"I don't want to set the world on fire..."

According to the Steam™ game management system, I've spent 1,405.4* hours in the post-apocalyptic world of Fallout 4, not to mention extensive untracked time in Fallout 4, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas before switching to Steam™**.  (Sadly, my Fallout 76 online experience has not led me to a return visit.)  

As such, it's safe to say that I'm more than a little familiar with the alternative future of the franchise, which fully prepared me to bring a critical eye to the new Fallout series which made its streaming debut on Amazon Prime Video this week.  To my intense relief, the adaptation is excellent, using all the building blocks from the source material to combine drama, humour, action and violence into a clever, gripping storyline.

For readers unfamiliar with Fallout, it takes place in an alternative version of the United States which diverged from our timeline somewhere in the 1950s. Atomic energy has become a commonplace power source, to the point that even cars are powered by small atomic reactor units.

In 2066, China invades Alaska in order to seize its oil reserves, and eventually the conflict escalates into a merciless exchange of thermonuclear weaponry that destroys the world in 2077, leaving behind a legacy of death, chaos, and conflict. The series is set in 2296, just over 200 years after the disaster.

The opening scene in the first episode is a disturbingly realistic introduction to the end of the world, as mushroom cloud after mushroom cloud rise over the future Los Angeles, after which we are taken to the post-war paradise of Vault 33, one of the underground Vaults created by the Vault-Tec Company to preserve a chosen few survivors whose descendants will eventually emerge to rebuild civilization.  

The writers have chosen to focus on characters from three areas of the Fallout world: Ella Purnell plays Lucy Maclean, who has left her secure home in Vault 33 in search of her kidnapped father; veteran character actor Walton Goggins is the Ghoul, a victim of severe radiation poisoning which has left him a damaged and distorted parody of humanity but granted him near-immortality; and Aaron Moten takes the part of Maximus, an aspirant in the Brotherhood of Steel, a paramilitary organization dedicated to restoring civilization by any means necessary.

As in the game, Fallout uses the naive character of Lucy the Vault Dweller, and her quest for her missing father, to introduce us to the post-war Wasteland and its various perils, monsters, inhabitants and communities. The show does a superb job of evoking the look and feel of the game, and is loaded with background Easter egg references: Vault Boy bobbleheads, laser rifles, two-headed mutated Brahmin cattle, raiders, cannibals, and feral ghouls - not to mention the beloved Dogmeat the dog, a stalwart companion for any quest. 

As with the games, the series has stories within stories, plots within plots, and mysteries within mysteries.  The quest-driven nature of the computer versions translates well to the narrative format, combining a larger overall storyline with smaller sidebar interludes.  The episodes alternate between the post-war plot and a pre-war storyline about Vault-Tec, in which Goggins portrays Hollywood cowboy Cooper Howard before his transformation into a mutated monster.

The writers make full use of the same oddball humour that characterizes the game dialogue - and the same level of violence, perhaps more than expected by some viewers. To be fair, the source material is a first-person shooter computer game, but even so, it's a bit more graphic than the standard television fare in terms of gore.

Based on the final episode, Season Two will take its cast of characters to New Vegas, a logical step from the Los Angeles setting of the first season which will allow the writers to integrate material from Fallout: New Vegas, which is generally considered to be the best of the Fallout game franchise. 

And, finally, the season ends on an appropriate note with Walton Goggins uttering the franchise's iconic motto: 

"War.  War never changes."

Let's hope that's true, at least in terms of future episodes.

- Sid 

* To give some perspective to this, if playing Fallout 4 was my job and I worked seven hour days (with an hour for lunch), five days a week, I've spent about seven months living in the Wasteland.

** I actually started all three back in the days of installing from physical media.  (Oh, sorry - for the younger readers in the audience, games used to be sold on discs - originally floppies, later CDs, finally DVDs - all of which involved switching out disc after disc as prompted by the installer, and then requiring that the first disk to be in a drive for the game to run.)

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.

Virtuality 2: Fallout 3

Was it Laurie Anderson who said that VR would never look real until they learned how to put some dirt in it?

