War never changes

I am glad I did not pick up Fallout 3 while trying to finish painting the house.

I beat the game in a little under sixty hours of gameplay, but I suspect I could spend another ten to twenty hours or more seeking out the rest of the quests and extras, and simply exploring the world.

I have a special (no pun intended) place in my heart for the Fallout series. Not only do I eat up the post-apocalyptic genre like candy, but I believe the story and choices offered to the player really add a level of verisimilitude often missing in most computer games. I think the current development studio did a fine job in keeping with the original two games, unlike the disowned, non-canon garbage that was FOBOS. I really am quite happy at a new generation of gamers experiencing the Fallout world, with promise of more games to come. As of this writing, there's a Fallout: Vegas game in the works for 2010 and at least three downloadable content packs for the console games.

Most people expect me to play a lot of video games, but Fallout is the first video game that I've played to completion in quite a long while. I'm quite satisfied and pleased.

Grand Theft Auto does some good

While driving today, I made a left turn from one divided street into a red light on another; this intersection has no stop bar painted in the road; many people run this red light after making the turn. For all I know, it may actually be legal to complete the turn if there's no white line in the road.

I saw a cop approaching the intersection, getting ready to turn drive away in the direction I came from. I chose to not run the light. Would I have continued driving if no cop? Maybe. Yes, the in-game police behavior in GTA reinforced my real-life driving behavior to obey the law.

Clearly, I will not leap out of my car, dash across a busy intersection, pull the cop out of his car, steal his shotgun ammo, then drive across three trees and into the bayou on my way to avoid crashing into a building. I am a normal, rational human being who respects the laws of our society by and large, civil disobedience notwithstanding.

Still, this is an interesting consequence of gameplay.

Still here

Hello, loyal readers.

Last night, I dreamt of Grand Theft Auto. Nothing too crazy, honestly- just dreaming about playing the game. I drove here, there, picked up this package, dropped it off at that location, ran over some pedestrians, evaded the cops, blew some stuff up. Fun times.

I deeply regret the negative impact the game has had on my posting. I assure you that I'm still here, still working for NOCCA, still getting married on a streetcar, still playing games.

Thrice again, I ROCK

Cat surprised me last night with a new PS2 And Guitar Hero 3! We spent a few hours last night a-rockin' and a-jammin' and just having a blast. I need to get my other guitar back so we can play some co-op.

For the record, I'm getting mostly 98-99-100% churning though Easy, notwithstanding the cat deciding he wants to knock things over and ruin my set. I'm out of practice, but the skills are still there. Rusty, but there.

Yes, I appreciate the irony of working for an arts conservatory and playing fake guitar.

Serendipitous Interactive Fiction discovery

I've recently started reading up on Inform 7, a natural-language approach to writing and coding up interactive fiction.

When I think IF, I think Zork ("You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here." So familiar, and so evocative). Right after Zork, I usually think Zork II and Zork III, but also the other classics of Infocom: Planetfall and Suspended, the Enchanter trilogy and Wishbringer. All of these I played on my trusty Commodore 64, but I distinctly remember playing the first Zork on a Compaq luggable in the mid-80s at my aunt's house in Houston, running off five-and-a-quarter-inch disks. I know I owned and never finished Stationfall, the Hitch-Hiker's game (briefly played on an Amiga), Ballyhoo and Hollywood Hijinx. Thanks to the wonderful series of tubes and Bittorrent, I can play all of these and more. I'm primarily using a great multi-game engine called Spatterlight for Mac OS X, which rules- I'm a big fan of using one app that pulls double (or triple, or quadruple, or quintuple, or...) duty instead of several.

I've also started searching for other, good, IF to play. As much as I love the old classics, they have a tiny bit of roughness around the edges- lack of UNDO and the inability to use X for EXAMINE keep cropping up out of habit. Save early, save often. But the medium has evolved in the last score years.

While doing research for game suggestions, I started at the no-frills but hugely complete Baf's Guide. I wandered into one of the IF newsgroups and happily discovered that the thirteenth annual IF Comp is in full swing. It's too late to submit an entry, but it's not too late to donate a prize or play and vote. Who knows what this year brings?

How to be teh AWESMOE

Guitar Hero.

I just picked up Guitar Hero 2 and its "encore," Guitar Hero Rocks the Eighties, plus two guitar controllers. I've played the game once or thrice before, but now I own 'em both and can rock out whenever I can crank the volume. Better still, I have two guitars so I can play with or against someone.

Bennett and I can play Freebird.

Insert kopek

Wired has a great multimedia spread (read: photoessay) to accompany an article on two guys who are restoring Soviet video games from the Cold War era.

Game over, tovarich.

Beauty in chaos

Watch the 1K Project 2. Safe for work, make sure your sound is on to catch the music, less than five minutes.

Weight loss through video games

I swear I am not making this up. A guy lost nine pounds by playing thirty minutes of Wii Sports for six weeks and making no other changes in his lifestyle. How awesome is that?

Some of you might know that I'm losing weight by eating less and moving more, to steal a phrase from a vegetarian I know. I lost at least 5-10 pounds by switching to diet Dr Pepper, and more by cutting out mayonnaise and reducing my cheese intake. I've punched a third hole in my belt and am about to go down another pants size.

But back to games. Read the article- he has before and after pictures, and a lot of data about his health. The Rocky-esque montage of he training with the Wiimote is pretty amusing, too.

I'll probably pick Boxing back up. Tennis is my game of choice, hearkening back to yon days of Pong. Cat and I have started playing together, both competitively and cooperatively against the machine. Boy, do I want a widescreen TV.

Earlier this week, I saw a boxed Atari Pong set for sale in an antique store. How far we've come!

Videogames save lives in New Orleans tornado

I'm not making up any part of that headline. Last night at about 3AM, many folks in New Orleans woke up to the sound of a tornado.

Uptown, Westwego, and Gentilly all suffered damage. Specifically, folks still in FEMA trailers (STILL!) found their trailers turned over, moved, smashed, bashed, and generally in disarray. A motel full of people with no homes nor trailers due to Katrina had its roof pulled off. At least one woman is dead. Some 20-30 thousand people have no power. The Picayune says that there was a touchdown very near to an old apartment of mine.

One friend of mine was woken up by another friend of mine at 5AM because his roof came off and he needed a place to crash. As far as I know, everyone is okay.

How do videogames save lives? Well, as I hear it, there was a kid up late playing videogames in his trailer when the tornado came through. He woke up the other people in the trailer, and evidently they all took cover. When my friend's roof crashed through their trailer, it crushed the bed where they were sleeping. If the kid hadn't been up playing videogames to wake them, they might've been killed. True story as it was told to me.

So let this be a lesson: Always have one person in your household up late, playing videogames, to keep an ear out for tornados. It might just save your life.

There goes my game budget

I bought a Wii!