video games

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This November will mark ten years since the release of Fallout 4.  That game was published seven years after Fallout 3.  There was Fallout: New Vegas in 2010 (still need to finish that one, my friends swear it’s the best of the series).  And I suppose there was Fallout 76 in 2018 but that game just isn’t the same.  Fallout really is more of a single-player experience, though I know that Fallout 76 does have its loyalists.

So this will be a full decade without a mainline Fallout entry.  Surely we’re going to get word sometime soon that a new one is coming, right?  Right?!?

The sad fact of the matter is, friends, is that video game production is now (a) very expensive and (b) very loooong.  Grand Theft Auto V was first published in 2013.  Its follow-up was announced two years ago and it’s ...

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A couple of things went online today that I’ve watch a few times.  I’ve got a good feeling about both of these.

First, it’s the first trailer for the second season of Amazon’s  Fallout series.  As a die-hard fan of the Fallout games I absolutely loved the first season.  They completely nailed the look and feel of the franchise.  It was an astounding surprise that throughly delighted me.  Season two debuts in December, which may be a busy month for streaming if the final volume of Stranger Things comes out then also (as many are speculating).

So here’s the trailer for Fallout season two:

And then there’s this: the new (and probably final) trailer for Superman.  This is a project that has gotten me increasingly intrigued with each new spot that’s been released.  I think David Corenswet is going to do much as the great Christopher Reeve did ...

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I  very rarely play video or computer games anymore.  Mostly it’s because of a lack of time.  And there are other amusements too, like having a miniature dachshund.  But that doesn’t mean I don’t have an active interest in the industry…

(I am currently trying to finish Fallout: New Vegas at last, whenever I’m having some downtime.  It’s only been out since 2010.  Time to wrap that baby up!)

There is one game franchise that is especially near and dear to my heart though: the Gears of War series.

Maybe it’s because each of the games seem to have coincided with some circumstance in my life.  Gears of  War was released on November 7th, 2006.  That was also Election Day of my first/likely last political campaign.  Then came Gears of War 2 two years later.  That game came out a few weeks after the worst thing that ever happened ...

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I’ve been a massive fan of the BioShock games (admission: I’ve never played BioShock Infinite) almost since the beginning of the series.  From the first moments of the original BioShock I was swallowed whole by this tale of sub-Atlantic horror.  To me the story of the city of Rapture is a fable, a morality play.  It is about what mankind is reduced to after consciously and willfully choosing against having a belief in God and the restraining morality He provides.  Man without God is a terrible thing, is what I’ve found in the BioShock games.  It’s a theme I’m looking forward to seeing touched upon more in future games from the franchise.

Anyway, if you’ve played the first two games you’re familiar with the Big Daddies: those hulking brutes in diving suits that lumber around Rapture, usually accompanied by the Little Sisters who they are programmed to protect. ...

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 “War.  War never changes.”

Actually, Ron Perlman’s voice for opening narration is pretty much the only thing missing from Fallout: Amazon Prime’s new streaming show based on the legendary video/computer game series.  I was looking forward to what those first words would be.

But that can be forgiven, in light of how epically faithful a live-series adaptation of the Fallout saga is to the source material.  It’s all here: the vaults, the stimpacks, the Brotherhood of Steel, the retro-futuristic look of pre-war America… Heck in the second episode we even see a live-action brahmin (the two-headed cattle seen in most if not all of the games).

So I’ve just finished watching the third episode, and it’s pretty well established that Lucy (Ella Purnell) from Vault 33 is way out of her element.  Actually, just about all of the dwellers in Vault 33 are in over their heads.  They ...

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Word is breaking loose at this hour that Bethesda’s new Indiana Jones game has finally been revealed…

Coming later this year it’s Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.  Looks set pre World War II aka the “golden era” of the saga.  As for the “MacGuffin” of this particular adventure, there are hints of in in the trailer that went live a little while ago.

So let’s take a look at it!

I’m not much of a video game player anymore (though I still want to eventually finish Fallout: New Vegas) but this might tempt me to get a new console.  Well, of course a new BioShock game would make me want that even more 🙂

...

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Doom, arguably the most installed piece of software in the history of anything, today celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of its release.

It was at 12:01 AM on the morning of December 10th, 1993 that the team at id Software uploaded the first one-third of the game – the shareware version – to an FTP server at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.  Within minutes wanna-be players crashed the school’s system as everyone and their brother (and a few sisters) tried to get Doom.  Hours later and campuses around the world were banning the game’s network play capability, it was such a resource hog.

By the end of that first day it was very obviously clear: the world was Doomed.  It wasn’t long afterward that the id Software staff started getting sales of the full game to the tune of a hundred THOUSAND dollars a day.

And it wasn’t ...

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 “War.  War never changes.”


 

It was on this day in 2008, exactly fifteen years ago, that the long-awaited Fallout 3 was released.  And computerized role-playing gaming was never the same again.

This was the first Fallout game that I ever played.  I bought it a few months after it was released.  At that point in my life I was needing something to distract my mind from itself, after a lot of recent events had rocked my world.  I bought Fallout 3 on something of a lark, having heard how much it sucked the player into it.

I am very glad that it did.

At the time I blogged about my journey through the Capitol Wasteland: the grim setting of the game.  Fallout 3 became not so much a game as an experience.  Something that put you in situations that you share as tales you tell your ...

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I’m hearing very mixed word about the upcoming motion picture Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.  I seriously want this to be a good movie.  Raiders of the Lost Ark is my all time most favorite film and I found something good in each entry of the franchise.  I even thought that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was pretty good: all you need do is keep in mind that Lucas and Spielberg wanted to make a homage to the “flying saucer B-movies” of the Fifties, that they fondly remembered from adolescence.  Do that and it’s a perfectly fine movie.

But I want Dial of Destiny to be good because seeing an Indiana Jones movie in the theater together was something Dad and I did with every chapter of the series.  This will be my first time seeing a new Indy movie without him. I ...

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This coming December will mark thirty years since the original computer game Doom was released by id Software.  Gadzooks!!  Where did all that time go to?!?  Well, Doom sucked me in hard and refused to release its grip.  There had been a few first-person shooters before, notably id’s own Wolfenstein 3-D.  But it was Doom that showed off the REAL potential of the genre.  And it broke the ground for other high-drama atmospheric entries in the category, like Star Wars: Dark Forces, Duke Nukem 3-D, and Quake.  Those in turn showed the way for more advanced games in the forthcoming generations, such as Halo and Call of Duty.

But no matter how advanced home computers and gaming consoles have become, my heart belongs to 1993’s Doom and its contemporaries.  Especially for how editable it was, and it seemed like everyone and their brother was creating WAD files containing new graphics ...

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