APB showed up on my radar a few days ago and hasn’t left room for anything else since.  While the original APB died under the weight of a pathetic management team and lack of funds, its rebirth is something of a statement on how popular the concept as a whole is.  While it’s not a traditional MMO in that it doesn’t have RPG elements such as ridiculous quests to scalp twelve dogs or something, it does have a bit of an RPG feel in regards to unlocking bigger and better toys, but is otherwise a chance to run around and just do whatever you want.

The gameplay resembles something from the Grand Theft Auto series though without the annoying minigames.  You choose to play either a criminal or enforcer, and from there you go on missions to earn rankings with your contacts and money for new guns, but there’s also a few elements that make it stand out.  As self-aware beings, the enforcers can instigate missions when they spot a criminal conducting a crime, making it a mad-dash for home if you want to keep your loot.  The criminals have an easier time making money, what with being able to smash store fronts with cars and carry off loot by the van-load, the enforcers do seem to have a slight edge on combat, meaning it’s easier to pounce on unsuspecting crims and cash in on their hard work.  It’s an element that works well in most cases.

The biggest downsides for free to play characters has to be the time limits on guns.  Even the most expensive guns come with limits on how long you can use them, so if you have a gun you really really like, better have enough money to pay for it at the end of your limit, though granted it does usually take 10 days for the weapons to expire.  Ammo is ridiculously cheap and easy to come by from vending machines scattered everywhere, and vehicles are in such abundance that it’s only the option to customize your car that keeps you coming back for more.  And that customization is insane.  Everything on the car can be painted and decorated in such a way that it’s nearly impossible to find a real limit, short of the imposed limit placed on free players by the server.  A plain car can suddenly take on the appearance of a legitimate police car thanks to the magic of carefully placed logos, decals and paint.

All in all, if you liked Grand Theft Auto and really want to have fun in an over-the-top world full of guns, girls, explosions and enough testosterone to fuel half of China, then APB is a safe bet.  The expiration on weapons and grinding to earn money and rank do get a bit repetitive, but the thrill of hitting a ramp to land on a criminal only to jump out and open fire on a van full of his team mates more than makes up for it.

I was genuinely excited by Empire at War because when it comes to Lucas Arts and the handling of the Star Wars franchise, brutal prison conquest springs to mind, especially in the area of real time strategy.  Thankfully some chaps at Petroglyph studios were on hand to sort them out, as most of their developers were from the gutted and ruined Westwood studios after EA games decided to feast on the meaty bits and throw the rest away.

Empire at War has two major modes of combat and is a real time strategy combat through and through, actually letting you explore the strategy hinted at in the name.  Instead of the ever popular start-from-scratch bollocks that most developers throw into RTS, Empire at War lets you move pieces across the galactic map, letting you see what planets are strategically valuable while also needing to defend your vast area from enemy infiltration.  This is a unique element that’s actually quite fun since being able to take units from a planet deep behind your lines and move them where they’ll be better suited lets you feel like you’re really a general and not some pissant who gets told where to piss all over the enemy.  Planets have different abilities that can make them easier or harder to take and each side actually has a fair balance, with the Empire preferring to use heavier firepower while the Rebels run around trying not to piss themselves.

The combat is broken up into space and ground, with your fleet needing to move in and take space above the planet so you can bring in ground forces.  Most of the time there’s a nice large base in the way which means you’ll probably need to bring some firepower.  While there is an emphasis on bringing along fighters they’re actually little more than targets, especially early in the game.  While they can be a pain in the ass, a few anti-fighter ships dice them up into meaty chunks.  One nice thing about the separate space and ground combat modes is that one doesn’t immediately progress to the next.  If your army is running a bit low, you can send your battle fleet against the Rebels to fuck their shit up and then run away snickering at them when they try to send reinforcements only to get there and find you’re gone.

Ground combat can be summed up in one word: Boring.  Just like in Star Trek Online, everyone wants to fly around in the space ships because at the end of the day they know which is more awesome.  Fighting on the ground is annoying because it’s just you and your mates against some other sack of meat and his mates and it’s an energy weapon pissing contest until someone falls over dead.  While the Rebels typically get their asses handed to them in space, the right weapons on the ground can fuck their shit up properly, mostly in the form of those giant metal walkers with some anti-air support to keep those annoying speeders away.  One thing I hate about ground combat is that everything else is faster than the fucking walkers so rather than take up a safe position in the rear, the anti-air runs to the front to get picked off by some asshole with a blaster.