William Gibson, Disneyland With The Death Penalty

To my surprise and disappointment, I've just reached the conclusion of Bethesda Softworks' Fallout 3, the current version of the Fallout game franchise.  Based on my reactions, you might think that I didn't enjoy the game, but my surprise and disappointment were at the fact that the plotline of the game had reached its climax - in my mind, I was far from finished playing. 

In the first post in this series, I mentioned virtual realities and the fact that millions of people now spend a lot of time immersed in some digitally manufactured world or another.  For the last couple of months, I've been one of those people as I crept through the wreckage of Washington DC in 2277, and wandered the blasted landscape that surrounds it.

Fallout 3 is set in a future that results from an alternative America, an America that seemed to have stopped developing culturally in the middle of the last century.  There's a 50's aesthetic to everything: buildings, weapons, robots, even hairdos.  It's especially noticeable in the wrecked cars that dot the landscape, which explode if shot, leaving behind a legacy of radiation - apparently they're powered by uranium rather than premium unleaded.  This design aesthetic is matched somewhat by the cultural feel of the game, with its rampant anti-communist sentiments and reliance on justice from the end of the gun.

In this world, it's a war in 2077 with the Chinese communists which has led to the downfall of society. The player controls a character who has been raised in a fallout shelter, Vault 101, but who leaves at the age of 19 to follow his father out into the unknown radioactive world outside.

And that was the part of the game that impressed me the most, the almost endless blasted wasteland that the area around Washington has become.

For any readers who are unfamiliar with the basic first-person shooter paradigm, the action generally takes place in what is generally referred to as a dungeon-based system, derived from the venerable Dungeons and Dragons tradition. It's basically rooms - admittedly, rooms of differing sizes and dimensions, with stairs or hills or elevators or windows or walls, but essentially rooms.  You walk in HERE, and you exit THERE.  Games like Halo have expanded the landscape, but essentially one follows the path laid out by the designers.  You kill everything in the way, find the exit, and you're on to the next set of rooms, never to go back.

Fallout 3 has its share of "dungeons" in the form of caverns, subways and buildings, but they're all part of a huge area known as the Capitol Wasteland.  The Wasteland is a vast, sprawling interface between locations, marked by burned buildings, collapsed freeways, pools of toxic radioactive waste, giants scorpions, and the occasional distant thud of a boobytrap explosive being triggered.

The scenery is marvelous.  The game takes place over time, and so the player sees the Wasteland at all times of the day, from dawn to midnight, and the lighting effects match all of these time perfectly.  If you come over the crest of a hill, the sun will get in your eyes and blind you, and the night time landscape is a flat mix of bluish grey that effectively conceals all sorts of dangers.  Dustdevils swirl over the shattered pavement, and the wind stirs the dried grass as you walk through it.  Streets and buildings are littered with the detritus of the American Way of Life:  lawnmowers, cups, empty bottles, and a thousand and one other items to be salvaged and sold for the currency of choice - bottle caps.

It's not an endless landscape, one does eventually discover the borders, and a critical eye will spot that there is a library of stock elements that sometimes repeat - note the identical mirror-image trees to the left in the picture above.  But even with its limitations, the Wasteland is an astonishing creation in terms of size, variation, and unpredictability.  Roving bands of mutants or raiders can appear at any time, and it's never possible to return to a location without the possibility that the enemies that were disposed of during your last visit have been replaced by new and different challenges.

The other element of the game that really set it apart for me is the moral compass that it presents. From the very early stages in Vault 101, every action and interaction, every choice and decision, has its consequences in terms of karma.  Are you polite or rude at your 10th birthday party?  Do you speak with Old Lady Palmer or ignore her to harass people for gifts?

This approach continues when you enter the outside world and are faced with more significant moral challenges. Most empty houses are unowned, and as such the possessions therein are up for grabs.  Enter someone's home or business, and you can still take things, but your karma diminishes and you may be shot by someone - or you can shoot them and take whatever you want.  If you find a bound captive after killing some cannibal mutants, do you free them or ignore them?

Apparently I'm quite a good person at heart.  I killed hundreds of people, but they were all evil.  I looted scores of houses and buildings, but they were all empty and ownerless.  I freed slaves, refused to become a hired killer, and gave water to the beggar outside of Megaton, the town built around an unexploded atomic bomb - which I defused to save the inhabitants from radiation poisoning instead of blowing it all up for 500 caps.

