Enoch

Yeah, I thought that the stand-off in Boulder was poorly done. In a supposedly tense situation, you can simply saunter over from NCR lines to the Khans' side of town without any confrontation at all. I get that they wanted to make it a quest solvable via multiple paths, but the Charisma Boy option is "just walk over there and pass a dialogue check," which doesn't feel plausible at all. They could've worked in something with radio communications or a backdoor entryway or surrendering your weapons casino-style to preserve the verisimilitude of stand-off.

My big mod-related complaint so far (playing an Energy Weaps character) is that there isn't a way that I can tell to put a scope on the unique Laser Rifle. The absence of a scope makes it less useful than the base model. Edit: Also the "beam splitter" LR mod that actually makes the gun less effective.

Store inventories are randomized, but they re-set every few game days. Keep checking back with the merchants in Goodsprings, Primm, Novac, and the junkyard lady until you find what you want. Weapon mods can only be bought, and are never found in the gameworld for some reason.

It's a huge loss, but it's not a loss of 50

The blond-haired doctor is worth getting to know. He's my favorite of the companions I've chatted with so far. Interesting to talk to, and quite handy in a fight. (He uses a plasma defender, which has an insanely fast rate of fire. It's key drawback for the player is that it burns through ammo and degrades very fast, but neither are concerns for an NPC.)

Yeah, all the signs seem to be pointing to a Medal of Warfare Duty game with a ME setting. Ho-hum.

Well, they don't want anybody's money-- they want their "Microsoft Points." (cue "we don't need no stinking..." jokes)

Bah, any Fallout game with a map function that actually provides useful feedback to the player would be a Fallout in Name Only!

The former. Well, yeah, it was serious. The humor comes from the juxtaposition of all that serious brutality with the . It's really the same kind of irony-based black humor that has been in Fallout since the opening credits of the original game. (Particularly the bit with the My Lai style execution by 'peacekeeping' soldiers happily waving to the folks at home.)

To flesh that out a little, go talk to the junk dealer with the dogs a little ways north of Novac. IIRC, she can point you where you need to go for both items.

That would be bad news for Obsidz. A good portion of the bet they've made on Dungeon Siege III is based on its cross-platformity giving it an edge over the next Diablo.

I bought the game in a GOG sale a few months ago. I haven't installed it yet, but I fear that my experience will be quite similar to yours.

Talk about over-analysing. Just name the game that's been the most fun for you. Why would it have to be replayable now? What influence does that have on the experience it was? You two are trying to answer two different questions. Neither approach is wrong, but I do find reading a person's struggling with a game (or a text, film, whatever) on a critical level ("critical" meaning like a serious art/film/literature/etc. critic or scholar would) more interesting than I do a simple report that "it was fun to me."

Miniscule nitpick department: The guy who runs the co-op in Westside: The text is inconsistent on whether his name is "Etienne" or "Ettienne" (the former is likely correct). Also, the voiceover for the Followers dude who is helping him calls him something that sounds like "Entenee."

I don't know that it's necessarily that. I mean, outside of the "getting dipped" option to end to FO1, the player's birth, death, and motivations are similarly scripted. Actually, I think FO1-mimicry is behind a lot of the FO3 plot. The ending seemed specifically designed to emulate the bittersweet ending of Fallout 1 (for a "good" Vault Dweller). They just didn't do it very well. The game up to that point really hadn't succeeded in convincing the player that the gameworld outside his/her character was worth saving (or, for that matter, what difference having abundant clean water would make). So the "sweet" part was missing, and the player was left chewing on the bitterness of losing the character that he/she had invested hours and hours of attention and care to.

You have an oddly idealized view of what "normal conditions" are. There's always a crisis of one kind or another-- over the last 60 years, the only two periods when the government was run in something other than "we'd like to keep the budget balanced, but there are pressing concerns that we have to deal with" mode was in the mid '50s to early '60s and the mid-to-late '90s. (Which were both periods of huge economic booms, bringing in plenty of tax revenues to fund all the governments' budget priorities.) Even in those rare years when there isn't a crisis, the people can be made to believe that there is one pretty easily (see: the Iraq invasion). The size of the deficit/debt might make it "different this time" from an economic or sound-policy point of view, but I don't see any evidence that it's going to be different from an electoral point of view. It's still an abstract and amorphous concept to the population at-large. Something that they can reliably spout cynical comments about, but not something that they particularly care about when they decide who to vote for.

The NY Times' website has a fun little game: You Fix the Budget. Check off which of the proposals for budget savings currently being discussed that you want implemented, until you bridge the gap. The projections are, of course, huge guesstimates, but it gives the reader a sense of the relative importance of each of the issues.

'Doh. Not sure why I made that mistake, other than that they're both in the "'80s also-rans" folder in my brain. I'll edit my post for clarity. Also, the deficit increases under W were primarily a result of his tax cuts, which were a campaign promise from back when the economy was still looking rosy and when he still thought "Osama bin Laden" was the punchline to a joke about a camel in Road to Morocco. The wars and security increases sure didn't help, but the tax cuts and the Medicare prescription drug benefit are of more import with regard to the long-term federal budget picture.

