I’ll be honest; Next week is probably going to be weird. I’m going to try out a few new styles, just to see what the reaction to them is. Leave feedback! The story will still be moving forward, just expect it to look like a different comic.
As you can see from today’s comic, I added a little thing down at the bottom. Why? I don’t know. It seemed a little smoother than the sidebar-that-wasn’t-even-there-on-the-story-pages.
the astute will also notice a change in the resolution of the comic. Why? Because for the most part, the difficulties I’ve been having with comicpress dumping my files was due to me making the comics in 300 dpi, then converting them to illustrator, then back to Photoshop, the doing another layer in illustrator, then merging it with the photoshop document, then finally flattening it, then shrinking the DPI. Honestly, it was hell, and that whole method took forever. It was fine when it was two people working on the comic, but with just me,… it takes a huge chunk of time out my day. So, I’m trying to set it up so I only have to have one photoshop document, and so far, it seems to be working: Comicpress hasn’t fucked up in more than a week.
But, if I’m not working with the huge files anymore, I need to find a happy medium with quality and simplicity. Hence the testing. Leave feedback!
Also, the other reason next week will be wierd is because my brother in california (you know, Skitzo) was hit by a car on wednesday, as he was chasing down a couple of guys who stole his backpack. Essentially he ran across a highway and got hit. 6 lanes of instant death right there. He’s in the hospital right now, getting stapled and screwed back together. I don’t know a terrible amount of how he’s doing right now, but I do know:
A) He’s still alive.
B) His right arm is completely mangled.
C) The driver that hit him was nice enough to call an ambulance after he broke her windshield in the impact.
D) The two guys he was chasing got away. With his backpack. Which had hit wallet, social security, medicaid, diabetes stuff, bank information, soda, etc… basically every personal document you could imagine and his meds. Go figure.
I imagine he’s going to be pissed when he realizes he can’t play video games with the broken limbs.
So, honestly, I don’t feel like devoting a terrible amount of time to the comic for the next few days. I do, however, find the whole thing mostly infuriating but slightly amusing. This is the first time he’s been hit by a car, so I want to throw a losing-your-automobile-impact-virginity party. I don’t think my mother would approve though. Maybe I’ll send him a card instead.
And for those who wonder, I myself have been hit by 18 cars. Or, 17 cars and a bus anyways. But then again, I’m invincible, so HA!
Alrighty, I just finished Fallout 3, and I suppose I should write my opinions about it down here, otherwise this blog will probably go to rot. As such, I’ll probably be writing reviews of any sort of media I watch, read, play, etc. I’ll try to avoid spoilers and what-not as well, but hey, usually the only people who read reviews are people who really really liked or really really hated something anyways, so I won’t worry myself too much.
It was good. Not as spectacular as some people would have you believe, but it really was a good game. But I dunno, my grading system is usually pretty hard; About 90% of the games I play (and movies I watch) are absolute crap, despite how many other people gush and orgasm over them. But, maybe I’m biased. I did go to college for video game design after all. I see wastes of potential or laziness where other people see “cool flashy light thingys”.
The graphics were good, but the animation was clunky. Very clunky. The environments were cluttered, dirty, and everything you could expect from a post apocalyptic wasteland. Add in zombies and mutants,… hell yeah! But even in the wasteland, with all the horrors it may have, I wasn’t really expecting the horror getting stuck inside of things. Which I did. Often enough to make me stop feeling like I was part of a living world, and make me feel more like I was just playing a game on the Xbox. Which I was. Collision detection was a bitch.
Audio was awesome, but repetitive. It got really irritating listening to enemies shout the same crap over and over and over and over and over and over and over. Seriously. Usually you hear the same line about 5 times in the same fight. Except the robots. They have the good sense to shut up most of the time. The raiders on the other hand keep shouting “I’m gonna kill you!!” as if the statement were somehow part of their metabolic process, i.e. breathe in, heart pump, breathe out, heart pump, shout “I’m gonna kill you!”, breathe in.
