I like Fallout 3

Uh... coincidentally with what Derek suggested in his reply to my previous post, I have been replaying Fallout 3 for a while now to see if I could have any interest in getting New Vegas.

As you know, Fallout: New Vegas has been recently released. It's the Fallout 3 type of new Fallout game done by the original Fallout guys, and from what I can tell so far it incorporates the new engine with the original details of the Fallout universe (for example, RadAway is once again more of a rad-hoovering kit than a bag of brown goo, very important for a game to get right!).
I weren't too interested in Fallout: New Vegas to be honest. After reading the reviews and watching some gameplay clips I thought of it as a Fallout 3 with a different tint and more bugs, and although I've never actually said Fallout 3 is crap, or if I have I didn't mean it literally, I've never really liked to praise the game either because I've felt it's had more than it's fair share of positive press.
After watching about the 200th video of Dead Rising 2 where a banana hammock showgirl Chuck is riding a tricycle (very original of all you thousand random guys) I decided to instead completely spoil some other game for myself that I didn't plan on getting anytime soon, and conveniently Spoony has done a bit of Fallout: New Vegas on his justin.tv channel. The game still looked boring to me, in the "these new features seem interesting but I don't know, is that all there is?" kind of way. Like when you are promised a plethora of features and given three examples, and in the end there's a total of four new features. Game developers, publishers and critics always exaggerate (which is why I think I may have a future in game reviews, all I do is bullshit) and try to make your imagination tell you that they're only showing 2% of what they'll give you in the final product when it's really 75%.

Anyway, like was written in the first sentence, Fallout: New Vegas' release brought Fallout 3 back to my mind again and since I have nothing better to do than play video games I started a fourth character in F3. Because I've already played through Fallout 3 before (you may even remember my Fallout 3 Platinum trophy post way back) I set myself a few key rules for this playthrough. No abusing of the game's design flaws or my knowledge of the game to make things easy for myself, no jumping out of my good guy character just to get sweet bad karma rewards, and no quick travel. Basically you might say I made the game a chore for myself.
The result of this playthrough is that I have changed my opinion: Fallout 3 is right fantastic and I do want Fallout: New Vegas now.
Seriously, restraining myself and playing the game like a role-playing game and not just teleporting between locations changed the game experience remarkably, and now I see Fallout: New Vegas as a new opportunity for a similar, but also a more powerful gameplay experience since I haven't yet managed to find as much about it as I did with Fallout 3. With Fallout 3 I fucked up and didn't play it in a way I should've right from the start, I read spoiler reviews, quick traveled between quest locations and whatever extra there was to miss I spoiled by reading the Vault, the Fallout wikia. New Vegas is my second chance for that special gaming experience I missed two years ago. I won't read anything more about New Vegas for now and when I do get it I'll play it like I've been playing Fallout 3.

What also made me slightly more interested in New Vegas was hearing people talk about the added nuisances like hunger, thirst and ammo having weight. Casual gamers, kids these days, probably don't understand why someone would want those features to stop you from flying through the main questline in 5 hours, but I look forward to the added challenge, or fun as I personally like to call it. When I initially heard about a "hardcore" mode when someone was whining about it being pointless and annoying online, mostly crying about there being a trophy for it that he felt he should get without playing on hardcore, I imagined a mode where the game is permanently locked on Insane difficulty, your saves are limited to certain save locations, your skills are crippled, no perks etc., but once I found out that all "hardcore" means is having hunger/thirst, ammo weight and mortal companions, I asked the nonexistant presence next to me "Why would you NOT play on hardcore mode?" What are gamers these days, little babies? What's next in line for games, you stop dying on normal difficulty? On Easy the enemies die when your health is depleted? In the foreseeable future games probably play themselves while you watch, and kids will complain about having to press the start button to begin.

If you didn't quite get the point of this post, I just went the long way around saying that I've been playing Fallout 3 lately and that's why I haven't posted anything.
I also played a bit of Minecraft, although it's starting to get more and more boring everytime I play it, and I played a few levels of Hitman: Blood Money. I've been wanting to do an indepth guide of Blood Money since the first time I played it through, but I really can't because everytime I play it or watch someone else play it, I find something new about it. It's a daunting task, writing a guide, and I'm already busy doing nothing.

On other news, I thought about buying my mother the "25 years of Dr. Feelgood" collection for Christmas, but my great plan was ruined at that same instant because finding it, or any other Dr. Feelgood cd is not simple in Finland. Oddly enough I do know a place in town that sells the one and only cd of the short-lived and far, far more obscure US band of similar style and name, Doctor Feelgood. All the more evidence to support my theory that I'm actually living in some sort of bizarro world where everything I know is wrong.
I don't often buy gifts and presents, but this would've been a cool one in my opinion because I don't think my mother knows about this particular British pub rock band but I would dare to bet that she'd like the music. Everyone in our family has a good taste when it comes to music.

Remember that post two months back when I said I had recorded MORE Second Sight and wanted to do something with the footage? Well, truth is that I intended, and still do, to upload it as a Let's Play, but nothing like the YT LPs I did (I really weren't being serious with those LPs, guys. Honest!). I'll actually edit this one. Heavily. And the commentary will be more along riffing, as you MST3K kids might call it (unfortunately my childhood was MTS3Kless). And the commentary will be edited. Almost completely. Out. And I'll have a video review to go alongside the crap. Don't hold your breath waiting for it all, though, it'll be posted on my blog as soon as it's up and I'll even post an advertisement on YouTube to fish viewers. Why anyone would be looking forward to see any new LPs from me at all is none of my business though.
You might be interested to know that although I have not even started actual editing yet, and probably never will at my pace, some progress has been made. I do have a Sony Vegas project file created for it, I cut the first 2 minutes of nothing out, I have cropped all the footage to fit the screen and most importantly I have realised that, very akwardly, my 5th joke into the damn thing was straight out of someone else's funny LP. I knew the joke was too funny to be one of mine the second I made it.
I wrote about the LP here to remind myself of it more than inform any of you about it, since I have a bad habit of leaving things undone and my PC is crapping out just enough to make me think I should organize my files before the smoke rises out of it.
Now I'll go play Fallout 3 and forget I ever even had Second Sight.

As an extra, here's the local weather report: since last week the snow melted, the water froze, the ice melted, more water rained down, and this morning it started snowing again and it looks like winter. Again. I hope it stays evenly cold from now on but it probably doesn't.