"Did you wish really REALLY hard?"

The Doctor Who breakfast draw is now closed.  Finger crossing ensues.

- Sid

Fallout 4: You had to be there.

Well, yes, this is in fact a picture of my Fallout 4 character standing beside a pile of dead people in their underwear.  And well, yes, yes again, I killed them in the game, and, yes, I took their clothing and then I stacked up all the bodies.  But really, you have to understand how the game works...

 

Okay, I got nothing, it's weird. But, honestly, it made sense at the time.

- Sid

Fallout 4: "Survive..."

I'm having a rough time of it right now.  I've just killed a couple of super mutants, but my salvaged power armour is in shreds and its stolen fusion core is almost drained. I can't carry any more weight, I'm dehydrated, starved, and haven't had enough sleep, weakened by an infection and suffering from a minor case of radiation poisoning, low on food, water and ammunition, and my canine companion has been injured so badly that he's gone back to our base to recover because I don't have any stimpacks left to heal him.

My only hope is to sneak between the killer sentry bot on the hill and the nearby Gunner base without running into any radscorpions, feral dogs, ghouls or bloodbugs, eliminate all the raiders at the captured listening post to complete my mission, and then carefully retrace my route in hopes of getting home without being killed and having to start all over.

All in all, just another day in the Wasteland for Fallout 4's Survival Mode.

When Bethesda Games came out with Fallout 3 in 2008, they introduced an innovative open world gaming strategy which has stood the test of time, as demonstrated by the success of Fallout: New Vegas in 2010, 2011's Skyrim*, and Fallout 4 in 2015.

The basic system is simple: there is an overall plot line made up of many discreet missions, combined with side quests and random encounters.  The player initially explores the map on foot, but as new locations are discovered, they can be revisited by instantaneous fast traveling rather than having to retrace the entire route.  Weapons, clothing, armour and supplies can be found in abandoned buildings, purchased from vendors, or looted from the bodies of opponents, and there are a variety of crafting stations so that the player can upgrade their equipment, cook food or create lifesaving drugs. As the player accomplishes different tasks and completes missions, they accumulate experience points that allow them to level up and chose different perks that enhance their abilities or give them new ones.

The different games in Bethesda's library have built on this system in a variety of ways.  Fallout 3 rated your character based on whether or not they were a good person or a bad person, and modified the game's options based on that profile. Fallout: New Vegas introduced different factions that could either be allies or enemies depending on how the player interacted with them, and Skyrim allowed players to chose from a variety of species, and then select a political alignment in the course of gameplay.  Fallout 4 added the option of managing settlements by creating radio beacons to attract settlers and then constructing buildings, beds, water pumps and defensive structures to support the settlement's new inhabitants.

I worked my way through Fallout 4 from the start to the resolution of the main plotline, and then started to replay it so that I could do some side missions that I'd missed the first time by failing to join the Brotherhood of Steel** when I had the chance.  Sadly, after completing the game once, it wasn't as challenging the second time, and I found myself starting to lose interest.

However, there was another option.  I'd been playing at Very Difficult, the most challenging of the standard difficulty settings, but there was still another level:  Survival Mode.

Survival Mode changes Fallout 4 into something which may be a little too close to real life.  The player loses the ability to save the game whenever they want to - the only way to save your progress is to find a bed of some sort and sleep.  And regular sleep is a definite necessity, as is food and water, not to mention that eating uncooked food increases the chances of getting sick.

Fast travel is no longer an option: if a mission requires you to walk across the entire Wasteland and back, you do it the old-fashioned way, no instant jumps.  It's harder to locate supplies to scavenge, and trying to carry more than your rated load capacity will reduce your health and eventually cripple your legs.  Ammunition, which has no weight in the other modes, becomes a definite factor in your burden, and your companion's ability to help you out by carrying things is reduced.

The result of all these restrictions?  A much more challenging and gripping experience which has renewed my interest in the game.
 
Survival Mode requires caution, patience and planning.  Gone is the option of just saving a game if it looks like things might get dangerous, then charging in with the confidence that if you end up getting killed, you can just restore your game and do it again.  There's no more skipping across the entire map to sell a full load of looted weapons and armour to different merchants, and no more jumping to a location with a power armour maintenance rack every time something get banged up and needs repair.  Cooking stations and water pumps go from being somewhat pointless bits of scenery to crucial elements in staying alive, and the random beds, mattresses and sleeping bags scattered around the map suddenly make a lot more sense.