Having finished the game with a ranking of "Saviour of the Wastelands", I'm a bit tempted to go back and play it again as an absolute bastard.  If nothing else, I'd like to find out what the consequences are - it would sadden me deeply to discover that it really doesn't matter.

- Sid

 

"Barren, silent, godless."

On the far side of the river valley the road passed through a stark black burn. Charred and limbless trunks of trees stretching away on every side. Ash moving over the road and the sagging hands of blind wire strung from the blackened lightpoles whining thinly in the wind.

- Cormac McCarthy, The Road

I've just finished reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and I was startled and impressed. So much post-apocalyptic fiction either feels a need for a ray of hope, or fails to believably address the realities of the end of our civilization: McCarthy's grim, ashen future does neither. It is a dark and plausible window into what life might be like in a worst-case scenario.

Science fiction has an almost complete claim on end-of-the-world stories. Fantasy will sometimes address the topic - those of you who haven't read the Narnia books are in for a bit of a shock when they adapt the final volume for the movie screen - but for the most part apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic tales are the province of SF.

But what do we mean by the end of the world? Very few such stories deal with the destruction of the planet itself. In our near-infinite hubris, what is generally considered to be the end of the world is really just the end of humanity, which is not the same thing by a long pitch. (Mary Shelley of Frankenstein fame breaks the ice for this sub-genre of science fiction in 1826, with her novel The Last Man, wherein a plague devastates humanity.)

The first post-apocalyptic novel that I can remember reading is Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank, which I purchased through the Scholastic Books catalogue when I was about ten or eleven. (I still own that somewhat battered text, although I see that I've had to tape the spine a couple of times.) Originally published in 1959, it's a fairly conventional tale of nuclear war and its aftermath, a popular topic for that period.

I recall enjoying it when I first received it, but in retrospect I'm amused by the almost positive picture that it paints of the aftermath of a thermonuclear exchange. Much of the United States is destroyed, yet the protagonists, located in Florida, don't suffer from fallout, nuclear winter, starvation, or any sort of degradation. A few cardboard characters die tragically, but for the most part the novel portrays the lives of the survivors as a quiet but optimistic struggle, complete with fresh-squeezed orange juice.

In sharp opposition is Nevil Shute's On the Beach, written in 1957. Shute's novel takes place in Australia, the last part of the planet uncontaminated by fallout after a massive nuclear exchange. But this is only a temporary respite: the invisible cloud of airborne death is gradually making its way south, and slow, lingering death is inevitable. However, a thoughtful government has come up with a solution: mass-produced suicide tablets.

The novel portrays a response to inescapable doom that seems depressingly accurate. Characters become alcoholics, take refuge in complete denial, or indulge in high-risk distractions such as suicidally dangerous car racing. In the end, the fallout cloud arrives, radiation poisoning begins to have its way, and everyone takes their pills and dies. The novel ends with an orphaned American submarine making its way into the open sea so that the captain can scuttle his vessel - and kill the crew - in quixotic obedience to military regulations.

The Road takes a different approach. It tells the story of a father and son wandering through the ashen remnants of the world. The nature of the catastrophe is never specifically articulated, there is little backstory, and the father and son are left nameless. All of the detail is reserved for their struggle through the wasted landscape, and how that brutal struggle has molded and in some ways crippled their relationship.

This sparse, masterful narrative, written in McCarthy's signature punctuation-free style, pulled me in completely. I can imagine that this might not be the case for everyone, depending on your background: for me, the evocation of memory, of walking through barren, leafless trees in rain and snow, of monochrome landscapes and no sounds but those of the weather, was complete.

This is in no way a cautionary tale - the anonymous nature of the catastrophe leaves no room for sermons or cries of "Alas!". The equally anonymous nature of the characters allows anyone who reads the novel to slip into their worn shoes and stinking clothing, to see themselves as starving pilgrims without a destination. In spite of that Everyman structure, I'm uncertain about recommending this book to everyone. It's one of those books that is more easily described as impressive or admirable than enjoyable, and that may not be the sort of thing that people are looking for as we enter the holiday season. However, for anyone who does embark on The Road, I can guarantee a unique literary experience.

