Category: complaining

Everyone’s War: Backstory and engagement in Fallout 4

A month or two after Fallout 4 launched I started my second character and something immediately bothered me: the male and female player characters have different backgrounds.  This has been criticized for falling short of gender neutrality and for practical reasons – the character’s skills and knowledge – but my big issues are with the character’s emotional journey. Continue reading Everyone’s War: Backstory and engagement in Fallout 4

Rude awakening: Why Fallout: New Vegas felt incomplete

The Fallout series of role-playing video games have been well-received and popular since Fallout was released in 1997 as “America’s first choice in post-nuclear simulation.” Post-apocalyptic video games have been numerous, yet the Fallout games stand out for their immersion and complexity. Fallout has managed to transcend the traditional combat- and leveling-focused RPGs to satisfy players on a much deeper level.

At least, the Fallout games transcended the typical genre offering until Fallout: New Vegas. Never before has a canonical, major release Fallout game received such hedged reviews from fans and critics. Yet, New Vegas seemed to have all the ingredients of a stellar Fallout game: an expansive world, factions to meet, choices to make, and excellent casting, all centered around a sweeping and nuanced regional conflict. Why, then, did it feel incomplete? There was something missing from New Vegas that, as players and critics have remarked, makes it feel more like a really big Fallout 3 expansion rather than a Fallout game in its own right.

Continue reading Rude awakening: Why Fallout: New Vegas felt incomplete

i started one of these things

i hate blogs.  or rather, what blogs came to represent.

first, there was the Internet, and no one cared.  then there was the World-Wide Web, and folks scratched their heads over what to do with it.  geeks would write things on message boards or personal web sites, and the information flowed freely.

then regular people discovered the value of the internet (no more capital “i”) for commerce and socializing.  they then spent the next ten years discovering everything the geeks and nerds knew all along. suddenly it was cool to be doing everything the dorky kids had been doing – without, of course, acknowledging where it all came from.

so “blogs” came along – they weren’t anything special, just dumbed-down content management systems that mimicked the hand-coded or hacked-up CMSes the OGs (Original Geeks) wrote.  ah, but the response from the masses was “ZOMG!!!!1!!! U CN RITE ON UR WEBZ AND PPL CN REED IT?!?”  internet innovators world-wide collectively smacked their foreheads.

it was like coming out with “wraps” while all the Mexicans stand around wondering how people are charging $9 for a burrito.  or Twitter “revolutionizing” communication by hacking together a very poorly written way to broadcast text messages.

i didn’t want a part of it.  i was content with my work, my experience, remembering what things were like in the days of 1200-baud modems, usenet, gopher, and telnet (TELNET!  pre-SSH!  “hi!  sniff me!”).  but, hell, i had to break down some day.

a big chunk of the reasoning is that there are a lot of valuable things on the internet that i use or am entertained by every day.  sometimes i fix something after finding nothing helpful on the web – maybe i should add some contributions of my own. and, of course, there are also a lot of stupid things said on the internet, so why not cast my lot in, too?

things you can expect here:

  • pixels:  photos, photochops, UI topics.
  • tools:  software and hardware fixes, hacks, firearms, electronics.
  • commentary.
  • complaining.

– emilio