1. Solivagant means Lone Wanderer. It's an english word.

2. I enjoy writing most about things that I love, even though you'll probably only know me by my bashing, specially since I get a kick out of posting hateful comments in news stories whose writer decides to add a funny (read: crap) line.

3. I hail from the great nation of Portugal, whose current accomplishment is being the home of the winner of the award for best football (or soccer if you call it that) player in the world, Cristiano Ronaldo.

4. I'm a budding game designer and writer and will share my evil plans for world domination with all of you one day.

5. Playing PS3 and being on the computer are concurrent activites for me, since the console and the computer share the same screen, therefore I'm always switching source and losing track of what I was doing in each.

6. In music there are three bands that have my utmost respect and love: Tool, NIN, Rammstein. Each of these bands has crafted its niche, perfected it, and then torn it apart and reinvented themselves proving that music genres are just pigeonholes.

7. The Matrix Trilogy are my all time favorite movies and get incensed everytime someone mentions the sequels as the inferior ones. After those films I favor thrillers and all sorts of strange films. I'm currently getting learned on Alejandro Jodorowsky.

8. Own a DS, Wii, PS3, PS2, PSX, N64, SNES, Mega Drive and had a gameboy thats gone the way of the dead. And a GBA.

9. I'm currently finishing my computer engineering degree and I'm on the limb whether to keep studying or go to work. Tending towards the latter.

10. I consider that the truth of life lies in the passion with which one does his work and lives his life.

11. I don't know how to count.

Hello folks, back to your non-scheduled programming: Fallout 3 hating.

So I guess the nfans (new fallout fans) have seen the latest videos concerning OPERATION ANCHORAGE dlc, wherein Bethesda invents "a battle of Fallout lore" and uses it to their advantage. Basically if you read "batle of Fallout lore", you might think they finally decided to actually read the Fallout Bible released by Chris Avellone of Black Isle and currently Obsidian fame. But no, they didn't. They just made up shit.

So, about the trailer. Well I could only stomach one and now I'm going to nitpick the hell out of it. By the way, I know I'm writing like an idiot and complaining just to complain, but since Fallout 3 is such a huge success, I guess that as a tfan (tru & proppah fallout fan) I should be allowed to piss all over it since no one else besides the guys at the rpg codex will do it.

Ok so this is the video im talking about: http://www.gametrailers.com/player/44826.html

Right, it starts off with Bethesda's trademarked way of starting off DLCs and quests that pop out of nowhere: a fucking green box in the middle of the screen. Instead of allowing the player to find about this "distress" signal on his own, no, Bethesda KNOWS the player of today will want this shit fed to him to the vein, so they just put a stupid huge IMMERSSHUN BREAKING block of text in the middle of the screen.

Then the guy checks the radio. Poor voice acting rears its ugly head: the raider actually sounds like a mutant! Eh eh, guess you guys will be saying "you dont even know that Mutants don't talk?" or whatever, well they could in the first games, and on Fallout 3, since the plot is basically a ripoff of Fallout 1 and 2 combined, cept on the East Coast (really, to all farts (old fallout fans that embraced Fallout 3) did you guys really eat that excuse of A NEW PLAN TO PUT VIRUS ON PEOPLE AND TURN THEM INTO MUTANTS based entirely on the East Coast? What goddamn shitty excuse is that? The FEV plan should have been, and was, the ONLY plan to.. shit I sound like a Star Trek fan!).

That previous phrase got too convoluted so I'll just continue. When the guy goes and opens the door (shouldnt it be locked?) he gets three dialog choices. I'll resume them, the top one is "i'm a good guy that IGNORED the huge BLOCK OF GREEN TEXT, the second one is I'M EVILLLL and the third one is I'm a good guy that FOLLOWED the huge BLOCK OF GREEN TEXT. I guess that if the character had enough Intelligence he would get an Intelligence option that would read "I'm a good guy that FOLLOWED the HUGE BLOCK OF GREEN TEXT + I CAN SEE YOU GOT A PROBLEM HERE!", just like Fallout 3 which has a lot of examples of this kind of crap dialog.

