America is a nuclear wasteland in chaos. Now go out there and survive. What better premise could there be for a sandbox shooter-RPG game like this second entry in the revived Fallout series? I would find a virtual hiking game exciting if it operated off of that premise. Not that you won’t do plenty of hiking early on, but New Vegas does an incredible job of balancing first-person shooter and RPG genres with a survivalist sandbox frame of mind, providing very compelling gameplay and storyline that deserves multiple playthroughs.
New Vegas adds to the successful formula by taking the engine and gameplay of Fallout 3 and giving them a sense of place (in this case, a mixture of Wild West and 50s casino aesthetics) that they only rarely accomplished last time. Fallout 3′s Washington D.C. setting may have shocked a few people with its images of a demolished National Mall, but for the other 90% of gameplay, the sense of setting really never took off. So Fallout 3 developer Bethesda may have realized they were a little too focused on, well, the immediate area around Bethesda, so they shipped allowed the sequel to be developed by Obsidian, who have a claim on the rest of the Fallout series’ past. The new setting around the former Las Vegas area is an inspired choice, and the narrative surrounding an important regional battle for Hoover Dam propels the narrative better than Fallout 3′s setting did.
The setting is so important, in fact, that the gameplay is hardly changed at all from Fallout 3, which has led to accusations that this new title is more like a large $60 DLC package than a new game. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing– RPGs generally don’t improve their gameplay for each iteration, because gameplay isn’t really the point of a lot of RPGs. They are more about storyline and character interactions than most video game genres.
New Vegas concerns a major upcoming border clash between the New California Republic and Caesar’s Legion, two armies of nebulous morals in conflict over the resources of New Vegas and Hoover Dam. The player character is a courier who has been miraculously revived after receiving a bullet in the head from a New Vegas casino owner trying to get at your character’s mysteriously significant delivery, a platinum poker chip. Your character is driven by the desire for revenge to reach New Vegas, and events he encounters along the way may lead him to either align with one of the armies looming over New Vegas or attempt to forge his own destiny.
Yes, the gameplay is more or less the same as Fallout 3, however there is one major gameplay addition that’s very enjoyable, but might be looked over because the game actually recommends that you don’t use it. The new Hardcore Mode provides some realistic survivalist additions like requiring your character to eat, drink, and sleep, and making it so they cannot immediately heal all injuries on the fly. The game warns you not to adopt such a challenging feature, but the changes do not actually make the game significantly more difficult, and in fact they add to the fun feeling of surviving a postapocalyptic society. If Obsidian had simply forced the player to adopt these changes, this new gameplay element would seriously improve the game for everyone, but most gamers will likely not choose to adopt features that the game itself warns them will be more difficult than they actually are.
So it really is a fantastic game, but for a modern console game it is incredibly riddled with bugs, to a ridiculous degree. I did evaluate the game on the PS3, which Bethesda has historically not given two craps about while porting from Xbox 360 and PC versions of their titles, but that can’t explain all of the constant issues. A player may see in any given few hours of gameplay a scorpion fall out of the air, a giant gecko running in place forever, quests with an NPC that never quite figures out what it’s supposed to do to keep gameplay going, and a nearly controller-tossing number of random freezes. A downloadable patch is of course “in the works,” but given Bethesda’s track record, it may take months for these major issues to be solved, if they are ever solved at all. It’s not exactly game-breaking, but expect to reset your console about fifty times before you’re finished with the basic storyline.
Fallout: New Vegas is still a spectacular game, and the new western setting fits the series perfectly and adds a lot to the experience. Be sure you turn on Hardcore Mode unless you really find you can’t remember to eat and drink at times, and you’ll find this title really is even more entertaining than Fallout 3. And I’ll get right back to enjoying this game again right now, even after the 30+ hours I spent playing it for this review.
Archive
For the game review category
This Game Copy Wizard review will detail the benefits and virtues of this new software program, which allows you to copy games from virtually any system out there, new or old, and make flawless backups. We’ll break down its functions and capabilities, as well as its usefulness to the casual and hardcore gamer.
The first thing we noticed about gamecopywizard was the small, manageable size of their copying software. The newest version of their proprietary game copying software is version 2.3, and the whole download clocks in at just under 2MB. Other developers should take heed of this…bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better. Of all the game copying software we’ve tested, this Game Copy Wizard review introduced us to the smallest and most stable program of them all, while still retaining all the features found in other copying programs.
