Could you expand on what you've written, please? I'm having trouble understanding exactly what you mean. What I've managed to work out is:
a) issues should be dealt with ideologically rather than logically, because b) logic is less reliable than ideology
is that correct? Now, ideology appears to be an imperfect choice of word here, as ideology does not necessarily have to exist without a logical foundation, but I'm aware that it was the word chosen by the parent poster and not by you. Is there a more precise word or description for what you mean in your use of the word ideology?
Not understanding the material is one thing, but not even trying to understand the material and then coming into class at the end of the semester asking for extra credit options is common in her new degree path of Early Childhood Development.
I, too, was shocked at the number of complete dumbasses seeking higher education. Your wife's in classes with education majors, though, which means she's really got it bad. My wife did an elementary ed. degree, and man did she ever have some great (by which I mean sad) stories about her fellow students. The field seems to attract morons, for some reason. It's also full of people who will gladly tell you that they hate math. Weird.
Judging from her experiences with school administration, I'm guessing it doesn't get any better in grad school, either. A shockingly large portion of those people don't seem to possess basic reasoning skills, let alone an understanding of the scientific process (very important for school admin, given how often they attempt to imitate the processes used in whatever school management book is popular at the time)
So if I have designed such a social game and implemented a prototype on PC, for which platform should I continue development?
Hmmm... releasing a new game for an older console probably wouldn't be a good idea. The PS2's actually still got some games coming out, but they're mostly JRPGs that only enthusiasts are going to care about, and it was never much of a social gaming machine anyway (aside from a few rhythm and fighting games). All the new consoles are (AFAIK) expensive to develop for, but I'd imagine the 360'd be the easiest to port to from the PC.
If you're sticking to the PC, I'd recommend that you enable the ability to split the keyboard between two players, if you haven't already and if that makes sense for your game. Hunter, Hunted (GREAT game) and Return Fire did this, and it worked OK. Might let you reach people who don't have USB controllers or USB cables for their 360 controllers. Might want to aim low with the system requirements, so people with lower-end secondary PCs hooked up to their TV can play it.
I'd imagine Linux is better represented on those under-the-TV machines than on traditional desktops, too, though I'd bet Windows still has a firm majority. Might be worth at least making sure it runs OK in Wine.
I don't know whether this is just me or it's a common effect, but I'm about 10,000% more likely to buy an indie game through Steam or Impulse than off the author's webpage. You've probably already thought about that, but I'll throw that out there anyway.
I'm no expert on this so it's kind of silly for me to be giving advice, but those are my thoughts, for what they're worth.
True, but a lot of the old PC games won't run on anything but MS-DOS or Windows 9x. But you're right that GOG, DOSBox, and ScummVM can run a lot of the PC classics.
DOSBox is very nearly perfect at running older DOS games. Most of the trouble I've had is with pre-DX7 Win95/Win98 games and the occasional really, really bad console port (Thief 3, for instance, is already hard to run on a new system and OS)
Sure, you can emulate Genesis and Super NES by dumping your carts with a Retrode adapter [retrode.org]. But it's a lot harder to dump NES carts; currently, you need to take a working front-loading NES, desolder the CPU, and solder in a shim board [retrousb.com]. (Don't recommend downloading; UMG v. MP3.com.)
Haha, yeah, it's a pain if you're trying to go 100% legit (not even buying the cart then downloading the ROM).
As far as I can tell, that's a software issue; PCs support Xbox 360 gamepads, and most new TVs have a PC input. So in your humble opinion, is there a market for PC games that support in-person multiplayer?
Probably not, especially now that laptops are so cheap, common, and powerful that it's damn easy to organize a LAN party, provided you're OK with playing Source games, UT, UT2K4, Starcraft, and similarly low-system-requirement games.
Again, in my experience people don't much care whether they're playing those social games on the latest and greatest system or on a console from one or two (or even three) generations ago. Mario Kart's not that much more fun on a Wii or Gamecube than it was on an N64--any of those will do. Soul Calibur on the Dreamcast is damn near as good as Soul Calibur IV on the PS3 (hell, it's better in many ways IMO). My personal gaming group considers Perfect Dark (N64) and the first Halo (X-Box) to be the peak of console FPS gaming.