Audio was awesome though, despite it. The music is the game sets the tone pretty well. Or… at least until you hear the same song 15 minutes later. And really, there’s only one interesting radio station.
Inventory management was a pain. So was equipment. And the 3rd person camera angle… bah. Having the character stand on the left side of the screen was really awkward.
But biggest beef with the game… Telepathy. Oh? But wait 9! There’s no telepathy in Fallout 3! BULLSHIT. I keep walking up to people and for some reason I know things that I haven’t encountered yet. Walk up to a total stranger, and your dialog options are like:
A) So how was the vacation in the Bahamas with your wife, friend Joe who works at the 7-11 down the street with the social security number of 234-56-7890 and a birthmark on his left buttock?
B) You and your stupid vacation! I hate you! I’m going to kill you!
C) I’m leaving.
Now, that would be fine if this total stranger decided to tell you about his vacation. But he doesn’t. His first words to you are like: “Hi, nice to meet you.”
How the hell does the character know about his vacation? And his wife? And his friend joe? And where joe works? And joe’s social security number?!? Answer: Telepathy. It was good in Babylon 5, sorta cool in Heroes, but absolutely, completely, totally uncool in Fallout.
At first I thought that I had just picked up notes that I hadn’t read, but then I went on this big crusade of reading all the notes I encountered. I even started a new character so I could double check and progress along a more reasonable line, but nope. No such luck. The character is freakin telepathic. It really breaks the suspension of disbelief, and put me right back into “oh yeah… it’s just a game.”
On the flip side, I do realize why it’s like that. With all the NPCs and different quest paths, players would get incredibly frustrated to have to do the whole talk to person A, then person B, then person C, then A again, then C again, then B, then finally D so you can get a quest. But my beef with it isn’t just that they’re simplifying the system so it’s not so frustrating, it’s how far the game goes with it. Seriously, some pretty big plot points, twists, surprises were absolutely ruined for me, just because I walked up to a random NPC to see if they had a quest for me, only to find out that they’re actually the person that I supposed to talking to about 2 hours into the other quest I’m on, and have the game boot me forward in the quest, like “Oh, hey! He knows who he’s supposed to talk to! He MUST have played the game before! Let’s just skip ahead!”
Meanwhile, I’m left going “Wait,… what? What did I miss?? What the hell are you people talking about?!? I don’t know anything about this shit! What do you mean go talk to Tom? Who the hell is Tom? The guy I met back in that other town? I haven’t even been to that other town!” Then I’m pissed off and frustrated, because now I’m supposed to go to a town that I should have already been to, but haven’t so I don’t know where it is, so I just wander aimlessly, following the quest marker, when I stumble across another little town with people, then I get caught up in what I think is gonna be a simply quick “Go here. Kill this.” But nope, after it’s over, I suddenly realize that this was actually another part of the original quest I was on, and I just skipped another huge part of it. D’oh! Case in point: Right after I got out of the Vault, I started wandering aimlessly, did a few misisons for Moira, then just explored after I found Rivet City. I did a couple missions, nothing serious, mostly just ran around shooting and looting. Then in one of the places I was shooting Mole Rats, I stumbled onto a Pre-war Virtual Reality simulation. Anybody who’s played through will know the one I’m talking about. And understand why I was pissed when I managed to get out of it, you-know-who was standing there talking about shit I’ve never heard of. After all, I had just gotten out of the freakin Vault. But the icing on the cake there was that my freakin telepathic character knew a whole bunch of crap too.
Lesson learned. When in an open environment, the player isn’t supposed to explore. Exploring bad! Wait,… so why let me?
And that’s why I say its not a great game. It’s good. Better than most of the shit on the market. It will kill alot of hours, and you’ll be happy while playing. I mean, don’t get me wrong, while I complain about this stuff, it’s only a small part of the larger picture, and once I got used to never knowing what the hell was going on, I was happier. Just concentrate on killing shit, and playing dress up with my character and it’s all cool.
