Took a while (had several periods of non-playing) but I got to the end recently. Very solid game. It’s far from the engrossing experience and freedom of The Fallouts, but still really nice. Shooting, sneaking, RPGing (getting new augmentations and new weapons and weapon-upgrades), unfolding the story (good story by game standards), experiencing some pretty darn cool environments, good music. Lots of cyberpunk lore.

And that’s the end of that chapter, unless I decide to go back and play it as a hardcore sneaker. I did a fair amount of sneaking, but also a lot of shooting and it is possible to sneak far more (and shoot less). I didn’t even get some of the sneak augmentations (like seeing the cone of vision of enemies).

The augmentations are really cool and many are very useful (like seeing enemies through walls, or being invisible for a short period time), more useful than you think when you first get them.

Anyway, if I do play it again it’ll take a while because now I want to focus on other games. Right now I’m playing Wet, an action game. I like it, but it won’t last much longer. When I’m done I’m probably going for a big game, possibly Dragon Age 1 complete (all DLCs).

Interspersed with the above games I’ve played Battlefield 3. Not going great but it’s fun. Current K/D ratio is slightly above 0.5, so I’m excelling mostly at dying. But my W/L ratio is 1.32. Doing a lot of spotting to help my team.

Yeah I continued Deus Ex: Human Revolution, but haven’t finished, and now I’m off again, for a while. But it is pretty kick-ass though. The game play is kind of like Batman: Arkham Asylum, sneaking, fighting, developing the character and getting better gadgets/weapons, stopping bigger-than-life evil, some exploring and boss fights etc.

I like both, they’re very solid, but I like Deus Ex more, partly because I love the cyberpunk theme.

Also played some Battlefield 3, but only a couple of hours so far. Fun fun fun, except that I suck.

Yep, got my first platinum today, in, what else, New Vegas. Which means I’m now finally ready to begin Deus Ex: Human Revolutions, which I’ve had since the release.

Some spoilers (of New Vegas) may follow.

Played it a total of three times. It has four different major endings, and I did two of them in my latest play-through, doing as much of both as I could and when they began to conflict I saved and finished them one at the time (taking a bunch of hours actually, so it’s not like the split is close to the end).

Aside from the four major endings there are a lot of lesser variations depending on what you did during the game. The ending is shown in the form of a movie that’s really well done I have to say, you basically get to know what happens to the places you’ve been and the people you’ve met during the game, and it all depends a lot on your actions (but it’s not always obvious exactly how while you’re playing.)

This platinum is not that difficult a trophy to get, but it is time-consuming. The Fallout wikia says 80+ hours, but even then you almost have to target the trophies from the start. I’ve played for about 100-150 hours I’d say, but I’m a slow player (also doing a lot more than taking the trophies), and my by far most comprehensive play-through was the one in hardcore mode. It would have been faster to make that a shorter play-through just to get the hardcore trophy, and leave the exploration and such to normal mode. I didn’t, but it was probably more fun this way. Really, efficiency in gaming can be detrimental to the joy of it (not always).

There are moments in New Vegas when everything comes together perfectly and creates really memorable experiences. It’s almost crazy a video game can do that. Crazy but awesome.

Anyways, now I’m ready to take on Deus Ex, maybe starting tomorrow.

I still only play New Vegas, this time I’m exploring other ways to play the game. I created a different character (not primarily a fighter, but a talker, hacker and lock picker, I wanted to get into all the closed areas, and I am, nothing has stopped me so far), and I do a lot things I didn’t the first time around. Great fun, this game is way more fun the second time around than most games are the first time.

Can’t wait for Fallout 4, whenever it’s coming.

Second update is I’ve pre-ordered Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Not that I don’t already have a big stack of games waiting, but sometimes it’s fun to get something right at release. This one I’ve been waiting for for a long time, and I’ve done some self-hyping — that is, I’ve deliberately hyped myself about this game by watching trailers, previews, interviews etc.