Consequently, for social gaming it's easier to just buy an old console for $25-50 and drop another $50-75 on games than to bother trying to hook up your PC, even if you've got some PC games that will do the job. The Dreamcast, N64, Gamecube, and original X-Box are all very cheap and are good candidates for something like this.
Besides, you're going to have a PC anyway--might as well spend an extra $100-$200 to make it games-capable (and better at everything else you want it to do).
Unless you need to play the very newest stuff at top settings, you can make a rig capable of playing everything released up to the point you build it and a bit in to the future (if you're willing to cut the graphics options down some) for not much more than the cost of building one that won't. The back catalog of PC games is huge, too, and even bigger if you use it to catch up on all the console games you missed the first time around. I'm not sure I'll ever finish mining gaming's history for gems that I passed over or missed when they were new.
By all means buy a console too if you want, but even a fairly crappy PC is going to be able to play all those classics--including some pretty recent stuff--without trouble, and emulate everything up to and including the PS2 smoothly. About the only thing it can't do is satisfy social (i.e. in person) multiplayer, but I've found that even a cheap older console is every bit as good for that as a new one. No one seems to give a damn that they're playing an FPS on an X-Box vs. a 360, or DDR on a PS2 instead of a PS3, or Marvel vs. Capcom 2 or Soul Calibur on a $30 Dreamcast instead of some other fighting game on a $250 console.
having only tried TF2 via wine once about a year ago, i'd be inclined to agree with the AC. i got it running, and semi-playable, but the graphics were a little sluggish and stuttery - even on low settings, with directx adjustments and all the other tweaks recommended on winehq. it was enough of a performance hit to make me resigned to running a dual-boot system.
I struggled with dual booting for years before finally switching to a Windows system with Linux in a Virtual Box VM. Virtual Box is free and easy to use, and these days PCs are so damn fast that the VM doesn't feel much slower than the real thing.
This lets me use Photoshop and play games in Windows, and write code in Linux. Best of both worlds. They can even share a clipboard. For a number of reasons, it also saves me tons of disk space. I can't imagine going back to dual-booting.
Modern Warfare was a pretty big step up. CoD 2 & 3 kind of sucked. The original is still by far the best, IMO, followed by MW, which was mostly good due to its quirky levels--the execution, the gunship, the nuke, the sniper level that mostly just made me want to play the much-better STALKER:SoC again. Hell, I'd play a whole game of gunship levels.
Haven't played MW2 yet, though. Does sound like they want to turn the franchise in to MoH post-Allied Assault, which means it'll go straight to shit.
Yeah. It and (bizarrely) Hearts of Iron 3 are the only two games I've tried to run on this rig and found to be too much for it. Though admittedly I don't bother with ones I know won't work, like Crysis, I do attempt and usually succeed with ones I'm not sure about, like Bioshock and STALKER. Hell, I even got the demo of Empire: Total War working OK on here, and that's the latest entry in a series that's known for being taxing on system resources--sometimes unjustifiably so.
It might have just been a fluke, some odd combination of issues specific to my configuration, but I'd figured it was a case of an exceptionally poor console port. I've had other ports that didn't run as well as they ought to (the second Halo game, notably) but they've all worked well enough not to bother me much. I'd guessed that this was just an especially bad case of that.
Jade Empire runs just fine and looks beautiful maxed at 1920x1080 on a 9600GT.
Which is a much beefier graphics card than it ought to need, given how old it is and that it was an X-Box game. I've successfully run STALKER on this machine (at low-ish settings) and that thing's a notorious pig. There's no excuse for Jade Empire to chug on here, unless they were super-lazy and just used some sort of Wine-like X-Box to Windows compatibility layer and/or an emulator.
Now that I think about it, I can run PS2 games in an emulator on here and they look great and run at a decent framerate. Same generation of console, similar graphical capabilities. Jade Empire's "native" port vastly under performs emulation from the same console generation. That's a half-assed job, to put in nicely.
