Review Fallout: New Vegas - Contrarian Corner

[VentilatorOfDoom]

Tags: Fallout: New Vegas; Obsidian Entertainment

<p><a href="http://uk.pc.ign.com/articles/113/1138893p1.html" target="_blank">IGN ventures into the wasteland once more</a>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The gameplay system is a disjunctive network of overlapping lists, stats, statuses, items, quest information, character notes, curiosities, and upgrades. It's nearly inscrutable in the beginning but after 10-20 hours the most obscure corners of the system will be at least functional, if not entirely clear. It took me over 50 hours to reach my ending and I managed to not upgrade a single weapon. It took me five hours to realize that active quests could be toggled on and off in the voluminous quest log, automatically changing the markers on the game's map. I'm still not sure what sorts of ammo my Plasma Rifle was using, but I know that I could create more by finding an ammo station and transforming one strange thing into another. In the early hours I got a leftover journal from a character and searched in vain through my Items menu hoping to read it. It was nowhere to be found in the sub-categories of Apparel, Weapons, Aid, or Miscellaneous. Only 20 hours later did I realize that these non-essential character flourishes were stored in the Data section under the Notes sub-category.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Well, some realize things quicker and others ... not so quick. Such is life.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Combat is no more slippery, though its consequences are more immediate. Enemies all have a health bar the same size, though the rate it will be depleted by your various weapons depends on myriad factors, most of which are folded into sub-menus. Combat is a two step-process that involves first discovering a threatening creature, then deciding whether or not to fight it. All fights play out nearly identically, though the numbers being crunched in the processor are different every time. When an enemy is aware that you're near it bull-rushes, with different enemy types have different speeds of bull-rush. The only real response is to run frantically backwards while shooting, hoping there aren't any fences or big rocks waiting behind you. If prefer to use melee weapons to projectiles, you can move forward tentatively, hoping to time your attack animation so as to catch the enemy as she passes through your view. This can be reduced to the inane struggle to keep an enemy in the center of the screen while you both take turns whiffing at one another.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Does <strong>Fallout: New Vegas</strong> have too many stats and numbers and shit? Imagine you were a potato-for-brains video game journalist and had to answer this question truthfully.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>Spotted at: <a href="http://www.gamebanshee.com/news/100673-ign-does-fallout-new-vegas-yet-again.html">GB</a></p>

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Contrarian Corner takes a critical look at recent games

Wouldn't game reviewers be considered game critics?

The whole article is pretty amazing though.

 

[Andyman Messiah]

I could nitpick the entire article. How is it possible to be so stupid? Even for IGN this is remarkable.

 

[commie]

That's what happens when you get Volourn to do a review.

 

[JrK]

Should have read the... manual! *gasp*

And constructed more pylons. Just saying.

 

[grotsnik]

Wasn't that bad. At any rate, the beginning and end seemed to be feeling towards some kind of analysis of the tone of the Fallout series(though given that he claims to have only really played New Vegas, his opinions seem a little...uninformed).

A shame that the middle section consisted mainly of listing gameplay elements, sometimes without even bothering to criticise them in any detail. It feels almost as if an ordinary article was shoehorned into being 'contrarian'.

 

[Andyman Messiah]

pylons

It's always about pylons with you.

 

[JrK]

Gotta have more pylons.

 

[Carlos' Bitch1]

Gotta have more pylons.

Play Avernum 4 then. Enough pylons (pylons you have to kill no less) for anyone.

 

[baronjohn]

He's right in the sense that the interface is bad and it's easy to miss shit. For instance it took me an hour to figure out that the reason I'm always running low on ammo is because the fucking Plasma Defender is using 4 cells per shot, not 1.

 

[Grunker]

Wasn't that bad.

It took me five hours to realize that active quests could be toggled on and off in the voluminous quest log, automatically changing the markers on the game's map.

 

[racofer]

I agree with the article. Too much stats management for a shooter makes it a bad shooter.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

I'm still not sure what sorts of ammo my Plasma Rifle was using, but I know that I could create more by finding an ammo station and transforming one strange thing into another.

It...it says right there what kind of ammo a weapon uses.

Jesus Christ, redding is teh hard indeed

 

[grotsnik]

Wasn't that bad.

It took me five hours to realize that active quests could be toggled on and off in the voluminous quest log, automatically changing the markers on the game's map.

Ok, so he has sub-infantile interface common sense and gameplay intuition and seems to be weirdly proud of it. But still, for a piece of Ign journalism...

Fallout 3 has an exciting, top-notch main story. It all comes together for a spectacular climax that is just flat out awesome. Rather than spoil the story, I'll simply say that it does not disappoint. And there is a true end to this game. Once you finish Fallout 3 and view the ending, you're booted back to the main menu. You'll have to load up a prior save if you want to continue exploring with that character.

Now this ^ is that bad.

 

[Roguey]

Players don't have absolute freedom but they are flooded with choices and every available choice has a negative consequence. When you meet Caesar in the latter parts of the game he describes Hegel's concept of thesis and antithesis: in choosing one argument you essentially define what the counterargument will be. This is the area where artistry and authorship in video games is best embodied.
...
I'd started the game as a victim, spent 50 hours inquisitively helping everyone I could, and come to the end as a villainous autocrat. Even looking back now, I can't see where there was any better way, though there were options upon options to choose otherwise. There is no book I know that better captures that, nor any film. But I don't need them because now there is Fallout: New Vegas and it is enough of a masterpiece for any medium.

