I have been playing Fallout New Vegas a great deal of late, to take my mind off other things.
It is interesting because there were several really nice things that I had failed to discover, down to me being away from games too long and off the pulse, so to speak.
I did not realise that The King's robot dog, Rex could become a companion. I had become obsessed with gunning down Deathclaws from afar with the Anti-Material Rifle and gathering as much loot as I could, especially as I realised that there is a place to store it all and that's in the Presidential Suite of the Lucky 38, as this appears to be mine now.
I also got some real shocks too! After a stint in that offshoot err add-on that I am just trying to buy time until I remember what it was called with the chips and the bald and mute lady and that ... ohh damn it. The one where your abducted and put a collar on by that Elijah bloke. Lol! You have to go through that town with those ghost type people but you have to do everything stealthily and at a snails pace.
That is the one thing that stands out as annoying is that walking in their games is extremely frustrating and you fell more like your dragging a leg. Running is OK but walking is a pin in the arse!
Now what I got a real refreshing surprise from was the other two umm oooh NUTS! The Canyon Wreckage one with Hopesville and errrrrrrrrr ummmmmmm that courier chap, I loved that! Way too short in my opinion and should have been much longer but I still loved it. The Divide! Brilliant, lol.
A complete contrast to this and equally as good and just as equally too dman short was the Northern Passage add-on. Or at least I think they were add-ons, lol. The Grand Canyon was beautifully presented but it was a bit light on a few things. Loved the Joshua Graham character and a shame it did not go a bit deeper into his character. I liked that snowchalk, or was it chalkcheese guy the one you meet when you first get there, oooh Zion that was what it was referred to as I remember now, lol. I thought I had done something so very wrong when we suddenly reached Zion and it was not what I expected at all. Everyone gets shot and I am getting ready to hit the reload as I thought I had missed something!
The funny thing was as I was gunning them down with a sniper rifle of some sort I was left with one guy and I knew I hit him and he was still standing?! I kept low and got a bit closer, took aim and shot him again and yet still he stood there?! I remember thinking 'Whoa! Hardly anything can survive a shot from this gun while hidden! That must be one tough mother?!' Turned out to be chalkcheese, Slowchalk or whatever his name was. Man, that was a pretty map whereas the Divide was interesting and menacing.
I must admit to having used Fallout to take up some time and I wanted to leave Skyrim alone for several weeks. Then I wanted to get the expansion disks.
However I was actually paying much closer attention than normal to the games that have been coming out and I did not realise that the graphics had moved on a whole Direct X number from Skyrim?! Mind you on the one hand people now state how old Skyrim is and its engine but not too long ago it was the bee's knees! For me when I saw the screenshots of Skyrim I could not quite believe my eyes! How far the 3D Engines had come since I built my last RIG, notice I said MY last rig as I did sort of build one for someone else a couple years back.
I could not help thinking that Skyrim for me, as I had been out of the gaming world for a few years, looked good on my system. As stated before my system is a Phenom X3 1.8Ghz with a Radeon HD 5450M graphics processor.
I never thought I would be able to play Skyrim on it in a million years and many people in the Internet said no way. All of them were wrong and I realised after first owning Oblivion and then Fallout 3 that the later engines were coded alot more efficiently than previously. Skyrim looks far better and runs a lot smoother than Oblivion on my laptop! Mad as it sounds, it is true.
So I could not help but think each time I played it just how good it would look with the settings on max?! Obviously there was no way that was going to happen on my laptop and I would not even get half way there, that much I knew! Then after I discovered that other titles were not only reported as having better graphics than Skyrim but also with the free roaming world idea I started to wonder even more! Mind you there is no point having a free roaming world unless you have a nice length main plot mission driver with other side plots to actually extend the main plot line!
Personally I hated these done in two days titles of old and I did not like it. Playing Oblivion and then Fallout and Skyrim this seemed to me to be the natural way to go and to extend the longevity of the game was a given and for me seriously needed to happen.
