Masthead

The Corrente Review Of Games is published on the first Saturday of the month.
Posting is done in rotation by the following contributors:

Aeryl,
BDBlue and
danps.

Please contact any of us with submission ideas or feedback.

1. Glossary (BDBlue)
2. Review: Fallout 3 (BDBlue)
3. Review: Red Faction: Guerrilla (danps)
4. Why DLC kind of sucks - and will only get suckier (danps)
5. In defense of cheating (Aeryl)

After the initial post, several people asked about a glossary of gaming terms. I found this one online that seems to be more complete than I could ever hope to put together and seems fairly accurate. Using that glossary as a starting point, here are some of the more common terms you're likely to read here (I'll try to add a few more each post):

Console: a dedicated gaming system like the Playstation 3 (PS 3), the Xbox 360 or the Wii.

DLC or downloadable content: can be entire games or expansion packs for games generally put out by the game's publisher and available for download directly to your PC or console.

FPS: First Person Shooter, a game that is pretty much what it sounds like. The games (such as Halo) are played from a first person point of view and focus on shooting enemies.

MMORPG: Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, an online game played on remote servers by large numbers of people, usually - but not always - fantasy based. World of Warcraft is an example of one of the more popular MMOPRG.

Mods: extra pieces of code that can be applied to a game to alter logic, structure, or appearance. Mods are most prevalent in PC games, and are rarely seen on consoles. Mods are generally user generated and are most prevalent, but aren't exclusive, to RPG games. The fact that they are generated by users makes them different from DLCs, which are generally put out by the game's publisher.

Platformer or platform game: A style of gameplay typified by a mix of running, jumping, and fighting. The style of game often includes item collection within the game world. A classic example of a “platformer” or “platform game” is the Super Mario series of games. Another is the Ratchet & Clank series.

RPG: Role Playing Game, a type of game where players assume the roles of specific characters to engage in quests and narrative-based experiences.

Rhythm game: Movement and music games that rely on repeating button presses or body movements in time with movement. Guitar Hero is one example. So are the dancing games where you step on pads with your feet to music (these also provide quite the workout).

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War. War never changes.

It almost seems a waste of time to review Fallout 3. It came out last year to critical acclaim and high sales. Recently, Bethesda Softworks released a Game of the Year Edition (GOTY) with additional content, previously released as DLC expansions for the original game. Fallout 3 doesn't need me to tell you how awesome it is and it is awesome (mostly). However, with the recent release of the GOTY edition (retail price $59.99), the price of the regular Fallout 3 has declined to around $25 at Amazon and may be purchased used for even less. So with Fallout 3 possibly finding a new audience, it seemed like a good time to take another look at it.

Fallout 3 is an RPG and is the third game in a series of games that takes place after a nuclear holocaust. As with most RPGs, the setting or world in which the game takes place is extremely important. A boring world usually makes for a boring RPG. The first two editions of Fallout, which I haven't played, were PC games that took place on the West Coast of the United States. Fallout 3 was released for PC as well as the XBox 360 and the PS 3, and takes place in the "Capital Wasteland" of Washington, D.C., and what's left of its suburbs. The game was released on October 28, 2008. Given the economic meltdown occurring in October, it was in many ways the perfect time for a game to be released where your character roams around the desolate wasteland of the nation's capital, seeing monuments of a once great society now in ruins. Adding to the experience are broadcasts of speeches by the Enclave faction's president, who claims to be the President of the United States, like this one:

Greetings, dearest America. This is your president, John Henry Eden, let’s chat, shall we. We live in an age of poverty, greed, violence, destruction. Indeed the very seat of the federal government, Washington D.C., has been reduced to what is now known as the Capital Wasteland. The Capital Wasteland, how did it come to this America? How did your leaders allow the most powerful nation on Earth to die? The answer is really quite simple. Incompetence. Incompetence at the highest echelons of power. We put our trust, our faith, in halfwits. Our intrepid leaders had everything they wanted; power, wealth, prestige. It made them lazy America. Oh yes, and laziness breeds stupidity. Rest assured, I will not make the mistakes of my predecessors. When John Henry Eden builds a country, he builds it to last. The American Way. Don’t you, my darling America, deserve that? Don’t you deserve a future free of war, and fear, and terrible uncertainty? Of course you do. As President of the United States, you have my solemn pledge. That I will never rest, never rest, until we have we have what we deserve. A place to truly call… Home. But for now, my America, we must part. Restoring the greatest country in the world to its former glory, well, huh huh, well that takes time, even for the Enclave. Until we meet again, this is John Henry Eden, signing off.

