and if exposed to open sky above them, the zombies and skeletons will catch fire and eventually die. But creepers and spiders stick around until you move away far enough for them to despawn. Spiders will not be hostile in the day, unless you attack them or they were already after your blood in the night. But creepers will still attack.

On your first day in the game you will need to gather some basic resources and make a shelter to hide in fear from the undead. You will need somewhere where they cannot get to you, and usually the choice is a cave, as X does in the vid on YouTube. You will also need to stop monsters spawning inside the cave at night and also in the day with the use of torches. You will need to find coal, which can be found underground but also above sea level in the sides of mountains and maybe even under the dirt beneath your feet if you dig down a few blocks. But you are pretty much shooting blind there and you need to make use of your time wisely at first. You have no resources and they take a while to harvest. If you cannot find them then be prepared for a night of fighting and watching your back...

Eventually you will collect enough coal to make some torches to light your cave or even a house you can make from any kind of block you wish, and even make other stuff like glass from sand cooked in your smelter. And if you have a good mine system near your house but get fed up of moving your stuff back and forward when your inventory is full you could make mine carts with a chest inside to store stuff you dig up, and a powered cart to push them down the tracks you can craft with wood sticks and iron for rails.

Tools and weapons will wear out with use meaning you need to craft more, and the better the materials you use the better the tool and longer it will last. Diamond picks, for instance, last a lot longer than a stone pick, and they harvest stuff like gold, red stone and more diamonds faster than a stone pick. To harvest gold you need to use at least a steel pick anyway, and when you encounter obsidian you will only be able to pick it up with diamond picks and even then it takes a long time to break one block.

There are other hazards in the world in the form of water that flows into your caves if you break into a body of water elsewhere. The current could push you around and if it flows far enough it might push you down a deep hole you were avoiding, maybe to your death. If you dig deep enough you will eventually find lava and this too can flow into a cave, though much slower. And blocks like gravel and sand will fall down when you remove blocks beneath them. If you get trapped inside two blocks of either of these you will suffocate unless you can break out fast enough. If you wind up under water you have a breath gauge which turns to health loss the longer you stay down past running out of air. And having heavy armour on like gold or steel will make it harder to swim up to the surface or fight a current that pushes you away, or down in the case of a waterfall.

The designer of Minecraft, Notch, has also stated he wants to add in environment hazards like cold and heat damage.

Now, I have started writing this a few days before the Halloween update (or the 'Boo' update as it became known to Minecrafters) where everything I have said so far was the simple fact of Minecraft. So now I will tell you what Minecraft is now, since I plan this blog for after the Halloween release.

Notch first of all added a new realm to explore called Hellworld, though he renamed it to The Nether just before release, and was also called The Slip for a short time too. Anyway, I will keep calling it Hellworld... The Hellworld can only be reached through a portal, the first aspect of magic-like mechanics in Minecraft, and Notch has said he would like to add more magic to Minecraft in the future to facilitate things people request on the forums. You need to have 14 pieces of obsidian first, and make a large rectangle standing up, that is 4 wide by 5 high. So that gives you a 2x3 space in the middle. Set this on fire with the flint and steel crafted item already available, and you have a portal to Hellworld. Why go there?

Well, there are new resources in Hellworld, one of them a block that glows as bright as a torch and another that burns forever if set on fire. But given the scale of the world itself on the surface, Hellworld is compressed and runs parallel to the real world. Your portal will be mirrored in Hellworld, and when you move just 1 block away from it in Hellworld, and then go through another portal there that you might make, you will be 160 blocks away in the real world from the first portal. So this becomes a good fast travel method. Though.. keep reading for my initial experiences of this. It was not as advertised.

There is a new hostile creature in Hellworld too; The Ghast. This is a 4x4x4 square large flying jellyfish thing that is hard to kill since it moves quickly, and spits fire. In a world where blocks catch fire easy and burn forever (And water evaporates in Hellworld btw) you can die pretty fast. They also have a very slim chance of spawning in the real world around your portal and they are the first mob that will be able to destroy a block with their attack. None of the others, save the creeper, destroy blocks. And even then the creeper only destroys them when they blow, and they still only do this when they are 1 square from you so they don't break down walls to get to you, and neither do Zombies.

Having said that, the Ghast does not blow up much of the world like a Creeper does. Maybe one or two blocks break on their attack and I hear they do not break cobblestone or obsidian but I have yet to try this. Since they fly the only real way of hitting them is with a bow and arrow and they dodge well. Also their size seems to betray the eye on gauging their true distance so getting a good aim on them is tricky when arrows are affected by gravity. However you can, if you time it right, hit the fireballs and deflect them away from you.

