A Green Mushroom

I tried to go back and explore some endgame of Fallout 4 with my character who had completed the story.  It wasn't as compelling as it had been when I was pushing through the main story.  So I did the thing that made the most sense. I started using console commands. Player level 35?  Let's just crank that up to 300.  Then activate every perk. That was fun for a night. The next night going back to it and I was kinda over the normal loop of exploration in the game.  So I turned on god mode.  Want to know the best part of god mode in Fallout 4? Infinite Ammo. I basically spent an entire night charging into groups of enemies wildly firing the fat man.  If you haven't played Fallout 4 the fat man is a handheld mini nuke launcher.  I don't think I had fired it the entire time I played the game because I only ever had a couple shots of ammo for it. Running around and firing off fat man mini nukes all over the place was a ton of fun for ...

This post obviously contains spoilers.  You have been warned. I have to say that I like Fallout 4's main story so much better than Fallout 3's.  I completed Fallout 3's main quest because I felt like I should.  I finished Fallout 4's because I was really excited to see what would happen.  The story actually drove me to complete it, which is super rare for a Bethesda game.  I still don't think I've actually seen an ending to any of their Elder Scrolls games that I've played. Fallout 4 is my favorite Bethesda mainline story so far. The intro to the game was super cool.  I loved seeing the world of Fallout before  it was destroyed.  That futuristic yet 50's style is so well done.  It's the first true glimpse of that world that they've ever let us see and I thought it was a big insight into the rest of the world of Fallout. Shortly after entering the Vault and narrowly avoiding death by nuclear war you are frozen for 200 years in a cr...

No Spoilers in this post!  Promise!  Just gameplay thoughts. I'm not a Fallout diehard fan but I really liked Fallout 3 and I've been looking forward to Fallout 4 ever since it was announced. Since it came out earlier this week I've been able to starting digging into it.  I picked it up on PC and have been playing it both on my computer with keyboard/mouse and on my TV via my Steamlink with a Xbox 360 controller.  Well, I would be but the Steamlink set-up is a little buggy at the moment for this game.  I can get it to stream to the Steamlink but I can't get sound.  It's launch week though, and it's such a low priority bug.  I'm sure it'll get patched up quickly. As a quick side note so far I haven't had any gamebreaking bugs on PC.  Just a couple super tiny graphical oddities, but they're rare and far between. I really like Fallout 4.  It's a brand new open world to explore.  The very first night I touched the game I played a...

I went back to Fallout 3 for the first time since 2008!  The announcement of Fallout 4 got me really excited for the Fallout universe again, so I decided to revisit this game.  I loved it when it first came out in 2008, but I only played it for a few weeks before beating it and moving on. How does it hold up today? Well, it's pretty good, but not fantastic.  Everyone is so wordy.  The dialogue system breaks me out of the immersion in the world every single time I enter a conversation.  That's easily my biggest gripe.  But the tone and the world building in Fallout 3 are amazing.  They're still spot on.  The graphics are fine, not as sharp as modern day, but totally acceptable.  The combat is still fun and well done.  The VATS system is a joy. Really, the game just holds up well, even after 7 years. This time I played way differently than I normally do. In a normal game I go down every speech path, try to talk my way out of ...

Woah, blast from the past. I had never tried out Fallout 1 and 2 before this, but since they were so cheap on the Steam Sale I grabbed them to take a look. My history with the Fallout franchise is that I played Fallout 3 to completion right when it released (2008 I think?) and that's all I've done with the franchise.  I liked my time with Fallout 3, but it never felt as mindblowing to me as it did to others.  That being said, I'm really excited to get my hands on Fallout 4 later this year. Anyway, Fallout 1 and 2 are kind of interesting.  They nail the tone of the Fallout universe perfectly, even though they're really old games at this point.  The tone is just spot on. But, the gameplay in these two games is essentially unplayable by modern standards.  It's brutal to try to do anything in these games.  They appear to be running on the same engine, and it doesn't hold up to my current standards.  I tried each game for about half an hour befo...

I've been playing a little bit of Fallout Shelter since it was announced and launched on the same day during an E3 press conference last week. On one hand it's nice that they made a mobile game set in the Fallout universe that doesn't have any paywalls or annoying F2P mechanics.  You can purchase "lunchboxes" if you want but it's less critical than any other F2P game I've ever seen. On the other hand I've played this exact style of game before.  Build a little community of characters, get more space for them, get new facilities, upgrade stuff.  There's nothing new here.  The main thing the game has going for it is the Fallout branding thrown on top of it.  I've fairly confident this game would not have gotten the attention it has if it didn't have Fallout attached to it. I can already tell that I'm waning in interest on this game.  It's kinda cool that they made a nice F2P game in the Fallout universe, but there's real...

I think I'm just going to write up E3 thoughts whenever they strike this week, instead of waiting for my normal posting schedule. I just watched the Bethesda Press Conference and it was... ok?  I have to fess up, I'm not a huge Fallout fan.  Or Doom fan.  Or Dishonored fan.  I don't even think I like the Elder Scrolls as much as most people. Honestly, I usually play a Bethesda game for a week or two, grow bored of it, and move on with my life.  That's where I'm coming from, so keep that in mind. I watched the press conference anyway because it's E3 and I'm interested. To me, Doom looked super generic and bloody but not all that interesting. Dishonored 2 was basically a pre-rendered concept trailer so who cares.  I'll hold off having real thoughts until I see gameplay. Elder Scrolls card game looks like it wants a piece of that sweet sweet Hearthstone money.  Now that Blizzard has proved there's a market for mobile digital card games it...