Affectionate Diary

Fallout 3 is, of course, Fallout Tactics - a much-maligned example of the isometric, tile-based strategy genre that boasts such awesomeness as Commandos and the monumentally incredible Jagged Alliance series.

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Fallout Tactics is awesome, as it doesn’t have a proper storyline as such, which is a stunningly good move as we all know that storylines are generally fucking shit. I mean, I finished Mass Effect yesterday and I was spectacularly underwhelmed, both with the boss fight and the ending scenes. Put it this way - three people fighting one dude in a blatant arena does not, in any way, make me feel part of an epic battle for galactic survival. It might have worked for Return Of The Jedi, but to me the space battle and the boss fight were in no way interlinked. Probably because one was a movie and the other was a STINKING PIECE OF SHIT that saw me crouched in a corner, spamming like a cunt until the annoyingly darty boss was finally fucking dead. Somehow, this totally fucked a colossal alien invasion fleet with technology far superior to ours and I really don’t get why. At least I got to abandon the council to a certain death, though WE DIDN’T SEE THEM SCREAM AS THEY ACTUALLY DIE. This means they’ll make some shitty comeback in the sequel, presumably as ludicrously transparent knock-offs of captain Jean Luc Picard after he’d been eaten by the Borgs.

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It’s this sort of idiotic, disgustingly deriviative piss that makes me lament for the weird Sci-Fi worlds of Captain Blood, Starglider, Dodonpachi and Mercenary. Paul Woakes, man. If that dude should do a procedural version of Mercenary in flat-shaded 3D, but ultra hi-res. That would fucking rule. It generates the city layouts and escape routes randomly, has some RPG shit in it. Fuck yeah. I’m going to rename my work PC ‘Benson’ in Paul’s honour.

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It seems fucked that every Sci-Fi universe we get these days is a shoddy mish-mash of utterly tired genre staples. Mass Effect did some quite good work to move away from that, but the story is pure, unadulterated Blockbuster and as a result, is utter trash. Why can’t we have a Robinson’s Requiem made anew? Oh yeah - it’s Fallout 3!

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Nonetheless, we need to create original Sci-Fi worlds. I seriously worry that the lineage of Star Wars, Blade Runner, Aliens and The Matrix have seeded writers with so much referential bullshit that weird, original worlds don’t coalesce unless there’s a wall-crawling insectoid and yet another evocation of Alien’s Atmosphere Processor. Can’t we just start to look at other stuff? What about THX1138? I guess that’s Portal in some vague way, but we can do so much better. Enemy Mine then, you cunts. There’s a fucking proposal for you.

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10/10

With MAG. I was literally crying whilst watching the target render.

You know, it’s been fucking ages since anyone had a serious debate about scores and although in a perfect word I’d prefer there to be none, I’m actually way too lazy to seriously read every word to work out if shit’s worth playing or not. I mean Addictiveness is a brilliant scoring criteria and Presentation totally brings into account the hideously depressing world of user interfaces, which to this day throws up epic crimes against humanity in the form of 10-second anims for option menus to change and utterly contemptible bullshit like that. Continuous pad rumble test is something else that’s missing from every game and should be mandatory for the obvious fucking reasons.

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So then. I’m going to push for a standardised scale based not on abstract bullshit, but what the reader should actually do with the game in question. For security and contingency purposes, this scale is organised into codes: