Battleship Pegs and The Realization You're Smart While Dumb

So first off: Did anyone else notice that the bombs the aliens used in Battleship resembled the pegs you use in the boardgame. NOW YOU KNOW. In other news, as I was burying myself in some Sherlock Holmes post gift ripping when I got a disturbing text from a friend. He informed me that he was playing a simple sidescroller with a younger relative of his and made a startling discovery. At a particular instance, the younger relative had extreme difficulty in conjuring what to do to beat the instance. After 15 minutes, the boy finally got it, but it spoke to the problems I addressed in another article. The handicap we've given modern gamers by making gameplay grossly over simplified with extensive and implicit instructions or tutorials is causing the generation gap to widen. What only perpetuates the problem is the rise in popularity of the FPS and the casual game. While I personally believe the popularity of Angry Birds was merely a fluke, there is still something to be said about the highest grossing video game genre on all aspects. Which is 'ew.' My point is, we really are neutering the creativity of our generation by making games so simple and easy, we don't encourage gamers to puzzle at all. And whether we're fond of the notion or not, gaming has risen in such popularity that it's become a solid part of mainstream culture. If it continues to trend the way it has, gaming will become an integral part to the development of children in the first world (sometimes called More Developed Countries or MDCs). That in mind, do we really want to bog down our kid's minds with simple physics slush or do we want to help them expand their minds while still enjoying games? Do I have to ask? PS I hate Angry Birds. Stepping off to the side, I want to close with another interesting pattern I noticed. Pixar seems to have a fixation with the big and the small, old and the young. The dichotomy works insanely for them, but what's the deal? Think about every one of their shows. Finding Nemo. Toy Story. Wall-E. Every single one of them. Seriously what's up with that? OPERATOR OUT

The Obligatory Moments

Every gamer has their moments, and every gamer/writer has their moments post. This is mine. I was conjuring the intrinsic value of video games and the stories they tell. More importantly, the lessons they tell. And as I was pondering, I thought "That's all well and good, and I've harped on that for years." This time around, I want to be able to just, reminisce. My gaming history didn't start with an NES or Atari. My first game was Crash Bandicoot 2. That crazy marsupial, I'm still unsure if bandicoots are such a thing. Chasing down Cortex wasn't the hardest of levels but it was certainly satisfying to bring that madman down, after throwing me to the strangest fiends I had seen yet. But this was only the beginning. Fast forward to the moment I finally beat Songi in that blasted forest in Legend of Legaia, wiping his lackeys across the ground on their faces. A minor instance, I know, but satisfying all the same, it was so difficult and I had no clue how to play RPGs. When Kairi was separated from Sora I was choked up, after everything we had been through defeating the Heartless. But some of the greatest moments were shared whilst playing with friends. During an all-nighter, my roomates and I played Halo 3 through the campaign on Legendary. I gotta go into detail for those unfamiliar. The whole area is breaking up. In order to prevent the Gravemind, essentially a sentient fungus that assimilates all sentient life (hence it's sentient...ness), Master Chief has to cause a wildcat explosion triggered by lighting the unfinished halo installation on the Ark. As the installation breaks up around you, you're forced to race across falling platforms in warthogs avoiding falling bits of the installation and the various enemies trying to escape as well. In four player coop, you have two jeeps, but if one falls and dies, that team has to wait until the other stops at a checkpoint near a new jeep for them to rez again. This only happens twice. So my friends and I are leapfrogging to the end, we've passed the last checkpoint, we're trying to reach the ship before the halo ring goes up. A platform explodes and sends the other team sailing. My gunner and I are it, trying to reach the end, we're all tired, we want to go to bed. And someone shouts, "Do a 360 into the ship." Soon it becomes a shouting match "Don't do it! You suck at driving! Just get there!" Ignoring it all, I race down the final hill to catch speed, hit the jump, and just before I run out of ground, I jerk the wheel, slam on the brakes, and start to spin, clearing the platform. In mid air as we near the ship, I pull a 180, and it still looked classy. Suddenly, the cut-scene, and the room explodes as we cheer. We made it and did it with style. I miss those kinds of moments. The moments when waves of Locust are chasing us down in multiplayer, and during the 25th wave, both my team mates die, and from the other room they hear me shout "you've got to be kidding me!" Or the long winded discussion my roommates had about the end of Mass Effect, and disagreeing completely on the character of Saren, when finding out months later, the reason their opinions differed entirely was because their choices had led to two completely different Sarens. These moments make gaming epic, when all else fails. And I love it. Whether it's killing dragons, successfully tanking for a crew from across the world, or laughing at something stupid with my siblings, games offers a chance to connect over story telling like never before.