Of course, then LucasArts said, “Hey, this game only covers up to Episode IV, we need more stuff because our crack and whore money is running out.”  Well, rather than sticking to the tried and true, Petroglyph showed that while they’re some of the better elements from Westwood, they still brought along the office fuck-up.  The expansion, Forces of Corruption, introduce us to someone who we’ve never met before, never care for, and hope dies a needlessly painful death.  I removed Forces of Corruption so don’t expect me to deliver a review on it, just know that there was only one thing that I actually liked about it, and that was the addition of a Super Star Destroyer to kick enough arse and have it all done in time for tea.

Thankfully, if you buy it on Steam, it will come with FoC but you can choose to play without it.  Empire at War was good enough without FoC-up ruining it.  Unfortunately, it seems Petroglyph is a one-trick pony and can’t produce anything but RTS games similar to FoC, so I don’t think they’re getting another review from me anytime soon.

I went into Fallen Earth expecting Fallout and wasn’t disappointed.  While the game actually tries to stand on its own it feels like the actual plot was just an annoying attempt by someone to change it away from Fallout just enough to avoid a lawsuit from Bethesda.  The official backstory is confusing and contradictory, since no one knows what the hell happened and doesn’t seem too keen to find out either, which I guess is more realistic.

What I can say is that it does take efforts to explain just why you can and often do respawn in a tube, since apparently you’re a clone with a lovely collar that monitors your brain.  You begin in single player to get a feel for the clumsy controls and graphics drawn by the rejected artists for Bethesda.  You wake up in a tube and it turns out you were bred for the sole purpose of having your liver chopped out by a man who I forgot because he bites it towards the end of the single player tutorial/intro.  You run around under the guise of Ms. Exposition who tells you what you need to know and what you need to do.  The controls are, as mentioned, clumsy, so you wind up running around in circles like a drunk staring at a whirlpool, and it’s a good thing you’re in single player or everyone would make fun of you in Starterville.

After you get blood on your hands and find a bunch of helpful soldiers who want to save the clones, you get to run down and chase some bloke who has a bomb strapped to an ATV and wants you to drive it towards an underground vault and it turns out that he forgot to include a fucking fuse because it blows you to shit.  Turns out this is on purpose because you get some fucked up message saying, “You have died! We’re sorry.  But don’t worry, you’re not dead!  You are in fact alive thanks to a completely bullshit science that you’ll probably call shinanigans on but it works.”  You also get Ms. Exposition who explains that you were blown to shit to help win the battle but your genetic material was destroyed during the fight and it took 4 years to put you back together.  Wow… that sucks ass.  Oh and you’re somehow special just like every other prick running around in this game.  With that, you pick where you will be starting, and you begin your Fallout Fallen Earth adventure.

The game bills itself as a class-less system that includes plenty of combat which helps keep you busy but you have to grind to even leave the town.  Three missions in you get just enough chips to buy a few skill books to help you learn what you need to escape into the wilderness, but the game feels like an epic grind just to get out of Starterville, because everything surrounding the town is at a minimum 5 levels above.  You can take them on, but expect to find yourself in a tube again and looking at a long march back to where you left your horse.  Yes, horse.  Turns out they love vehicles and even give you a horse a few missions in.  It makes travel go much faster, but the clumsy controls make it easier to try and keep one hand on the mouse for fine controls.  The crafting system is innovative but they give you everything you need right off the bat to start using the kits and it’s only the need for certain skills that holds you back.  To get started you often use money to buy enough skill points in each to let you roam around and gather up raw materials, most of it tainted by whatever doomed your world.  You craft and get skill points that make it easier to do more crafting and it builds up, but starting out you’re still grinding like an organ grinder saving up for a monkey and fez.

All in all, this game desperately wants to be Fallout but can’t be.  It offers plenty of features that will hopefully wind up in Fallout 4 when Bethesda gets around to making it, but that’s all it is.  Anyone who knows about Fallout gets the same feel even if the graphics are a bit lacking.  That’s not to say it’s not fun, as I keep going back, but Star Trek Online has a much more intuitive layout and design, almost linear in design.  The smoother controls of STO have spoiled me as I want to feel like my tap will be interpreted as “Don’t turn all the way around, you pillock.”  Get the game if you want to see what features a Fallout MMO would include.  It’s free, but that’s the only reason I keep going back.  If I had to pay, I’d rather spend it on starships for STO rather than continue this crap.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a way to stop the staff from using my blog as a billboard.  This royally pisses me off, but until I find a way to fix it, I’m just going to keep trudging along.  What I can say is that changes are coming, and good ones at that.

