Reviews: My First Bethesda, and Still More Zombies. Oh, and my life changes again.

Well, so much for THAT permanent change. The Monday after my last post, I finished my job. Or rather, it finished me. Apparently customer service is not my forte. Not that I mind, though part of me was bothered by the way that situation resolved itself. The real problem was how I had to hit the job running. Week one was "training week," except I had no formal training except for a guide to leaf through. Then during week two, I was tossed to a phone while one of their main customer services representatives was on vacation for more than a week and the entire office was being audited! It never got better. And the entire database was archaic, full of discrepancies and elaborate F key commands that differ for every menu. One day of learning these commands and the myriad exceptions would be enough, but updating the system with a real GUI and links to a map (say, with ties to Google Maps,) would cut the time to handle these questions in half.

Anyway, unemployment returned for a few weeks. I technically started a new job, but I'm in training AGAIN, so we'll see how this goes. So I had a lot of free time to play video games, including last month's birthday present, Fallout 3! This is my first Fallout game thanks to my focus on console games and my first Bethesda for pretty much the same reason. And my opinion? It's pretty good and I CAN'T stop playing it.

As a general rule, this isn't my type of game. Sure, it's an RPG, but it's also a shooter, which are fine except I've played little but them lately. Thank you, XBOX! Beyond that, I enjoy RPGS with strong main characters, but I also am not a fan of the constant sense of loss. In Fallout, you have to worry about how much weight you can carry (except ammo weighs nothing, nice that,) every weapon has ammo, and most importantly, every piece of equipment you have will degrade constantly. You have to constantly progress just to stay in place. Eventually, at least, that doesn't last forever. By the halfway point, the game mercifully gives out enough bonus money for minor, otherwise worthless items and just by adding places on your map. Ironically, the game then goes in the opposite direction in that I get too many rewards. The game has a maximum experience level of 20, making missions beyond that point pointless. That will change only when I spend money to get an expansion pack. As a result, I hit the maximum level after seeing barely half of the entire game! Since I plan on getting the expansion pack eventually, actually playing the rest of the game now would be a waste of the experience I would only get after I bought the expansion pack.

To make up for that, I started a second, evil character and am playing him until I'm ready to get the expansion pack. This time, I went out of my way to avoid experience bonuses, letting me see more of the game, though I still get shocked when I gain nearly an entire level from a single, short quest. Having played this game A LOT now, I can safely say that I'm ready to give my opinion. The best thing of this game is the vast number of options. Sure, you can save a town from destruction by evil forces. Or you can work with those evil forces and even press the button that turns the entire city into a mushroom cloud. The game lets you be as kind or evil as you want. Ally with noble knights in powered armors or massacre the downtrodden for evil indistrialists. Save escaped slaves or be a slaver itself. Return home to save your troubled people or murder and EAT your childhood friend! In fact, the biggest downside to the game (save for a glaring number of bugs still, from people reacting strangely to outright game freezings,) are the lack of options! For my "good person" game, I saved whole cities and am considered a messianic saint, but I didn't feel like I was helping the people overall. Hell, because random encounters get worse to match your level, the wasteland gets consistently more dangerous as you act. Thanks to the open nature of the game, this means tons of unique characters can be randomly killed off.

The one thing I really missed was any form of romantic options. Sure, the romance arcs of similar games like Mass Effect tend to be pretty limited, but at least they gave you an option. If I wanted to date, say, the quirky inventor of your hero's home base (unless you explode said home base,) why not set that up? I understand that no video game can equal your imagination. That's what tabletop role playing games (and, err, your imagination,) are for. But I still felt a bit unsatisfied. Still, that that's the worst thing you can complain about in a game, I'd call that a success.

Slightly less successful was the next game I played, Dead Rising. Dead Rising is a very Romero-esque zombie apocalypse game from Capcom. That was strange unto itself, since it was made by Capcom, who already has a zombie apocalypse series. In fact, they have the series that revolutionized the survival horror genre: Resident Evil. Capcom understandably wanted to make this series nothing like the other one, and in a way it was. Resident Evil was supposedly a survivor horror game, but it was a lot like a normal adventure game full of strange puzzles and labyrinthine police station/dungeons along with super-mutant bosses. If anything, Dead Rising cuts back on the horror in favor of the survival elements. In this one, your goal is mostly just to survive 72 hours and get as many survivors rescued and as many mysteries solved as possible. In many ways, the main enemy isn't the zombie horde, but the clock. Often you have to find a way to escort a horde of survivors with only minutes to spare before the next plot point flag.

The lack of "horror" also makes the zombie fights less horrific, and they knew it, so they made it more fun. Gone are the evolved super-mutants, with only two varieties of zombies: normal slow, shuffling zombies and slightly more aggressive slow, shuffling zombies. Instead, the boss enemies are all humans gone mad or just evil in the wake of the zombie disaster. The game's appeal comes, at least initially, from an endless hoard of slow-moving, shuffling zombies and the myriad ways you can mess with them.

This coupled with the time and survivor escorting elements, however, made for a game that seemed to hate itself. Yes, it's fun wacky times killing zombies en masse with a lawnmower, or running over them with a car, or putting silly hats on them mid-fight, or beating on them with novelty weapons like huge teddy bears, but if you actually try to, you know, win the game, the difficulty quadruples. Zombies you laugh at when you run past become deadly threats to the five or more very, very stupid people you try to escort to safety. And so you have to go out of your way to save them, which puts you in danger as well, and believe me, nothing is more fun than being grappled three times in a row and having to do quick-time events each time. And so you soon realize you have to forget the joke items and focus on real killing weapons like every other zombie game. The main offender here is a single optional boss fight that becomes an easy mode (or at least less hard mode) option. Defeat him and you get unlimited access to deadly hand-held chainsaws, AND you discover a convenient teleporter that gets you from the single farthest point from safety, a point that normally requires traveling though the most choked zombie points or into a battle with insane convicts armed with a jeep and turret, to within sauntering distance of the safe house.

It makes the game hard to appreciate it. I rented it expecting mindless fun and got something often frustratingly hard. The time limit and stupid victims, who eagerly avoided easy routes to run into swarms of zombies and needed help from inescapable grapples constantly, were a nightmare. Literally. There were some rough nights there. As a game, it worked and it was certainly engrossing (both in pun and non-pun definitions,) but it certainly needed just a little more time to get the rough parts out. And the story had issues as well. It was your usual horror movie cheese, intentionally humorous at times, but it had some clever twists involving multiple endings. If you just survive the 3 days, you get a generally positive ending, but if you finish all the story missions, you can get into longer endings involving secret government conspiracies, obvious sequel hooks, and a fairly uninspired final boss fight. What's odd, though, is the endings don't always make sense collectively. I'll avoid spoilers, but just for an example, one character who is perfectly fine in the normal ending becomes a zombie in the good endings, despite nothing remotely related to this changing. Similarly, the game is really vague about just how you become a zombie. Your fellow survivors become a zombie if they are killed by zombies, sure. But you and pretty much every one of them will get at least damaged by zombies, and yet some parts of the game insist that even a zombie bite could infect you. What, were the zombies just gumming people to death otherwise? Is this Schrodinger's zombie apocalypse?

Ultimately, I'd at least suggest people play these games. Fallout 3 is recommended for anyone with plenty of free time, and Dead Rising to anyone without blood pressure problems. And yes, this is at least two updates I merged into one after the first was embarrassingly late. Things have been weird, lately. I'll get into that more some time in a week or so.