Apocalypse Evolved: a Fallout rant

No surprise that i'm writing this since Fallout 3 went live several days ago, so i'm gonna cut it short on the intro. This is both a review, and an old gamer's perspective on Fallout 3 versus its predecessor.
Let's chill out a bit and go way back, to the era of games that didn't have million-dollar budgets, when consoles didn't each have their own code and when people made games because they had a passion for it rather than to gain popularity. That was the era in which i started gaming, and the time when i experienced some of the best moments of my life. Let's go back to when a tiny little company called Interplay got it into their heads to make a game about a post-nuclear dystopia where everything was ruined, desecrated and basically fucked up. But they did more than that: they added 2 of the most basic yet defining elements a game can have: violence and humor.
So take a really violent game with lots of humor set in the ruins of a post-apocalyptic universe, and you have something that kinda follows the idea of Fallout. Make that game have one of the best atmospheres, settings and feelings that ever graced the history of gaming and you have Fallout. Now i didn't play the first Fallout, and this is why i won't be talking about it here and now. However, its sequel, Fallout 2, i have finished a total of 4 times and still consider the best game ever made for the PC. Let's get this straight: it was not perfect. It was far from perfect, in fact it had craploads of bugs, the story wasn't the size of Legacy of Kain or even Baldur's Gate, but the game flowed on through all its problems. The bugs were more game-making than game-breaking(well if you saved a lot), to the point where you actually used some of them to have fun. The story was not the best there could be for its setting, but because of that very setting it was perfectly balanced. And the universe sucked you in, it dragged you down to the point that it was no longer a game. It was beyond a game. And that oppinion has been shared by countless people who have waited for a sequel ever since.
Enter Fallout 3. At first, everyone was dismayed that Interplay had dropped its own F3 project, but people continued to hope. Not until the license was brought by Bethesda did people start to fear: fear that Fallout would not in fact be Fallout, but rather a cheap Elder Scrolls copy. But you know what, The Elder Scrolls was a nice series, which proves they aren't totally idiots when it comes to games, and if they keep the Fallout essence intact, there's a nice chance it will be Fallout. So up until i finally got to play it, there was this burning question in my gut: will it, or will it not be Fallout?
So is it a cheap Elder Scrolls copy, in the end? Yes, and no. More like an incredibly well-done Elder Scrolls copy, because it's better than Oblivion, but NOT better than Fallout.
Let's start with the basics of what makes Fallout Fallout: mechanics. I think everyone who's played Fallout 1 or 2 remembers the interface's ease of use (when you mastered it) and the useful, fun options you had to customize your char. Well, how about Fallout 3? I can't possibly explain this without writing a wall of text so let's make a list.
Fallout 2:

1. Skills can be raised up to 300% and get more expensive to raise starting at 100%
   
2. Skills can be used frequently in a variety of unconventional situations
3. Tag skills get raised twice as fast and a tag increases the base skill by 20 points.
4. Background traits can drastically modify the way you play
5. Each point in a stat contributes to a very important aspect
6. Perks are gained once every 3 levels (by default) and offer unique, powerful and game-changing bonuses
7. There is no maximum level, and you can still play the game as you like after finishing the main quest
8. Weapons/armor don't degrade, and you can get your own travelling "stash" in the form of a car.
   

Fallout 3:

1. Skills can be raised to 100, after that, fuck you.
2. Skills are rarely used in dialogue, and very rarely used outside of dialogue with the exception of using them exactly for what they're supposed to do. If Fallout 3 was Fallout 2, you could not repair the well in the first village.
3. Tag skills are a 15 point bonus for that particular skill and nothing else.
4. Background traits do not exist
5. Each point in a stat gives a measly contribution to 2 or 3 skills and a non-skill feature (like weight limit)
   
6. Perks are gained every level and 90% of them offer either a skill bonus, stat bonus, exp bonus, more dialogue options, accuracy bonus, money bonus, damage bonus (both situational and usual), action point bonus or a combination/variation of the above. The only truly unique perk is Explorer, but getting that means throwing away other good perks.
7. The maximum level is 20 and it's only attainable if you stray far, far away from the main quest for a long time and no apparent reason. After the game ends, you can go fuck yourself because you're not going back, no matter what ending you chose.
8. Weapons break themselves like you were hammering them with a super sledge instead of pulling a trigger. Not much different from Oblivion, that is. This wouldn't be so bad if you didn't need copies of the same weapon to repair them. The car is gone, replaced by Oblivion's fast travel. Surprisingly, fast travel doesn't have a fucking trunk.