Oh yeah then the guy asks "how did you find out about this EXCLUSIVE broadcast?", Well, no duh! Bethesda TOLD ME!!!

Then they show a guy with cliche sergeant voice, and then the first good model i've seen of Fallout 3, a chick with cool blonde hair. And then she spits out shit. Simulation? Fallout 3 had that crap right into the plot, I take this chance to ask: WHY? Is this Fallout 3, or the Matrix? That kind of shit DOES NOT make sense in the valve huge mainframe world of Fallout 1 & 2. It's a cop out to put out shit by Bethesda.


Then the lady says that they will put this NEWCOMER THAT CAME OUT OF NOWHERE, he will get into the simlation because he has the necessary pipboy and because the Brotherhood of Steel or whatever the shit these guys are are cool and stuff, and "you are attached to it". Even though, if this was Fallout 1, they'd rip out the pipboy out of your arm and leave you to die. Oh yeah, I know, theyre the Outcasts. Or maybe they're the originals, but theire called OUTCASTS because the Brotherhood of Steel that rules East Coast, who were the original outcasts, now dominate this scene, so the originals, are now the Outcasts. -Great JOB, BETHESDA! I congratulate your writer. And I wish he would quit writing.

Then a terrible animation of the char entering into the pod ensues.

And then MATRIX shit.

And I'm a huge Matrix fan. But I dont want any Matrix on my Fallout, just like I dont want any Fallout on my MAtrix (even though the Matrix's Real World has a bit of the vibe).

And then the video ends and you guys creamed your pants.

Hacking has been portrayed through different ways in games. We have games that are hacking simulators like Uplink, which is the most famous and, in my opinion, the best, even if there are a ton of inaccuracies concerning actual hacking, and then we have RPGs, FPSs, and hybrids, that implement hacking as one of the various actions that you can do. I'll focus on these.


The Cyberdog was one of the enemies during System Shock's cyberspace sequences.

System Shock, the percursor to System Shock 2 and the recent BioShock, had a vibrant hacking system, where the player is immersed in cyberspace, similar in appearance to the movie Tron or Lawnmower Man. Various colored shapes roam about, Cyberguardians and Watchdogs attack, and functions are objects in this virtual world. So at the beginning of the game, the player needs to hack the medical suite's door open, and so he jacks into cyberspace, picking up hacking softs along the way that allow him to shoot at these Cyberguardians. In order to succeed at the hack, he must navigate through cyberspace until he reaches the shape that represents the door lock he wants to open. To leave cyberspace afterwards, he must find a portal, similar to the rings in Starfox, that will allow him to exit.

This system can be considered cumbersome and outdated nowadays, but in System Shock, you were the Hacker partially responsible for the AI's rise to power, therefore the elaborate hacking system made sense, and was an intriguing twist that went beyond being a mere minigame. Since then, developers have been finding different answers to hacking.


System Shock 2's elegant hacking minigame.

For System Shock 2, Ken Levine and the rest of the designers/developers of Irrational and Looking Glass implemented a system that worked the same way for 3 different skills: hacking, repairing and modifying weapons. Presented with a grid, representing the electronic innards of the object you were interacting with, the player had to connect three nodes. The chance that each node, when hacked (clicked on), would work or fail, depended on the skill being used and the Cyber-Affinity statistic. This statistic determined how many red nodes would appear on the grid. If hacking these red nodes failed, the system would respond differently depending on the skill: while hacking security stations, it would set off the alarm, while hacking locked boxes, it would destroy them, while repairing a weapon, it would damage it.



SS2's grid system was spiced up by describing an event within the object you were hacking every time you clicked on a dot. If the hack worked on that dot, it would display a line of text saying something like "Re-routed security system successfully.", and a contrary phrase in case of failure. This lines also referenced ICE, Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics, a term popularized by William Gibson in his cyberpunk masterpiece, Neuromancer.