Michael Thomsen was born in Kenya, though his family actually lived in Tanzania (Kenyan hospitals were appreciably more advanced at the time). His parents, both Danes with a pronounced streak of wanderlust, spent the next few years bumbling around Europe before deciding to settle in none other than Fresno, CA. After whiling away his youth tipping cows, reading poetry, and trying to beat Section Z on NES, Mike moved to Los Angeles for college. After being rejected twice at the Schoenberg School of Music, Mike cut his losses and took a degree in English.

After college, Mike bummed around the movie industry, working for the producer Adam Fields on Brokedown Palace and Donnie Darko. After three years in Hollywood, Mike had seen enough and jumped ship, opting to join Peace Corps. Mike taught English in Southwestern China for a year before being evacuated during the SARS epidemic. Peace Corps reassigned Mike to Madagascar and he spent the subsequent two years working as a health educator and counselor and a small clinic. Upon returning to America, Mike began working in the videogame industry, working in QA for a major publisher and writing for Nintendo World Report. In the winter of ’07 Mike joined the IGN Insider team and moved to San Francisco.

The type of guy who thinks RPGs should just tell a story with lots of choices but doesn't want to play visual novels. Fuck stats and systems and combat it's just too confusing and difficult.

 

[The Ninth Circle]

He's right in the sense that the interface is bad and it's easy to miss shit. For instance it took me an hour to figure out that the reason I'm always running low on ammo is because the fucking Plasma Defender is using 4 cells per shot, not 1.

The first time you shoot and notice the reload after one shot you should realize the 4 cells are being consumed.

 

[bonescraper]

Dude's got a point. He's a retard allright, but i just grabbed the IWD II manual and it's fucking huge by today's standards. Today you get a 16 page booklet which covers obvious basics and some shit like character bios. Well, even dumbed down, popamole, 8 button console shit can be more complicated than that. Of course they wouldn't touch the manual anyway, but fuck, i want the old days back

 

[Overweight Manatee]

This is a joke, right?

 

[Phage]

Now that we've seen how fucktarded that author was - keep in mind that he is smarter than the average gamer

 

[Achilles]

i want the old days back

Don't we all,bro. Don't we all

 

[Sulimo]

In my capacity as a journalism student, I can safely say his writing is godawful. Seriously, why all the pseudo-intellectual bullshit in an article for the kind of people who frequent IGN? He should try to write on the level of his audience, now I just get the feeling he wants to show off.

New Vegas performs the stories you pull from its wasteland dwellers with awkwardness to match the combat system. It's three different things simultaneously: old cinema, radio play, and novel. The camera fixes to characters' heads in long takes reminiscent of old silent movies--they sometimes get stuck looking in the exact opposite direction, giving you five minutes of the back of someone's head.

Oeh, it seems he once read an article on cinematography. Good on him.

The war reporter and author David Rieff has said he doesn't believe in history as a "progress narrative." If Rieff is wrong, America is where his hunch has been most disproven over the last 200 years. An emancipation proclamation, an industrial revolution, an urban expansion, labor rights, extended life expectancy and the commoditization of scientific breakthroughs have brought us to a place where the idea of life improving generation after generation is obvious. We've mapped the human genome, have antiretroviral treatments, vaccinate the majority of the world, connect to the internet on cell phones, have minimum wage laws and a 40 hour work-week. Take that 19th Century.

Seriously, I'm not even going to bother. What the fuck is this I don't even.

 

[Phage]

I also wonder if he found NV overwhelming and dark, what he would think of Fallout 1.

 

[skyst]

I guess he thinks the FO3/NV design needs some streamlining.

 

[markec]

 

[Brotherman Bill]

He also wrote this one, on civ 5:
http://pc.ign.com/articles/112/1128430p1.html

What it lacks is the emotional purpose and irresolvable conflict that cinema, like every emotionally-oriented form that preceded it, leave lingering in my brain. Civ V is the plot of the Godfather, not the dark final moment where Diane Keaton stands in the door of Michael's office and sees him, surrounded by articulate cretins, looking at her like a stranger. It's the atmospheric science behind the tornado that destroys the town of Xenia, not the gorging anarchy of Bunny Boy kissing Chloe Sevigny in an above-ground pool in the overcast ruins. It's a dictionary to interpret the invented foreign tongue in The Silence rather than an encapsulation of the alien mystery of a boy in a cavernous hotel with no way to understand the terrifying artefacts that surround him.

It's a game without cinema, a logical skeleton without blood and flesh to give it human shape or empathy. It's history as a series of straight lines whose rate of ascension can be manipulated, but it leaves out the most interesting parts of irrationality and human failing. It's more a game and less a video game, one that could have existed as easily 1000 years ago as today. That can't be said of cinema, and the degree to which it resists enhancing itself with cinema's emotional agency reveals how aging and purposeless the mechanical system has become. Consider it a cultural defeat.

Needless to say this guy is a massive retard. Go watch a goddamn movie and stop declining mah hobby.