There are lots more i could add, but we're talking about game mechanics here. Bethesda has changed Fallout's skill and stat system to a state which would have been unrecognisable if the game didn't throw the word S.P.E.C.I.A.L. on our heads every fucking time, and if the game didn't make use of the same names for perks/skills. Which leads me to the next bit: if you ever play F3 after F2, you'll clearly see that Bethesda has tried hard to keep the Fallout humor and atmosphere. Sometimes, i think, too hard. First off, F2 never told us anything about SPECIAL, i remember discovering that the stats make up that word by myself. Second, some things seem exaggerated. For instance, the sound. Fallout 1 and 2 each had (if i'm not mistaken) ONE single old-school Jazz song attached to them. One GOOD song, which made sense in their given setting and were right on the spot where they should have been: the intro. In Fallout 3, you can choose to listen to a radio station that plays a crapload of these songs. And while i've been watching the Fallout 2 intro over and over just to listen to Armstrong's "a kiss to build a dream on" one more time, there's only SO many raiders i can kill while i'm "hackin' and whackin' and smackin'". So eventually i really feel the need to turn that shit off because it actually cripples the atmosphere instead of making it more integrating. And that's just an example... there's vaults everywhere, you use the same drugs (even though Jet was invented by the Mordino family far away on the west coast), but it just doesn't do it as good as Fallout did.
Then there's VATS. Vault-tec Automated blah blah. Basically, a very cheap re-enactment of the old turn-based action-point-based system. It's overpowered enough to make you use it (how i was able to shoot a gun 16 fucking times with pinpoint accuracy in what could qualify as half a second is beyond me), it feels awkward, it looks awkward, and it pretty much takes you away from the FPS experience and into the RPG. It completely eliminates all idea of tactics and using your action points in a smart way, making the game a "click the body part and shoot" thing, but at least it's entertaining in the form of violent slow-motion deaths.
I remember one particular pattern i used to follow in Oblivion: ride around, find dungeon, enter dungeon, kill everything in dungeon, loot dungeon, exit dungeon, find more dungeon. Then i played Fallout 3: walk around, find dungeon (cave/factory/office building), enter dungeon, kill everything in dungeon, loot dungeon, exit dungeon, find more dungeon. To the point where it's becoming pretty clear that they only put those dungeons there to extend the playtime. There's only 3 vaults of any significance in this game, the 3-4 remaining ones don't have any story to them and aren't related to the main story in ANY way. Sure, one is full of clones while the other is messing with your brain but overall it's just the same sequence i outlined earlier.
Which makes it kinda sad since that was the element that alienated me from Oblivion in the first place, and it's coincidentally also why i got bored of Mass Effect. Are people losing inspiration so much that they have to take simplistic MMORPG elements (aka the dungeon with no soul) and insert them into single player games as a way of extending playtime? Well, wake the fuck up and stop calling yourself game designers. Get a new name, like FAIL designers.
Ok, i've nitpicked the bad parts of the game long enough, and i think we can all agree that it ain't Fallout by now. Yet the fact that it ain't Fallout doesn't mean it can't be a good game, all things considered. Let's start with the obvious: the game is gorgeous. I've looked closely at the details and they've recreated the game pretty close to its predecessor. The first-person view is fine when you get used to it, and it doesn't obstruct the morbid beauty of the Wasteland. The soundtrack is good despite what i said about the old songs (well, as good as depressing music can get, i guess). The dialogue is nothing compared to Fallout 2, but it's vastly improved over Oblivion, as is much of the storyline and many of the quests. I finished the game, but reloaded and went back into the waste to see what i've missed, and i'm still not bored with it yet. At one point while i was exploding ghoul heads with my shitgun, i suddenly realised something: i was actually having fun. And i had as much fun during the robot sequence near the end of the game: you know what i'm talking about if you got there, and i dare say it's one of the most exhilarating experiences ever felt in gaming. So as non-fallout as it is, the game will still be worth a shot, especially if you have no idea what fallout is and/or played fallout but didn't like it (in which case i welcome you to the museum of rare people). So that's mostly it... i hope they don't decide to push the franchise further because i really don't want a Fallout 4 now. And if they do make Fallout 4, then let it be this. Take a look at it and see what the true Fallout 3 looked like. This, with all its ancient and fucked up graphics, is Fallout.
And despite what's happened to the game, it wasn't the worst thing that could have happened. Fallout, no matter what happens, will still live on in our hearts and in our minds as the game that gave us one of the best adventures in gaming. Because even if Fallout itself may change, we all know war... war never changes.

