PC News and Game Reviews

Brief preview of Fallout 3 on the Xbox 360 (First 10 Levels)

The christmas rush is here again. Developers around the globe are working round the clock to have
games on store shelves for the holidays.And as always with this time of year we’re spoiled for choice
with dozens of games battling for our cash.One such game is the new offering for Bethesda, makers of ESIV: Oblivion and now Fallout 3.

First off i’d like to clarify, i have never played the original Fallout games. But judging from screenshots that really doesn’t matter as this new title seems to be nothing like its predecessor’s.
Of course we have a similar setting but apart from that gameplay, view and pretty much everything else has been changed for this new outing.

Outline/Gameplay

The game kicks off in typical RPG fashion as you design your character and lay the ground work to mold him into a certain class. I have to say i was really impressed with how Bethesda freshened this experiance up. When you start the game you literally start at your character’s beginings. After ploping out of your mother you are greeted by your father (Liam Neeson). And through him you make choices on sex and apperance. You then get to experiance a gaming first as you take your first baby steps around and discover your skills using a pop-up book. There’s more progression iinside the vault as you move up through childhood, teen years and finally become an adult.

Its then that the game really kicks off as you leave the safety of the vault and enter Capital Wasteland. Once outside you really get the Oblivion feel about the game. Lots of open world to explore and NPC’s to meet. You really have to take alook around your surroundings to find what to do. The story isn’t sppon fed to you. Its all around you, on the radio, in books and notes or just picked up by earwigging on NPC conversations.

Now on to the fun part, the combat. This is where Fallout really sets itself apart from Oblivion. Combat is handled in two ways. As a basic FPS, relieing on your own skills to take down opponents. Alternatively you can use V.A.T.S, this feature basically lets you target specific parts of your enemy with the hit percentage based of distance and your skill with the equipped weapon. Its comes in really handy when the surrounded as you can target multiple opponents to attack. It also works as a kind of overview/command tool, giving you the chance to think about your strategy before attacking.

There is a downside to V.A.T.S though, it relies on AP (Action Points). This means you are limtied to a certain number of shots. The amount per shot depends on the weapon equipped. Once you expend your AP you need to wait from them to replenish. I think this was a smart idea by Bethesda, if you had infinite AP the game would be more like an RPG from FP than an FPS/RPG.

GFX

Graphically Fallout looks gritty and dull, but in a good way. Th art design matches the setting very well and although it wouldn’t rival Crysis it suits the game. Of course the version tested was on the 360 so add some AA on the PC and it will look even better.

What really stood out so far is the graphic ways to kill your enemies. There’s lots of bloody murder with arms, legs, torso’s and heads flying especially when using V.A.T.S. There’s also the Bloody Mess skill which basically devastates your opponent to bits, this has been one of my favourites so far.

As with any RPG there’s not much to say about the GFX apart from they lend themselves well to emersing you into the gameworld.

Conclusion

So far i’m really enjoying the game. Although it is very reminescent of Oblivion it brings enough to the table to keep me involved. I think the best way to describe it is as a lovechild of Oblivion and Stalker. After 8hrs i’ve barely cracked the surface of the main story and i feel there’s a hell of alot more to experiance. Expect a full review soon.

If your in anyway into your console RPG’s, you’ed of realized as i have that up to now the Xbox 360 really hasn’t unleashed many jems in the genre. Sure we had Oblivion but outside that the rest were sub-par at best. Blue Dragon, Enchanted Arms, Eternal Sonata, these games all tried to set the bar for future action RPG’s on the 360 and failed misrably. Our last glimmering hope for 2007 was a big budget title by renowned RPG makers Bioware.

The first riddle in this game is to get the bloody thing working. There are cross border talks and a peace corp forming to march on Creative Assembly and Steam, oh and Nividia to start development with the right code and drivers! Apparently the latest Nvidia drivers don’t work with the game. CA have been bayonetted repeatedly on this one… Readon.

This is what I did to get my game working: 8800GTS, 191 Nvidia drivers.
Fearing the 196 Nvidia Drivers would make the game even more unplayable, I gave it a shot!! I was using 191 drivers before hand and had the choppy jumping graphic textures.

It seems to be totally random from user to user, but this worked and is working SO FAR for me. Played for about an hour, no visible problems. Campaign map is a wee bit laggy in places, but playable.

And Finally!! I got this biatch working. Everyone on the forums with Nvidia drivers have to roll back to 185 or soemthing. Also, I never play RTSs with shadows either so I switched them off. I lowered the shader quality too for pig iron.

I’m really getting into it, I love the tech tree they included and the politics side of things, I learned last night that the only way to change government is to start a revolution. When the revolution starts, you lose control of your empire but gain control of the rebels and have to invade the capital!! If you lose the fight you lose the campaign. Fairly realistic I thought.

Trade is brilliant too, you can build trade vessels and sail to places around Africa and India and trade in Ivory and spices for extra cash, as Russia I’m using my fur pelts, and I recently annexed Mesopotamia and set up Cotton plantations!! Huzzah!