- Sid

Merch 2: Vaulted.

When Karli and I were planning our stop at Funko headquarters in Everett as part of our recent trip to Seattle, it occurred to me that it was the perfect opportunity to get the matching Lone Wanderer to go with the Fallout: Power Armor figure that Karli had given me as a Christmas gift. 

Sadly, a little research on the Funko web site revealed that both figures had been  Vaulted*, which means that they are no longer in production.

My first thought at this piece of information was: Oh well, at least I've got one of them - and the cooler looking one! 

My second thought was: Damn...obviously I should have left my gift in its packaging to preserve its MOC (Mint On Card) value.  What have I done? **  

My third thought was to shrug and get on with my life.  After all, we're talking about polystyrene toys here, it's hardly the end of the world (no pun intended) to find out that they're not being manufactured any more.

Aha, never say never.  I still don't know if she had advance knowledge or not, but Karli almost demanded that we pay a visit to Golden Age Collectables, an excellent comic book and collectable shop with a comprehensive selection which is located at Pike Place Market.***  As we wandered about the store, we stumbled across the Lone Wanderer figure in their inventory - how could I not buy it?

Both the Lone Wanderer and the Power Armor stand up well to a close inspection:  they're quite detailed, accurately modelled and well articulated.  However, I had the same problem with both of the figures.  As I've already noted, it is not easy to get them to hold onto their supplied firearms.

So now I'm the proud owner of both Funko Fallout figures - and yes, they're both out of their packaging, my sincere apologies to my heirs for ruining their inheritance.  If you're very upset, feel free to drive to Seattle and buy your own - they still had four or five of the figures left in stock at Golden Age. 

  - Sid

* This is unintentionally funny - the Fallout franchise is based around characters who have survived the nuclear holocaust in an alternate history United States by sheltering in underground shelters - called Vaults.

** Seriously, though, that's no fun.  As The Big Bang Theory's Penny said about her virginity, it's a lot more fun to take it out and play with it.

*** There's a sister store on Granville Street in Vancouver.

I know, some people decorate the tree.

Has everyone had a happy holiday season?  Personally, I spent most of the night before Christmas trying to find a way to get my brain back into my head.

Perhaps this requires some explanation...

Having somewhat unexpectedly finished off Arkham Asylum, I thought it might be fun to revisit Fallout New Vegas (the sequel to Fallout 3) with the aid of some downloadable content, or DLC as it is more commonly known.  Personally, I think that DLC is one of the best innovations in gaming for quite a while, allowing game developers to easily add value to a game purchase over time without having to develop a whole new game engine - or having to invest in packaging and disk burning, for that matter.

I purchased two additional modules for FNV and started out with Old World Blues, a visit to the Think Tank at Big Mountain, a hidden scientific base originally dedicated to pure research which later became involved in weapons development as part of the war against Communism.

After the transition from New Vegas, I awakened in the main dome only to discover that while I was asleep, the disembodied brains making up the Think Tank had shared the wealth by removing my brain as well.  Even worse, when they weren't paying attention, one-time Think Tank member Doctor Mobius had somehow stolen my brain and taken it to his dome in the Forbidden Zone.

I eventually fulfilled the main quest for the module by defeating the evil Doctor Mobius and his robot scorpions - well, to be fair, the overly confused and not terribly malicious Doctor Mobius - after which he generously offered to let me ask my brain if it wanted to be reunited with its body.

Of course, my brain wasn't interested, and I was required to find a way to convince my wayward cerebellum to return to its home in my cranium.  Which might not have been too bad until I discovered an unexpected glitch in the game which stuck my brain in a loop of reminiscences about shared memories (if one can share memories with their own brain...anyway, you get the idea.)

But let me tell you, whatever the challenges of overcoming my brain's distaste for life in my body might have been, they were nothing compared to the challenges of getting the damn game to function properly, a challenge made even more difficult due to the need to reboot the computer every time the program started to loop.

The down side of the sort of freedom offered by an open world game like Fallout is that it's impossible for game developers to anticipate every possible configuration that a player might create, and as such it's not uncommon for bugs in the software to prevent players from accessing certain portions of the game.  Generally, there's only one solution:  reload a previous save of the game and change as many parameters as possible going into the nonfunctional area.