Also, Notch has added biomes to the game, where the climate can change as you generate new areas by exploration. Old areas remained the same, though there are slight variations in grass and tree collour added in where altitude and temperature takes effect on the world, but the changes of biome type, ie, snow or desert, only take place in new areas generated after you apply the update. So, to put it another way, if you have only wandered a few minutes away from your spawn point and home then that area will be as it always was and everything beyond when you venture out in future could randomly change. If you have explored for hours on end and have a massive map already generated you will have to go further to find new biomes. In the future there may be new block types or even resources in biomes and the monster spawns could become more biome specific.

Notch intended to remove torches, ie the stick and coal type I talk about above, as being an infinite light source that they were when I started writing this blog. They were to be replaced with a lantern instead as an infinite light source and made torches finite so they burn out over time. You can reignite them with flint and steel and they burn for a while but expire again soon. So your priorities when starting the game for the first time would be to make temporary torches, as they are quicker and easy to make at first, and search out some steel and flint quick to relight them as you need them until you build up a supply of lanterns. Fortunately for long time players, torches placed down, in the inventory and stored in chests would be replaced with lanterns to begin with, saving people a large job of putting down more new lanterns where they want infinite light.

However, Notch could not get torches to burn out properly, whatever that means, so this was scrapped for now. And you can still harvest the red hellblocks that burn forever, though not good in a wooden house. And the yellow light blocks I have heard being called sulphur are as bright as a single torch. When you collect them they drop into dust and you need 9 dust to remake one block of light. I am now using them in my ever growing house to keep the middle sections lit and they look better than makeshift torch holders since they cannot be fixed to a roof and only the floor or the sides of block.

As part of the Halloween spirit you can collect pumpkins that are already carved and turn them into lanterns or even wear them as a helmet, that does not provide armour value though it creates an effect of looking through the eye and mouth holes which was pretty funny. And while before the update, if there was just a little light from a torch a monster would not spawn, there is now a chance of them spawning in slightly lit areas, getting greater the deeper you go so deep mine shafts and caves might still have plenty of monsters unless you stick a torch every other block. Notch has added in the ability to fish, making use of the already in-game fishing rod, new sounds for hell as well as new music and a clock you can craft that shows you the time of day. The sunset is nicer, with an orange sky instead of just a dimming blue sky to night as well.

Overall you make your own destiny in Minecraft and could dabble in multiplayer mode to craft with friends and make whole cities. A search on yourtube might show you some people's crafted areas they made with friends on servers. A visit to Crafthub shows you the potential for construction if you have the imagination and time.

Minecraft comes with an old free version that is just a world builder with unlimited blocks and no crafting or monsters or even day/night cycle. The alpha version is around 10 euro until it goes beta. Pay for an Alpha game? Well Mojang Specifications is an indie developer planning to continue development on Minecraft in the longterm and maybe bring more games to people soon. They are practically in their baby stage looking for backing and investors still and have about 5 people on staff so far, most likely all of them a friend of Notch. So if you think this game is worth your investing and supporting the makers then do buy it. If not then don't, as no one forces you to until it is done. As I look at it now, it is not so much a full sandbox game in its own right, despite the constant updates and content additions, as it is worth the money in the first place.

Yes, another old one. Fallout 3: The game and gaming

So, I figured since I raised the issue of Fallout 3 in a previous blog, and the last blog being about PC gaming as an industry, it would be appropriate to dust off an older PC game that still shines like new today. And with Fallout New Vegas ready for release soon, we should all get back in the mood for Fallout as a series. I will not only review this game, which I will try and keep shorter than the last breakdowns, because I will also try and squeeze in some more thoughts in PC gaming in general.

In the last blog, people will remember I linked Chris Taylor's podcast interview with G4TV's X-Play where he threw down a gauntlet to the anti-PC game crowd and the doom-sayers who hail the passing of PC games in general. As I watched the interview one game jumped into mind that highlights PC games, and that game was Fallout 3. The reasons for this were not picked up by Chris, who used examples of MMOs and digital distribution methods like Steam and D2D as key to PC game's resilience, though I stated them as another unique aspect of PC gaming. Modding. And as I talk about FO3 in general you will see why this is a great aspect of PC gaming experience on the whole.

So, to put much of that into context and flesh out the bones of that argument, let us look at Falout 3. A game on both consoles and the PC. First, the story is that of post-apocalyptic America, where people saw the war coming and society geared towards survival. VaultTech, a corporation specialising in fallout shelters, creates a large network of 'Vaults' around the country and people apply for a seat should the bombs begin falling. People are selected and when the day comes they all file into the vaults for a life below ground. Fallout games of the past have involved this concept in their story and take place a long time after the war where the surviving society above ground has degenerated into tribal life and small settlements living in fear of raiders, slavers and mercs.