Respect the superior race

SPORE, the one, the only, the evolutionary game. The game which can make you smile, make you laugh, and can even tuck you to bed.
A highly anticipated game, Spore started out just fine, great even with a few glitches however, but the game managed to overcome it`s not so nice parts with state of the art possibilities, the illusion of freedom, and a strong hunger for creativity. One of the things i liked most about Spore is that no matter how big or how ugly you are, there will always a creature stronger and another one weaker. Also there are three ways of going through the game : herbivore, carnivore or omnivore. The herbivore part clearly suggests a strong amount of "EMO-l33tness" having to go peaceful on just about every other species or you end up dead. As for the carnivore part, the game just gets easier, you kill everything, you eat their corpses for hit points, and all that stuff until you end up dominating the world. The omnivores tend to be more industrious, and unlike the others, they prefer to buy their opponents.
The game lets you start at the EMO stage, in a small or big pond on a selected planet, you appear. Small enough to eat and ugly enough to be avoided. The first stage of Spore can be compared to a PacMan game, meaning that the only thing you can do is eat shit and/or die.Trying to somewhat represent a "cell`s" life in the real world, but here, the more shit you eat the bigger you get, the bigger you get the more dangerous you are. The way you build your creature isn`t as important as it should be, because you can morph it into a dick, literary, and back at any time you want. Sure the number of legs, teeth, horns and other mutant parts are important, but where and how you place them simply does not matter.
After reaching a certain level, a brain spawns on your creature, somewhere where the head is supposed to be, congratulations, you reached the creature stage. In this stage things tend to be a little more complex, but sadly, they are not. There is only one rule : Only the strongest/richest survive. After the creature stage i climbed on a ladder and reached the conclusion that the fun just ended, and i mean it. Up to the creature stage you create the creature, after that, you dress it up. The tribal stage turns into a RTS, a bad RTS ofcourse, it is short and hardly worth playing. Few moments after and voila, i got to build my own city, fact which sounds good in theory but sucks ball in practice. Designing buildings and pleasuring my Penises, C`OMMON. Here, the goals is simple : kill/buy/convert other cities, in other words, become "the biggest, the best".
Despite the fact that i tried playing it on all possible methods: religious, economic, military; at the last stage it all ends up the same way, an RPG, a BAD rpg to be exact. While the first four stage are short and fun, the last stage involves a series of shitty missions, involving planet coloring, collecting EMO`s from all over the galaxy and blowing up would-be enemies.
It`s hard to believe though, this game promised a lot, but what it really did is quite simple, it put together 5 types of games and the result is clear : BULLSHIT. The fun stages are short and the fucked up ones are long and full of shit.

I guess i should say more about SPORE, more about the "Sporepedia", but when i think that the creator of spore made his money by creating girl-games like The Sims, I rather cut my tongue out. Who knows, maybe Will Wright only wanted to show the world that there`s a little Hitler in all of us.

Boredom: Neverwinter Nights 2

I should have taken up NWN2 a lot of time ago, but that didn't happen since i was saving the game for my "escape" route: when boredom becomes too bad, turn back to the only game (or so i thought) that could present any more interest for me: a D&D game.
I'm going to be brief, since Devil already made a (brief) review for it in the first gaming post of this blog.
Basically, it was a disappointment. I started the game hoping to try my all-favourite D&D class (sorcerer). Alright, so they took Time Stop, my favourite spell, from the game. So they nerfed the sorc class to kingdom come for "balance" reasons while buffing the wizard class a whole lot. Who cares... it's still sorc, right? Well...
Apart from being full of glitches, the game is outright... boring. I stood the usual 3+ hours at the character creation screen only to be met with crappy animations, bad voice-acting, same casting incantations as the old NWN1, crappy character control (even though it was customizable), all those useless items and professions that you hoped would just go away in the second of NWN's expansions (talking about craft alchemy, weapon and all that nonsense... basically just "please hoard lots of junk") and the all-new party system which is as stupid as it gets. Want to control your character while letting the others' AIs do their job? Well i hope your character isn't a spellcaster since you'll almost always step in front of your party making you the first char that every mob you see, attacks. I even had the stupid situations of running around with 2 mobs on my tail while the stupid dwarf tank was taking his time killing the third. Obviously, stopping to cast would mean half of my hit points go bye-bye. Which is the reason i took invisibility as fast as i got it... making the game even more boring as i had to cast it before and after every fight. Joy.
Then there's the melee-to-spell ratio which is awfully fucked up, at least at the lower levels: my magic missle can do a whopping 5 damage, while the stupid dwarf with the stupid sword scores regular 21-damage hits. I need to get into almost melee range to cast color spray, i am weak and useless in melee, while the stupid dwarf can tank 3 enemies with no fucking problems whatsoever. Not to mention that he tends to score 1hitkills on all of them before i'm done casting my crappy missle (yes, all of them... great cleave and all that).
The story has potential, but it's kinda ruined by the stupid voice-acting (meh, not like NWN1 was any better) and the dumb, dumb AI of your team-mates which kinda likes to lag a lot.
All in all, i'm going to give this game one final try and then move on. The Witcher, perhaps? Or maybe Thief 3... wow, that sounds boring when i even think about it.