So - back out into the crater containing Big Mountain to kill some more of my fellow Lobotomites (I wasn't the only visitor to be relieved of their grey matter) until I leveled up and felt that I could take another shot at the buggy brain conversation. To help load the dice, I did everything I could to alter the parameters before initiating the conversation with my brain: dropped some weapons, loaded some Intelligence and Persuasion modifiers, and even stood in a different place in the dome.

And then, after all that, although I managed to get past the problem and my brain finally agreed to rejoin its body, I unwittingly went through the wrong exit at the end of the game and launched the "He decided not to restore his brain" conclusion.  At which point I wrote the whole thing off as a lesson in humility, and left my brain in a bottle.  And you know what?  There were no problems starting the next module without a brain.  This may well be some kind of larger editorial comment on computer games - or at least on the players.

 - Sid

Fallout 4: The Life Aquatic.

As part of my Survival mode replay of Fallout 4, I've also been exploring parts of the map that I just didn't get to previously, such as Spectacle Island*, located in the ocean to the southeast of the city.  Because I'm unable to fast travel to locations, I've also been using bays and lakes as shortcuts to speed up my travel time.

As a result, I've been spending a lot of game time underwater - which, quite frankly, creeps me out.  I had a bad experience with water as a small child, which has left me with a lifelong aversion to swimming.  I realize full well that I'm just looking at pixels on a screen, but my chest tightens a bit whenever I jump into a body of water and the weight of my power armour pulls me down, down, down to the bottom.

It tightens even more whenever I find myself forced into deeper water for any reason - it's one thing to enter the ocean by walking into the water from a beach, a completely different thing to discover that, in order to make your exit, you have to detour deeper to find a path out of a shipping channel.

Granted, if you stay underwater long enough, your armour will eventually run out of air (which, again, creeped me out more than a little the first time it happened and I realized that I was in trouble) but there's also an upgrade perk which allows you to breathe underwater, so now that I have that, presumably I could spend as much time as I want marching around in the wet.

Unfortunately, the game programmers haven't done very much to make it worth my while.  There's a bit of seaweed, some sunken cargo containers, the occasional ditched aircraft or drowned house, at least one suit of submerged power armour, and my trip to Spectacle Island revealed massive enigmatic pipelines running under the water, but that's about it. There are amphibious monsters in the game, but I haven't run into anything dangerous under the water, all of my encounters have taken place in the air.**  In fact, it's not even possible to deploy weapons when submerged.

If anyone from the game development group at Bethesda Softworks is reading this, I'd like to strongly recommend that they change all that. Making the underwater environment as fully featured as the land would be a huge opportunity to add additional depth (no pun intended) to the game.

As hinted by the appearance of dead fish and beached mutant shark-dolphins on the shoreline, it would be easy to create an underwater ecology to match the surface one.  Whereas on the surface the player harvests plants and shoots animals - either for food or in self-defense - the submarine survivor would be dredging up seaweed, prying open shell fish, and defending themselves against whatever undersea menaces the creative minds in game development could come up with.

And, obviously, there would have to be an armoury of subsurface weaponry:  spear guns, tridents, and so on, as well as modifications to the existing catalogue of surface weapons to allow underwater usage.  (After all, a knife is a knife, whether you're on land or under the sea.)

To make it even more involved, the concept of underwater settlements would be an interesting addition.  Whereas on the surface, settlements are restricted to certain areas, the oceanic equivalent would be abandoned undersea bases which the player would have to pump out, supply with oxygen, and equip with defenses against pirates or aquatic creatures. There could even be one or two of the experimental Vaults that sheltered a selected few from the atomic holocaust - perhaps one with a secret tunnel connecting it to another Vault located on the mainland.

The creation of submarine wildlife would be simple. Instead of birds, there would be fish, the amphibious mirelurks would have a larger role as we discovered their underwater nests and communities, and the reptilian deathclaws would only need gills and fins to make the change to life in the ocean.

Frankly, I'd like them to stop there.  As we go further from land, the bottom drops away to vast dark gulfs, alien to light and warmth, where unimaginable horrors may lie in wait...

Seriously, the underwater parts already make me nervous, I don't need to have nightmares.