Before we go further in-depth into the software itself, let’s look into some of the other areas of importance for this Game Copy Wizard review. In addition to the software, we were given a bonus product with our order, Advanced Console Tricks. We’re not sure the book is worth the supposed $30 they claim it is, but it’s a nice little addition nonetheless. We weren’t particularly impressed with the writing on the website, as despite the limited amount of writing on the site, they still managed to infuse it with poorly written and grammatically incorrect writing. This isn’t of great importance, but showed a lack of professionalism.
Lastly, we tested out the website’s customer service by contacting them with a question (not a question we needed the answer to mind you, simply as a means to test out their quality of service). Their response was received within 12 hours, and was personally tailored to us and not a generic response. We were impressed with the knowledge of their customer service staff, and their willingness to go into great detail to help out their customers.
Back to the software itself. We began by testing its compatibility with a wide range of systems. We copied the Sega Saturn game Radiant Silvergun, followed by the PlayStation game Metal Gear Solid. After this we moved up to the next generation of hardware, copying the Xbox’s Halo, the Nintendo Gamecube’s Zelda: Twilight Princess, and the PlayStation 2′s Dynasty Warriors 5. Lastly we moved on to the current generation hardware, making copies of the Wii’s Wii Sports, the Xbox 360′s Lost Odyssey, and the PlayStation 3′s Metal Gear Solid 4.
The copying process was smooth no matter the system or game copied, and we experienced no technical difficulties, which was a nice change of pace from similar programs. Next we sat down to play our copied games. No matter the game or system, we were thoroughly impressed with the results. A good deal of copying software has difficulty with animated sequences and audio, but our copies ran flawlessly, with nary a hitch.
Our last goal for this Game Copy Wizard review was to test out its ability to copy PC games, which also gave us a chance to evaluate the software’s built-in copy protection busting abilities. Again, we walked away impressed with the results. We copied the PC game Spore, which uses the vile SecuROM copy protection. Gamecopywizard sliced through it and copied Spore without any issues, no patches needed.
We walked away from our Game Copy Wizard review thoroughly impressed with the software. It’s backed by some great customer support, free software updates, and even includes a nice bonus. We recommend the software to all gamers.
When you are deciding on which free Internet games to play, you might choose to read some game reviews of the particular free online games and Flash games that you are considering. Game reviews can be useful in helping you narrow down your choices of which games to play, but sometimes they can come with some pitfalls that you might want to avoid.
Although you like to play free games such as Pac Man, Battleship and Tetris on your computer, you likely do not have a lot of extra time to read reviews, because that is time that you could be spending playing the games instead of reading about them. But even so, there are certain aspects that you are looking for when you read a game review. To be respectful of your time, hopefully the author of the review will be concise, and the review will be to the point focusing in on what you want to hear. The point of any review is whether or not the game is any good and why.
Some reviews, you will notice, use a number system which provides an at-a-glance rating for the game being reviewed. But in order for this to be informative for you, you will likely have to read several reviews for games you are familiar with, and see what number they got and if that matches with the number you would give it if you were rating it. Then you will begin to see how closely the written reviews match the number ascribed to it, and how closely they match your particular preferences.
By reading several reviews of games that you already know well, you will also be able to determine if the reviewer really knows the game. The reviewer will hopefully have played the game at several levels so he or she is well-versed with all aspects of the particular game. This will help ensure that you will get a useful analysis when you read a review for a game new to you.
There are several online sites that offer game reviews. Although no longer in publication in a hard copy format, Computer Gaming World Magazine is archived at the Computer Gaming World Museum, and contains articles and reviews concerning online games. 8dimensional.com offers a game review index featuring thousands of online game reviews. Gamespot.com offers a fairly extensive review portion on their site. You simple choose “pc,” and they will take you to your particular game’s reviews. At the beginning of the review it gives a very brief overview of the reviewer’s impression of the game, along with a numerical score. It then gives, quickly, the good and bad aspects of the game. After this, it provides a more in-depth review, with pictures from the game in question along with the reviewer’s commentary. If used wisely, reviews of Free Online Games can be helpful in aiding your decision to play a game or not.