Game Comparison: Hellgate London vs. Titan Quest

This is a new type of review in which i'm going to compare two games between them by analyzing key elements and seeing which is better. I wanted to do it a while ago, but since i didn't have that much experience in these 2 games, i decided to play through them a little more to see if anything changes later in the game. Note that at the time of writing this, i have yet to finish any of these games, so my experience is mostly mid-game. I could go and finish them, but frankly i don't think i ever will (at least not Hellgate). Now let's proceed with the comparison. Note that from now on, Hellgate will be abbreviated as HG and Titan Quest as TQ. When talking about Titan Quest, i'll have the expansion (Immortal Throne) in mind.
Why HG vs TQ? Because they're basically clones of the same game (Diablo 2) while being pretty much different in how they work. So who's the better clone? I'll try to detail an oppinion as unbiased as possible.
Outside
The outside of the game are the elements which directly influence you as a player, such as graphics, sound and feeling.
Graphics
HG: the game takes advantage of Directx10, that and the fact that it's about 2-3 years newer than Titan Quest makes Hellgate the better one to choose for graphics. I played it with all settings to max except AA, and i can say that the graphics are somewhere along the lines of "pretty nice". Even with Directx10, i don't feel that the game makes the most out of the graphics engine... faces are pretty sharp when you look at them at a close distance, and the game has this omnipresent blur that not only makes you dizzy, it's also unnecessary.
The design of the armor suits is awesome though, and is one factor i really like more than TQ. The mobs could use some work.
TQ: not much to say here, the game has nice graphics for its age, the lawn bending as you run through it is a really nice touch, and the producers have made sure that we'd see it. TQ follows Diablo in its viewing perspective, but it's 3D and gives a pretty "clean" view, isometric as it is.
The armor and weapon design tries to replicate those of ancient times, but i found it pretty weird that my male character has to wear a skirt for the whole damn game, even an armored skirt like the Romans wore. Monster-wise, it's about as interesting as Hellgate, nothing really out of the ordinary.
One thing about TQ though: it suffers from rubber-banding, the phenomenon where the game starts to slow down, then fast forward again for a second. This apparently happens when your system is BETTER than the reccomended requirements. No fix yet, and i doubt there ever will be one.
Sound
Neither games had an impressive soundtrack, in fact i found it so boring that i resorted to external music (for the record, HG with Nightwish playing is significantly better). I lasted more when it came to TQ, though it's nothing special. I guess they copied Diablo pretty well on that part. As for the normal sounds... well, hack&slash games never had GREAT dialogue, but TQ does have better lines for its NPCs, and they do actually say what it's written in that little box over their heads. HG has some lines which attempt to be funny, but take away a lot of the feeling through that, at least i didn't like'em.
Ambience
Ambience is the feeling you get when you look around in a game world, and how much what you see/hear/etc affects you. Games with a strong ambience tend to base themselves heavily on exploiting human emotions to make you like them (i.e. horror games), others (like arcade shooters) tend to not concentrate so much on the surroundings.
HG: the ambience in this game is apocalyptic, in fact it reminds me of Fallout when i think of it (but not in a good or bad way, mind you, it just reminds me of Fallout): destroyed buildings, dark skies, demonic ships patroling those dark skies, remnants of a war fought long-ago with conventional weapons, abandoned barricades, demon-infested sewers and metro tunnels, no sign of humans, at least until you reach the safe zones. All this, mixed in with British architecture and style, and Sci-Fi elements. The blend is far from perfect, and there's something in it that doesn't really attract me. But it's good enough for a hack&slash game.
TQ: Ancient Greece, China and Egypt are some of the locations which describe this game. While in HG you have abandoned and defeated war outposts, in TQ the war is fresh and there's hardly any damage to the enviroment. The game's sights, while pretty, mostly don't have any connections that make you stop and say "wow, so this is what ancient Greece was like" because they're mostly simple: greece is mountains and green grass, egypt is desert, china is snow... though you do visit some interesting places like the Acropolis and the Pyramids. All in all, ambience is better in HG than in TQ.
Feeling
Ambience's bigger brother, feeling refers to the emotion you get when you're right in the middle of things, blasting away at enemies and doing whatever the game wants you to do. Feeling is the strongest emotion you can get out of a game, takes a lot from the soundtrack, and is closely related to FUN.
HG: The feeling in hellgate isn't intense. Actually, there's hardly any feeling at all in that game... unless you're listening to Nightwish. I swear, that music is the only thing that kept me playing it.
Without it, it would have been headache heaven. So i can't really have a pure oppinion on this, but i can surely say that the feeling in HG isn't quite much... even after trying several characters.
TQ: the feeling that you're overpowered prevails, and if you choose the right class, this game can be pretty much thrilling even as a normally dull class like a healer. TQ is a game made to make you tell your friends "dude, i kick ass so much with that char" and that gets major points from me. The gameplay styles are enormously diverse, and you soon grow attached to the character. One element that adds to continued feeling is the better customization options, i'll get into that later.
Inside
A game's inside elements are the ones happening to the game rather than to you personally, both behind and in front of the curtain. These are mostly game mechanics.
Complexity
Complexity isn't what should be discussed in a hack&slash, but this is a comparison, and all games are complex, when looked at in relative terms. Some are just less complex than others. And some gamers, like me, appreciate the level of complexity even in a simple game.
Basically, complexity means diversity and amount of content.
HG: this game is complex, in that i don't really know what some things mean even by now. I don't know how the damage mechanics are calculated, nor do i know how many types of damage there are in the game. The skills are of very specific use, and even if they don't have many practical applications, even if some skills are totally useless, i can't say Hellgate isn't diverse. The item enhancements are mostly Diablo-ish (normal, magical, rare, unique) just with different names for them. To do stuff with items, you need to first dismantle unneeded items(destroying the item in the process, therefore eliminating selling items for money), which nets you some materials with which you can upgrade your weapon damage (or armor value), or create new items. Since you don't sell the items, money is pretty scarce (which isn't what you'd expect from a hack&slash but from an MMO, but in my book it's definitely a good thing), and you're left with even less if you choose to add some stats to your item.
Another diverse factor in HG is the playstyle: HG offers 3 completely different (as opposed from the usually slightly different) playstyles, based on the class you choose. You can play it mostly like an FPS (engineer and marksman), a 3rd person shooter (evoker and summoner), or a 3rd person action (guardian and blademaster). Overall, HG is complex, too bad the complexity doesn't add much fun to it.