So I’ve played about 50 hours so far, but there is a lot left to do. A lot. It’s a huge game. And moreover, it’s great great fun to play. The immersion factor is off the charts. No doubt one of the best games I’ve played. The complaints are minor, save for the bugs. The bugs are annoying though, occasionally very annoying, but at this point in the patching process the game is playable, or it was for me anyway, but it did get worse toward the end so maybe going beyond 50 hours (on Playstation) is pushing it (for now, latest patch is 1.06). After that it’s safest to start a new game to play more.

Okay, so just like Fallout 3 it’s a first-person post-apocalyptic RPG. You wander the world, find interesting places, talk with people, help them do things (quests), and in the process you change the world in noticeable, interesting and permanent ways. There is also a lot of killing, but exactly how much depends on type of character and playing style.

Like in the other Fallouts, some of the people (and non-people) you meet will want to join you, which makes things a lot easier and less lonely. The companions in New Vegas are more fun than in those in Fallout 3, and there are more ways to manage them with instructions. This is great, a simple but very effective way to enhance the gameplay.

That’s one of the many improvement tweaks in New Vegas. Many of the differences are small, but they add up and the end result is a noticeably better game, and I’m saying that as a huge Fallout 3 fan.

Fallout 3 ha a nice and solid story (especially by computer games standards, this is an often lacking area I’m afraid), but the story and storytelling in New Vegas is better, IMO. It’s a really excellent and vital part of the game. More interesting characters, factions and conflicts, better dialog, and overall more mature in the sense of being more complex, subtle and morally gray. In Fallout 3 too you could choose your path, good or evil, but it was usually clear exactly what was what. Not always in New Vegas. It’s also less epic in scope (though depending little on what ending you go for, whether preserving the status quo or shake up the world a little more), but I like that. Epic games can easily feel contrived, like the world is basically created specifically for enhancing the players adolescent dreams of being important and “the chosen one”. Those are good feelings, but it’s hard to experience them when the world  so obviously is being set up that way. You don’t want to see the puppeteer pulling your strings.

New Vegas is not like that; you don’t feel like the center of the world or the chosen one. You’re more like a minor player trying to survive in a harsh world. Sure you do some pretty awesome things by most reasonable standards, but by computer game standard, where saving the galaxy is an ordinary Tuesday, they’re pretty minor. This is especially true in how the game feels. And it’s great, it helps making the world feel authentic.

The fact that there are a lot of meaningless objects and information in the world contributes to this feeling as well. The buildings are full of garbage like old cups the like. In a contrived player-centric world all objects have some sort of meaning and value, like they’re specifically put there by the creator just for you (which they are), but how authentic is that? Same with information, you read a lot of data in the in-game computers that aren’t mission critical by any means, but sometimes provide very interesting information on what exactly happened to a certain place, say an underground vault where everyone’s dead.

Then there is the difference in setting. There is a lot of city ruins in Fallout 3, not as much in New Vegas. It’s more of a desert with settlements here and there, sometimes it feels pretty wild western-ish, especially in the beginning. No underground tunnel system and generally a more open environment, and more sun. But rest assured, there are some nice apocalyptic ruins in NV, like a pretty cool old industrial area.

They made New Vegas a little harder than Fallout 3, especially in that it isn’t as easy to create a super character. Less skill points are awarded at each level, you only get a park every other level rather than every, you found less stimpacks, and so on. This is most welcome, Fallout 3 was a little on the easy side. There were a lot of things in New Vegas during my 50 hours I wanted but couldn’t afford to buy, which is great also. Feeling too empowered definitely makes things less interesting. And of course, there is the option to play the game in hardcore mode.

The music is great, there’s a lot of reuse of old hits from Fallout 1 och 2, which are some of the best game soundtracks ever.

The hostility in the environment is more dynamic. It’s easier to avoid confrontation in New Vegas (by sticking to the roads), making it more feasible to play a more peaceful character, especially with the help of companions, but it also quickly gets tougher than Fallout 3 should you venture off the roads and into the wild. Fallout 3 on the other hand had a lot of unavoidable hostiles (especially in the underground tunnel system), but they were generally easier.