The system required nanites to be used, and every time you tried to hack again you had to pay the nanite cost. Nanites were the currency of System Shock 2's world.

So while it was at its heart a minigame of connecting dots, there were at play several statistics, whose evolution was chosen by the player during the course of the game. It's definitely a simpler method than the first game in the series, but it's still pretty complex, and interesting.


Hacking in Deus Ex had a variety of actions and effects.

After System Shock 2, Deus Ex was released by Ion Storm. This game was much more of an FPS than the Shock series, but it borrowed the idea of skill levels for various possible actions, and with it, the hacking skill. This skill's progression was more linear than SS2's. Only one skill was used, and it determined how fast would the player hack, and how long would it take to be detected while interacting with a hacked terminal. One important thing to note is that the player had to spend the skill points to obtain the first level of Hacking if he wanted to hack at all, like System Shock 2, it wasn't given to the player from the start. Like SS2's system, Deus Ex's hacking also featured flavour text like System Shock 2, and also referenced the ICE concept, though the text was always the same and didn't depend on the player's input.

Hacking in Deus Ex allowed you to read emails of the accounts you hacked or change security settings, like altering the turret's affiliation, remotely controlling cameras or shutting them off. With higher levels invested, it was possible to discover the killswitches to two of the hero's nemesis, by checking email sent by their higherups.

It was a streamlined but immersive way to implement hacking, as you had access to several computers spread across the game and could interact with them. Logging on them, either by hacking or by finding out the password through datacubes (similar to the audio logs of System Shock 2, but not as intricate or colorful), allowed you to learn more about the story of the game, be it from the logo of the company that owned that computer, by the net address below that referenced Daedalus, a being that contacts you in the middle of the game, or by the emails themselves that not only enhanced the personality of the various characters in the game but also contained key data that could help you.

This was lost with the sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War. While the datacubes remained, hacking computers became merely watching a purple loading bar reach the end, accompanied by sounds resembling a 14.4 modem, and you couldn't read any email, only the security settings remained. To perform a hack you required a biomod, which were basically the same as the first game's augmentations, and can be equated with BioShock's plasmids. Once you had the biomod, you could improve it two times, the first to control cameras and shut off turrets, and the second time to make the turrets attack your enemies.

Gone were all possibilites of finding out secrets, important information that could be used during cutscenes or to avoid a boss fight. It was a simplified system that removed all the flavour, and most of the fun, of hacking.


Vampire's terminal hacking was very intriguing, and unexpected.

Afterwards, Troika's last game, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines implemented hacking in an interesting and immersive way. The player interacted directly through a command line with the computers. They all looked like old terminals, monochromatic and displaying only text. The hacking itself was performed by simply pressing Ctrl-C. Your hacking skill would determine whether it worked or not. After that, in order to access the various emails and functions of the computer, the player had to type in the commands by hand, which helped the illusion that you were actually accessing files on a computer.

While the hacking itself in Bloodlines wasn't very deep, the use of the command line was a nostalgic factor and helped ease the player into using computers without being too complicated.


Pipemania of the Year.

In 2007, BioShock brought back hacking, this time through a straight minigame, similar to PipeMania. It makes sense in the context of the game, computers would be controlled by valves and routing water from one place to another could change its functions. It's not very different from System Shock 2's hacking, but there isn't any flavour text, nor does the game have any skills that could be accounted to help you out. There were, however, gene tonics that changed the various variables in the game: alarm tiles, overload tiles, how long it took the water to pass through the tubes, etc, so the hacking was at least interesting in that it wasn't always the same, and your character would get better at it by using the tonics.

Pausing while hacking wasn't so immersive, and could lead one to think "here's a round of pipemania, all you splicers wait a bit while I finish this". A better system could be a smaller pipe grid that didn't occupy the whole screen, and that way allowed the action to continue (like SS2).

In the first two Fallout games it was possible to interact with computers (the interface was the same one used for dialog, only the dialog options would be actions made on the computer) and the Science skill was applied to determine what options you could perform and if you were successful.