Essentially, you are presented with this scorched playground in Fallout 3 full of ambiguous moral choices with consequences and character building as a classic staple of and RPG. Gain experience points and increase your proficiency in various aspects of wasteland life from small and heavy weapons and explosives, to lock picking and sneaking, to charming personality traits that will leave npc characters beaming wide as you pick their pockets.

The campaign is pretty open, like the world that is also full of smaller jobs and quests you can pick up and defeat in many different ways. Some of them give you different rewards for different outcomes, while others don't make a distinction. Others open up a branch where you have an optional secondary quest not always apparent to you unless you talk around to the npcs. Approaching such a game requires you break down your expectations based on other more linear games where you are expected to behave in one way or another and only one outcome will do for your employer. See Red Dead Redemption for an example of what I mean there.

A case in point is soon after the enforced tutorial stage in the vault itself, where your stats are established along with the story of our hero, you are nudged towards the nearby settlement of Megaton (a bunch of walled off houses built into the impact crated of an unexploded and still live atomic bomb) where you wandering around and chatting to people about the first thing in your mind will most likely see you interact with a Mr Burke. It takes a little observation on your part to find this job but you most likely will. In a way I feel Bethesda put this job into the game at this stage the way they did to really give you a taste of what Fallout 3 will offer you time and time again. Mr Burke will wave you over from his little corner of the bar in Megaton and ask you to plant a pulse fusion charge on the bomb so he can detonate it and wipe it off the map for his very wealthy employer. Of course, you and refuse the job and never get the chance again to accept it and just carry on as normal, or you can go ahead and do it and become an instant dark side evil monster of a man.

However, you can also say to Mr Burke you will help him and then go running to the sheriff of the town and tell him about it too. I won't spoil much for anyone that has not played it, but the essences of doing this means you occasionally get ambushed by Talon Company mercs who have notes on their bullet riddled persons that you will dispatch with glee issuing a bounty on your head due to your goody goody actions.

Another example would be the encounter with a nutty scientist who was trying to make giant mutant ants smaller again and ended up making them breathe fire on people and destroy a whole town. He asks you, rather dispassionately, to go help him render the current bath of eggs impotent in the ant queen layer so he can start again with his mutagen batch. Since he showed little compassion for the people killed in the town above the tunnels, I saw fit to also press the button I was not meant to press that would destroy his mutagen sample so he could not do this again. He was rather unhappy at this and refused my payment. So I shot him in the face and took what I wanted from his lab. What the hell, not like there are laws any more to either stop me or bring this man to account, right?

So, you see what I mean by the moral choices, which I really like with a game and has been a rare treat to find. Other features of Fallout 3 is the unique aiming mode called V.A.T.S where you pause time and your targets are divided up into choice cuts on your HUD, each one with a percentage chance of hitting and damage state. You can cripple the arms or legs of an enemy, weakening their aim or slowing their pace. Cripple their heads to disorientate them or even just go for the head splattering brain fragmenting kill shot. This might sound like it critically breaks the flow of your action but you will surprised how much you use and and how it does have drawbacks. Because while you are treated to the head-splatter, limb detaching slow motion kill sequence of one bad guy, his friends are still slowly wrecking your shit and your controls are locked for a few seconds. And each shot you line up takes away action points that regenerate slowly so you have to use them sparingly when encountering a gang.

The ruins of DC doe a good job of herding you into choke points and ambushes to keep the difficulty fluid, and blundering around a corner into a raider outpost early in the game will really ruin your day. The options to run and hide are there but they may choose to search for you if they are certain you are still around. And sooner or later they go home. Keep this in mind for my secondary topic of PC gaming in general as I will come back to this.

Back on the difficulty curve, eventually it will seem more like a gentle slope as you advance in level and unlock more bad-ass means of breaking skulls, from awesome weapons to mad skills. However, the respectable DLC library will keep the challenge going. I had found the wastelands to become tame, as even the fearsome Deathclaws cower before me when I pick them off with a .44 cal hunting rifle and VATS assisted headshots. Then I got Point Lookout for the game and the first scrawny swamp mutant I came across gave me a real run for my money. Emptying nearly two clips from my assault rifle saw him off finally, as I mistook their heads for being the usual weak spot while they were quite resilient in the old noggin. And this was with a top level character with really good weapons. Another point I will revisit in my PC gaming section.

