Fallout 3: My Life as a Tutorial

I'm still going through the training parts of Fallout 3, but I've got some early thoughts:

• Hey, Liam Neeson's my dad! And, um, his wife dies giving birth to me. Hmm... I didn't realize the uncomfortable (and completely unforeseeable) real-life parallel there until just now.
• Woah, that's some intense customization they let you do with your look. Favorite part: the half-million interestingly-titled facial hair options.
• The whole concept of teaching you how to play the game via flashes of your life from birth to adulthood is a pretty cool idea. What's not cool? Turret controls. Walking around like I'm driving a tank is something I've never been able to quite get the hang of. Can't we just assume that I want to face in the direction I'm moving unless I say otherwise? At least I can invert the up/down part...
• I'm also really digging the little kids' book that introduces your stats.
• My "G.O.A.T." (S.E.?) exam says that I have a future as the Vault's chaplain, which apparently makes me good with bartering, medicine and lock picking. Okay...
• Ooh, exciting things are happening, and it looks like I'm about to put those lock picking skills to good use!

To be continued...

Doin' Time on LittleBigPlanet

So the other night I finally set up the PlayStation 3 that I'd been using as a carrot to get me to finish NaNoWriMo (see my last post; yay, my slacker vampire vs. zombies story is complete!). After giving the controllers an extra day to charge, last night I finally jumped into the first of the two games that came with the thing: LittleBigPlanet (LBP).

My first two thoughts:

1. Maaan I wish I had as much time for playing video games as I did in the good old days.
2. Nintendo systems have been spoiling me with how fast they let me get into a game.

Okay, maybe that second point could stand a little explanation. Before I could start playing LBP, I was forced to download three updates for LBP. Now granted, this isn't something that's gonna happen every time I boot the game up, but geez... I'm somebody who grew up with cartridges, where you had to make damned sure that a game was 100% before it shipped and oh god I sound like an old geezer now I'll just shut up.

So I was a bit miffed, but when the plummy narration kicked in I started feeling all warm and fuzzy inside again. I love all the personality they crammed into these little "sackboy" characters, and the first level was a pretty refreshing way to get the credits sequence taken care of. Just one thing, guys: ease up a little on telling me how wonderful and creative your game world is. That's my job, okay? I'll get around to creating my own levels later; just let me explore a little first.

I customize my guy as a little penguin-mozarthair-mustache dude, and I'm off to the races. Ooh, pretty colors! I get to enact violence upon Humpty Dumpty for extra points! The tutorial stuff comes in a little hot and heavy (I'd like to play around with the concepts they teach me for a little while longer before learning new ones), but I can see how other people might be more impatient to get past the learning phase and into the wider world.

Oh, and there's stuff to collect! Lots of stuff! And it lets you customize stuff more! And... wow... that's quite a bit of stuff I've collected there already... It reminds me of Animal Crossing; I hope I don't end up with "stuff fatigue" like I did with that game.

I'm still getting the hang of the controls. Moving between the foreground and the background is an interesting twist, but having three different "depths" may have been a bit of a stretch: sometimes I move between them without meaning to, and it's hard to tell how far back some of the things floating in the air are.

All in all it's been a fun experience so far, although I wish there was a bit more of a story to keep the momentum going from one level to the next. I understand why that's not a huge priority, given that the whole "build your own level" aspect is one of the game's big selling points, but it would've been nice.

Next up: Fallout 3, which promises to eat up hundreds of hours of my time if I let it.