Terminal Hangman

In Fallout 3, there's a table of words with randomized characters, and you get a number of attempts to select the word on the list that might be the password. Failing all of those attempts means you need a key, ALWAYS found somewhere in the area. Which doesn't sound so good. Again, a minigame.

It seems the status quo is to implement hacking as a minigame, which to me is unfortunate.

Hacking should have some form of flavouring, it doesn't have to be text and it doesn't have to reference something like ICE, but the player should feel like he is performing a felony, a crime, something forbidden, and also something technical. Characters should react to seeing the character hacking, and order him to stop or attack him. It should be viewed as stealing an NPC's items or going into restricted areas. It shouldn't be accessible to anyone, as it should require investment from the player, and it should get easier/harder with time. Different objects or functions could be hacked through different systems, and more secure systems should be significantly harder to hack.

I just got off Vault 101. I took a bunch of screenshots of the worst moments. I'll state what I enjoyed first ("Oh my god, he actually enjoyed something?" the fanboys will say):

-Conversation between NPCs. Examples being the birthday party, Jonas talking with Stanley the Pacient, and Andy (the best NPC of the lot).

-The whole birth thing is good, though the mother voice actor wasn't very great. It's still an improvement over Oblivion's three voice actors.

-The GOAT. Actually, not the GOAT, but the way it was presented. I skipped it through dialogue, I guess that's a plus as well. But I enjoyed watching the teacher present the questions to the students with the projector slides.

Ok now to what I didn't like:

-Pipboy 3000. Pulling that huge piece of crap all the way to my damn eyes every time I want to check my items is jarring, and I got a headache as a result. Well, that and the searing light every 5 minutes. And the fact that all of those screens could have been reduced to one or two full page sheets. But since this is primarily a CONSOLE game (since the original games WERE! on the console and everything...), Bethesda thought it best to put a million screens in the pipboy with very little data.
Also, using it pauses the game. Just like Bioshock's hacking minigame. Don't worry, I won't bash Bioshock, it's actually one of my favorite games

-Gone are the item descriptions. Those were actually great back then. Now you get the CND (what the hell is that? ) and damage, not much else. And the icons are okay, though why do they lack color? I suppose its to fit the Pipboy metaphor. The old inventory was much better though.

-Characters are generic and bland. The Dad is obviously styled after Christ or God and will probably sacrifice himself near the end. Your own character is completely generic because animations totally suck.


-No reaction to a 10 year old girl dropping her clothes during her party. I remember Oblivion having reactions when you walked around naked, or was that only Morrowind?

-On my very first shot with VATS, I ripped the head of the first guard I encountered. So much for being a novice, eh?

-Luck doesn't affect critical chance like the previous games. My luck is 1, and I keep hitting them critically. And seeing that stupid pipboy head grinning all the time got me pissed fast.

-A Ca-shing sound when you gain XP? Really? Do people really need the incentive of likening XP to cash in order to play? What were they thinking?


-Guess the Vault dwellers know all about Mutants. Even though in a report that I found in the Overseer's office they are wary and are just finding out about them.

-Radroach invasion. More like the god-damn Radroach PLAGUE.

-I kept hitting Dad and Jonas with the BB gun and in VATS. They fell and got unconscious. Too bad, Bethesda had a chance to really make a difference here if they allowed you to MAIM that damn Dad figure. But he only kept going "I'm your father, I assume you know the rest."


-Hand holding. The game telling you to check the Overseer's bedroom? Do you guys appreciate this sort of stuff? Sure this is the tutorial area, but damn. It's not like there were many more rooms to explore...

-Combat is dreadful. The guards shot at me as if they were lighting firecrackers, ducking and standing up, but not really moving away or dodging.

-The animations totally suck.

-They changed the scale of the skills. Previously you started getting real good at 85% upwards. The maximum was 200. You couldn't shoot crap with just 30 on Small Weapons. Now they lowered the scale, I guess. Sure, I know someone will comment saying "what does it matter?". Well, why was it changed? Because the game is basically a retextured Oblivion?