In Survival mode, you carefully select the things you take with you, and keep a constant eye on your surroundings as you travel, because it's very very easy to run into something unexpected that will kill you long before you even get close to your destination.  Finding an empty bed is a triumph, and the allied settlements become desperately sought refuges rather than micromanagement challenges.

Now I find that when I log in to play, I pay much more attention to my surroundings, looking for movement and moving cautiously along the roads and through the forests.  When I could fast travel from place to place, I had no feel for the map, but now I have a keen awareness of what's where, to the point that I'm surprised to discover that certain destinations were actually quite close to each other, even to a person limping along in damaged power armour.

Difficulty management is one of the great challenges of game programming. Too easy, and players become bored; too hard, and players may just give up.***  Ultimately, you need just the right amount of frustration as the final spice required to make a game completely appetizing, and, as with any spice, too much of it results in an unpalatable experience.  I'm pleased that Bethesda was able to add just the right amount of frustration to Fallout 4 in order to suit my personal tastes.

- Sid

* At this point, my gaming snob nephew Chris says, "Actually, Uncle Sid, it's Elder Scrolls V, not Skyrim."

** There are female members of the Brotherhood, but there's no option to ask them how they feel about gender-biased organization names.

*** A gaming experience which has actually happened to me - twice.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: "You will always be my sister."

"Can we put the bickering on hold till AFTER we survive the massive space battle?" 

Gamora, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

And now, my sister Dorothy offers her take on how to pose with the Guardians of the Galaxy.  We welcome your comparative critiques.

- Sid

Gunpla 04: With a little help from my friends.

Arms and the man I sing...

Virgil, The Aeneid, Book I

Two days later*, and I'm back, working on Gundam arms. There are three pages of instructions just for this section - and everything has to be done twice.

As anyone who owns a cat would expect, Jaq the Cat has been very curious about what I've been doing, and he's eager to become involved in the process, in spite of my best attempts to discourage him.

He does eventually make his way onto the table as I set things up to continue working, but I manage to restrain him before any real damage is done other than a couple of relocated sprues.  He's actually a bit scared by the rattling of the plastic - we've speculated extensively as to the events in Jaq's previous life that would have made him skittish about things like this.

After a few minutes of conciliatory chin scratching, I move my disappointed assistant off the work surface.  Cats being cats, this process ends up being repeated a couple of times before our frustrated feline decides that it's easier to just lie on the couch and go to sleep.

The instructions for the arms start off with components that appear to have nothing to do with arms as they are commonly known, but I'm willing to accept that giant warbots adhere to a different standard.  As with the torso assembly, there are rubber pieces that are probably part of the connection and articulation system.

The next bit of assembly is equally mysterious, and considerably more challenging.  After combining some sliding pieces that actually aren't connected to each other, just held between rectangular collars, the instructions tell me to sandwich the results between a pair of plates and a strangely shaped armature.

I did some research online for hints and advice when I originally purchased this Gundam kit, and one of the posters specifically commented that the elbows were the most challenging part of this model. Hopefully that's what I'm working on now, because if there's something worse than this, I'm in trouble. It might actually be easier to do this with full scale metal parts and a crane - at least then there would be some weight to hold things in place.

It seems to require an extra hand, and lacking that** I struggle unsuccessfully with the parts for a little while. I finally figure out a method of setting the large holes in the sub-assemblies over the pins in the lower plate, then use the top plate as a guide for the other pieces.

Magically, it all very suddenly snaps together.

Next, a pale grey piece of armour has to go over one end of the assembly, which involves bending part of the joint that I've just created.  Again, the part seems to suddenly find its place and snap into position.

Thank god that's done! Unfortunately, now I have to do it again.

Fortunately, I have the piece I've just finished to use as a guide, so the second iteration goes much more easily and quickly than the first one.

I've used up my allotment of modelling time for today, and perhaps the month - time to fold the laundry and do some vacuuming.* An hour and a half of painstaking work has resulted in four enigmatic assemblies which will hopefully start to make sense as things come together for the arms - literally. 

