Tales of the Capital Wasteland

by gamer_152

The Easter holiday is over for me and today marks my first day back at university for this term. I’ve got three weeks of designing games, coding programs and preparing for my exams ahead of me, although as I’m writing this I do have the slight problem that my internet is offline leaving me effectively incapable of accessing any of the resources I need. Unfortunately my university has had a power outage which means no lectures can be presented, no computers in the university can be used, the network is down and the food outlets have had to close which has been more than a little annoying but there’s not much I can do about that.

On the subject of playing video games though I had a very eventful last week back at my family’s home. I put a lot more time into Fallout 3 and finally finished the game, it was a bit shorter than I thought it would be but overall it was fantastic. I do have a couple of issues with the end of the game (major Fallout 3 spoiler follow, obviously):

SPOILER WARNING: Click here to reveal hidden content.

Firstly although it was awesome to watch the Brotherhood of Steel’s massive mechanical creation laying waste to the Enclave forces with his eye lasers, metal fists and giant bombs, from a gameplay perspective it felt a bit of an anti-climax. This kind of thing usually doesn’t bother me greatly in games but in what had felt a very action-oriented RPG up to that point the final mission simply had you walking at a slow pace behind the Brotherhood’s robot from point A to point B.

I also felt like my death at the end of the game was somewhat unnecessary because with me I had Fawkes, a mutant capable of resisting even the highest levels of nuclear radiation. On attempting to send my jolly green giant into the radioactive chamber which would have very quickly killed me or Sarah, my companion from the brotherhood, Fawkes refused, stating that it was my destiny to enter the chamber. Fawkes always displayed a kind of wisdom you wouldn’t immediately expect from one big, lumpy living science experiment but he could have easily carried out the task that had to be done, taking little of the credit himself and letting nobody die, to me his “destiny” excuse seemed a bit of a cop-out.

I've seen enough of this guy to last me a lifetime.

Maybe I’m just being a bit picky though. Some of the points in the game I enjoyed the most were Tranquillity Lane, my return to the vault and the Enclave base, all of which I thought were very well-done. I finished off a few of the side quests in the game after beating it and hope to jump into some of the DLC after I’m done with this term of university. Fallout 3 may have more than its fair share of bugs and glitches but I feel like an incredible amount of effort has gone into designing the game and it’s really paid off.

On Saturday I picked up a brand new mouse for my laptop and something I’ve been waiting a long time to get my hands on: Pokémon HeartGold. Although I didn’t know it when I bought it apparently HeartGold and SoulSilver have become perplexingly popular among the people on my university’s video games programming course. I would have jumped straight into the game as soon as I got it but I’ve been holding off until a point where I can really give it the time and concentration it deserves. Despite playing masses of each Pokémon game and being pretty much an all-round Pokémon nerd the second generation of games are the ones I remember least about so it should be interesting to see how familiar I find the events of HeartGold.

My next big adventure.

That just about covers my last week in games, thanks for reading everybody. It seems that the university network has come back online now sooner than expected and I can get straight to uploading this to the internet. For those who have not yet seen it I leave you with this. Happy gaming.

-Gamer_152