The thing is, American voters don't really care about deficits. They never have. They care about economic prosperity and jobs, and about national defense, entitlement programs, and other stuff like that. Here's a quote for you: The year was 1984, the incumbent was Ronald Reagan, and the speaker was Walter Mondale. That was from his acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination. The Reagan deficits were a centerpiece of his campaign-- a campaign that went on to lose one of the worst landslides in American history. Reagan then did nothing of note to address the deficit in his 2nd term. Nor did Bush the Elder in his. The combination of the '90s boom years and the Clinton tax increases brought them down, briefly, but that was a momentary digression from the overall trend. And voters didn't really care when the surplus went away in W's first term. @GD, I think you've hit upon one of the chief things that bug me about the libertarian wing of American politics: smug certitude based on an understanding of economics that is "basic" and "common sense." Demand curves drawn on the blackboard in Econ 101 may look alot like the F=MV stuff drawn on the blackboard in Physics 101, but the two really have nothing in common. There are some incredibly complicated reasons why Sowell and his ilk might be correct about their core prescriptions, but there are also some incredibly complicated reasons why the intelligent modern economists who disagree with him might be correct, too. If a tough question about an economy larger than few thousand people has an answer that is "basic" and "common sense," then that answer is no better than a pure guess. And it's intellectually lazy to pretend otherwise. EDIT: See below.

I agree wholeheartedly with Tale's disclaimer paragraph. I try to focus on games that have stood the test of time well, and ones drive by original ideas that have proven influential. But then I end up excluding recent releases. The top of the list that hit on all of these are probably, in some order or another: Railroad Tycoon Civilizations 2 & 4 Alpha Centauri Fallout Planescape: Torment Portal There are plenty more games that I have really enjoyed, but it gets tough for me to differentiate once I get below the ones I consider truly superlative.

Aw, I spend the weekend doing home-improvement projects, and I miss a Pop-Gromnir throwdown? Dang. I probably come out more on Grom's side on this one, although my perspective is the opposite of Cant's-- I'm a DC local, so a lot of the color that Bethsoft put into FO3 hit home with me more than most. Dupont was very well done; I like the use of the Pentagon; the Metro felt authentic (although they did put in way too much of it) and made my commute interesting for weeks, peeking for ghouls in the maintenence areas between stations; the National Archives and Natural History museum were both very cool. Little details like the texture they used on highway overpass retaining walls were just right. And, for all the boxed-in feeling that the areas of FO3's DC gave us, it at least felt like we were picking through the remains of a Big City. FNV's Vegas feels like it's only about 5 blocks across. Granted, DC is an easier hand to play than Vegas is, as most of what people remember about Vegas involves landmarks that have arisen since the divergence of the Fallout setting's retro-future timeline. FNV's comparable 'color' (Primm's rollercoaster, the Novac dino, the pseudo-Stratosphere, the Hoover Dam) just hasn't impressed me the same way. It's certainly true that I'm missing the little details in the Mojave that my real-world knowledge of DC clued me into in FO3. And it might be partly because I was spoiled about most of the FNV landmarks I mentioned before playing the game. For whatever reason, the exploration element doesn't have the same pull. I haven't hit the endgame yet, but, all told, I am still somewhat underwhelmed by the scope of improvements over Bethesda's entry. The gameplay changes are nice, but they fall short of making the combat fun for it's own sake. The writing in FO3 was rather banal, and while FNV avoids the worst of what Bethesda offered, I still haven't had a whole lot of "that was a very well written quest/character/location" moments. (Vault 11 is the notable exception so far. Maybe Arcade, too.) The diamonds in the rough have been worth the slog so far, and I keep going hoping to find more, but a lot of the slogging along the way feels a bit too familiar.

My parents came to visit for the weekend, and we accomplished a huge amount of house projects with their help. Replaced the front door (which used to be ancient, warped, and drafty), did some new weatherstripping on the back door, replaced a flagstone step out in the yard (one of two to climb from the driveway to the front walk), installed a new mailbox, fixed a showerhead, replaced a bathroom faucet, and hung some blinds in the kitchen. The new front door and surrounding trim still need to be painted, but it doesn't look terrible at present, so that's low-priority.

Ever since the last patch, I've had the old "application crash on quitting the game" pretty consistently. I recall this happening occasionally with FO3 and Oblivion, too, but not with this regularity. Doesn't affect my playing or operating my PC, though-- just have to go though the task manager to kill the program after I've told it to quit in the main menu.

If it's a repair quest, I just do it with a repair skill, or move on. I think it's cool that tin cans can be used in a quest or recipies and stuff, but there's enough of them that I won't bother hoarding them. At the same time, I have no issues skipping a quest that has me do stuff like that if it's not something my character is interested in doing. Same here. Any quest that depends on gathering samples of the 87 different flavors of shelf-clutter in the gameworld is one that I ignore entirely. I've been keeping my stuff in the NoVac motel room. Guns in the footlocker, Ammo/explosives in the safe, apparel in the cabinet, and everything else in the fridge. It's close to a fast travel point and to a merchant. I don't do much crafting (little more than recycling energy ammo), so the only thing it's missing is a fresh water source. I usually stop for a drink at Helios One after spending a night there.

Zork may be longer than Black Ops. If you know what to do, you can finish it quite quickly. But if you're going by experimentation, well, it's going to take a looooooong time.