-On that note, armors adding skill points makes absolutely zero sense. It's just some idea to make the various clothes useful, until you get to the Power Armors.

-Random encounters in the Wasteland (I did play a little bit there) are crap. You start hearing firecrackers at you and then there's this raider openly walking towards you, shooting from the hip. He doesn't say anything. At least the guards in Vault 101 had barks. The original games had hundreds of lines during combat, by the way.

-Vault 101? More like "little hole in the ground 101". Terribly scaled. The original game's Vault was much bigger than this. And you only got to see three levels of it. And it had rooms, not just big corridors. And lots of characters. And optional quests!

-The Radio. Why? Does everyone have working radios in the wasteland? Instead of trying to rebuild Mankind some idiots decide to put up a radio station? The Enclave radio is pointless anyway. They should be DEAD. The Chosen One killed them in Fallout 2.

-I found a mini nuke within 5 minutes of Vault 101. Don't have the nuclear catapult yet.

-Bethesda Ruins. Yes, they certainly deserve a cameo in their own game. No one knows about them. They sure deserve it for their hard work. If anyone knows of a cameo from the original developers, gimme a holler.

Yes, I am analyzing every detail. I think this usually happens with games or movies or books that are a translation or continuation of something that is already established. People pore over it and debate every little detail.

...the real RPG fans have reason to cherish. The Witcher has just reached the milestone of 1 million copies sold.

The great roleplaying game of both 2007 and 2008 (original release and Extended Edition) is getting its due.

Go back to your fake Fallout.

It amazes me that at a time when so many great games are being released there are still so many paying attention to Bethesda's new title.

It also amazes me that nobody recognizes their marketing ploy. They've been pulling every single trick in the book since those first exclusive magazine scans:

-The first thing they announced was Liam Neeson's voice acting. Completely relevant to the fans of the original!

-Then came the teaser trailer, a knock-off of Fallout 1's intro, which I actually liked, and confirmed Ron Perlman as the Narrator. Too bad it also heavily hinted at the decision to go first person and ignore the previous gameplay.

-After that, the exclusive magazine scans, revealing Lucas Simms, that awful reused model from Oblivion, the bald and completely different muties, the first person/third person perspectives and the idiotic as hell portable nuclear launcher.

-Then, lots of other magazine screenshots later, they started inviting "game journalists" to their company. No, not the fans, those fan sites were never contacted. That makes me sad, specially since Todd Howard has been answering in interviews that they pay attention to the fans and that the fans aren't really that evil, as if there were some kind of interplay between the fans and the devs (besides the official Beth forums).

-Then these journalists were showered with cakes, and bobble heads. And big events. And they flew the journalists over and paid all the expenses.

-Then the first gameplay videos. Showing the poor animation, the way VATS truly worked (like a GOD button in an FPS), and Todd's awful voice.

-Recently, there were/are all the release events at the game shops, and then there were that army of Brotherhood of Steel in real scale, the special edition of the game with the crappy pipboy, the dreaded bobble-head, etc.

What does all of this amount to? Bethesda have been buttering up game journalists and reviewers since before any gameplay footage went public. They've been pulling for that "GOTY" award since the beginning of the year, and people are all eating it up. I've only see one article complaining about the way they gift the gaming sites and shower them with crap.

Am I the only one that sees what they are doing here?

I'm fighting a losing battle. Blackcats just got Fallout 3 for PC, and the Xbox version has been there for two weeks. I already know how the game ends, a poor twist ending that I won't spoil for the sods that decided to plunk their dollars in this game.

Hard to believe there are people buying Fallout 3 when there's so many quality gamesbeing released, from Dead Space to Little Big Planet to Fable 2 to Red Alert 3 to Far Cry 2 to Witcher's Enhanced Edition and so many other great games that are barely worth a mention on this site because everyone's a console fanboy and the only retro they believe in is the 8bit kind of retro.

Cue the fanboys.