New Trailers

Over the week I’m going to go through and begin adding trailers to my reviews or possibly gameplay footage.  I don’t know when I’ll be able to get footage of myself actually playing the games, but if that happens, I’ll be creating a new segment.  I’ll gladly take any suggestions for names on that.

Stamps

With my collection of stamps I’ll be going through and adding stamps to the bottom of each post that you can click for more goodness.  The stamps will let you search using that specific stamp, so if you click the Star Trek stamp, you get Star Trek related posts within my blog.

Re-Reviews

Some of my earlier reviews were a bit on the silly side and that’s going to change here in a bit as well.  They’ll be redone, this time with an emphasis on improving quality and not just about being silly.  Hopefully.

Theme Change

This is an item I’m not sure will get changed, but there is a possibility, so if you log in and it looks different or funky, that’s why.  DONE

Thank you everyone who reads

I had a hard time deciding which Fallout game I wanted to review, but decided that since I’d played New Vegas the most recently, and that it’s one of my favorites, I’d go ahead and review it.  This is a review solely of New Vegas and not the numerous add-ons, which I haven’t yet bought.

Fallout: New Vegas is Bethesda Softworks’ second outing for the series, using the Gamebryo engine to power it just as they’d done with Oblivion and Fallout 3.  Unlike Fallout 3, however, this outing takes us far away from the bombed out craters of Washington DC and to the frontier of the New California Republic pushing into the Mojave desert.  Here, the NCR is brushing up against its first major opponent since The Master, Caesar’s Legion.  The Legion is an army of 47 conquered tribes each serving their charismatic and ruthless leader, Caesar (sometimes called Kai-sar in the game).  To make the situation worse, the NCR is trying to play nice with the major bigshot in New Vegas, Mr. House, who is soaking up NCR resources without helping them out.

You begin the game staring down the barrel of a gun, literally.  A man in a checkered suit and some gangsters have you tied up and have stolen the item you were meant to deliver to Mr. House.  He shoots you, and you wake up some time later staring at the ceiling.  You survived, somehow, and a kind old man named Doc Mitchel patched you up.  Here’s where you set up your character, choosing what you look like, your skills, your personality.  He gives you something to wear, an old Vault 21 jumpsuit, a weapon depending on what skills you chose, and some bottle caps, the local currency.  With that, you walk out into the bright sunlight and begin your adventure in the tiny town of Goodsprings.

The game is open ended, allowing you to choose who you side with and how you go about doing it.  You can be good, bad, neutral, doesn’t matter.  The natural choice is to side with the NCR against Caesar’s Legion, but there’s also the ability to become one of Caesar’s able warriors, an associate of Mr. House, or to take over New Vegas for yourself.  Each decision you make has consequences, such as shooting NCR troops will piss off the NCR and gain you points in Caesar’s books.  There’s also other groups out in the wasteland that’ll either help you or try and stop you, depending on how you react.  Each faction has wants and needs, and you have to decide how you’ll shape the wasteland with your actions.

A nice touch they added to the game was including more options for crafting.  While Fallout 3 had a way to produce unique items in the game, Fallout New Vegas gives you more options, such as cooking steaks at a camp fire, or breaking down ammo to manufacture other types.  They also included new ammo types for each round, giving you options such as hollow points, armor piercing, jacketed soft point, full metal jacket, etc.  The right type of ammo at the right time can make all the difference.  They also included Hardcore mode, where not only does ammo now weigh in your inventory, but you can also become dehydrated, starve, and require sleep.  Roaming the desert is one thing, but needing to bring water because you’ll dehydrate and die is something that adds a whole new level of realism.

So grab your gun, pick a side, and settle in for a wild ride.

Questions? Comments? Suggestions?

I decided to review Tropico 4 because while I had also played Tropico 3, there was an expansion I hadn’t gotten so I didn’t know how that affected gameplay.  What I do know is that I got Tropico 4 and was instantly happy with the changes made to the game compared to their third outing.

Like all Tropico games, Tropico 4 has you playing El Presidente, the charismatic leader who has arisen to power of a small Carribbean island.  Unlike Sim City, which has you building a city and trying to manage all the little details like taxes and whatnot, you are the single most important person and you can choose to be a democratic, benevolent leader or a ruthless dictator.

You have several options for making money in the game, depending on how you want to go about playing.  You can choose to have a mostly agricultural economy, using uneducated masses to farm for bananas, corn, coffee, pinapples, papaya, sugar or tobacco or to work the mines for bauxite, gold, iron or salt.  You can have a mostly industrial economy using high school workers to refine raw materials for a higher price, or you can rely on tourism.  Or you could do all three.