- Sid

* Isn't it sad how life makes so many non-geek demands on our time? Over the last couple of days,  I've gone clothes shopping, had dinner with my friend Joe, done the laundry, and otherwise taken care of business.  I've also done some extended computer gaming - after all, man does not live by bread alone.

** This is when the cat's help would actually have been useful, although the infamous feline lack of thumbs might have limited his contribution.

Gunpla 03: "Head and Shoulders, Knees and Toes..."

The first part of my Gundam RX-78 build has been a bit tedious and time consuming, but now I have a feel for how the parts go together. Down side - there are a lot of sprues left...

Surprisingly, one of them is a rubber moulding, which contains some of the parts required for the torso segment.  The assembly of the first element in the instructions puzzles me for a moment - what are these things supposed to be, anyway? - until I realize that they must be shoulders, and the rubber parts are required for the connection and articulation of the joints. I gather that the final model will have a large range of motion, assuming that I put everything together correctly.

Not the least of my challenges in that area is that the instructions are in Japanese, which is why I don't know exactly what it is that I'm building right now. Similarly, I'm certain the sentence with the exclamation point at the top of page 9 is alerting me to something important, but hopefully things will go together as they should in spite of my lack of comprehension.

 

It does go fairly smoothly, although I'm temporarily baffled by how to put the two pieces of the chest together - until I realize that one of them is upside down.  Fortunately, there's a certain logic in the process:  tabs will go into slots, pins will go into holes, and so on.  It's rather like a jigsaw puzzle, where you can tell instantly whether or not you have the right piece to go into a gap.

 

And, like a jigsaw puzzle, right now it doesn't quite look like the box yet.  But it's coming along, the Gundam's torso is beginning to come together as I locate and detach each of the multicoloured pieces from the various sprues. (Obviously camouflage has become irrelevant on the battlefields of the future.)*

I'm momentarily stumped when I can't find one of those specified sprues, which makes me feel like someone who is missing a crucial screw for the IKEA dresser that they're trying to put together. To my relief, I finally locate it - in my defence, it's transparent.

 

The instructions for the head are a good example of the complicated techniques used to hold the parts together. It's made up of 16 parts from six sprues, and I gather that should I wish, I could add an LED to the head in order to make the eyes light up. 

Having seen exactly how that looks full sized during our visit to Japan, I'm a little tempted.  However, it's not an option which is included with the kit, so I'll have to do some aftermarket research.

After the head, I complete the neck module and decide to call it a day.  I'm stiff from sitting crouched over the table for most of the day, but I'm pleased with my progress:  core fighter, chest, neck assembly and the distinctive Gundam head.  Next, arms and legs - and maybe hips.

- Sid

* Which actually makes a lot of sense when you think about it. The sort of complex electronic sensors used on ships like Star Trek's Enterprise would make any sort of painted camouflage pointless.  On the other hand, there was that Star Destroyer that couldn't find the Millennium Falcon when it was hiding right under their noses on their hull, so who knows.

Gunpla 02: Let the games begin.

It's been several months since my Gundam RX-78 model arrived, but I somehow just haven't been able to find the time to start on it.  Part of the problem is that it's quite an intimidating array of parts and instructions, and I feel that it's not the sort of thing that you approach casually.  As such, I've been unable to find an adequate block of time that I can dedicate to the build.

However, at long last an opportunity offers itself.  Karli has planned a weekend away at Harrison Hot Springs with her two sisters and a cousin, and it occurs to me that this is the perfect time to make a start on assembly.  Feeling that I should make the most of it, I end up booking a vacation day for the Friday in order to give myself as much time as possible.

Friday morning arrives, and I bid a regretful farewell to my lovely partner - she's heading out directly from work, so I won't see her until Sunday afternoon.  I have breakfast, make a fresh cup of tea, and take a seat at the official workspace of hobbyists around the planet: the dining room table.

I have my tools ready on my cutting board:  hobby knife, files, scissor style eyebrow tweezers - some of the parts are VERY small - and what I think of as sprue* cutters, although there may be a more official name for them.  I'm a bit surprised to realize that I've owned the hobby knife since 1983 - that's a long run for an Olfa cutter.  I would rather work with an emery board than my selection of battered metal files, but sometimes you just end up using the tools at hand.

How hard can this be?