Given the events of the last year, the early part of the speech has a certain appeal even without a nuclear holocaust, while the latter part is a reminder of the kind of jingo-istic bullshit that sowed the seeds of Fallout America's destruction in the first place. And that's one of Fallout 3's strengths, its ability to allow the society that once was to peak through so that the Wasteland feels more real. It does that repeatedly and in a variety of ways. You find computer logs and voice recordings of people caught up in the initial holocaust - teachers on a field trip with a group of students, nurses called out by the national guard to help locals, family members separated by the attack - and in the struggles of people in the Wasteland in the present that echo back over previous American struggles. For example, the effort by escaped slaves to restore the Lincoln memorial as a home and beacon for other slaves. They do this even though, since most books have been destroyed, they know little about Lincoln beyond his status as a great emancipator.

It is into this world that your character steps after spending all of his or her (I'll use her) life in Vault 101 in search of her father, who has for some reason left the safety of the vault. It is that search - first for her father and then to complete his previously unknown mission of bringing fresh water to the tidal basin, and with it life, back to the Capital Wasteland that serves as the main quest of Fallout 3. While not everyone who has reviewed Fallout 3 liked the main quest, I did. But then I'm a goody-goody gamer who is all about saving the world. In that light, what's a better mission than bringing water to the small communities of survivors hunkered down together trying to fight off mutant animals, mutant bugs, mutant men, psychopathic raiders (essentially murderous gangs of un-mutated people), and slavers?

While I tend to be a goody-goody gamer (my karma score on my current Fallout 3 character describes her as the "last, best hope for humanity") you certainly don't have to be. You can enslave people, murder people, detonate an unexploded atomic bomb at the center of a town (which I admit looks cool against the night sky, even if I did immediately restart the game because I no longer "liked" my character), and many other nefarious things. You can be as good or bad or neutral as you want to be.

As for the gameplay itself, the world of Fallout 3 not only feels real, it also is enormous. There are lots of buildings and other interiors to explore and a variety of characters to meet. You can spend hours just running around looking at the desolate beauty of the Capital Wasteland. There are also numerous side quests and random encounters throughout the Wasteland. When you do run into a Radscorpion or super mutant (and you will), there's a nice variety of weapons and a fun combat system to help you take care of the Wasteland's more deadly life forms.

Having said all of that, Fallout 3 is not perfect. You can customize your character by race (Caucasian, African American, Asian, or Hispanic) and sex and, unlike some RPGs, you aren't punished by taking, for example, a strength or endurance hit for choosing female. Regardless of race or sex, your character starts out with the same stat range. However, if you play a woman, you will notice that some "armor" is more revealing than protective in terms of how it looks on you. I can't imagine a woman going into a gun fight with only her breasts and legs protected, leaving her belly - and all those internal organs - without any covering. Yet, that's how some of the armor fits women (some of it is just regular old armor, thankfully). In defense of the game, perhaps it only makes sense that America's misogyny would be one of the few things to survive the bombs.

As for the gameplay itself, after playing the game a couple of times it becomes much less challenging. Even if you hobble your character with low endurance (health) and other low combat stats, by the time you've reached level 10, you'll still be killing pretty much anything that comes in your path. Making matters worse is the prevalence of drugs throughout the Wasteland. In Fallout drugs give you immediate benefits - make you stronger, give you more action points, etc. - and that can make the game easier. The main downside to doing drugs is the ability to get addicted and suffer withdrawal, which drags some stats down unless you get a fix or treatment for your addiction. As a practical matter, however, the drugs are so plentiful you can usually get a fix and, in any event, treatment isn't very hard to come by. It is amusing that the most ubiquitous items found in post-apocalyptic America are guns and drugs. War isn't the only thing that never changes.

Also, as I noted above, the combat system (VATS), which lets you target your opponents various body parts and then fire often creating a bloody mess (especially if you have the Bloody Mess perk) is a blast. However, you can also play the game as a first person shooter (FPS). It is not, however, a very good FPS and if that's what you prefer, then you'd probably be happier with one of the many high-rated FPS games on the market.

