So Skyrim's been out for a year. I was looking at saves from my various characters and reckon I've played about 150 hours. What's ridiculous is that, while this is a huge number, it's nothing compared to how much a lot of other people have played. What a great game. I'm not really going to talk about it, though.

Instead I'm going to argue that Bethesda's next RPG should not be Fallout 4. I played the hell out of Fallout 1 and 2 back when they came out, and I loved both Fallout 3 and New Vegas, so my aversion to a possible sequel isn't coming from a rabid No-Mutants-Allowed-type nostalgia-based rejection of the newer ones, nor from a dislike of the series in general. Rather, I just don't know what you do with that universe.

Setting 3 in DC was a smart choice; the new setting worked as a sort of palate-cleanser, allowing modern visuals and shifts in tone and gameplay to establish themselves. 3 was incredibly different from 1 and 2, but it felt right in a lot of ways, and seemed like a modern rendition of that world. When Obsidian went back west with New Vegas, it felt like the series had come home, and seeing old players like the NCR firmly cemented the continuity of the series. But New Vegas also brought a lurking problem to the fore: if each game jumps the timeline forward a few years, how long can you keep making something post-apocalyptic?

New Vegas is set approximately 200 years of the series' nuclear war. (This is a rough guess - I think Fallout 1 was 70 years out, and 2 was 70 years after that. 3 was about a generation after 2, and New Vegas was a little bit after 3, but I forget how long. The children of Fallout 2 characters are full-grown in New Vegas.) And appropriately, a lot has been rebuilt. Governments are reforming, and there are full-fledged armies and states instead of tribes and gangs. But there's a point where certain trappings of the series just don't make sense. Eventually all the pre-war ruins will have been picked over by scavengers, collapsed completely, or rebuilt. What made the post-apocalyptic setting interesting was the idea of new societies forming over the old - but in the context of the game's universe, eventually there just can't be any traces of that old society.

Skyrim is so phenomenally popular because, in a lot of ways, it feels like the promise of Bethesda-style RPGs has been fulfilled. With new consoles coming soon and a probable wait of several years before the next Elder Scrolls game, it's the perfect time to take that formula and establish it in a new IP. My vote would be a hard sci-fi setting, focused on exploring Mars, or a series of colonies on Saturn's moons.

Space Marine was a surprise treat for me last year. I had discovered and briefly dabbled in Warhammer 40K during the mid-nineties, but eventually drifted away and not really paid it any attention for 15 years. Space Marine, which at first glance seemed like a shameless Gears clone, had some unique mechanics and a gleefully over-the-top charm. I remember an early scene where a servo-skull floats directly in front of Titus's face to scan him - suddenly the gruesomely dark nature of the universe which had repelled me as a child seemed tongue-in-cheek and fun, in the same way that Doom's enthusiasm for the devil is sort of cute, in a weird way.

The end result is that I started dipping my toes back into 40K. I devoured the Dan Abnett's Eisenhorn omnibus over a vacation, and am currently a bit more than a third of the way through Ravenor. I'm also playing through XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and hearing Jeff talk about Skylanders Giants made me think: why hasn't someone combined these things? That's rhetorical - read on to see why I think no one has done so.

XCOM my just be a fluke, but suddenly turn-based tactics is popular in a way it hasn't been in a long time. Wouldn't it be great to take advantage of that and bring out a turn-based Warhammer 40,000 game that mirrored the tabletop game? It's counterintuitive, but probably not, as much as I'd like one. Someone (I forget who - it may have been on the bombcast, it may have been on another site) pointed out when Space Marine came out that Games Workshop probably doesn't want a video game cutting into their miniatures sales. If you could perfectly recreate the table game in software form for $60, why would you then pony up $15 or $20 bucks for a new squad or a vehicle in the table top game? Tabletop players probably wouldn't be satisfied with anything less than a carbon-copy of the tabletop rules, but the nature of game develop is such that I imagine some changes would be inevitable. Finally, the Dawn of War games have established a decent-sized fanbase for Warhammer-based RTS - would you want to introduce brand confusion and possibly alienate those players by switching to a turn-based format?

When the first Skylanders came out, I saw several people speculating that model would be a good fit for Warhammer. You could buy and paint your tabletop army, then drop them into a game and play online, or something. As I said in the above paragraph, I think the idea of turn-based Warhammer game is a little far-fetched, so this point is sort of moot. Still, I think it's a cool idea. I can't understand the general fascination with Skylanders. I don't know why Jeff fell for them hard. I imagine at least some enthusiasm Skylanders stems from the Giant Bomb community blindly jumping on a meme, but I've seen enough articles and talk about it elsewhere to believe that other people are genuinely into it. And of course it sold like crazy. When you translate the Skylanders concept to a franchise I care about, it makes a lot more sense. I like building and painting 40K miniatures more than I like playing the game with them, so the idea of being able to have a physical thing that I'm already invested in also manifest in a game is pretty cool. I think there are logistical problems with a Warhammer-based Skylanders-type game that you don't get with, say, Transformers. Would you still paint the figures? If so, does the game recognize that? How do you sell another, more expensive squad of Space Marines to people who have already invested hundreds or thousands of dollars in massive armies? Still, at first glance, the naked commercialism of Skylanders seems like a good fit for miniature wargaming.