Opening the box for the first time, I'm a little intimidated by the number of parts involved in the assembly.  When I was in my early teens, I used to build Airfix 1/76 scale tank models, which max out at about 50 or 60 parts.  This model has over 400.

However, it's all done very logically: everything is labelled and numbered, with each sprue labelled by letter and/or number, each part individually numbered, and the instructions clearly indicating which parts are required from each sprue at every step.  It's a snap-together model, which means that at least I don't have to worry about all the problems related to using polystyrene glue.  On the other hand, I expect that there will be some complicated solutions to the problem of holding things together securely.

Bandai starts you off easy by having you assemble the Core Fighter, an integral escape/combat ship used by the Gundam pilot in emergencies.  It's a relatively simple stand-alone piece, and as such it makes a good introduction to the process.

My tea grows cold as I cut, file and assemble the tiny parts.  It's somewhat unnerving - it would be very very easy to break one of these little pieces of styrene.  

Some of the parts are connected to the sprues so that the removal cuts are quite obvious, and it's challenging to file a nub on a flat panel down so that it's invisible without damaging the surface of the piece. Usually you can rely on paint to cover the flaws in a model, but the whole reason for the multi-coloured spectrum of the Gundam sprues to to remove the need for painting, so it's important to do as neat a job as possible.

At one point I cut the wrong part off a sprue and panic a bit - I really really don't want to lose track of part numbers, that's my only line of defense against error with such a huge selection of parts. Fortunately it's a distinctive enough piece that I can recognize it when the time comes, and it's used in the same section of the model.  In a few minutes, it's snapped into place and I don't have to worry about losing track of it.

 

The final challenge is to connect the cockpit to the fuselage.  As initially suspected, there are some interesting solutions to the problem of glueless assembly, and this is one of them: a combination of pin and socket that allows the cockpit to rotate downward when it's pulled out of the fuselage (I think).  Fortunately, my choice of weapons makes it relatively straightforward to push the two parts together - I can't imagine how you'd do something like this without some kind of tool other than your fingers.

With the addition of a transparent undercarriage, the Core Fighter is finished. In some ways, I'm not impressed. I believe that the ship is articulated so that it can be folded up and placed inside the body of the model, but the hinges for the wings don't hold them in place very well.  (Subsequent online investigation reveals that I'm not the only person who is unimpressed by the wing attachment mechanism.)  I'm also disappointed by my own work on the model, the filing marks on the top of the cockpit are far too obvious for my tastes.  Nonetheless, it's complete, and I have a much better idea of how the process of Bandai snap-together modelling works - it's been a very useful warmup exercise.

The core fighter done, it's time for lunch.  One empty sprue, many more to go...

- Sid

* A brief explanation in case there's someone reading this who is unfamiliar with the process: 

Model parts are cast en masse using an injection molding process. The channels through which the molten polystyrene is injected into the mold are called sprues.  Generally model parts are cast in sets and left attached to the sprues, and as such it's necessary to cut the parts away from the sprues to assemble them.  Sprue cutters are a specialized modelling tool with flat angled blades that allow modellers to cleanly cut the sprues without damaging the parts, and with as little remaining plastic as possible left attached to the part itself.

May the Fourth: Shouldn't this have been the ministry of consumer affairs?

And now, ladies and gentlemen, an announcement from the Canadian Federal ministry of transportation:

#Recall All-Terrain Armored Transport the hydraulics could fail in extreme cold causing the #ATAT to fall https://t.co/5fTSLgdPJt #MayThe4th pic.twitter.com/axE5xmIprF

— Transport Canada (@Transport_gc) May 4, 2017

 

Between this and the Stats Canada announcement regarding Wolverine's military records, it just make me feel that we have the right people running things in this country. Let's face it, it's difficult to imagine that anyone in the Trump administration* is making Star Wars jokes today.

- Sid

* A little research reveals that President Trump has (apparently un-ironically) signed an executive order on religious freedom today as part of the National Day of Prayer in the United States. Hopefully that includes the countless thousands of Americans who identify as being members of the Jedi religion - countless because the US Census refuses to recognize them. Given that Jedi is the seventh largest religious group in England with over 175,000 members, and there are about ten thousand Canadians who list themselves as followers, there must be a few Americans who would like to have their faith in the Force recognized. After all, what better day to make that change, Donald?