Aram

Guybrush looks retarded.

Yeesh. Telltale really knows how to make ugly looking human characters.

I didn't say the good stuff wasn't good.

The amount of silliness in the game actually seems to vary by which area you're in--apparently because different people were assigned to different areas. Take, just as an example, Broken Hills. There's an intelligent scorpion that knows morse code you can play chess with, and a talking plant just outside which tells you how to beat him. (talking animals are oddly common in Fallout 2--there's a superintelligent rat in Gecko named Brain who's trying to take over the world...yeah.) There's a super mutant that forces you to have implied rough BDSM sex with him if you lose at arm wrestling. A super mutant couple is having an argument about one of them looking at porn all the time and they're not having sex. If you walk through an invisible part of a wall you can find a direct reference to some pulp hero who's apparently been asleep since before the war and you get an exp reward for "finding yet another pop culture reference." That's just from a fairly distant memory of a fairly innocent little town. I don't even have the stamina to go through New Reno. Becoming a fluffer or a porn star at the porn studio is probably the highlight there. In any fifteen minutes of gameplay you can probably find as many lewd jokes, cultural references, and blows with a sledgehammer to the fourth wall.

I would say that Fallout 2 spent more time being intentionally silly than Fallout 3. And often, it relied on the very worst sort of humor. Worse even then puns. Family Guy style humor.

It'll be like FO3. But better. Or something. It'll probably be pretty tyte.

It's more like complaining if the Highwayman from Fallout 2 had been a 1998 Audi S4, or the Batmobile, instead of something that made sense for the setting.

Historical accuracy is one thing. Culture references and real life firearms curio that completely contradict the setting the Fallout series claims to strive for is another.

The .223 commercial round and 5.56mm military round, I think, were both made available in '64. It had been around much sooner than that, however, as an experimental load developed specifically for the AR-15--I think in the mid-late 50s. The round itself was developed out of a stretched .222 round, and prototypes for it had been around for even longer. I don't think there's anything wrong with the .223 existing in the Fallout universe since it was a concept well underway in the 50s timeframe, and the low-caliber assault rifle concept had been around since WW2, and made extremely common in the AK47. I agree though that it makes no sense for a bunch of Chinese rifles to be in the same caliber. Canonically, did any Chinese troops even actually land on American soil, besides Alaska? It really doesn't make sense that there would be so many Chinese weapons around. Maybe a few in odd places like that secret Communist guy's apartment where you get the hat might make sense. Of course, the Fallout series has a long tradition of introducing arsenals which make absolutely no sense. It's one of the flaws of the setting, I think. Even if you have a hatred of real life weapons and want the most ridiculous, oversized, Lefieldian comic book generic weapons, the original Fallout itself doesn't seem to know what it wants to be. Take, for example, the handguns available in Fallout. There's a 10mm pistol, a Desert Eagle .44 Magnum, a 14mm pistol, and a .223 pistol. J.E. confirmed that the 10mm in the game is supposed to be the 10mm Auto, a fad cartridge of the 80s and 90s that has become a connoisseur's cartridge today if anything--almost forgotten in a professional capacity in favor of the .40 S&W or otherwise just forgotten. It is a real world cartridge with absolutely no basis in the 1950s and, in fact, no basis today either--if we look forward into the future from where we stand now, there's no reason to think the 10mm will be anything but further forgotten. That makes that part of Fallout a product of the time when the original game was made, not the time it claims to emulate, and even less today. The graphic itself for the pistol is actually a reference to an 80s hyperviolent Frank Miller comic, which might have fit as a homage to one of Fallout's influences, but is so obscure a reference today that it seems like a bad decision. The Desert Eagle is a real world weapon--though it's one so often overused in film and fiction that one could almost think it's not. The Desert Eagle has nothing to do with the 50s and everything to do with the 80s and 90s trashy action film. Watching movies like Robocop, Predator 2, Commando, Harley Davidson & The Marlboro Man, one would think that it was the most common handgun in the world. The awful movie adaptation of one of my favorite novels, Miami Blues, turned a .32 pistol and a .38 snub into a .44 Magnum Ruger and a .50 Desert Eagle, just because producers thought moviegoers in the 90s wanted them. It's a small complaint, but its presence detracts from the setting rather than clarifies it as it should. It also creates the problem those same movies had. It stretches the imagination that someone could be hit multiple times with one and not be reduced to a greasespot. The 14mm pistol, believe it or not, is probably the most sensible of all of them. It more or less fits the setting, if that's what the setting wants to be. If it wants to be wacky looking big guns in outrageous calibers, that's unfortunate but certainly allowed. If its picture is a reference to something, I can't find it. The description calls it a Sig Sauer which is a bit hard to believe, but that's about all you can really disagree with if anything. The .223 pistol makes no sense logically. It does more damage than the .223 rifle, even though a shorter barrel should mean significantly less damage. Firing a .223 through a pistol length barrel notoriously slows it down to a speed in which it loses its fragmentation effect, which is where the round gets most of its damage potential. Logically, it should do less damage even than the 10mm pistol. It also is drawn as an exact replica of Harrison Ford's pistol in Blade Runner. Another culture reference, at least a little more timeless than one to a Frank Miller comic, yet still an 80s reference rather than a 50s one. If it was drawn to look like something from Buck Rogers would be one thing. Blade Runner just doesn't fit. Fallout 2 further confused the issue by adding a plethora of real life, high tech, and decidedly 90s weapons that, like the 10mm round, fit neither in a retro 50s setting nor a game made ten years later. The G11, Pancor Jackhammer, CAWS, and others that they added to the game never left the prototype stage. They're pieces of 90s curio at best. The addition of the FN-FAL and Grease gun make a little more sense, especially as the descriptions offer explanations for their presence. Fallout Tactics suffered from a bit of everygun-itis which resulted in a party which could simultanously possess an M16a1, a gauss rifle, and a WW1 era Chauchat. Frankly, before someone can come up with the perfect arsenal for Fallout, someone needs to define just what a Fallout game arsenal wants to be.