It is not, however, all sunshine and happy days as it seams, as occasionally I encountered some little annoyances with the game. As with many RPG games, inventory management would be a pain and this was no exception. While overall better than many others such as Mass Effect, you only had to press the wrong hot key and all the items you have in your store boxes will flood back into your personal inventory, leaving you to pick out the stuff you didn't want to keep on you once more and put them back into the box where they came from. Also, as you gather your loot from roaming the wastes and exploring that old burnt out town, you realise you accumulate more stuff than you can sell without some effort of travelling around, though there is a fast travel that helps for the most part. The vendors in various settlements slowly accumulate currency, in then novel form of bottle caps, but between your looting and hoarding of weapons and odd bits and bobs, you quickly outpace them and before you know it you have more stuff than you can shift. Again, this is the way RPG games have been and is no major deal on the whole.

However I also felt there were some missed opportunities with the game, and this is where I come onto PC gaming on the whole. I said in the blog about Chris Tarlor's that games modding is what sets PC games apart. Now, before people launch into the comments section and scream 'DLC!!!11!!!1!1!!!' at me, they are categorically not the same thing. And I will explain why, right now. A DLC is made by the game company to deliver you some additional content for a nominal fee. We have had these for a long time in PC gaming too, and they were originally called expansion packs. And while they can create a better gaming experience by giving you additional functionality, they don;t have the same spirit as a good PC mod made by some guy in his converted attic-now-battle-station-command area, surrounded by empty pizza boxes and drained cans of Red Bull.

The modder has seen where a game could be better and has some potential, and endeavours to open that crack of potential into a wide and gaping valley of gaming heaven. They are the enthusiasts that love gaming to the point they want to make it better all the time, and these are the kinds of people who make games in the industry today. However, an official DLC from a game developer is like getting something from a closed club of game makers, where getting a mod gives everyone the chance to give modding a try. And while Bethesda make DLC's too for Fallout 3, they see the major modding scene thriving at their feet and feed it with substantial tools like the G.E.C.K.

Anyone that has played Fallout 3, answer me this. Would you have liked to create a camp fire, cook better food from the basic stuff you harvested, carry a sleeping bag to sleep anywhere it is clear of enemies and even reload your own ammo? Did it make sense to you that even when wearing Raider armour the raiders would shoot you on sight? Would you have liked your own mini-vault elsewhere on the map closer to your favourite hunting grounds? Now, do you have Fallout 3 on a console? If you do then you cannot do any of this unless Bethesda implemented it in a DLC, which they have not. If you have the PC game, you can by downloading much of this at the Fallout 3 Nexus site.

I could download a mod that lets you recruit your character's childhood friend, Amata, as a team member, complete with her own mini-story of how she ended up out of the Vault. I also mentioned earlier I had really good weapons. That is because I downloaded a mod that added more weapons to the game, as well as means to get them if you can. Sure there are some over balanced weapons in the modding scene, and many of them are god mods where you can melt whole armies with one shot. And if you want to go for them then that is your issue. I simply downloaded a pistol that used the .308 cal ammo from sniper rifles. It looked like a chunky middle section of an old machine gun, missing the stock and with a shorter barrel complete with a huge compensator on the end. It was not much more powerful than the standard 10mm pistol, but it looked awesome and felt more satisfying when I fired it, because it was unique an custom feeling. Something I wish the named guns in the game itself would have had going for them. You could get the special hunting rifle, Ol Painless, but it looked and sounded just like the standard rifle. I wanted it to have maybe a custom scope, or a different looking stock, and maybe a different sound too so it felt special to have it. And modding can give me that experience.

It is not just Fallout 3 that has a mods coming out of the ears to make the game much more than it was on release. Other games such as X2 and X3, which I was often disappointed with, can be modded to enhance the game experience. For X3, I downloaded a mod that would create larger battles with the navies and pirates at random, give the pirates more ships than just fighters, so there were pirate cruisers out there too! I could crate a ship factory, which could make a ship from various components in the in game industry, and even buy my own capital ship docks and trade hubs to sell my goods through. Even better, I combined this with another mod that lets me taker over any system if I destroyed the trade hubs and other stations owned by that faction in the system, and placed my own trade hub there. Any non-faction stations would then pay me rent if I wanted them to. Also, I like lasers on my ships, not these slow moving energy projectiles the game comes with. Again, modding gives me this too.

Overall, there are many other aspects of PC gaming to highlight such as their larger array of MMOs, but going over them is not really needed. Console gaming has gone from strength to strength and has a target audience all of its own. They are awesome things and have become the social gaming experience of choice for fast action, quick loading multiplayer games. They are easier to haul to a gaming night with friends than a huge desktop, unless you have a very expensive gaming laptop. They can now have DLCs to get the same expansion to games ported on the PC. This is not about if a PC is better than a console. It is about PC gaming still being as strong as before, and everything consoles are owe themselves to PCs. They have not been more innovative than PC gaming rigs, they have just caught up and kept pace with the times.

My final word? Why, yes it is.