Years ago I was waiting for Half Life 2 with baited breath, do you know I just found the original receipt from PC World for my purchase of Half Life 2?! Yes it was good except for the fact I had completed it in just two days and yet at around that time I had the demo of a Real Time Strategy game Age of Empires II, I think it was, that I had played for around a month?!
I remember thinking how bloody stupid it was that this had occurred, I had paid 'X' amount of money and been forced onto a system, STEAM, I did not like and never thought would work, well it has not really and mostly full of crud lol, that was problematic at best t o play a game that was going to last in the hours and not even days for some.
Fast forward to present day and Bethesda's games are going for bloody weeks, but I would prefer months guys?! Lol!
In all honesty the maps are great and I am all in favour of bigger maps and more areas. Oddly I seem to recall reading somewhere that the Elder Scrolls online game had the entire Tamriel map? Stunning! However from a hort clip I saw the game looked like complete pandemonium and I will be honest here and stating that your charging for the software and then a monthly subscription on top?! Sorry there are absolutely no excuses for that and you will not ever get me paying out that money and those that do? Well your a few sandwiches short of a picnic! Well based on the video I saw and the way people are playing the game anyway they do seem to be minus those sandwiches?!
Why on earth would I pay to go into a game that instead of playing it with an interesting plot and getting together with other in a team or co-op type fair they're just running at each other in some massive drug influenced mad battle the likes of which reality has never seen and Napoleon Bonaparte would turn in his grave over!
These are obviously spotty teenagers that seem to hink that playing a game that way os the cool thing to do? Hmm maybe they should round up the players one at a time and do a psychological evaluation of them?! Lol. If any have dyed theur hair green then lock them up in a padded cell until a psychological evaluation is done.
I am looking arund currently trying to catch up on titles I have missed but that are not too old!
Not worked out FacrCry 3 yet as this gets some good reviews but then I see many are moaning because the plot was very thin and very short? I also here that rather surprisingly FarCry far was about to be, or has been, announced? I wonder if this is because of the things I read? I played the original FarCry and I am sure I got FarCry 2 but seem to remember it crashing and not completing it?
Similar to what I read about FarCry 3 was Thief! Now Thief, which I am most definitely getting, is an odd one because the graphics looked great and I was kinda hoping it was at least some of the original team behind it. I still have several copies, two came with two GeForce 6800GT's I used in my original SLI rig, today of the third instalment Thief III Deadly Shadows and this for me was one of the greatest games ever made! The best part was my sister laughing at me and said a game cannot be frightening so I let her play until cacking her underwear became a major problem as was the leaning to one side like she was going to dive under the kitchen table! I kid you not! She was not a kid either and was in full time work. She said she just never imagined a game could be scary!
Those reading this who played the game would have long since known that it was the asylum and they also would have known I was letting her play the part where you go up the spiral staircase!
But I hear the latest Thief is not all that. Well we will see before long.
Right now though it would be nice to know if there was going to be a Fallout 4 at some point and a Elder Scrolls?! Now what with the recent advancement of graphics and a couple of new graphics APIs of Direct X and Mantle along with HSA and hUMA I for one simply cannot wait!
Now the very idea of a title each of Fallout and Elder Scrolls with these technologies about makes me dribble like a madman! Lol! One thing I do feel sure about and that is that we will here something about BOTH titles before 2014 is through. I think that would give us all something to smile about?!
Now I have regained interest in Dishonoured and am looking for other open ended titles and see what is out there.
On another note I am getting excited about both Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen, though I am sure it wont be called that, maybe STAR COMMANDER? Lol!
On the lookout for forthcoming car racing titles too and that Project Cars sounds good even if the title does not? Hopefully a decent Need for Speed? I love the Need for Speed titles but they have the whole old Star Trek thing going on! One good one and then one or to crap ones, or so they say. Never played a crap one myself but then I missed out on a great deal of titles over the last five years! I do have Hot Pursuit and that is good!
Shall return to Hot Pursuit in the next coupld of weeks!
