Weekly Shenanigans #6

Hmmm. This is going up a bit later than usual today. Then again, I got up a bit later than usual, if that’s any excuse. Anyway, I’ve got a few more links for you than usual, from all over the internet (which, as I understand it, is actually a series of tubes). Topics cover a range of things, from the funny, to the nerdgasmic, the the outrageous. It’s a carefully formulated balance of content designed to… who am I kidding. It’s a bunch of random crap I find interesting. Down the rabbit-hole with you:

• For starters, I’m gonna go all dealicious/slickdeals/cheapass gamer on you. For reasons unknown and not entirely understood, Bioshock and Oblivion are being bundled together into a package that’s $39.99 on Xbox 360 and $29.99 on PC. Words cannot describe how wonderful a deal this is. If I didn’t already own both games, I’d be out buying right now. You, though… maybe you don’t have them yet. That’s a problem. Fix it!

• This story is old, but (sickly) fascinating, and its title, “The Adventure of the Camera Shy Computer” really doesn’t do it justice. I would’ve preferred, “The Epileptic Computer,” or “The Big Computer That Couldn’t.” Sometimes it’s nice to know how far we’ve come.

• Traditional Media is Dead and Dying: The RIAA has once again succeeded in making the little guy (or woman, in this case) suffer for the presumed, collective sins of the entire file-sharing community. The court handling the Jammie Thomas file-sharing case has ordered her to pay $1.92 million dollars for downloading and sharing music using the Kazaa file-sharing service. That’s $80,000 per song. Want another metric? The idiot judge on this case just ordered her to pay 240 Kias, or 1,600 new 13-inch Macbook Pros, or 38,400 new PC games, all for something that’s barely worth money in the first place – poor-quality music. You know all those gamers that were planning on attacking Valve for making them buy Left4Dead 2 as a standalone game? They should take all that energy and put it into something positive, like burying all the dinosaurs over at the RIAA.

Bethesda Interview: Ashley Cheng

I first mentioned my series of interviews a couple weeks ago, and suffice to say I’ve been a bit busy since then. Scrounging, hunting people down, coming up with hundreds of (hopefully) interesting questions, hitting a lot of dead ends… it takes some time to get a project like this going. Regardless, I’m happy to announce that the first interview has been published, courtesy of VE3D. It’s got a bunch of pretty pictures and cool stuff like that attached, so frankly I would click through to their site to read the piece. If you really want to do it here, though, I’ve got the text-only transcript after the jump.

Fallout 3: An Examination of Morals

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve got to admit something up front: I haven’t been able to put a lot of time into playing Fallout 3 yet. There’s still tons of content I haven’t seen yet, I’ve only explored perhaps a dozen or so markers on the game’s map, and I haven’t even started pursuing the main quest yet.

Despite all this, I’ve managed to get a juicy taste of the moral dilemmas the game presents.

Clearly, Fallout 3 isn’t the first to examine such issues

Fallout 3: Initial Impressions

So… up until three days ago, I had convinced myself that I wouldn’t buy any more computer games until the semester was over. It was almost like my version of a New Year’s resolution, and it lasted about as long.

I saw that Fallout 3 was available for pre-purchase on Steam, and couldn’t help myself. I bought the sucker, and promptly began counting down the hours until I could play it. For some reason, once the release date rolled around – yesterday, October 28th – Steam wouldn’t allow my download of the game to start until 1:00pm my time (central). Not too sure why that was the case – I’ve purchased plenty of games on there before, and a few of them even gave the option of pre-loading game files so my experience wouldn’t be hindered in any way once  it was Go Time. Honestly though, it was a minor inconvenience, as I was somewhat busy yesterday and didn’t even have time to install the game until this morning.

I’ve only put in perhaps two or three hours so far, but I like what I’ve seen. As I play through the opening, explore the immediate area, and take a few quests, I’ve decided that Fallout 3 is a blend of a few recent games, both visually and in terms of gameplay and interface. Bioshock, Oblivion, and Half-Life 2 all came to mind, and none of those are bad things. Incidentally, some of the voice acting done was by the same professionals used by Oblivion.

All in all, I’ve got nothing but good things to say about it. Parents might want to stear clear of this one, because Fallout 3 has definitely earned the Mature rating. There has been an amount of language and truly impressive levels of gore (headshots that blow away the cranium, realistic body fluid effects, etc).

Hopefully I’ll be able to post some screenshots and a few gameplay videos tomorrow. I really want to capture a few good examples of the V.A.T.S. system, as the visuals that accompany it are really cool.

Right now, however, I’ve got a paper to write. It’s due in a little over two hours.