A dual-core processor, an 8400 Nvidia, and 2Gb ram should be WAY more than I need to play a port from the X-Box era, yet Jade Empire's a slide show, never getting out of the single digit FPS range.
I haven't tried the others (mostly due to my experience with this one) but Jade Empire's port was horrible. The graphics look like Quake 2, but even with everything cranked all the way down it was unplayable. My machine gets good multiplayer framerates (so, high) with medium settings in L4D. It can damn well handle an X-Box game at full graphical settings, if it's ported well. Jade Empire wasn't.
Parent is correct. Every other capitalist democracy in the world provides universal care of some kind.
Switzerland's very good, but good luck getting in. Germany's good. Japan's good. France is good. Any nordic country is good. Canada's OK. The UK's probably the worst, but not horrible.
I also use Lunarpages. They've never given me any trouble. Great host. However, you get way more from Dreamhost, including Ruby on Rails and (IIRC) Subversion.
If neither of these things are true, then that's damn sad.
In case the former is true, let me explain:
Rich people spend a way, way smaller percentage of their income on retail goods than the poor. They also have the means at their disposal to easily avoid such a tax, assuming the government doesn't try to tax goods purchased overseas and never brought in to the 'States.
Further, this has the effect of dampening consumer spending, which, despite what the trickle-down dumbasses say, drives the economy. This recession has given proof enough of that, for anyone who couldn't figure it out on their own. You don't have to look too hard to find stories about business owners complaining that loans and tax cuts won't help them much, since they can't hire more people unless they've got the orders to justify it. I know, seems obvious, but believe it or not there's a school of economic thought (I use the term loosely) in the US that holds that companies will hire more people if you just give them more money, rather than giving them more business.
Jade Empire, for instance, is unplayably slow on my (high end, 1.5 y.o.) laptop, despite the fact that its graphics look about as good as Quake 2 and I can play plenty of much better looking games (e.g. L4D) at reasonably high detail.
You've gotta have a machine 3x as powerful as it ought to have to be just to make sure you can play all these half-assed ports. It is a dark time for the PC gamer.
I haven't played it in a few months, but L4D used to have somewhat frequent seconds-long (deadly in a multiplayer game) freezes when both cores were used. Had to cut it down to one to make it playable.
"We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris." -- Larry Wall, Programming Perl
Re:Guess I'm one of the critics to ignore
on
BioShock 2 Released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
If you like FPS games I strongly recommend you try STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, if you haven't.
It didn't get a whole lot of press, but it's one of the best single player non-Valve FPS games to come out in--oh, years probably.
No console version, PC only, which probably helped. It's (sorely needed) proof that the genre isn't completely worn out.
It's available on Steam. Should be super cheap by now.
Re:That is exactly where they failed most SPOILER
on
BioShock 2 Released
·
· Score: 1
But the story beyond that point failed for me as well. Then I had the suggestion switch turned off (I think, I seem to remember they operated on me). So then really why did I go off to kill the dude? The Sisters kind of wanted me to, but I had no really compelling reason to do so other than to progress in the game. Then I was just playing any other shooter, or that is what it felt like... where in System shock I had a personal compelling reason (from the character's standpoint) to be playing that sucker until the very end and defeating who I had to at every point.
That was actually my favorite part--until they ruined it.
I got the impression that my choices were to die (along with everyone else) or to turn myself in to a monster to get revenge and save the others. I then set about methodically destroying myself, turning myself in to a walking tank because I had nothing to lose.
Then I'm suddenly not a big daddy any more in the ending. WTF? They just un-did it? I lived for years more? I still feel like they'd set up the big daddy transformation as something that could not be undone, and the game was way better when I thought it was.
During the transformation I thought that the (mediocre) rest of the game might be saved by a poignant, emotional--but not maudlin--ending.