If I had a conclusion it would go here.

This is something I've been thinking about off and on since this summer. Around July, when there wasn't a lot of new stuff coming out, I started replaying Dragon Age: Origins to see some of the DLC that had been released. I also started playing Jade Empire while dipping in and out of Borderlands.

I reach a point where I became unsatisfied with both Jade Empire and DA:O - I wasn't interested in the combat, and I started skipping through dialogue sections because I was bored with the story. I feel like BioWare has, in a lot of ways, been making KOTOR again every few years, just changing the setting and iterating slightly on the core concepts. At the same time I was really enjoying playing Borderlands again, despite having sunk dozens of hours into previous characters.

I picked up Deus Ex: Human Revolution when it came out and enjoyed it for a while, but became incredibly fed up with the last quarter or so of the game. Through hacking emails and reading everything I could find I felt like I knew exactly where the plot was going and was impatient for the game to catch up with me. It seemed like I was just infiltrating one facility after another, and I didn't really care how it wrapped up. A few weeks later I tried Space Marine on a whim, and was surprised at how much fun I was having with what is, on the whole, a pretty stupid concept.

I don't think this is just a case of preferring shooters over RPGs, although it may appear that way. When Giant Bomb did their SNES party I started seriously thinking about the split between games that prioritize storytelling and those that prioritize gameplay. I think the technological limitations of early consoles forced developers to focus on gameplay over story in most cases, and this is no longer the case. But when I think back over my favorite games, I've had the most fun with the ones that were games rather than stories. I don't think narratives should be abandoned entirely, but I've come to regard them as more superfluous that I would have supposed a few years ago.

Everytime I watch Star Trek VI, I pick up on another nuance that I never noticed before.  Today, for example, I realized that when Lt. Valeris asks the two crewmen in the transporter room, "You men have work to do?  Then snap to it," (you know, right after Captain von Trapp and the Klingons beam aboard the Enterprise for dinner?), she's actually referring to the assassination plot.  Huh.  Not sure if this means the movie's really good, or I'm really stupid.  
 
Along with Jaws, Hot Fuzz, Casino, and a handful of others, Star Trek VI is one of those movies that you're never NOT in the mood to watch.  If it's on TV, you might as well catch a half hour or so of it.
 
Video games?

SO ACHIEVEMENT POINTS, HUH?  I realize that this subject has been done to death by just about everyone out there, and I really don't have anything new to add to the conversation.  This post is mostly for my own benefit - an attempt to clarify my own opinions to myself, rather than convert others to my view.  The thing is, I like achievements.  I like earning them, and I like seeing number increase.  But at the same time, I'm frequently annoyed with them, and I'm concerned that they're taking a lot of the fun and relaxation out of my hobby and turning it into a chore.  Occasionally, I even wonder if a mandatory incentive/reward system negatively impacts game design as a whole.
 
Chasing points is what it is - if it's something you enjoy, then more power to you.  I enjoy comparing point totals on a game-by-game basis with my friends, and when Street Fighter IV came out my buddy and I definitely had a contest going to see who could rack up the most points - but most of the time, my friends and I aren't all playing the same games, at least not at the same time.  In addition, my total score is almost meaningless.  I keep my 360 friends list pretty small, and the relative rankings among my friend (in terms of total points earned) hasn't really changed since I got the system.  The total score really is just a function of how long you've had the system, how much time and money you can devote to buying and playing new games, and how much you care about going out of your way to get points.  Comparing points with a larger community is even more meaningless.  Not only does the enormous sample size almost guarantee you that your personal totals will be locked in statistical mediocrity, but the prevalence of point hacking means that all point totals have to be, to some degree, suspect.
 
So if the community aspect of achievements is pointless (puns! HAHA!), I think the only entertainment to be derived from them has to be on a purely personal level.  But what enjoyment is there in grinding out a tedious task to earn an arbitrary point value?  I'm playing Dead Space 2 right now, and stomping every necromorph I see in order to get the achievement for dismembering 2,500 limbs.  While busting open an alien corpse to pick up ammo is fun to some extent, being told to do it x number of times is an unnecessary chore - how about I only do it when I feel like it, rather than compulsively?  I think I spent close to an hour trying to get If They Came to Hear Me Beg in Halo: Reach.  Why, exactly?
 
Occasionally developers will use achievements to encourage behavior from the player.  For example, Civilization: Revolution used them to encourage experimenting with victory conditions and playing with various civilizations, and Mass Effect used them to promote playing with different party members or classes.  I used to think this was a good use of achievements, but now I'm not so sure.  I ended up getting an S-rank in the first Mass Effect and a near-S-rank in Mass Effect 2 (that is, everything except playing through on Insanity), and spamming biotics isn't very fun.  Space racist/religious fanatic Ashley Williams is awful, so it's a good thing there's an achievement for playing through most of the game with her!  Otherwise I might have role-played and just left her on the ship to clean the zero-G toilets.
 