TQ: attempts to bring originality to character building in that it lets you choose one speciality tree in the beginning, and ANOTHER later on. There are about 10 of them, so the class combinations in this game are huge. Even more so, each combination gets its own unique name, and as far as i've seen, most of them work quite well with any other, provided you know where to put your points. In the skills chapter, TQ owns HG hard since it has a lot more skills, and even though the uses are not so diverse, you don't get bored that fast and there's always the decision-between-what-to-choose that has to be made. Regarding items, they're the same complexity as diablo and HG, TQ only having broken items as a plus compared to Hellgate. I've yet to see a set item in HG, but there have to be some. Items in TQ can be customised with special charms that you get from mobs (charms of the same type can be combined for additional bonuses) that only work on "magic" or less quality item. Charms and spell scrolls can be combined with a special recipe to form an "artifact" type item, which fits a certain slot in your equipment and gives passive bonuses.
Overall, TQ is more complex than HG. HG should have extra content added in multiplayer soon though.
Gameplay
Gameplay refers to the interface's user-friendliness, the rate which you progress through the game, repetitiveness, and generally how the game doesn't feel like work. An "easy" (light) game is casual, fun and generally replayable. A "hard" (heavy) game usually makes you work or wait a lot for an item or for progress, can sometimes get frustrating, but is usually more rewarding. Note that ease of play is not related to difficulty. Examples of light games: Diablo 2 and Quake. Examples of heavy games: most MMORPGs.
HG: this is not a light game. Hellgate's ease of play can rival even that of MMOs, and is maybe one of the reasons why i didn't like it so much. You level absurdly slow, abilities don't get much boost from level to level (even if you put points in them), the levels are repetitive as hell and everything you do seems to drag along. For a hack&slash game... that's not a pretty good sight. To progress in such a game you need to really like the playstyle or the visual. I didn't find any playstyle that i really liked, since all 3 of them seem to meld into the same thing soon enough, but it may be enjoyable for someone else. Good thing the graphics are ok.
TQ: i loved how easy TQ was to play... beside the class combination, you also get 3 skill points per level instead of one, and level up pretty fast compared to HG. Both games take repairing items out of the picture, so that's a load off, TQ makes it even easier with unlimited town portal scrolls that take up no inventory space (you just press a button). Still, poor class balance in the early game can make some classes easy as pie, while others can be dreadfully hard, at least with a melee weapon.
Overall: i have to give TQ the prize here, it's much less frustrating and dull than Hellgate. If you like games that feel like work, or that challenge you to spend a lot of time farming and doing repetitive stuff, or if you are willing to bear it all just for the sci-fi theme, HG is your game.
Interaction
Interaction in single-player refers mostly to dialogue, quests and characters. In a hack&slash game, quests are the only relevant factor out of the three.
HG: quests look like they're abundant, in fact they're the incentives to enter other areas instead of the one you normally enter to progress through the main quest. Sadly, i found myself skipping through most of what the quest-givers say, because it's both monotonous and there are a crapload of lines, most of which look like they're just put there to annoy you (when the NPC say things like "hmm..." or "what did you say? where?"). Quests give both XP rewards and items/cash, though the xp reward was never that great.
TQ: not a lot of quests, TQ stays very close to Diablo 2 on this, but still, wouldn't hurt to have a few extra quests here and there, especially considering the rewards are shit except for 1 or 2 quests which give you stat and skill points. TQ has some NPCs whose only role is to talk to you, and sometimes they say interesting stuff, like a short version of greek lore so you understand better who Zeus is and where he came from (if you don't know already).
Realism
Don't expect a single bit of realism in both games, that's not the genre's forte. Items practically jump at you in HG, fleeing peasants can take a hell of a beating in TQ, well... not much to say here.
Difficulty Curve
HG: kinda steep. The game starts with mobs that don't even hit you, continues with mobs that try to hit you, and then it starts getting full of mobs that come at you in groups of 5, and not just melee mobs. The game was easy until lvl 9 or so, after that, i found that (probably) my poor choice of skills (since i didn't really know what to choose, and all i chose turned out to be useless) coupled with the mobs' rising difficulty were making it pretty hard... doable, but hard. If the game wasn't such a drag, i wouldn't have quit, but it is. To me at least.
TQ: the game keeps the difficulty in check most of the times, the mobs are usually at your level, and dispatching them isn't a problem. The problems are boss fights and hero-monster fights. Still, shouldn't be any problem for an experienced gamer, the end-chapter boss fights are actually enjoyable in that you need to apply some tactics to beat them.
AI
Both games keep up to Diablo 2 in terms of AI, which means shitty AI, so it's not enough for an in-depth analysis. The AI in TQ is more scripted than intuitive, and some mobs know how to retreat and use special attacks in HG, but that's about it.
Story
Following Diablo 2 closely, both games consist of the same character bring-up type: you start as a nobody, and become somebody.
HG: The story does its best to appear sophisticated, but it's still shallow in the end: demons attacked earth, earth lost, earth wants to win now. The intro is poorly narrated by some british chap whose only quality is the accent, and shows a young girl separated from her father who's off to fight the demons, then 20 years later (rough estimate) she's off to fight the demons as well. Of course, there must be some more depth in this, i just couldn't find it. I have no idea what relationship you have with that girl - maybe the game will tell you when you've reached the final stages.... or maybe not.
TQ: We're in ancient greece, and every monster ever depicted in lore just thought to drop in and ravage the place a bit. Humanity is cut off from the gods by 3... demigod somethings, who were imprisoned... somewhere, at some time. Now they're not imprisoned anymore, and they want to burn the whole world. Their names are Diablo, Mephisto, and... whoops, wrong game.
Apparently they were some of the Titans who got imprisoned by Cronoss for trying to be better than him, if you're into greek mythology, i know i am but the game doesn't really let you "feel" the story. The intro is better than Hellgate's, i'll give it that.
Multiplayer
The third aspect of the game, one i'm not particularly fond of but has managed to bring many games forth from the pit of obscurity. Comparing the multiplayer of these games is pretty hard since you have to pay a subscription for one of them (Hellgate) thus allowing you to play on dedicated servers, and also subscribers get extra patches with extra content and stuff (though i wouldn't pay for that crap if you gave me money for free), whereas TQ is totally free. You can play Hellgate online without subscribing however, but you still can't play it in LAN mode, unfortunately.
As for class balance and roles: Hellgate has 6 classes, none of them are so complex to warrant a healer/tank/DPS combo like you see in normal MMOs, but the skill tree is pretty well tweaked for a multiplayer game, some classes having skills that benefit the party and so forth.
TQ has a lot of classes, so multiplayer diversity is something you'll see there, you'll probably have some fun trying out different combinations too. May i add that the only tree that has healing spells in TQ can also become overpowered by stacking multiple "-%cooldown" items (there's also a skill which dramatically reduces it) thus bringing the cooldown to effectively 0, allowing the heal to be spammed continuously at almost 0 casting speed for as long as you have mana. Did i mention you can make it a chain heal?
Both games look appealing enough in multiplayer, with downsides for HG's no lan play and the nerve to ask us to pay more money to play online properly. Yet from my point of view, i'd sooner immerse myself into TQ's universe than HG's.