Slashdot (sometimes abbreviated as/.) is a technology-related news website owned by Geeknet, Inc. The site, which bills itself as, "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters", features user-submitted and evaluated current affairs news stories about a variety of science and technology related topics. Each story on the site has an Internet forum-style comments section attached. Slashdot was founded in 1997 as a blog, Chips & Dips, by Hope College computer science student Rob Malda, also known as "Commander Taco". The name "Slashdot" is described by Malda as "a sort of obnoxious parody of a URL", chosen to confuse those who tried to pronounce the URL of the site ("h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slashdot-dot-org").
Summaries of stories and links to news articles are submitted by Slashdot's own readers, and each story becomes the topic of a threaded discussion among the site's users. Discussion is moderated by a user-based moderation system in which randomly selected moderators assign points of either -1 or +1 to each comment, based on whether the comment is perceived as either normal, offtopic, insightful, redundant, interesting, or troll (among others). The site's comment and moderation system is administered by its own content management system, Slash, which is available under the GNU General Public License.
Slashdot's traffic is estimated at approximately 5.5 million users per month, and the site has won over twenty awards, including People's Voice Awards in 2000 for Best Community Site and Best News Site. Occasionally, a story will link to a server causing a large surge of traffic, which can overwhelm some smaller or independent sites. This phenomenon is known as the "Slashdot effect".
Wikipedia's just described Slashdot in a nutshell.
I was initial worried about the idea of a first-person Fallout game, but after playing the (excellent, excellent) STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl became more hopeful for the idea, and resistant to others' concerns that it would be Oblivion with guns.
Then I played it.
It's Oblivion with guns.
It missed the mark big time on two of the key elements of a Fallout game, which are the leveling system and the branching side quest arcs.
1. The first two Fallouts encouraged actual role-playing in their leveling/skill systems. Unless you've got massive amounts of time to waste, or slightly less time and a guide, you're probably not going to be maxing out many skills (hell, probably none). You have to pick a play style and stick with it.
In Fallout 3, you are almost guaranteed to max out most or all of your skills. If you don't max one out, you'll be damn close to maxing out on it. This is more like Morrowind/Oblivion's "you are a god by the end of the game" style of character development, and takes away a lot of the Fallout feel.
2. The quests are total shit compared to the first two Fallouts. There are three cities of note, and none of them have much more to do than Klamath did in F2. Let that sink in for a second.
There's nothing that could even be called a shadow of the vast political struggle in Fallout 2. Gone, consequently, are many of the decisions you got to make in the earlier games. Again, actual role playing is severely diminished.
Other things you may miss are robust companion systems (yes, you can call the mediocre one in prior Fallouts robust in comparison to this one--it's that bad) and a main story line that doesn't completely suck ass.
That said, the game's not a total disaster, if you can forget it's supposed to be a real Fallout game and pretend it's some kind of alternate-universe fan fiction. The fighting is satisfying (for a while at least--it gets goddamn dull about half way through) and there are a few cute one-off quests. The beginning part of the game is solid gold, too, up until the point where you realize the first town you find isn't intended as a little starter town, but rather is about the best this game's going to have to offer.
I'd give the game a 3/5 taken on its own. As a Fallout game, though, it's a complete failure. For fans, I'd say the only reason to play is one minor, heart-wrenching quest related to Fallout 2, the one or two other decent serious quests, and the half-dozen or so humorous quests (I'm convinced they stuck their best writer on the one-off side quests, actually). I'd say just borrow (or *ahem* you know, whatever) it rather than buying.
Slashdot Mirror
Could you expand on what you've written, please? I'm having trouble understanding exactly what you mean. What I've managed to work out is:
a) issues should be dealt with ideologically rather than logically, because
b) logic is less reliable than ideology
is that correct? Now, ideology appears to be an imperfect choice of word here, as ideology does not necessarily have to exist without a logical foundation, but I'm aware that it was the word chosen by the parent poster and not by you. Is there a more precise word or description for what you mean in your use of the word ideology?
I, too, was shocked at the number of complete dumbasses seeking higher education. Your wife's in classes with education majors, though, which means she's really got it bad. My wife did an elementary ed. degree, and man did she ever have some great (by which I mean sad) stories about her fellow students. The field seems to attract morons, for some reason. It's also full of people who will gladly tell you that they hate math. Weird.