....aliens?

I believe guys like this deserve to die. I don't think, however, that there should be a death penalty because I don't think ours or any government, court, or jury is perfect or even adequate enough to handle the responsibility of using it properly. Someone will be and probably has been executed wrongfully because of a mistaken cop, a mistaken judge, or a mistaken jury. There's just too much room for error for a such an ultimate solution. There's probably no mistaking anything about this guy, and I'd be happy to hear of him dying, but you can't make exceptions like that in law, especially not because of emotions. Hell, all we know is what this small web article says, some scrap of information we found on an internet forum, and we're ready to get a rope. It's too easy to be misinformed or plain wrong.

...aliens?

Maybe their next one won't be balls. But I doubt it!

Also, some single-action sixshooters in .45 Colt in the holsters of a gunslinging lawman would be fairely bitichin'. You could just cut a corner and let the one .45 be universal. It's also not totally wrong for the 50s setting, as there was still enough nostaligia and interest in single-actions that Ruger got started on them in the 50s, and a .44 Mag Ruger was available less than a year after the Smith & Wesson.

.44 Magnum with .45 ACP or .45 LC? All three calibers are AMERICA SQUARED, just different eras and applications. Well for the roles they served in the original Fallout, I'd prefer the 10mm pistol had been a 9mm pistol, and the .44 Desert Eagle a .45 pistol. This could account for the former's lower damage and higher capacity, and the latter's lower capacity and higher damage. They could in fact have exactly the same stats and make as much or more sense. If 10mm was really chosen because of the 80s and 90s fad cartridge, it makes sense in neither the Fallout alternate reality setting or regular reality, and is a piece of errata that could excusably be repaired. The same could be said for the Desert Eagle. The .44 Magnum, being the most powerful factory loaded pistol cartridge of the 50s, should be in the game, but it should be the top dog--serving the sort of role the .223 pistol serves. Ammo rare, but very powerful, and very low capacity. Calibers in RPGs should start low and work up. Having the first pistol you find be a cannon like a 10mm, and having it do such low amounts of damage even against rats, isn't good math. Neither should a .44 Magnum be something you later discard for something more powerful--you've already reached the power/recoil pinnacle of what one could ever sensibly consider a defensive handgun. It just makes no sense that everyone and their mother would be packing one.

J.E., are you still going to replace 10mm and .44 with 9mm and .45, or is that no longer an option?

Where's my guns thread?

