After a few attempts I finally managed to get Fallout 3 to load without crashing my system and after playing for about two hours I am ready to give my initial assessment of the game.  I am not an overly huge fan of 1st person shooter type games and Fallout 3 is very much played in the same fashion as Half Life, Doom 4 and others of the same Genre.  Fallout 3 does differ in the fact that role playing aspects have been incorporated into the game and these are very cleverly integrated.

You start the game in one of the best character creations I have ever witnessed in a game, where you basically choose the gender of your character at birth and then progress through several stages of childhood developing skills and choosing what type of character you want to be.  In the initial scene you even get to choose what your character will look like as an adult, and you can pick a preset appearance, but if you choose to customize the amount of choices are staggering.

You can change the shape of your nose, eyebrow line, facial hair, head hair, eye color, cheek bones, facial density among others.  The amount and range of customization is uncanny and if you are really detailed you can drill down as you want.  I created an Asian character with a mohawk and made his nose and cheek bones slender.  I gave him flaming red hair and he looked pretty wicked when I was finished with him.

The usual perks and abilities are there for you to choose from, Strength, Agility, Luck, Endurance, Intelligence…etc.  As well as the skills are almost identical to Fallout 2.  You gain your PIP BOY in the 3rd sequence which contains your map, inventory and health indicators.

Game play is fairly smooth but my video card is not new and is over two years old and I am plagued by lag and clipping even during normal walking scenes at 1920×1200 resolution.  The texture mapping is excellent and I have the texture details set very low, one could only imagine how beautiful the terrain and people texture maps are if the detail were higher.

Combat is mixed bag, manual combat I find to be very hard to do as the commotion makes me miss alot.  But you can use the V key to bring up a targeting screen that will allow you to automatically schedule your attacks and then the scene is played out in a Max Payne type of slow motion mode which is quite fun to behold.  I love when you shoot the radroaches and you can see their ichor splatter all over in slow motion.  You can choose to target head shots, body shots or leg shots and damage is dealt appropriately.  Percentages are listed on each body part showing you your accuracy of hitting the intended part.

Melee is a bit hard to predict as swinging is a bit slow and you have to be very close, it is more fun with ranged weapons, but against radroaches I don’t waste the ammo.  One crack of the baseball bat finishes them off anyway.

Story is very predictable initially in the vault and I only just escaped the vault, I like the dialogue portions and choices so far, but this part doesn’t feel too much more advanced than previous first person shooters at this point.

I do miss the turn based combat system of Fallout 2 and actually prefer those type of scrolling out of body games to the 3D Shooter ones, even though you can scroll out so you see your character, this happens at kind of a side profile and walking a specific path is hard to do.  I almost wished for a GuildWars type walking interface in this case.

All in all so far in my first 2 hours of playing the game I would give it 4 out of 5 stars, though it did crash several times during movie sequences, it at least functions and works.  I hear the crashing is a pretty common bug among various gamers playing it.

-Dragon Blogger

I have been a fan of the PC Game King’s Bounty ever since Commodore 64 and Amiga days.  This game is the precursor of all the Heroes of Might and Magic games that were released over the years.  I decided to pick up Kings Bounty - The Legend which was released recently.   There hasn’t been a new HoMM game in years so I was itching to play a game in the same style and genre.

Something to fill the time between now and when Fallout 3 releases on the 28th of October.

The game is a roleplaying strategy game, if you are unfamiliar with the series, you are in control of a hero and you lead armies of different types (creatures, soldiers).  Combat is set on a grid type battle system with “turns” being taken by your various unit types.  Each unit has hit points, and each unit combines to represent the number of units on a map.

Your hero does no fighting at all but provides his bonuses on your combat units and can cast 1 spell per turn.  The game involves collecting various artifacts to grant your army bigger and better bonuses, leveling up your hero, advancing your armies and building larger armies.

I have only been playing for a few hours and I like the game a lot so far, the small touches are wonderful like the walls coming to life in a necromancer’s lair, the spirits trying to break free from the walls.  It is nothing but artwork but beautiful to look at.

My computer though is a big sluggish through the game, and rotating the camera and battle scenes slow down periodically.  I have a Dual Core Athlon X2 4400+ processor, my video card is a bit old (256mb Geforce 7800GT), and even with 2GB of ram, it seems to stagger when I play the game.

-Dragon Blogger

I have not played a new game in a while for my PC.  I still play Guildwars from time to time and was looking for something to pass the time between now and the release of Fallout 3 later this month.  I saw an online add for Shaiya a free MMORPG and headed over to the website.  The game looked sound, lots to read, cool story and cool concepts.

I downloaded the 1GB installer file, and ran the installer.  This took a while to download and when the installer finished I installed the game without a hitch.  I created an account on Aeriagames and was all set to go and researched my Races and Classes.

That is when my trouble started, I ran the game executable and it downloaded some updates which took another 1/2 hour to download.  Then when I clicked the Play button, my computer immediately locked up and rebooted.  I thought this a fluke and repeated the same procedure again, only to have my computer crash and reboot again.  I don’t know if my video card doesn’t like the resolution or my monitor, I have a Dell 2407 FPS widescreen 24″ LCD Monitor, it only does 1920×1200 resolution, anything less it has trouble with.  Shaiya can only do 1280×1024 max resolution, so I don’t know if it crashes my OS in trying to switch the resolution to a lower rate.

Either way, 2 hours of debugging and forums and Google searches and I gave up and uninstalled the game.  It’s a shame, I really would have liked to check it out.  I love the concept of Free MMORPG’s and there are a ton of them out there.

-Dragon Blogger