But even with those drawbacks, Fallout 3 is tons of post-apocalyptic fun. As with other RPGs, the real fun comes is bringing all the pieces together to survive the Wasteland. If you want to be a sneaky character, you can use your experience points to raise your sneak, lock pick and small guns stats, find a silenced pistol or get a schematic and build a dart gun (also silent) and sneak up on raiders and super mutants and take them down with critical sneak attacks or lure them over your mines. You can build a big strong brawler and go after foes with a sledgehammer or, even better, using big guns like the Fat Man (mini nukes = big boom). You can build a science geek that hacks computer terminals to reprogram turrets to kill your enemies instead of you and excel at energy weapons that turn enemies to piles of glowing ash. It's the role-playing element that keeps it interesting. Sure, you can do drugs, but maybe your character won't. Or perhaps your character is an addict and never gets treatment. Just because you can create a god-like character who is never in any real danger, doesn't mean you have to. It's your Capital Wasteland, do whatever you want to.

Bottom line, at $25, Fallout 3 is a good investment, especially if you like RPG games. You can easily get a couple of hundred hours of enjoyment out of it. And when you're done, you'll be able to sell your used game for $10-15 and pick up the GOTY edition for $30 instead of $60.

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I've never been a fan of first person shooters (FPS). I've tried, I really have. I was fired up to play Doom when it first came out, and didn't like it. Same thing happened a few years later with Quake. I feel almost obligated to like FPS because they are so popular, especially with guys. There's a persistent, nagging fear that the Man Police will take away my card if I don't like these games as much as I ought to, so every few years I'll try the game of the moment and see if it clicks. Most recent attempt: Gears of War. Didn't do anything for me.

When I read this review of Red Faction: Guerrilla I decided to give it another try. The recommendation to play it on "Casual" and use the sledgehammer made me think that maybe this time would be different, that something would click and I'd finally properly dig an FPS. So I bought it, tried it and...IT'S AWESOME BABY WOOOO!!!

It works because it breaks from some of hardened FPS conventions. Usually in these games you are forever hunting for new weapons, health, armor and ammunition as you go deeper and deeper into the game. Except for occasional cut scenes or a couple of episodes with uninspired wrinkles (shoot your gun from a car instead of on foot!) you're more or less doing the same thing from start to finish. Red Faction lets you do that if you want to play it straight through and finish as quickly as possible, but there are loads of side missions as well. You can drive enemy vehicles to safe houses, disrupt convoys (sometimes by destroying them, sometimes by hijacking a key one), rescue hostages, annihilate enemy property for fun and profit, or just drive around looking for trouble. There isn't the completely linear feel that most FPS I've played have, and opening it up like that makes it a lot more enjoyable.

Another FPS convention it drops is the melee weapon as last resort. Usually you have something - a knife, a club, whatever - that you always have with you and can use if you have no ammunition. Some games, like the Metal Gear Solid series, incorporate it well (though MGS has other problems) but overall they are there for you to use only when you're too dumb to find enough ammo or too spastic to keep from using it all up. As the Wired link describes, Red Faction's "Casual" difficulty setting is designed to allow the melee weapon to be a primary weapon, and the melee weapon is fabulous: A big ol' sledgehammer.

The sledgehammer is a blast. Since destruction of property is part of the game you can pull it out and start taking down buildings beam by beam, which might sound monotonous but is actually a lot of fun (especially since it's hard to be killed by falling debris). If you happen to find yourself in close quarters with some marauders it's easier to start swinging than to try to aim while turning, running or whirling about, and it's infinitely more satisfying to see the bodies fly. On the night I got the game I went into a zone, which I have repeatedly failed to achieve since, where I bulled my way through a crowd with it, made it to a cluster of vehicles, and methodically whacked each villain as he emerged from his car. It was improbably lucky and extremely hilarious - and the most fun I've ever had with a FPS.

Similarly, another time I was driving around and decided to launch blindly off of a hill. I landed squarely on top of an enemy building and caved in the roof. I then got out and went to work with the sledgehammer, swinging wildly and sending metal and bad guys alike airborne. By the time I wrecked my way out of the building it had been surrounded, at which point I switched to my Arc Welder and began liberally dispensing high voltage justice. The game just seems set up to deliver a more entertaining brand of mayhem.

Video gamers usually gravitate towards particular types of games. I'm definitely more into longer form quest type games, with a healthy diet of younger skewing kids games like Ratchet & Clank and Little Big Planet mixed in. I've never felt drawn towards the pure action genre - I don't enjoy what I think of as "twitch games", even when I do well at them. Red Faction: Guerrilla, especially on Casual mode, is enough of a departure to draw in someone like me. Highly recommended, even for those who don't normally go for that sort of thing.

