Geek Smithology

I loved Fallout.
I loved Fallout 2 even more.
And so far I’ve really loved playing Fallout 3 (yay Steam!) but my love of the previous games has tripped me up. I was developing my favorite type of character, a man who can destroy anybody with a hail of small arms fire, generally going by the name Doc Holliday, I developed my character the wrong way.
Based on my previous experience, I was putting some stats towards Perception, only to find that I should have been putting those stats into Agility in the new game. Well, shit. I begged off the game for a bit, only to find out (thanks to some direction from Foo), that you can edit your stats through the console if you’re playing on the PC.
So for anyone else who needs to change their stats, I just did the following:

(Hey, I don’t wanna cheat, I just want to do things the way I thought I was doing them all along!)

This is a pretty comprehensive list of console commands for anyone else who may be looking.

Puzzle Quest was the best game of 2007. Bioshock was cool, but didn’t hold my interest long enough to finish it. Maybe some other year. And while Portal held my attention like few games in history, it only held that attention for about three massively entertaining hours. So it was with great glee that I read on Gamasutra that there will be another game. In space! With my PC languishing in the basement, if I game it’s on the DS, so between a new Puzzle Quest game and the upcoming Civ port, I’ll be content for a very, very long time.

It would appear that if one wants to review things, there must be some sort of rating attached for quick judgment by a fickle readership. While I of course subscribe to the literary snob idea of writing the review as text and letting the reader make up his or her mind based on a careful reading and analysis, I realize that most people just skim a review for anything funny and/or inflammatory and skip to see what the score is.

So, without further ado, I reveal my rating system, which will heretofore be used to score anything and everything a review in the future. Please note that I review everything “as is” and “how I feel about it at the time.” There is rarely any conscious analysis and comparison against the greats of a particular genre or medium, or even against items of similar ilk.

This means that I loved it. Go out and do whatever it takes to have the experience, even if it means watching Gigli.

I liked it. Do whatever it takes, short of watching Gigli.

It was “okay”. Check it out if the opportunity presents itself, but don’t go out of your way.

I didn’t like it. It’s better than Gigli, but unless you love the genre or not having fun, don’t bother.

I hated it. It probably is Gigli. If you have a dog-eared copy of The 120 Days of Sodom. on your shelf, this might be right up your alley. But don’t forget to pick a safeword…

As with all things console[1], I have been very late to Nintentdo’s latest party offering. My last experience with Nintendo (aside from some retro McLovin with an emulator and some 2-player Legendary Wings sessions) not involving the words GameBoy was so unremarkable that I don’t even remember what system it was on – Maybe one of the Tony Hawk games on the Game Cube.

During the standard celebrations of holiday mirth an uncle who was able to procure a Wii brought the system over for some demonstration. 18 rounds of boxing and at least 30 baseball pitches later, I am nearly unable to lift my arm, but committed to purchasing a Wii the next time I see one. It doesn’t really matter if it’s next week or next year, so I won’t be getting into any eBay bidding wars, but it will be mine. Oh yes, it will be mine.

It’s easy to see why the Wii is outselling everything else – the XBox 360 is almost tempting, but ultimately not compelling, and I’ve never even considered a Playstation III for even the smallest measurable instance of time – and the resolution on those atomic clocks is downright terrifying. And what’s this I hear about a Civ game for the DS?

[1] I am an unrepentant PC Gamer.

According to this article from Gamasutra, the Dead will have a whole bunch of songs put into the Rock Band game. Sweet. If anyone wants to play, I wanna be Jerry. (but then again, who doesn’t?)

From the article:

According to a joint statement from the companies, the iconic group is making 18 master recordings from its diverse catalog available as digitally distributed game levels following Rock Band’s release this holiday season. Among the songs available will be the classic Dead tracks “Truckin’,” “Uncle John’s Band,” “Touch of Grey,” “Sugar Magnolia,” and “Casey Jones.”

Yeah, turns out all you have to do is cut a fair bit of the tip of your thumb off while stupidly trying to cut garlic[1] with a big ol’ serrated bread knife. So…if you thought gamepad thumb hurt “in general”, it’s a lot worse after you’ve tried to amputate your thumbprint with stainless steel teeth of woe. I would post some pictures, but frankly I’d be creeped out if anyone actually looked at them. Lucky for me, I don’t need my left thumb for typing, or tomorrow could be a very long day.

Hope your Sunday evening is progressing with far less blood.

[1] To be clear, my relationship with garlic has not been harmed by this incident, and I still extoll its many virtues.

So the latest edition of one of the rags I subscribe to shows up Friday (PC Gamer in this case. Why do I subscribe to this magazine even though the only game I managed to get through last year was Half Life 2? I guess because it’s cheaper than buying it at the bookstore. Duh.)

It comes with a DVD now, and I noticed that there was a 14 day free trial of World of Warcraft on it. I watched Tim live through the horrors of WOW addiction, so I wasn’t even going to install that one. But a beta/demo of Dungeon Siege II was also on the disc, so I installed that. I never played the first one, but here are my impressions after finishing the demo (only a few hours worth – nothing big.)

It’s very Diablo-like, for all that’s good and bad about that. You’ve got your teleporters, and your chest o’ stuff in town, endless amounts of proverbial ph4t 1007 (fat loot, for the 1337-impaired) and enchantable weapons. A big difference is that DS has a fully-3D camera and you can pan and zoom and all that jazz. I was able to cruise @ 1280×1024 with a good frame rate and looked mighty fine. The skill system was your standard pick-up-points-and-assign-them-to-different-hierarchies system, but all in all it was a pretty fun couple o’ hours.

Perhaps the best compliment I can pay is that when this game comes out in the fall, there is no way in hell that I am going to buy it, because I just don’t have that kind of time.

I’ve been playing through Doom 3 and the hell level just got to be a little too much (yeah, that’s right, I was scared ) So I was surfing the web and happened upon Doom 3 Classic. Despite my internal emergency warning system (“This is not a test”) I downloaded and installed it. Here are my thoughts:

E1M1: The Hangar
“Cool, Doom was awesome!”

E1M3: Toxin Refinery
“I miss all these monsters. Sweet, a soulsphere! Keycards blow”

E1M4: Command Control
“Man keycards blow. A maze? WTF? Hmmm, looks like I missed some switch to extend this bridge. I’m bored.”

Cue the fat lady, ’cause I’m pawing for the exit button. Turns out remakes are never as good as you remember the original to have been (someone should’ve told Van Sant that before he actually went through with that Psycho nonsense.) The cool things were no weapon reloading, running as long as you want, and lots of monsters (although my machine wasn’t up to the task – things got sloooow.) The not cool things were, well, everything else.

It’s not that it was soul-crushingly bad so much as completely unnecessary.

Do not play Doom 3
When you really have to pee
Don’t ask, just trust me