Out of my scale of:
1: Avoid it
2: Maybe rent it.
3: Rent it, definitely. Buy it if you like it.
4: Buy it, for god’s sake.
I’d say fallout 3 is a 4, like Orange Box. Just don’t believe anyone who tells you the game will shit gold and cure impotence.
Thing I liked:
- Easy mode was actually easy. Holy crap. Usually games these days mean “Just slightly less infuriating” when they say “easy” as if everybody who plays games has no life, no job to go to, and can just sit there and try the same damned mission over and over again until they “master” it. Too Human, I’m looking at you.
- The story line was good. A little wonky, but I’ll just consider it “quirky” in a good way.
- Conversations with Moira. Laughed my ass off virtually every time. If more of the game had that sense of humor, I’d probably take the game out for a nice dinner and a walk on the beach.
- There was usually a way to talk to a solution to the problems. Unlike in KOTOR and Mass Effect where talking was just foreplay to murder. Yeah, there was usually a way to talk to a solution in those games, but you would have to play through the scene several times to figure out which options it was, as if it was a secret code that nobody felt like telling you because they’re busy trimming their toenails.
- The camera following the bullet right into someone’s forehead as it explodes. As a sniper in virtually every game I play,… Hell yes. Just… Hell yes.
I would have been happier if:
- Collision detection were improved.
- More Gatekeepers when it comes to important dialog. Don’t let me accidentally trigger things I haven’t rightfully progressed to, unless it makes sense. If I just happen to be raiding a bad guy city and discover some slaves that can be freed, the dialog should be “Save us! We’re slaves!” not “Damn! I’m sorry I screwed up! I promise it won’t happen again!”
- More options for setting the camera up in 3rd person. Specifically, the ability to switch the sides the character is on.
- More music. Contract some nerds at a convention if you’re nervous about how much it’ll cost. I’m sure fallout has more than enough fanboys who would be willing to laydown a couple tracks for free. Plus, most fanboys were in the band in school. So hey, get enough together and you’ve got an orchestra.
There’s probably more, but I’m tired of typing.
Well, everything is back up online, and updates should start again on Monday (11/10/08).Why the site overhaul? First, everything was slow to begin with. Second, the files were going all wonky. Anyone who tried RSS or browsing the Archives knows what I’m talking about. Third, having the strips and issues on seperate domains was getting to be a colossal hassle once The Colorist quit. Doubly so when fighting all the filetype problems. Fourth and Lastly, the auto-updating thing for Comicpress and Comicpress Manager (You know, the whole reason for having them on the site in the first place) was broken. Things weren’t updating at all. To actually get the comics up on the page, I had to manually post them.
Notes:
- I’m not going to mess with the style.css for a while. Translation: I’m not messing with the colors anytime soon. Or at least I don’t plan on it.
- Comicpress is still giving me crap about the file types being invalid. Rather odd when every other program on the face of the planet is fine with them. For some reason or another though, comicpress is perfectly fine with the images once i put them into MSPaint and save them. Don’t even have to change anything. But MSPaint doesn’t exactly do the whole “quality” thing. BOTTOMLINE: If you notice some of the images having compression grain, blame MSPaint. And comicpress.
- There’s a new setup here. I ditched the old Comicpress Theme and used one of the new ones. Yay. I was trying to avoid using wordpress and comicpress again when I redid the site, because of the sheer size of the two of them, but I can’t get away from it. Yahoo webhosting evidently has problems with me using content management systems. Not any rules or anything, just the sheer fuckupedness of how their servers are configured.
- No more forums. Maybe I’ll add them again later, but until then, you’re all still free to comment on individual comics.
- No, I’m not fucking with the style.css anytime soon. Deal with it.
- I still don’t know whether or not the auto-posting will work. I should know on Monday. If it’s still broken… well… God save you all, that’s all I can say. I’m about ready to just snap like a slim-jim.
Oooooooo yeah.