Fallout 3 vs. New Vegas: Endless Tunnels or Endless Possibilities?

As far as video games go, I was a late bloomer, so my first dungeon crawler wasn't Diablo or Morrowind. My first was possibly at it's most basic, Gauntlet: Dark Legacy. Unbeknownst to me, this would be the beginning of a beautiful love/hate relationship between me and the 'endless RPG.' My absolute favorite of the genre has to be Bethesda's Fallout ensemble; the early PC versions, the nearly unforgivable ten year hiatus, and the two sudden installments creating a Jim Jones cult following, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. Bethesda is better known for it's previous fantasy titles, the Elder Scrolls, more recently being Morrowind and Oblivion. Admittedly, Fallout 3 was most certainly my real 'first dungeon crawler' despite total lack of dungeons. I knew little of the game, and just in discussion with a random passerby, I learned that Fallout was something to devour, being somewhat of a journeyman RPG connoisseur. Like a babe crawling between the American and German trenches of WWI, I stumbled in the the bright and heavy laden future that would be my addiction. The first thing you notice upon exiting the introduction of the game (I'll leave that portion to discovery) is complete and utter destruction. The haunted skeletons of burned out homes lined a short street littered with retro 50's space cars and trash (I recycle every tin can I see in real life as a result of this game. What boggles my mind is if they're made of tin, why are they all rusted?) The asphalt is crumbling, the vegetation is brown and sparse, and there were no signs of life anywhere. After checking to be sure I was supposed to be in DC and that the beginning of the game didn't start somewhere in Arizona, I discovered that the crouch option was toggled and not held and I proceeded to crawl my way through the entire game, because I'll admit, I was freaking out. Knowing that game developers, like amusement parks, always try and direct the flow of traffic to begin to the right, I mustered as much rebellion to the developer's plans as I'm capable of, and veered to the left, towards a decrepit brick schoolhouse. It seemed harmless enough, and once I realized I could walk in the front door, I readied my 10mm pistol and ventured forth, not knowing what to expect. If the entrance way of the school didn't seem to scream, “Run away or you're going to die,” enough, the rest of the building sure did. Dirty mattresses and dead bodies everywhere made that nervous flutter of fear rise in my soul. What followed were my shouts of terror as some horrific apparition started firing on me. Pleading to God, Allah, Buddha, anyone I tried to fight back, knowing nothing of the aiming system or of the battle engine. Nothing to heal myself with, nor anyway to defend myself (Link had a frigging shield and I get just a gun and my face??) I proceeded to turn everything within my peripheral vision into Swiss cheese, before collapsing in sudden death from my attackers. Many days of loving devotion later, I was rewarded with a high-powered mini-gun. Once again, peripheral vision, Swiss cheese, me standing triumphantly on a pile of the bodies of my enemies. A good portion of my time was spent in DC's underground, the writhing subway system spanning a good half of the available map. If 60 hours could be spent above surface, it would be no problem at all to spend at least 30 below in dead office buildings, subways and factories. Without fail, a quest would last much longer than anticipated as my ADD kicked in randomly when I would spot something of interest off in the horizon. The thrill of scavenging everything I could was enough to ignore the slightly disappointing color palate or the regular glitches, but to someone with a more artistic eye, the bland landscape could easily grind on the senses. The audio appeals to personal preference. Either I could switch to the radio and listen to Billie Holiday, or I could shut it off and take in the nothing blowing through the speakers, giving me a pure sensation of being IN the wasteland. Needless to say, I loved both. The only thing I hated about the radio was the station with the Enclave on it, because the Enclave are pretentious jerks. What irks me is Bethesda deemed it necessary to offer a horse in Elder Scrolls, but neglected such courtesy in Fallout 3. Gimme a car. A bat. Maybe a flying flaming bat of death. A rabbit. Something. Sure, the fast travel function was handy, but how am I going to find