The game lets you use the island’s natural resources to your advantage.  Ugly islands or islands with few natural resources would be better suited to importing raw materials and refining them into usable materials.  Beautiful islands are tourist meccas that cater to fat Yankee tourists who wander over your island spilling hotdogs and beer on everything.

One thing I enjoyed them including was new types of natural disasters.  Now you not only can deal with a volcanic island and hurricanes, but also tidal waves, tornadoes and earthquakes.  Each one has different areas of affect and can be devastating if you’re not careful.  Thankfully, they’ve included a weather station to give your people a heads up and avoid dying, though there’s nothing you can do about the property damage.  Also, some disasters take a long time to fix, like oil spills, which can impact your fishing industry for quite some time.

They also decided to include lobbyists, a unique feature that I enjoy.  The lobbyists each have an agenda based on their faction, which are the communists, the capitalists, the religious, the intellectuals, the militarists, the nationalists and the loyalists.  What benefits one faction may annoy another, which can be dangerous as rebels are still a potential threat.  Everything is yours to command and destroy at your whim, though the US will be happy to come in and escort you out of office.

So make the call El Presidente.

Questions? Comments? Suggestions?

Star Trek: New Earth is a series that I found interesting because it takes the heroes of the Federation, James T. Kirk and the USS Enterprise, and has them not racing off to explore space but doing the ever important job of escorting colonists to a new home.  Starfleet wants to protect the people who have chosen a world far beyond the Federation’s frontier, and Kirk is a compromise.  Kirk has the experience and pull, plus a famous starship, without requiring a small fleet that would step on settler toes.  It’s a side of Starfleet you rarely see, the side that handles bureaucracy, security and colonization.

Wagon Train to the Stars is the first book and it’s the one I’ll use for this review because nothing I say will really reveal that much of the challenges ahead, of which there will be plenty.  The book opens with the Enterprise dealing with a crisis.  Specifically, the mining lasers on an automated vessel have suddenly targeted another ship in a convoy.  The Enterprise can’t just fire on the ship because it’s one of only four vessels in the convoy built for mining asteroids.  Kirk, being the brilliant devil he is, uses the Enterprise as a new target while he and the mining company’s representative beam over and shut the vessel down, revealing that Kirk spent many days in his youth working on such ships before Starfleet.  How he find time to do that between banging green alien chicks is beyond me.

Turns out the Enterprise is leading a convoy of settlers towards a world beyond the established Federation frontier to a planet called Belle Terre.  Belle Terre is a lush, earth like planet and seems just perfect for a group of people who are tired of Federation bureaucracy and just want to live on a world they can call their own.  The Federation knows the settlers don’t want anything to do with them anymore but still has to provide a show of force.  Unfortunately, this means that they rope Kirk and the Enterprise in to carry out this mission, something Kirk isn’t looking forward to.  Like all convoys, they can only travel as fast as the slowest ship, and it’s so far away that they’ll need months just to get there.

There’s also a problem of a pulsar in the region that blankets the entire region with energy, preventing movement because they’re blind.  The ships have to stop during this time and that’s just slowing everything down, much to Kirk’s dismay.  There’s also an escaped prisoner aboard one of the colony ships, eager to get his hands on a ship full of young, vibrant colonists to sell to the Orions as slaves.  He’d weaseled his way out of court and managed to get aboard before Kirk found out about it, and Kirk’s naturally pissed.  Kirk had been the one to originally arrest him, only to find out that’s a bust.  He can’t throw the man in jail for nothing but Kirk knows he’s up to something.  It’s a nice battle of wits while the convoy continues on, with the Enterprise even picking up a few Orions on long range sensors shadowing their movements.

The entire series is fun though I will say that book 3, Rough Trails, stands out.  L.A. Graf wrote it and it focuses on the Enterprise trying to deliver supplies to a continent devastated by a disaster.  It stands out because it feels like all of a sudden they’re in a sandstorm fighting cowboys and outlaws, and so you can feel free to skip it without harming anything.  None of the later books reference it enough to really be a major continuity issue.  The ending comes with the Enterprise being replaced by another ship and returning to Earth, just in time for the Enterprise to become the training ship we see her become in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Questions? Comments? Suggestions?

Mystery Science Theater was one of those shows that I saw as a kid, but never really appreciated until much, much later.  The premise is simple as it is brilliant: take old movies and make fun of them on TV.  Most of the films they got were old and, thankfully, horrible enough to easily make fun of.  It was a better time because movies are taken so seriously by some people and it’s fun to poke fun at them.