What I would like to see is a game that doesn't recycle the old nemeses of past Fallout games. You stopped the Super Mutants in Fallout 1, and by Fallout 2 they were no longer a menace. You blew up the Enclave in Fallout 2--that should have been the end of them. Fallout 3 brought them both back rather than invent a new threat. At least Fallout Tactics came up with Robots! instead. A raider warlord, a Communist revenge invasion, space aliens--something we haven't already seen. Canonically, the Super Mutants should be fossils by now, and I don't ever want to see the enclave again.

It's 2:00am you're alone in an old movie theater, watching your favorite classic movie for the 100th time. It's 2038 and outside the economy has collapsed and global warming and plague and nuclear war are about to wipe out humanity. You've been laid off work and the doctor you went to see about that cough told you have days to live. The world's gone mad and they're rioting outside. You've been evicted from your apartment, the bartender won't let you in until you pay your tab, and the only solace you can find is to retreat into this small cinematic refuge. Citizen Kane in playing for you alone in this abandoned theater. Suddenly Orson Welles comes down off the screen and sits down beside you. He bums a cigarette and asks you why you're still watching this same movie over and over again. He says "let's watch something else." He offers you that chance to watch anything you want. Any film, but more than that. Any god damn performance, and god damn show one human being put on for another in the history of showmanship. If you want to go watch Hamlet at the Globe Theatre, you're there. If you want to watch Vivaldi shred a fiddle, you're there. If you want to go to Woodstock, want to hear Homer recite the Illiad, or watch your own kindergarten class put on a terrible play, you're there. You've only got one ticket. Which do you choose?

Badly written, at least. I had not yet learned the art of brevity. If you write more than one sentence describing a gun in a story, you need to try again. If you spend more than a page, you need to seek medical help. It did get finished, but in its current form it must never see the light of day.

oh god. That thing I wrote on the old board was so bad.

Absolutely. Anything can happen. I'm just stating my expectancies of the medium as it exists now. If I was a comic book reader in the 50s I wouldn't expect Sandman or Maus, but they appeared in time. However I think games a particularly difficult medium to tell a good story because the obligation to include things like shooting, driving, and jumping sequences, gameplay itself, is as or more crippling to a storyteller's ability as the obligation to include Michael Bay esque action sequences. In fact, the genre perhaps best suited to being a storytelling medium--the adventure game--is largely dead because gamers look for action and big developers look for people who specialize in tech. RPGs are our second best option, and they seem to be devolving rather than anything. The difference between good, average, and bad storytelling is pretty universal, but yes, different mediums all have their different ways of telling stories. Watchmen made a great graphic novel and a pretty horrible film. Torment, I think, could only have worked as well as it did as a game. The majesty of Torment came only from the sum of its many tiny parts which were so numerous that they could not have been told unless the reader or player had some control over which part to examine at what time. The part where you meet your three former selves at the end and it all comes together is probably the most ****ing revelatory moment in gaming, and could never have been as significant in novel or movie form. The means are definitely there, or very close, for a fantastic story to be told through an electronic medium, but I don't think studios today are interested in reaching for it. Also, if they did, they'd probably fall short on their first try, the game would tank, and their studio would go bankrupt, and we'd all cry.

Not me. I'm brimming with hope. Particularly if they aren't crippled by Fallout 3's technical restrictions, and they don't repeat the idiosyncrasies of Fallout 2--I expect it will be fantastic.

I don't think Fallout 3's writing is terrible. Maybe a few choice instances, but that's to be expected. I just think it was a step down from the first games, which meant for disappointment because video game sequels are supposed to be progressive in more ways than just tech. Baldur's Gate II surpassed the first, for example, in almost every way. The original Fallout set a landmark in dialogue and decision making in dialogue--its sequel took that a bit further, but its second sequel took a step down rather than a step further as it should have. It didn't disregard it entirely--and it was definitely a step forward for Bethesda from Oblivion, but they didn't quite do the original justice. That's all I mean. What I meant to say is that because we have enough games that have managed a level of writing at least on par with a mostly decent movie, we know bad writing when we see it, even through the colorful smog of graphics and gameplay. We'll probably never see video game writing approach the level of a truly great, meaningful movie, but it's not wrong to at least expect the sort of attention to scriptwriting they put into a decent action movie.

You don't. You don't need to read anyone's, and nobody needs to read yours. We're all here idly wasting time because it's entertaining. Angry, whiny posts like yours make it a tedious chore.