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Downloadable content (DLC) marks a fairly big change to console gaming, and as far as I can tell no one really has anything bad to say about it. It's going to end up with many of the same problems that has plagued other digital content, though, and as time goes on I think gamers will become increasingly disillusioned with it.

Let me start by singing its praises, lest I be accused of drinking the Haterade. It's really nice to see a new game released (or just hear great buzz about it), download it from the comfort of home immediately, begin playing it without the hassle of swapping out discs, see all the DLC content in one place for easy switching between games, and have patches/updates pushed down as needed instead of having to accept something buggy or otherwise bad (there was a "freeze" bug in one part of Oblivion that made me nuts). DLC opens up online gaming with all the MMORPG happiness that implies - provided you have a fast enough internet connection with minimal latency. All good stuff.

Here's why it kind of sucks right now: Digital Rights Management (DRM). CD/DVD and cartridge based media have a reputation for being more reliable than hard drives. They are read only and single purpose. If you buy a game and it works when you first play it, chances are it will work for as long as you own it. Provided you don't live with toddlers. Which isn't the video game industry's problem. Hard drives (any kind of rewritable media for that matter) get a lot more wear and tear. Unlike read-only devices, it's a good idea to back them up. None of the current generation of platforms support any kind of backup mechanism. What happens if the hard drive that you've downloaded a couple hundred dollars worth of games onto fails? Sony allows you to download Playstation content again (not sure about Xbox) but that's a pain. Much more importantly, that's Sony's stance now. Will they still allow that in a year or two? Who knows. Without being able to make your own backups you are at the mercy of the company, and as music lovers have learned the hard way companies sometimes decide to bail on DRM schemes and leave little recourse for customers. There's no substitute for having your own local, fully unlocked backup of all the bits you're stuffing into your system.

Here's why it will get suckier: For as big as the hard drives are right now, they fill up. After a couple of years you may have to decide on buying a second hard drive or deleting DLC you've paid good money for in order to free up space for the latest and greatest. Without having a backup that might not be such a good idea (see above). Once you have a handful of hard drives accumulated how do you know what content is on what drive? Write it on a label and stick it on the drive? That could be a lot of writing, and in any event it will probably change over time. Trust your memory? I don't know about you but I could see myself getting really pissed off over swapping on to the third hard drive to find a game, and then discovering it was on the first one and I overlooked it. When you get to a terabyte of downloaded content how will you manage it? That also has a parallel with the music industry. If you have a portable music player with 32 GB storage do you keep your entire collection on it? That's an awful lot of scrolling my friend. I've got a 2 GB Walkman on which I only keep music I'm listening to right now, because I don't want the hassle. That's doable because all my music is DRM-free MP3 files. Copy protect it and it's a different story. The same is true for DLC - the inability to make copies of just what you're using at the moment means you're (metaphorically) lugging the whole collection around with you all the time, and that's a pain.

Then there's emulation. When games are on physical media they are available for future emulation. Fifteen years from now you may want to play the games you're enjoying now, if only for a brief trip down memory lane. If you have original media you can use it with whatever is around to read and play it. If you've got a hard drive, how will that go? Maybe emulation software will adapt and you'll be able to hook up that old proprietary Xbox hard drive to it - if it still works. Maybe not.

Right now DLC is sort of a novelty and it's definitely got some strong selling points. But it will become harder to manage and more of a pain as time goes on, unless game makers stop locking it down so tightly. I still buy some occasionally but I don't put anything there I really want to keep. I'd rather buy Fallout 3 Game of the Year Edition a year after Fallout 3 than buy Fallout 3 and get the extras sooner as DLC.

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Plenty of gamers will voice outrage at the use of cheats and walkthroughs to help complete a game.

It corrupts the purity of the game! It cheapens the victory!

It’s hard to take those voices seriously, when the use of strategy guides has become so widespread that it even has it’s own Wiki. The publication of “Official Strategy Guides” is a multi million dollar cash cow for the game manufacturers, and that’s not to mention, websites like GameFAQ’s and IGN.

