Further notes on Halo: ODST, Half-Life 2, and Fallout 3. More stream-of-consciousness comments than actual analysis on the latter two games, because I’m not nearly done with them yet..
Halo: ODST: finished. I wish I were a more proficient FPS player, because I think I would have enjoyed the story more if it had been delivered at a faster pace (or, to put it another way, if more of my gameplay experience had been the story portions) — as it would have been, if I were more efficient at shooting aliens in the head.
That said, I very much appreciate the presence of Easy mode, without which I would not have gotten through. And I did have some extremely satisfying victories once I worked out how to use the different kinds of weapons. I’m totally going through Remedial FPS Playing here, because it took me more time than I’d like to admit to discover that some guns could be zoomed in for more accurate shots.
My enjoyment of the story had a lot to do with the audio portions. The environment of New Mombasa was less differentiated than I might have liked — it didn’t seem like a lived-in kind of place with residences and different kinds of public space. But probably too much realism in that regard would have made the spaces less workable for combat.
On the other hand, the music did a lot to establish mood and make the night portions especially melancholy. Meanwhile, a lot of my sense for the characters came from the voice acting, especially Fillion’s. But I have to respect the way genuinely characterizing dialogue is folded in as responses to events during combat. I wouldn’t say that the characterization exactly affects the gameplay very much — it would be neat if it did — but there’s some smooth work here.
Half-Life 2: I’m still working on it. I die a lot. It gives me a sick, uneasy feeling when I play, too, which means that I can only do a little at a time before I need a break. I had this reaction to Halo: ODST also, until I learned enough about the mechanics to be a little better at not dying. So I suspect the feeling will go away, but until that happens, most of the time I’m too stressed by the gameplay to be having fun.
My sister doesn’t like this game, though, and since we’ve been playing a lot of these together, I’m making slower progress with it.
Fallout 3: we just started. Here’s the evolution of my sister’s gameplay style over the course of the evening:
7 PM: “You seem to keep dying. Want me to try?”
7:30 PM: “I see what you’re doing wrong. Those red dots on the compass show where enemies are. I’m going to avoid them. Because I’m a pacifist.”
7:32 PM: “The avoiding isn’t working.”
9 PM: “Come here, suckers, I’m going to SHOOT YOU IN THE HEAD.”
9:30 PM: “Video games do make you violent.”
Three hours later I still haven’t gotten the controller back. She just frag-grenaded our avatar’s leg, but at least it got rid of the giant ants swarming us.
Anyway, first impressions: combat with the special aiming thing is more strategic than reflex-based, which is fairly well to my taste.
There’s a lot of dialogue. Some of it’s a little on the obvious side; and it’s entirely the lawnmower-able tree style. Lots of respect for the effort in creating it, but I keep thinking about how it might be done better.
I get why we started the game as a baby: it introduces various backstory to provide the protagonist’s history of growing up, and also lets you practice walking and shooting and such. All the same, it felt a tiny bit hokey.
The openness of the world is hugely impressive, and many aspects are beautifully realized. Excellent, if creepy, art direction.
Speaking of realization, though, I do not need to see the head of a dog actually fly off its body with blood spattering. Nor is it fun finding people’s jawbones lying about after a battle. I’m not offended by gore, exactly, but it feels completely gratuitous — in a way that neither Half-Life 2 nor Halo tended to be, even though overall they felt like more violent games.
We did hit one bug where, somehow, we were standing on a little partition thing under a low ceiling, and the movement engine decided that we were permanently stuck there and couldn’t move in any direction, whether by standing or crouching or jumping, whether in first or third person view. So that was pretty annoying. We had to reload the game to get out of that situation.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 
I’ve played a ridiculous amount of Fallout 3 in the time since it came out, so I obviously like it. However, I do agree that the dialogue could have been better and the gore is gratuitous. (It does make me laugh that you can search any portion of the remnants of an enemy to loot their entire inventory, as much as it also breaks immersion. There’s something endlessly funny to me about picking up a rocket launcher and several missiles, a suit of exotic armour, a bunch of money and some random foodstuffs from a severed eyeball.)
One of the things that amazes me about the game’s gratuitous gore level is that there is actually a perk that allows you to make it more gory. Given that you only get a few perks over the course of the game and they’re all very powerful, I can’t conceive of spending one for *more* gore.
One thing that I find with a lot of dialogue-heavy computer RPGs like Fallout 3 / Oblivion / Neverwinter Nights is that I really wish the quests were more varied. Fallout 3 does provide a fair bit that fall outside of the whole, “Go to place X, kill everything there, retrieve Macguffin, bring it back get paid lots of money,” sort, and I appreciated that. However, I wish that there were both more missions that involved talking to various people, leaning things, and working through social problems, and that these were more intermeshed. The world of Fallout 3 is giant, especially with the expansions, but too many missions are extremely solitary other than the core plot-driving arc. It winds up lending a *sameness* to them.