Judging from her experiences with school administration, I'm guessing it doesn't get any better in grad school, either. A shockingly large portion of those people don't seem to possess basic reasoning skills, let alone an understanding of the scientific process (very important for school admin, given how often they attempt to imitate the processes used in whatever school management book is popular at the time)
Hmmm... releasing a new game for an older console probably wouldn't be a good idea. The PS2's actually still got some games coming out, but they're mostly JRPGs that only enthusiasts are going to care about, and it was never much of a social gaming machine anyway (aside from a few rhythm and fighting games). All the new consoles are (AFAIK) expensive to develop for, but I'd imagine the 360'd be the easiest to port to from the PC.
If you're sticking to the PC, I'd recommend that you enable the ability to split the keyboard between two players, if you haven't already and if that makes sense for your game. Hunter, Hunted (GREAT game) and Return Fire did this, and it worked OK. Might let you reach people who don't have USB controllers or USB cables for their 360 controllers. Might want to aim low with the system requirements, so people with lower-end secondary PCs hooked up to their TV can play it.
I'd imagine Linux is better represented on those under-the-TV machines than on traditional desktops, too, though I'd bet Windows still has a firm majority. Might be worth at least making sure it runs OK in Wine.
I don't know whether this is just me or it's a common effect, but I'm about 10,000% more likely to buy an indie game through Steam or Impulse than off the author's webpage. You've probably already thought about that, but I'll throw that out there anyway.
I'm no expert on this so it's kind of silly for me to be giving advice, but those are my thoughts, for what they're worth.
DOSBox is very nearly perfect at running older DOS games. Most of the trouble I've had is with pre-DX7 Win95/Win98 games and the occasional really, really bad console port (Thief 3, for instance, is already hard to run on a new system and OS)
Haha, yeah, it's a pain if you're trying to go 100% legit (not even buying the cart then downloading the ROM).
Probably not, especially now that laptops are so cheap, common, and powerful that it's damn easy to organize a LAN party, provided you're OK with playing Source games, UT, UT2K4, Starcraft, and similarly low-system-requirement games.
Again, in my experience people don't much care whether they're playing those social games on the latest and greatest system or on a console from one or two (or even three) generations ago. Mario Kart's not that much more fun on a Wii or Gamecube than it was on an N64--any of those will do. Soul Calibur on the Dreamcast is damn near as good as Soul Calibur IV on the PS3 (hell, it's better in many ways IMO). My personal gaming group considers Perfect Dark (N64) and the first Halo (X-Box) to be the peak of console FPS gaming.
Consequently, for social gaming it's easier to just buy an old console for $25-50 and drop another $50-75 on games than to bother trying to hook up your PC, even if you've got some PC games that will do the job. The Dreamcast, N64, Gamecube, and original X-Box are all very cheap and are good candidates for something like this.
Besides, you're going to have a PC anyway--might as well spend an extra $100-$200 to make it games-capable (and better at everything else you want it to do).
Unless you need to play the very newest stuff at top settings, you can make a rig capable of playing everything released up to the point you build it and a bit in to the future (if you're willing to cut the graphics options down some) for not much more than the cost of building one that won't. The back catalog of PC games is huge, too, and even bigger if you use it to catch up on all the console games you missed the first time around. I'm not sure I'll ever finish mining gaming's history for gems that I passed over or missed when they were new.
By all means buy a console too if you want, but even a fairly crappy PC is going to be able to play all those classics--including some pretty recent stuff--without trouble, and emulate everything up to and including the PS2 smoothly. About the only thing it can't do is satisfy social (i.e. in person) multiplayer, but I've found that even a cheap older console is every bit as good for that as a new one. No one seems to give a damn that they're playing an FPS on an X-Box vs. a 360, or DDR on a PS2 instead of a PS3, or Marvel vs. Capcom 2 or Soul Calibur on a $30 Dreamcast instead of some other fighting game on a $250 console.