- Sid

* An actual island near the real-world Boston.  Thompson Island, located closer to the mainland, didn't make the cut for the game.

** Although  I do seem to recall being attacked while wading around in the sewers in Fallout 3.

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

World Building.

Although The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has been available since the end of 2011, I didn't bother picking up a copy of the game until the end of last year*.  And even then, I didn't start playing it right away - after all, I'd already played Fallout 3, which was also produced by the game developers at Bethesda, and as such I assumed it would just be a fantasy version of the same game.

Which is in many ways correct, but in saying that I do an enormous injustice to Skyrim and the unique, detailed environment that it offers to its players.  Fallout 3's blasted nuclear landscape was impressive, but Skyrim is astonishing in its evocation of the real world.

Driftwood, fallen hollow trees that have started to rot and grow moss, flickering torches, stumps from cutting timber, cloudy days, skiffs of dry snow blowing off the cobbled roads, textured slabs of stone in a city square, the Northern Lights flaring against the night sky, the shadow of a circling hawk rippling over the ground below, ferns at the side of the roadway, that peculiar greyish colour that snow gets when it's been trodden down into a path, the white noise of a waterfall as you pass by, the glint of light on the rippling surface of a lake, tattered banners fluttering against stone columns, grass swaying in the wind, worn grey logs in a makeshift bridge, curtains of rain sweeping across the heather, and on and on and on.

I did over 250 screen grabs for this posting - at which point I told myself to settle down - but that number is indicative of the sheer variety of the world that the game designers have created.  The template I use for this blog doesn't support galleries or tables, so I built something in HTML that would let me post some kind of representative sample of those hundreds of images in an attempt to illustrate just how amazing and varied the environment actually is.

If you take the time to click on any of the thumbnails for the full size image, remember that these views of the Nordic province of Skyrim are all taken from within the game as I played it - this is the actual environment that the player experiences as they battle dragons and complete quests in the process of discovering their destiny as one of the Dovahkiin - the Dragonborn. My character** has walked all these paths, climbed these hills, crossed these rivers, entered these houses.

I have to admit that it's not perfect. Skyrim spans hundreds of virtual miles, and when you're filling that much territory, something has to give or else players would need the sort of computing power that the Enterprise uses for the holodeck just in order to get the game to run. A close look at the trees and stones reveals that they're actually not that detailed, and there's apparently some Nord equivalent of IKEA™ that supplies furniture in bulk to the inhabitants of Skyrim, based on the similarities of beds and tables and chairs and so on. 

But ultimately, none of that matters when you're playing the game - it's a seamless, incredible illusion.

Of course, when you have that much going on in a program, mistakes do happen, as per my discovery of the rear half of a horse sticking out of the battlements of a captured fort.  At least I hope it's a mistake - either that or the game is making a very pointed comment about my gameplay.

Steam™, the online game hosting and management system from Valve which has changed the face of desktop gaming since its introduction in 2002, informs me that so far I've spent 99 hours wandering the varied landscape of Skyrim.  When you think about it, that's an impressive endorsement of the value of the game.  Skyrim cost me $29.99, which is more or less twice the cost of a two-hour 3-D movie, and it's provided me with almost 100 hours of entertainment - and I'm not finished. That's a pretty good return on investment for thirty bucks.

- Sid

*If you want to buy a computer game at half-price, all you have to do is wait about six months.  Not only do you save money, but other people get to test it, deal with the bugs, and let you know whether or not it's actually worth buying.

** My character is named Yendis, which has about the right sound for a fantasy game, and has been a convenient go-to for my fantasy alter egos since I was about ten.

P.S. Oh, and this is Lydia.

Lydia was assigned to me as a housecarl by the Jarl of Whiterun near the start of the game, and although I've had numerous chances to change companions over the course of events, I've developed a certain affections for Lydia, or Lyds, as I call her.

On one hand, Lyds has saved my life on innumerable occasions; on the other hand, if you're looking for someone to jump in front of you at the exact moment that you fire an arrow, charge ahead and attack a giant when you've decided to take the long way round and avoid a fight, or just stand in a doorway and keep you from getting out of a tent for ten minutes while you try to figure out how to get her to move, Lyds is your girl.