a new source of income if I keep skipping the spans between two settlements? On another note, despite the fact that though my avatar looks like they're about 5'11'' and 120lbs, I can carry in excess of 200lbs. It's obscene how quick it is to reach that limit, with no real alternative forms of storage beyond finding somewhere you can hide it all and remember where it was. Nevertheless, gold was struck and Bethesda knew it. So they asked the masses what they could do to improve their next installment, New Vegas, and the result was an interesting mix between two of Bethesda's masterpieces, the Fallouts and Elder Scrolls. More color was definitely on the top of the list, and though the developers added red rock landscapes and the colorful neon of the Vegas Strip, the signature, bland undertones native to Nevada's sprawling desert were still prominent. The map is definitely much smaller, and there are much fewer 'dungeons' to crawl through, but to compensate for lost space, New Vegas incorporates lost time. Quests are longer and have more conditional or optional ends and means allowing me to customize the experience directly to my tastes. The perks are more comprehensive, and it is somewhat easier to specialize in more than one skill making the game ultimately more fun. The addition of the survival skill and campfire remedies was also a nice touch, though I had a hard time devoting any time to them. Then there's the sheer insanity of the game. I didn't have enough trouble with Radscorpions in Fallout 3, so hey, lets have a nest of GIANT radscorpions waiting right outside the first town! Super mutants hiding in a ski lodge, led by one that resembles Ron Perlman, drunken stupor and frivolity on the mind-numbing strip, and I even found the holy hand grenade at one point (PS, that grenade? More effective than the mini gun. MUCH more effective.)The hair-brained antics and colorful characters easily made me forget the sparse number of Vaults and tunnels. New Vegas starts off fast paced, and you certainly hit the ground running, or perhaps better put, hit the ground bleeding, dying, buried and dug up by a friendly cowboy robot. When you start off, you're certainly punished for deviation from the beaten path as ruthless mutant animals quickly swarm you. On the other hand, sticking to the story quest allows you to branch out quickly and with valuable reward. Before you step onto the strip, you have to perform a 'credit check', which really means dropping a lot of caps (the Fallout form of currency) to bribe the gate guards (not friendly cowboy robots). Instead I chose to get a false passport from The Kings, a gang whose every member looks and talks like Elvis himself and resides in The Kings School of Impersonation. What followed were a number of favors to the different factions in the gritty out-lands surrounding the city of lights, which surprisingly resembles the ghettos of Vegas pretty well. One such 'gopher' mission led me to find a lost caravan in a cave that was inhabited by ROUS, or Rodents of Unusual Size if you haven't seen The Princess Bride. Excited I embarked, and found the cave quickly, skulking in the shadows, picking them off when I could without alarming all of them to swarm me at once. I found the caravan, grabbed the loot, was about to exit, when I saw one of those things perched on a ledge, and thought, if he can get there so can I. So I promptly shot him, and made my way up, finding one of my favorite parts of the game, the special weapons. Each weapon has it's own, lets say, master weapon. The best shotgun, the best .357, the best rifle, etc. I found the Ratslayer, a black varmint rifle marked with a rat skull and tick marks, with a scope and suppressor. Setting my stats so I was a sniper, this was a treat. Once I ran out of rats to slay, I decided it was retribution time for those blasted Radscorpions. Along the way, you're bound to find all sorts of other weapons to add to the appeal and ultimately the lunacy of the game. So if you're looking for some good old scavenging for parts to your Railgun (which sounds like a oncoming freight train when fired) but willing to spend upwards of 2 hours doing so, Fallout 3 is your game. Conversely, if you want a vibrant tale riddled with decaying casinos or bipolar super mutants, give New Vegas a try. Both are a favorite, both have given large hours of great entertainment, and both have made me confident that if the apocalypse happens in 20 years, it's going to be bad, but hey, at least Elvis makes a comeback.