I struggled with dual booting for years before finally switching to a Windows system with Linux in a Virtual Box VM. Virtual Box is free and easy to use, and these days PCs are so damn fast that the VM doesn't feel much slower than the real thing.
This lets me use Photoshop and play games in Windows, and write code in Linux. Best of both worlds. They can even share a clipboard. For a number of reasons, it also saves me tons of disk space. I can't imagine going back to dual-booting.
Modern Warfare was a pretty big step up. CoD 2 & 3 kind of sucked. The original is still by far the best, IMO, followed by MW, which was mostly good due to its quirky levels--the execution, the gunship, the nuke, the sniper level that mostly just made me want to play the much-better STALKER:SoC again. Hell, I'd play a whole game of gunship levels.
Haven't played MW2 yet, though. Does sound like they want to turn the franchise in to MoH post-Allied Assault, which means it'll go straight to shit.
Interesting. Maybe I'll give it another try.
Yeah. It and (bizarrely) Hearts of Iron 3 are the only two games I've tried to run on this rig and found to be too much for it. Though admittedly I don't bother with ones I know won't work, like Crysis, I do attempt and usually succeed with ones I'm not sure about, like Bioshock and STALKER. Hell, I even got the demo of Empire: Total War working OK on here, and that's the latest entry in a series that's known for being taxing on system resources--sometimes unjustifiably so.
It might have just been a fluke, some odd combination of issues specific to my configuration, but I'd figured it was a case of an exceptionally poor console port. I've had other ports that didn't run as well as they ought to (the second Halo game, notably) but they've all worked well enough not to bother me much. I'd guessed that this was just an especially bad case of that.
Which is a much beefier graphics card than it ought to need, given how old it is and that it was an X-Box game. I've successfully run STALKER on this machine (at low-ish settings) and that thing's a notorious pig. There's no excuse for Jade Empire to chug on here, unless they were super-lazy and just used some sort of Wine-like X-Box to Windows compatibility layer and/or an emulator.
Now that I think about it, I can run PS2 games in an emulator on here and they look great and run at a decent framerate. Same generation of console, similar graphical capabilities. Jade Empire's "native" port vastly under performs emulation from the same console generation. That's a half-assed job, to put in nicely.
A dual-core processor, an 8400 Nvidia, and 2Gb ram should be WAY more than I need to play a port from the X-Box era, yet Jade Empire's a slide show, never getting out of the single digit FPS range.
I haven't tried the others (mostly due to my experience with this one) but Jade Empire's port was horrible. The graphics look like Quake 2, but even with everything cranked all the way down it was unplayable. My machine gets good multiplayer framerates (so, high) with medium settings in L4D. It can damn well handle an X-Box game at full graphical settings, if it's ported well. Jade Empire wasn't.
Parent is correct. Every other capitalist democracy in the world provides universal care of some kind.
Switzerland's very good, but good luck getting in. Germany's good. Japan's good. France is good. Any nordic country is good. Canada's OK. The UK's probably the worst, but not horrible.
Seconding Dreamhost.
I also use Lunarpages. They've never given me any trouble. Great host. However, you get way more from Dreamhost, including Ruby on Rails and (IIRC) Subversion.
God I hope you're in high school. Or a troll.
If neither of these things are true, then that's damn sad.
In case the former is true, let me explain:
Rich people spend a way, way smaller percentage of their income on retail goods than the poor. They also have the means at their disposal to easily avoid such a tax, assuming the government doesn't try to tax goods purchased overseas and never brought in to the 'States.
Further, this has the effect of dampening consumer spending, which, despite what the trickle-down dumbasses say, drives the economy. This recession has given proof enough of that, for anyone who couldn't figure it out on their own. You don't have to look too hard to find stories about business owners complaining that loans and tax cuts won't help them much, since they can't hire more people unless they've got the orders to justify it. I know, seems obvious, but believe it or not there's a school of economic thought (I use the term loosely) in the US that holds that companies will hire more people if you just give them more money, rather than giving them more business.
It may have been an AMD thing.
Everything's a bad x-box port, though.