So there you have it, a long-ass, in-depth comparison of the two games. My goal was to make you decide which one you like more while not having actually played them, and if i reached that, then mission accomplished. If i didn't, then see ya next time.

Gaming History: Deus Ex 2

Ah, at last, i get to play the sequel to one of the games which marked my life as a gamer. Obviously, i was waiting for this since the game appeared, dreaming of the days when i was going to grab my sniper rifle and once again wage war on power-hungry beauraucrats with a taste for world domination. What i got was...
Well, it's pretty hard to describe, but i'll try to make a comparison: what do you get when you eat a really tasty, creamy cake, so tasty and unimaginately delicious that you order another slice, and just as you're happily munching the first bits of it, you realise that the second slice is full of SHIT? You get Deus Ex 2.
Honestly, this game is so retardedly different and simplified from the first, that it left me with such a bad taste in my mouth that i felt like vomiting over the first few hours. Remember how you used to memorize door codes? Not anymore. Inventory management? Not anymore. Every item occupies one slot now, so a nice small can of soda weighs and has the same size as a rocket launcher. Skills? Nonexistant. IFF? Comlink? No mention of them. They're still there, but they don't show up in your augmentations list (which are now called Nanomods). Notes window? Not anymore. HP related to specific bodyparts? Hell no, you now have 1 HP bar (which doesn't even show numbers, or even a percent) and 1 "mana" bar (the old energy bar, but bastardized now so that each energy item you get recharges it to full). More than one type of ammo!? GOD FORBID! There is only one type of ammunition in the whole game. The only difference is that some guns take more ammo to shoot. Lockpicks? Hell no! Multitools can open doors now, so your retarded console-gaming mind doesn't have to grasp the complexity of carrying 2 security-bypass objects at once. A log window? What's that? Needing a medbot to install augs? Pfft, that's old school.
And many, many more... it's hard to describe how i felt when i saw this weak attempt at a game before my eyes, beaten down, bludgeoned, mutilated, sawed-off, ripped apart, teared to pieces, hacked open and trimmed to a dim, retarded shell of its former self. It felt like Thor's hammer suddenly dropped at maximum velocity down on my balls. Not even the music managed to get me, aside from a few songs played in bars by some chick, the soundtrack didn't stand out one bit. Where was that corporate tune, those songs that made you feel like you were an agent of the state, strolling through office buildings in some hi-tech world... gone. All gone. The game went down before my eyes like the Titanic, so much that i was ashamed to even play it. But i did... and i finished it, gathering what little respect i had left for the first title in the series. It felt shallow... i wasn't "there", i felt like some prick shooting his way through tight corridors without having any idea what the hell's going on. I mean, the game doesn't even tell you... you're dropped off at some facility, with some doctors and shit, and stuff starts blowing up in your face as some guys in hoods infiltrate it and manage to get past the ARMORED guards with the greatest of ease. Then people start suddenly acting like you were the one, and somehow you were really, really special. At least they don't ask you to save the world, though i kinda wonder why.
I'll admit, once i got past the first few hours of the game, it started to suck a bit less. Either i got used to it and stopped giving it the title "deus ex" and playing it like i'd play some other retarded shooter (focusing on the gameplay elements that ARE there more than on the ones that aren't), or the developers started to suck a bit less at level design, i don't know. It's possible that i also became a little more retarded due to my brain not being able to take all the virtual kicks to the balls. Meh, whatever... the game still has dialogue, though you never get too attached to any character (like you did in deus ex 1 with paul, for instance, or even Alex Jacobson and the crew at UNATCO), not even JC Denton himself, which appears in the game like some enlightened AI consciousness merged with human mind, capable of freezing entire oceans but unable to stop a bullet coming his way. What's "new" about the sequel is that you're not forced into doing what other people tell you now, you are given a set of objectives from different factions which often collide with eachother, so you have to choose who to piss off and whose ass to kiss. The beginning major factions are either the WTO (don't ask me what it stands for) or the Order (order of what? beats me), and you have to do stuff for them throughout 80% of the game. Now choosing a side is like choosing between a giant douche and a turd sandwitch: one seeks financial domination and optimisation of the world (no matter how many people they step on by doing it), the others are a bunch of mumbo-jumbo tree-huggers who want me to get in touch with my "spiritual self". Right. Moving along, the game still tries to integrate stealth into what seems like an action shooter, and make it a bit more dynamic by adding canisters (nanomods) that give you certain abilities once installed, most of which are taken from the first game, but with some new ones like emp damage on melee attacks, or even first-person control of enemy bots. You now need to choose between 3 nanomods in each slot, the slots being considerably fewer. Concerning this: WHY IN THE NAME OF FUCK CAN'T I GET BOTH REGENERATION AND OPTICAL ENHANCEMENT AT THE SAME TIME!? These were my 2 most favorite augs back in the first game, and now i have to choose between them. Gah.
So to close this, if you like first-person shooters with a tint of stealth, and (most importantly) have never played deus ex before, give this game a try. Then go play deus ex 1, just to raise your standards. If you have played deus ex 1, then don't bother.