I was at war with the Ottoman Empire, I captured 1 port and was trying to get my Navy on the go, but the Turks had a huge navy and were blockading me. My navy sat in the port for decades LOL. Something like 20 turns. But all his money was in a sea war, where Russia pwns at a land war, so I took all his European regions and pushed him right back to Egypt. Bulgaria, Hungary and all the South Eastern Europe states surrendered to me right away. I like the way you can have an army in a city, but it also tells you that in the event of a siege or an attack the populace will take up arms and fight with you. The thing I haven’t mastered at the moment is the naval battles, I tried a custom battle and didn’t know what was going on in time and I lost. I forgot about several ships and they sailed away, probably off the edge of the world! They are huge and can drag on, one fellow gamer told me a massive fleet battle took 2 1/2 hours. I think I will be auto resolving them in future. I’m much better at land based warfare!! Tally Ho!

I think it’s alot like Civ (with trade, politics, research) but on a smaller scale, but then again you have the battles too.

At the moment I’m research box formations, plug bayonets and fire by rank! Which will have me pwn the battlefield. You can garrison buildings in townships and build siege defenses, like stockades, hedgehogs and trenches. The artillery is savage. The bigger guns can land shells almost anywhere on the map. I was attacked by rocket artillery in one battle and would lose up to half a regiment in one successful attack. The body count is insane in this game. When a good shot hits a regiment it tears right through the line, and you can see the bodys fly over and the numbers on his flag drop. You can use canister shots when the men are at close range, once they come inside the kill zone, they will never make it to combat stance once the canisters hit them! They flee right away lol

It’s fairly well done I think, when a cavalry regiment is charging and they hit the lines they can wipe out a full regiment of foot, or on the other hand if the regiment of foot get a shot off it can almost wipe out all the horse. I try to interlock the fields of fire so my men back each other up. Cavalry charges are lethal, in one scuffle, I had about 6 regiments but only a hand full in each, maybe 50 horse in total and they decimated about 250 men using charge, disengage, charge tactics.

Body Count ftw.

A damp fog of death spreads throughout the forest. You wonder why you chose to come here. In a small hut on the side of the mountain an old man with a massive book writes the never ending tale. The story about : NAT! Few who hear it of its treasures live to tell the tale. It has consumed the souls of Gods, Kings, and Men! (No Gods or Kings. Only Man - Ed)

You speak of NAT in hushed tones. “NAT Lore! Old man, Speak! What do you know of this?” You ask. The old crooked man, eons old, looks up from his scibbles and says…

- “What…is your favourite colour?”

For ages myself and fellow CoH gamers have had constant NAT negotiation errors when trying to connect to each other. Sometimes we couldn’t get a game at all. In about ten tries we might connect once or twice.

According to one of the many forum threads, it’s a worldwide error, Relic DON’T know how to fix it, and when you post anything about it on the Relic forum it gets deleted!! Well I thought I’d add some of the solutions here that might help anyone else suffering the NAT plague!

1)) I fixed the problem by setting my DSL modem to a “PPPoE Bridged” mode. And then setting my router to connect via PPPoE, rather than “Automatic configuration - DHCP” (had to give it the username and password that the DSL modem used to use to connect)

2)) If you are on a DSL connection, you may need to ask your ISP to forward ports for you. You may be behind a NAT inside your ISP. That is, a router that needs it’s ports forwarded as well, but one you can’t control.

Another poster opened the following ports 6112,9100,30260,30261,6113 and 9101. But I think all you need is 6112 UDP and 30260 UDP.

What I did:
I opened up those two ports via Control Panel > Windows Firewall > Add port tab
Then I updated my fireware on the router (Linksys WRT54G)
In the router setup I have also forwarded those two ports.

I can connect to gamers locally now, but for some reason I’m having problems connecting to hosts in Sweden or Germany for example. If in the games list in CoH you see a red X where the ping should be, that indicates that you won’t connect to it. Like your computer can’t see that dude’s computer.

www.portforward.com has all the solutions and router fixes for most if not all makes and sizes of routers and games. It’s a work in progress for me, but at last I can get some games in!

Updates to follow.

- “Blue…no yellow!!”

For all the those who still buy their games and don’t rely on Daemon tools or torrents

After some ‘Murder she wrote’ style research, minus the pearls, I made some nasty discoveries. Selecting some top games out at the moment, and looking on some of the more prominent game suppliers versus the power-fuck-house that is Steam, here are the results. Bear in mind, Steam do not make their prices universal, i.e. $1=€1 NOT…

I checked Amazon.co.uk and Play.com

Company of Heroes: Tales of Valor Steam €34.99 Play.com €14.45 - €22.99 Amazon €14.30

Empire:Total War Steam €49.99 Play.com €38,99 Amazon.co.uk €16.50

Medieval:Total War 2 - Gold (Game plus expansion) Steam €19.98 Play.com €9.99 @ sale/purchase (€14.50 now) Amazon €7.50
Individually bought, Steam is still 5 euro dearer on both titles, the main game and ‘Kingdoms’ expansion

Call of Duty MW:2 Steam €59.99 Play.com €45 Amazon €33

Left 4 Dead 2 Steam €50 Play.com €35 Amazon €27.50

This one is the best…

Grand Theft Auto IV Steam €50 Play.com €12.99 Amazon €11

Steam Fail!!

I have used Play.com alot and initially I thought it was one of the cheapest out there, but after this little excercise Amazon has proved its worth! Of course the whole debate about digital downloads can rage, but when it comes down to it, there are huge discrepancies there!