Jade Empire, for instance, is unplayably slow on my (high end, 1.5 y.o.) laptop, despite the fact that its graphics look about as good as Quake 2 and I can play plenty of much better looking games (e.g. L4D) at reasonably high detail.
You've gotta have a machine 3x as powerful as it ought to have to be just to make sure you can play all these half-assed ports. It is a dark time for the PC gamer.
I haven't played it in a few months, but L4D used to have somewhat frequent seconds-long (deadly in a multiplayer game) freezes when both cores were used. Had to cut it down to one to make it playable.
My first language was Perl :)
"We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris." -- Larry Wall, Programming Perl
If you like FPS games I strongly recommend you try STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, if you haven't.
It didn't get a whole lot of press, but it's one of the best single player non-Valve FPS games to come out in--oh, years probably.
No console version, PC only, which probably helped. It's (sorely needed) proof that the genre isn't completely worn out.
It's available on Steam. Should be super cheap by now.
That was actually my favorite part--until they ruined it.
I got the impression that my choices were to die (along with everyone else) or to turn myself in to a monster to get revenge and save the others. I then set about methodically destroying myself, turning myself in to a walking tank because I had nothing to lose.
Then I'm suddenly not a big daddy any more in the ending. WTF? They just un-did it? I lived for years more? I still feel like they'd set up the big daddy transformation as something that could not be undone, and the game was way better when I thought it was.
During the transformation I thought that the (mediocre) rest of the game might be saved by a poignant, emotional--but not maudlin--ending.
Nope.
What a let-down that game was.
This version looks way more like Paint.net than Photoshop, IMO.
Is that the one where you had to right-click on the image to save it? But that still had a "file" menu--just no "save" option in it?
'cuz that one had probably the worst GUI I've ever used.
Wikipedia's just described Slashdot in a nutshell.
It won't, because Tracer Tong will disable it.
Short answer: no, it's not Fallout.
Long answer:
I was initial worried about the idea of a first-person Fallout game, but after playing the (excellent, excellent) STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl became more hopeful for the idea, and resistant to others' concerns that it would be Oblivion with guns.
Then I played it.
It's Oblivion with guns.
It missed the mark big time on two of the key elements of a Fallout game, which are the leveling system and the branching side quest arcs.
1. The first two Fallouts encouraged actual role-playing in their leveling/skill systems. Unless you've got massive amounts of time to waste, or slightly less time and a guide, you're probably not going to be maxing out many skills (hell, probably none). You have to pick a play style and stick with it.
In Fallout 3, you are almost guaranteed to max out most or all of your skills. If you don't max one out, you'll be damn close to maxing out on it. This is more like Morrowind/Oblivion's "you are a god by the end of the game" style of character development, and takes away a lot of the Fallout feel.
2. The quests are total shit compared to the first two Fallouts. There are three cities of note, and none of them have much more to do than Klamath did in F2. Let that sink in for a second.
There's nothing that could even be called a shadow of the vast political struggle in Fallout 2. Gone, consequently, are many of the decisions you got to make in the earlier games. Again, actual role playing is severely diminished.
Other things you may miss are robust companion systems (yes, you can call the mediocre one in prior Fallouts robust in comparison to this one--it's that bad) and a main story line that doesn't completely suck ass.
That said, the game's not a total disaster, if you can forget it's supposed to be a real Fallout game and pretend it's some kind of alternate-universe fan fiction. The fighting is satisfying (for a while at least--it gets goddamn dull about half way through) and there are a few cute one-off quests. The beginning part of the game is solid gold, too, up until the point where you realize the first town you find isn't intended as a little starter town, but rather is about the best this game's going to have to offer.
I'd give the game a 3/5 taken on its own. As a Fallout game, though, it's a complete failure. For fans, I'd say the only reason to play is one minor, heart-wrenching quest related to Fallout 2, the one or two other decent serious quests, and the half-dozen or so humorous quests (I'm convinced they stuck their best writer on the one-off side quests, actually). I'd say just borrow (or *ahem* you know, whatever) it rather than buying.