All of that said, I do seem to keep coming back (except that right now I’m entirely stuck in one of the expansions and it’s hit the point where it’s just frustrating rather than fun).
Emily, I’m curious, have you heard of the game The Void (also known, in other parts of the world, as Tension or Turgor) by the Russian game developer Ice Pick Lodge?
Nope. Why?
Mostly curious. It’s a game I’ve been been recently and it’s very… well… interesting. Does some pretty unusual things with both game mechanics and story. I don’t want to clog this comment thread up with too much detail, I mean it’s got a wikipedia article ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Void_%28video_game%29 ) if you want to know more.
Story-wise, I haven’t finished it yet, so it’s hard to know what to make of it for sure. There’s a lot of vagueness and hinting, and I kind of suspect the entire game/world might turn out to be a huge metaphor, but…
I don’t think the Wikipedia article is appropriate if you want to know what the game is about. I prefer the RPS article mentioned in the wiki probably does a better job of describing it (The article on Pathologic is fantastic, by the way)
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/09/29/wot-i-think-the-void/
Good Old Fallout 3. I enjoy just ignoring the main quest and wandering around the outside world, of course with the Animal Friends perk so I don’t have molerats chasing me for miles. It really felt like they spent too much time on exploded brain matter physics instead of the script though, I find myself skipping the dialogue as quick as possible so I don’t have to hear Generic Guy talk about Generic Fetch Quest.
And if you want a less stressful play of Half Life 2, try playing around with the gravity gun. My favorite part of that game has always been building towers of garbage rather than shooting soldiers.
Count me among those who’ve devoted huge amounts of time to Fallout 3 (I think about a hundred hours with two characters) even though I think the character interactions are pretty weak. The game keeps *telling* you that it’s full of distrust and desperation, but most NPCs are happy to give you their drawn-out life stories as soon as they meet you.
What I do love about it is the attention to detail that’s been put into the world. I can’t get over how they’ve been able to make an environment that’s both huge *and* detailed. If you can find Hubris Comics (and it took me a while), there’s even a computer with a simple, menu-based text adventure.
I love the heck out of Fallout 3*. The sneaking around and exploring is immensely satisfying to me. A usual complaint people have is that the environments you’re exploring don’t really have enough unique content, so they end up being very samey after a while, and while I recognize that that’s largely true, the experience of creeping around in the dark was fun enough to me that it didn’t bother me. And when you do run into something unique, like an interesting computer terminal or some scenery objects that have been deliberately placed to evoke a little story about the previous occupants… well, they’re all the more surprising and fun.
*The main game, anyway. Installing all the DLC has made the game so unstable and crash-prone, that having to wrestle with it while playing is sucking most of the fun out of it for me. But I’m soldiering on anyway, because it’s just that good of a game. I’m playing on a PS3, so ymmv.
I think I could recommend you to try the trilogy Metroid Prime for Wii. It is a FPS with a very slow pace, oriented to exploration and understanding of the environment to solve the puzzle to advance the story. Although its structure is quite prototypical of games: riddles, power-ups (that serves as keys) and bosses. The mood was and it is quite novel: Samus Aran spend most of her time wandering around desolated alien environments. The story is somewhat cliché (the bad guys are called “space pirates” sigh…), it is not hard sci-fi, it is more classic space fantasy; but the tools and interface for exploring the environment it is exceptional, with a tight interface of augmented reality that allows us to “examine” and “analyse” the elements of the environment… gather information, active mechanisms and such.
Simply, until Vespers 3D is released, Metroid Prime is one unique slow paced FPS oriented to exploration, more than combat.
http://www.metroid.com/
One more recommendation, in general, any game of the legacy of “Looking glass studios” I think would fit you quite better than any modern triple AAA action game. Thief saga, System Shock 2, Deus Ex and Bioshock. You could get those old games at Amazon with easy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_Glass_Studios
Fallout 3 exhausted me with its repetition. After getting halfway through, it felt like every dungeon was a mild variant on the next. I never finished it.
The first hour of the game for me was the best. The flashbacks were a nice way to intro gameplay elements (learning to walk, etc.), and that first foray Outside, seeing that vista and stumbling around out there for the first time, was a visceral experience.
I wish they could have preserved the loneliness and survivalist feel of that initial walk out the world. Where do I get food? Shelter? Is anyone else alive? It degenerates into the tired town/shop/quest/monster/reward cycle too quickly for my taste.
Fallout 3 has consumed many hours of my life, and will probably continue to do so. I do find it a little annoying how most of the quests can be resolved by just going in guns a-blazing, or knives a-stabbing, or Tesla Cannons a-unleashing an almighty beam of electrified plasma…ing, and so on. I recommend downloading/purchasing The Pitt add-on. It’s a fairly short questline, but the fact that there isn’t any truly happy ending, and that I STILL don’t know if I made the right choice in deciding the outcome, make it a good, if a bit cliched, addition to the game.