I think the most damning thing about the entire achievement system is that the games I end up playing or enjoying the most are ones that I play without any regard for points.  While I got most of the points in ME1 and ME2, the majority of those came either on my first run through the game or on dedicated point-farming runs.  Most of the time, I was just playing through again for the sheer hell of it - either to try a different-gender Shepard, or because I missed some planets my first time through, or because I wanted to do back-to-back runs through both games in order to have a "canon" save file to bring over into ME3 when it comes out.  Most of the coverage I saw for Pac-Man Championship Edition DX contained something along the lines of "I almost wish the achievements were harder so there was more incentive to play it."  Oddly enough, I've been playing it more than any game in the past couple weeks, despite S-ranking it on the first day I got, simply because it's fun.
 
Achievements aren't going anywhere though, no matter what objections some people have, and it looks like more and more games are incorporating them, even on platforms like the PC, where there's no overarching system in place (save Steam, of course).  I almost admire Nintendo for resisting the tide, but I suspect it's less of a conscious, principled decision on their part and more a case of being out of touch with things like the Internet.

I love getting pre-order bonuses when I buy a game weeks after it's been released - it's like an admission from the retailer that these sorts of promotions are pointless.  I've seen it a handful of times at Gamestop, mostly with games that haven't sold too well.  Today I got Fallout: New Vegas from Amazon, and it totally came with the "Tribal Pack" (a bunch of bullshit I don't really want or need, but whatever), along with a fat orange "DO NOT SELL UNTIL 10/19/10" sticker.   I guess they just made way too many pre-order copies.

So I played through Professor Layton and the Unwound Future a few weeks ago and wrote a review of it for the site.  Last week I was talking with some friends about it, and I got to thinking about the difficulty of judging sequels.  I think every game should be evaluated on its own merits, but at what point can series fatigue become a legitimate concern?  Should perfectly adequate games be penalized for adhering too closely to a formula?
 
I enjoyed this new Layton, but nearly as much as the first two.  Although there have been some noticeable improvements in puzzle variety and selection, playing through the game felt just a little too rote for me.  Every game so far has been almost exactly a dozen hours long and the charming artwork and settings are (for me at least) undermined by absurd plot twist in the last third of the story.  Buying no. 3 was a no-brainer for me, but I doubt I'll play the next Layton when it's released.  The thing is, if asked if I could recommend it, I think I'd have to say "yes," because it's still a good game, but its failure to innovate in any significantly interesting way means I'm less interested in the series now.

I'm totally stoked for Fallout: New Vegas.  A few weeks ago, I decided to go back and do another playthrough of Fallout 3 in order to pick up the last achievements I needed for my S-rank, and with the experience fresh in my mind I've been thinking about what mechanics in FO3 I enjoyed in comparison to FO1 and FO2, which ones I hated, and what this means for New Vegas.  
 
I have decided that weapon durability is the worst thing to happen to the franchise, at least the way it is handled now.  It's unrealistic, annoying, and forces you to constantly consider a meta-game outside of the narrative.
 
Fallout 3 made ammo and most healing/medical items weightless in an attempt (I assume) to simplify inventory management and make the game more accessible, but it also introduced a weapon durability system that basically forced you to either carry around loads of different weapons or multiple copies of the same gun so that you could always repair what you had.  For the most part this was annoying but not an insurmountable challenge - if you liked using the Chinese Assault Rifle, you could generally find more than enough of them to keep yours repaired.  But certain weapons, like Lincoln's Repeater of the Chinese Officer's Sword, were either incredibly rare of had no corresponding weapon to use for spare parts.  I guess this was an attempt to make you ration your resources, but all it did was make me shun these pretty cool weapons in favor of something a lot more mundane but easier to repair.
 
Fallout: New Vegas is introducing a "Hardcore" mode, which basically sounds like a list of old Fallout mechanics that were scrapped in 3.  So bullets will have weight again, stims will heal over time, etc.  This sounds intereresting, but what's the point of a mode that tries to heighten realism when you still have to carry around 5 assault rifles for spare parts?
 
If you must include a durability system, I'd rather see something a bit more grounded in reality.  Make the player have to clean her weapons periodically to prevent them from jamming, and make jammed weapons useless until you can get a gunsmith to fix them in town, or something like that.  Maybe find a more realistic way to limit the inventory so that the player constantly has to make hard decisions about what to pick up and discard.  I'd even prefer a a super-restrictive weapon inventory like in modern FPS games - maybe you can only hold a pistol, a rifle, and a melee weapon at once.  My point is, there are better ways to highlight the survival factor and make the player think conservatively about inventory and combat than by breaking her weapon after 100 uses.

So Ryan going on and on about Civ V is making me really think a lot about Civilization.  I played a bit of Civ Rev, but that last one I got heavy into was Civ II, so this new one wasn't even on my radar.  Now, I don't have a PC that can run Civ V, nor do I have the spare change to pick it up right now...but Civ III is $5 on Steam.  Damn, that's tempting...