Not RPG month, I swear: Fallout 3 GOTY

The humor of buying this game is I never really intended to. I can't remember why, but FO:NV was on my wishlist, so a friend bought it for me. Or maybe it wasn't and he just bought me it, I don't know. I'd never played through FO:3 and I was told FO:NV totally replaces three.

I'm a little weird in this - If there's a sequel that totally outpaces the original, I always want to make sure I give the original a fair shake, because there's no going back. So I bought FO:3 because someone else bought me FO:NV when I didn't really want either. Then I started playing FO:3 when there are other games I felt like playing, but I just finished a controller game and I was trying to avoid RPGs since I wanted to play Witcher 2 a year after the first one. So I started playing ... A controller game that is also a RPG.

Ahem. I'm playing it KB+M though!

Fallout is a little weird for me as well because I never played the originals. One of my close childhood friends had three 'favorite' games: X-Com, Master of Orion and Fallout. Oh, and probably Simcity, but I'd played that before I knew him. So he loaned me two of them and I don't think I ever loaned anything else. X-Com and MoO are amazing classics, so I never played Fallout. That's sort of dumb, but for some reason I just never did even though he raved about it tons when we were kids. That's probably pretty shameful as my PC gaming cred goes, but I honestly don't have any cred. I just played lots of X-Com.

And it wasn't hard.

I do not necessarily like the post-apocalypse dystopia setting in any broad sense of the term. Though I don't think that post-apoc is necessarily as bad as say, time travel, it has a certain way of ruining any thematic sense. Stuff just gets thrown in without any real sense of logic, creating game worlds that lack any sort of coherence. I do love Dark Sun mind you, but fantasy post-apocalypse is a pretty rare treat comparatively. I like to classify Morrowind, likely my favorite true fantasy rpg, as sort of in that vein as well. Granted, I know basically nothing about Fallout's setting, but I'm leaning against it almost on an innate level.

So Fallout probably always had its work cut out for it. But hey Rage managed it, right?

A year in the making: Darksiders!

The time played on this, which I provide to give a vague idea how much play I got out of a game, is all sorts of screwy. I picked up Darksiders like, last year? The summer sale I want to say? I was pretty excited to play it or at least vaguely interested. Mostly on the basis of really liking the art style. Also, I waited a while, because I wanted a controller to play it with but was looking for a deal.

Problem being is my previous PC had little interest in running Darksiders, or at least enough disinterest that I eventually gave up about half-way through. I'd blame the game, but tons of stuff was crashing on that PC for a variety of reasons. Mass Effect 2, which I noted back in its review, would crash in the exact same way and had the same engine. I fixed that by going to windowed maximized mode, but Darksiders being more of a port wouldn't let me. So it got shelved and now it's back.

Darksiders is a weird experience for me in that I've never really played 3D Zelda games. I've been told repeatedly Darksiders is a huge rip-off primarily of Zelda, but I largely don't see it for lack of experience. Zelda is a weird one for me, in that I picked up the first 3D version and it sort of became the figurehead for how much I hated the transition to 3D from 2D. I played through the proverbial golden age of PC gaming and was never too impressed with where 3D took most games. So I never played past the first dungeon, and more for baseline reasons like 'I hate how this game looks' and 'I hate 3D controls'. LTTP was like Super Metroid, I wish they'd made another like ten of that game. So much so that I played the gameboy Zeldas. No, the original Gameboy. Have you looked at that thing? Horrifying. My old eyes can't even tell what's on a Gameboy screen nowadays. Is that Link? Or a turtle? what

So I really have no idea how innovative Darksiders probably isn't. To be honest, when people say games are innovative or whatever, I just think they're showing their ignorance. Games and books feel creative because we have pretty limited perceptions of the vastness of the medium. I probably say it too and I'm probably showing my ignorance when I do it. The only real spot you can have truly exciting creativity in games is in controls and UI, which I doubt Darksiders, Zelda or whatever the fuck else have really broken new ground in

And seriously if you count a game as unique because of storytelling: BOOKS.