Well, I’m not one to voice outrage over cheats, but to tepidly celebrate them! And it’s for a very good reason…

To explain myself fully, I will have to give some history. I got my start on gaming with Phantasy Star on the old Sega Genesis. My family and I were so dedicated, we made maps of the dungeons. The designs of these old dungeons, was identical to the old dungeon screensaver on Windows 95, where from the first person perspective, you traveled down tunnels and hallways, and would be forced to turn around as you “hit” a dead end, where the screensaver would start all over again. We played these games until the spinning walls made you nauseous.

These were good, time consuming games. They were among the first story driven games to come out, more complicated than “Rescue Princess” which was basically the complete story line from both Mario and Zelda.

Then came, Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy III(actually Final Fantasy VI, to be precise, but that’s a longer story, see the link for more information). All of a sudden, here was a story, with cut scenes. There were characters, drama, conflict. And from then on out, I was hooked.

Then, it was Chrono Trigger. Then Vandal Hearts.

You get the drift.

And for years, I steadily worked my through all the RPG’s I could get my hands on, and through several different consoles, from the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo, the Sega Saturn and the Nintendo 64, and into the original PlayStation, I stood firm in my disdain for all cheaters.

Until Final Fantasy VII. Then suddenly, the game is beating me. There’s a boss I can’t get passed. And no matter how much I send my team out to level up before hitting this boss, I can’t defeat them.

And now, I’m angry. Now I’m doing my best impression of a non-Gamefly customer.

I have always enjoyed games for their ability to tell a story. Outside of the book, there isn’t a better format for telling stories, IMO, since games require you to be active in retrieving the story, whereas a movie will spoon feed it to you. Games also require you to be very invested in your protagonists, while in movies, if it’s not portrayed right, a protagonist can leave you rather indifferent. I’ve seen movies where I could care less if the hero lives or dies, but I’ve always been very upset when my hero has died in a game, regardless the quality of the gameplay or the story.

But now, I couldn’t get anymore story. This was as enraging to me as buying a book, and finding that the last 200 pages had been glued together. This obstacle sent me scurrying to the internet, where I found the special strategy needed for this one boss alone.

The need for cheats became worse, after the rise in popularity of games like Resident Evil and Tomb Raider, where puzzles had to be solved before the game could move forward. And, since I have a tendency to overthink things, I would be stuck for hours attempting to determine the best way to maneuver three different pieces into the correct position, which I thought would open a door, neglecting to notice the switch on an opposite wall.

That’s a truly humbling experience; needing strategy guide to tell you the game is a lot simpler than you are making it out to be. It can also be an exciting experience to explore parts of the game you didn’t even know existed, because a strategy guide opened the way.

When I played Final Fantasy X, it was a fun game, with a very in depth story. As a matter of fact, the game was so good, it was one of the few Final Fantasy games to get an actual sequel, Final Fantasy X-2. The only problem was, I had stumbled across something called an Ultimate Weapon for one character, and it seemed if one character had it, all of them would.

So began the quest, with a borrowed strategy guide in hand. At the end of it, I used the Ultimate Weapon to defeat the final boss in one hit. One. Now, I had beaten the game conventionally, before going on the quest, so I didn’t cheapen the victory. IMO, I had actually increased the value of the game, because I got to experience more gameplay and, most importantly, more story. When you retrieved the weapons, the game always included a cut scene that gave more background information on the character who has to use the weapon.

And this explains my tepid celebration. Because this actually represents the absolute evildom that is the Video Game Industry. They’ll sell you a game for $40, but you gotta pay an extra $15 if you want to play all of it. When others do this, we call it a shakedown, but when a bona fide industry does it, it’s just good business.

This shakedown strategy has now paid off in full, as the gaming community now takes such blatant behavior in stride. Now, gamers casually accept that certain characters or levels will only be playable, if they buy their games at certain stores, or download them within a certain window of time. Which is just wrong on so many levels, I can’t chronicle them all.

But as far as strategy guides and walkthroughs go, thanks to the internet and the dedicated gamers whose parents bemoan their hobbies, these things are easy to find, FOR FREE! Which is all to the good, I say. It’s available as a resource for the desperately stuck gamer, or the bored gamer who wants to know they got their money’s worth, before the game begins collecting dust on a shelf, or goes to the secondhand game store, to contribute to the purchase of another game.

And it’s one less “Official Strategy Guide” bought, which gives money to the industry that intelligently, yet viscously, created the need in the first place. Because one of the few legitimate criticisms of cheating, is that it feeds the shakedown strategy, encouraging the Video Game Industry to put more and more game content out of the reach of average gamers.

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