Gaming Masterpieces: Deus Ex

This is the first in a long series of re-reviews dedicated to some games who deserve the title of "masterpiece". Games that occupied our childhood spare time, made us think about them at school, made us waste countless hours of our lives with good, quality enternainment. These games serve as examples of what the simple human mind is truly capable of, and in my opinion, are as worthy of being called "works of art" as any Rembrandt or Van Gogh painting.
The idea came to me after i saw the recent teaser trailer for Deus Ex 3, and somehow ended up listening to the old Wan Chai theme of the first game. It's funny how much nostalgia came to me while i listened.
Deus Ex (literally translated "God From") is the first game in a series of two, with the third coming up somewhere in 2009, and unlike its sequel, it features impressive bits of philosophy about life, ideas and society, while maintaining a "corporate" atmosphere which is felt about everywhere. I've finished this game nine times (the last try was on the hardest difficulty), not counting the times when i just started it without finishing, and to this day, i still want to pop my CD in and reinstall it to play it some more, at times. Because it's not about the graphics, the gameplay or even the soundtracks: it's about the FEELING. That little tingle you get when you really feel like you're there, like the world transcends into the game and you take the role of the main character, "living" the game as nothing you've ever felt before. Deus Ex can do that.
The game is all about conspiracies: the intro presents 2 obscure characters talking about a new world order, and their role in it. The game takes place somewhere in the future, where the internet (most likely wireless internet) has covered the globe and everything is now much more dependant on it. It is a more technological era, but not much different from what it is now: an unbalanced urban-centered society slowly becoming a dystopia, while anti-terrorist forces struggle continuously to maintain law and order. You arrive in this landscape as the new special agent of the United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition (UNATCO), and know yourself as having had several bionic implants and "upgrades" to your internal structure to support the use of what the game calls "augmentations", special upgrades which can be used to increase your effectiveness in the field. You have 3 at the start (though 2 of them are passive and always turned on), and will aquire more as the game progresses. The storyline focuses at first on you and the other operatives trying to put a stop to a terrorist movement called the NCR (New California Republic) but the game's many plot twists eventually put you through world-wide conspiracies, secret governments and world domination schemes, through places such as NYC, Hong Kong, and evenntually arriving at Area 51 where you will have a choice of 3 endings, neither of which is good or bad: they only depend on how you view them.
The depth of the storyline is amazing, there are several characters which you can choose to help or not, this will have no overall effect on how the game ends (i.e. the story is linear), but they are your choices, and will eventually leave a mark as you finish the game. The game's storyline vaguely reminds me of the general idea behind V for Vendetta (in it: "ideas are bulletproof"; in Deus Ex: "you can't fight ideas with bullets"), which in spite of having a different storyline entirely, focuses on the same general aspects: government, society, and one man making a difference.
Onward to the game mechanics: the game is a crossover between FPS and RPG, with a lot of elements previously found in System Shock 2: the brackets around objects which you can interact with, move around, or blow up, the general idea of having special "powers" which you can use with your special "energy", which once depleted needs to be recharged through special powerups that you can hold in your inventory. About the inventory, it also looks like system shock, meaning you can hold almost everything in it (even cigars and drinks), the size of an object requiring more or less space. There's also a skill point system which you can spend on general abilities (hacking proficiency, lockpicking, and increasing effectiveness with light weapons, to name a few). Once you have enough skill points, you can spend them immediately and without any requirements. Skill points come from exploring new areas, completing main and secondary objectives, or obtaining information. Speaking of information, the game is also heavily centered on dialogues between the main character and others, some of which require you to make choices in what to say (which affects the immediate future). The main character is JC Denton (the game lets you customise your nickname, with which you will be adressed in several e-mails and documents, and also lets you choose between a small variety of male skin and hair colors) the second of a new line of special "nano-augmented" agents (the first being your brother, Paul). The augmentations are special powers which you can aquire as the game progresses (they are also optional, the game never forces you to take one, and some are even hidden) and consume your bioelectrical energy when activated, letting you do things such as swim longer, become more resistant, regenerate, see enemies through walls or become invisible for a short time. For each augmentation canister you aquire, you are forced to choose between 2 augs (you may find them at more than one point in the game, but they're useless if you already made your choice) when you install it at a medical bot. You can upgrade the augs up to level 4 once you've installed them using special upgrade canisters, but they're rare so keep an eye out.
The game has a ton of secret areas, some being easy to spot, others not - i was surprised to find something new even on the 8th time i finished the game. I can very well say that i found them all, but... who knows.
Deus Ex holds a special place for me, being the first serious game i completed entirely without using cheat codes: after trying to finish it twice by using cheats, i found that i couldn't do it. The third time, i tried without cheats... it was much more fun, challenging and also, by the time i got to the area where i couldn't pass before, i was so used to searching dark corners and finding exits that i immediately knew where to go. As ironic as it sounds, this game is harder to beat by cheating than by normal means. Since then, i never used cheats in a game again.
I won't say anything about the graphics, those aren't the point of this article. The soundtrack is awesome however, and helps maintain that elitist "corporate" feel of the game.
So if you don't mind old graphics and haven't played this yet, go ahead and honor it by giving it some hours of your life. It certainly deserves it.