Because MST3k ran for so long, it’s hard to nail down exactly when it hit its going stride, but I’d have to say it was definitely not season one, and probably doesn’t include Joel.  The early production work during season one was atrocious, especially with Servo’s voice being provided by Josh Weinstein.  There’s just something about the voice I can’t enjoy.  Joel was just a bit too… bland.  I’m sorry Joel and Josh :(  Anyway, I will say that there wasn’t really much of a difference, that I can tell, in Crow following the Giant Gilla Monster skit, because it was after that when Trace Beaulieu got swapped out for Bill Corbett.

Each person played a multitude of roles, the aforementioned Josh Weinstein playing Dr. Forrester’s (played by Trace Beaulieu) bumbling sidekick before he left the show.  Kevin Murphy, who voiced Servo after Josh left, played Professor Bobo as well, and Mary Jo Pehl played the magic voice before taking on the role of Pearl Forrester.  The show always felt like it was on a shoe-string budget, but it never took itself seriously enough for anyone to really care.  I think that really helps because without that, the show would’ve probably been a flop.

Anyway, if you have Netflix, there are episodes on DVD and Instant, so go see what it’s all about, and don’t forget to check out Joel Hodgeson’s Cinematic Titanic or Mike Nelson’s Rifftrax.  Both are awesome stuff.

Questions? Comments? Suggestions?

If there’s one game I never grow tired of, it’s Evil Genius.  Published by Sierra way back in 2004, back before Activision absorbed it like EA was doing with so many of their own minor companies.  It’s a shame because without Sierra, the odds of a sequel ever being made are practically nil, and so this title will quietly die a slow death as it ages.  That’s why I’m glad I’ve got my copy and that it still works on Vista :D

So Evil Genius is a sort of parody of the spy movies and shows popular during the 60’s, notably James Bond and a few others.  Only instead of being the suave spy, you’re instead the villain, the Evil Genius.  You pick one of three characters, the technophile Maximilian, the beautiful and exotic Alexis, or the elusive and mysterious Shen Yu.  Alexis is better at retaining minion loyalty and Shen Yu is better at planning evil missions, but a bug rendered Max’s ability to research new stuff faster useless.

You arrive on a deserted island, just you, your loyal henchman and three minions in squeaky yellow jumpsuits and green boots.  You have some cash and there’s the beginning of a tunnel into the nearest mountain for you to use.  Yup, you get to build a secret underground lair.  So you set to work, only to learn that the only player you directly control is the Evil Genius and your henchman.  You cannot issue direct orders to your minions!  Instead, you use blueprints to plan out your base and your minions set to work for you, taking money to the depot to buy dynamite to blow out the rock and then build your base’s interior.  It’s a neat system and keeps you from having to micromanage, instead freeing you to focus on the big picture.

The thing I like about Evil Genius is that it gives you the hands off approach you’d  actually have in anything like this.  You issue commands and they’re carried out, and there might be delays such as a lack of funds or insufficient manpower.  You might issue an order and suddenly find everything delayed by a firefight with government agents.  Yes, government agents come to your island.  They start off as insignificant, mostly just investigators wanting to take pictures of everything, but there’s a few, such as the super agents and soldiers, that give you pause.  For this, you build traps, security cameras and keep a well stocked armory.

As you play, you get to capture people for interrogation, some giving valuable intel, others advancing your minions to the next rank.  There’s three major categories for your minions, the fourth being construction workers, the guys you start off with.  There’s social minions, who tend to your other minions, distract tourists and investigators and put out fires, there’s science minions who repair your base and research new items, and there’s your military minions, who walk around and defend the base.  It’s a system that works, though there are times you wish they’d give your technicians and valets guns.

In order to get money and up your evil rank, you have to conduct missions.  A precursor to the modern duty officer missions you have in some MMOs, you bring up the map and have hotspots, each one having requirements that must be met, mostly in the form of suitable personnel.  You choose which ones to send, maybe adding a military guy for increased security, a technician to speed it up, or a valet to ease tensions from the world powers, and then they load up on a helicopter and fly off.  Some missions don’t net you anything but infamy, others loot and infamy, and some progress you to the next stage.

There’s five factions, each denoted with a cute acronym.  There’s PATRIOT, SABRE, SMASH, HAMMER and ANVIL, which represent America, Europe and colonies, the third world, Russia and China respectively.  Each one will send minions and there’s a special ability later on to cause what’s known as Global Chaos, where the powers all fight each other rather than just you when they arrive on the island.  

So that’s the game and I hope you enjoyed my little review.  The game’s on Steam for $10 so if you want a classic game that pokes fun at spies and lets you take over the world, go for it!

Questions? Comments? Suggestions?