Well, that’s it for now.

Yesterday I reached one of the many endings of New Vegas, after about 50 hours of play. This is one of the best games I’ve played. There is so much to say about this game, stay tuned.

Finished Assassin’s Creed 2 yesterday (including DLCs), and began New Vegas today.

Haven’t even left the initial village yet, but so far so good! It’s great to be playing a Fallout again. It feels pretty wild west settler-ish, but maybe that’ll change with lasers and the like later, or when I get somewhere else than the sleepy village with two-headed cattle that is the starting point.

Killed me some geckos, which look like little monsters in this version, and a big ass scorpion what wasn’t a radscorpion (not by name anyway).

Had to restart when I realized, right after I left the house that strength is needed to operate guns (more strength the heaver the gun is). I started out with 3/10 (strength isn’t important in Fallout 3, not for the type of character I play), but in NV apparently it is. I set it to 5/10, hope that’s enough.

Oh well. Tomorrow the adventure resumes.

Played it a lot more now, should be completed in a few more gaming days (not all days are).

The colorfulness compared to the first game keeps being striking. It is especially obvious during the masquerade, ending with fireworks and everything.

There’s a lot little references to Altaír, the assassin in the first game. That’s pretty cool if you’ve played that one, and it makes him seem almost like a legend, more so than when you played him.

Like the first game I think the story is convoluted and pretty hard to follow in detail, though partly, I guess, because I don’t try very hard, as I just don’t particularly like it. It’s a lot of names and intrigues to the right and left and I just don’t care enough to keep track of it all. That doesn’t matter much though, I get the main quests and the immediate goals, and I like the gameplay. That’s enough for me.

It’s not a hard game. That’s fine, I’m not an adherent of the school of thought that games have to be challenging to be enjoyable; I’m more of an immersion and flow kind of guy, though challenges can be fun at times. (The best venue for challenge is probably multiplayer anyway).

And ahh, the music is mostly very good. Being such a fan of music that’s important to me, as it contributes a lot to the feel and immersion of a game.

There’s a lot of small additions and improvements over the first game, like a reputation system and some really cool weapons, like the possibility to secretly poison someone and than watch that person go crazy and strike blindly around him. Too much fun.

Anyway, this concludes my two part series on Assassin’s Creed 2. I will definitely be playing Brotherhood some time later.

Yep. The 1.05 patch did fix a lot of bugs, and 1.06 is on its way and apparently it’s going to be a huge patch for the PS3 — more than ten times as big as the XBox counterpart (but then the PS3 version currently is the most buggy of all, as was, alas, Fallout 3.)

So I finally purchased the game, and I will probably get playing as soon as I’m done with Assassin’s Creed 2, assuming the new patch has been released. If the game at that point still has freezing issues I’m going to… I don’t know, keep whining about it here perhaps. Or sacrifice a goat with the game attached to it.

I’ve shelved Oblivion before completion, possibly for ever. Mostly because I had the game freeze on multiple times (having to restart the PS3) within a short period of time. I knew the game has these bugs, but I was hoping they would materialize further into the game as the save gets bigger, just like Fallout 3 and other Bethesda games. While the game is good (great in some ways and problematic in others) I just can’t stand freezing. Especially not when I have other games waiting. So I turned to Assassin’s Creed 2 instead.

Have barely begun AC2, but I still have a few impressions, mostly comparisons to the first one which I finished not long ago.

AC2 is more colorful. Both in literal colors (although it still looks a little bland color-wise, but less than before, and the overall graphics is good), but also in other ways such as characters and story. AC1 is a very serious game where you play an Eastwood-esque silent loner killer, while AC2 has a more playful feeling to it.

Plus it’s set in renaissance Italy rather than the stony medieval cities of AC1.

All in all the overall “feel” is somewhat different despite the many similarities (such as the game mechanics, which also has some differences though, notably AC2 is a little faster, climbing and such).

There is more variety in AC2, like more mission types, more weapons and the option to buy different clothes.

Perhaps more on this later.