NeverWinter Nights 2

A while ago i decided to write wannabe reviews about all the games i`ll ever play, a year later i finally found the will power to do so. Hardly i had to give up on a few MMO`s to catch up on some nice titles, starting with Obsidian`s NeverWinter Nights 2.
Before starting NWN2 i felt the need to replay NWN because i loved the first one and hoped for the second to be even better.
First impressions were BAD and i don`t mean BAD in good way, but really really BAD. Even though it has some wannabe nice graphics, new classes/features/etc/etc i hated it in the beginning. The first 2 hours i felt like playing The Sims and in game tips enforced that feeling ( ...party members/companions have feelings too ...). Sadly, most of the time i was afraid that what i say might offend my companions and i might loose influence with them, by the time i figured out what to do with that influence i already started to hate my companions. Khelgar Ironfist ( dwarf fighter) for example wants to become a monk, it`s hard not to do his quest because it coincides with the story line. After loosing a lot of influence with the other companions and doing his quest i found myself loosing an excellent, well equiped fighter to gain a monk. To be honest Khelgar had stash/warehouse written all over him from day 1 and even though i tried to make him quit the quest the influence check always failed :(
The thing is i started with the new class in D&D 3.5 Warlock, i can safely say it`s more than powerful next to the other classes, the warlock has a few spells but he can cast them as many time he wants. The Eldritch Blast ( long range magical touch ) can be changed to all tipes of blast ( Drainging Blast/ Brimstone/ Beshadowed/etc/etc ). Its basically the same blast but with another effect or type of damage, there is even a blast that can do damage to magic immune enemies.
Amazingly the storyline sucks hard, there is nothing new about a character from a little swamp village who will eventually grow strong enough to save the day.
Another thing i didn`t like in NWN2 was the lack of freedom ( in nwn1 i would gladly depopulate the city of NeverWinter when bored) and the fact that i had to stay with the check view on most of the time to spot out the lootable stuff. Most of the doors/boxes/corpses are "unselectable", but as the story line goes on you eventually manage to check everything out.

The hardest thing to swallow in this game are the bugs, i mean .. the game is full of them. I can ignore the sound of a box opening while looting a corpse. But while running for my life from a not so successful attack with the last char in my party ( the other being dead of course ) and then making a nice quick save when the enemy is a long way behind me followed by a nice load game will result in having all the party members standing up ... even with 1 hp exactly where the game was saved, with the enemy away - can change the faith of one battle. About 3 hours after i started the game i even found a nice XP bug in the nice wannabe camp of Fort Locke.

There are a few nice things about NWN2 though, some of the wannabe insults from one companion to another (during some in game cinematic ) are funny, i can say the same about the players choosable lines. A rather ironicly funny situation was fighting in Duskwood, "the duskwood trees damper spells", it was kind`of "no spells allowed( buffs included)" and ... for whatever reason in the end i had to kill 4-7 wolfs/dire wolfs and 2 halflings wannabe werewolfs with this party : 1 fighter 1 warlock 1 wizard, the damn beasts zerged me for allmost one hour :(
All i can say about the official campaign is : the story is a lot worst than expected and the gameplay can be better
Enough of NWN2 for now because i simply can`t take any more disappointment from one game.