Red Alert 3 & Fallout 3
Well this weekend Mez had bought Fallout 3 for the Xbox and Jode had bought Red Alert 3 for the PC, he was even kind enough to pick me up a copy so we could try out the coop mode on it.
Right i will start off with Red Alert 3, at least that way we can end on a happy note 
So we both had out Red Alert 3 copies installed, loaded the game up, looked nice and pretty on the menu. Ok the art direction is a little different with this game but it looked good, so i went to update as the game was pretty trying to get me to login to some EA online thing. Logged in and couldnt get the patch for some reason, so i had to manually go find the 1.2 patch on EAs site, once i had that installed it decided it would download the 1.3 patch for me... Jode at this point was up to date too and it was happy days... time to acctually test the game out.
Now i wasnt sure about how graphically demanding it would be so to start with i made sure that i only had medium graphics on, we finally figured out how to start a coop match and we were off. First match for China or whoever Mr Zulu is in charge of, and i was faced with what looked like a playstation game. The first in game scene was it scanning over the enemies statues in town and there were some BADLY done trees with what looked like christmas lights on. Oh god it looked bad... very bad... the textures were dull, the trees and buildings looked WAY to odd, like they shouldnt be there. The troops may as well be 5 red pixels... ok ok as Jode said to me when i started ranting about the graphics, they took it a new direction and went for a more cartoony and vibrant sort of feel. Going a different direction with artwork is NO excuse for bad artwork though, the units just looked terrible. At this point i wanted to make sure it wasnt just my graphics, so i whacked everything up to full...
OH DEAR, its the same, ok maybe the sea looked slighly less like bathwater that had been sat out for 3 weeks, but everything just looked saturated and bland. This was the least of my problems, one of the next missions was to create a base, defend it and destroy enemy statues. So i go ahead and make my base, then i made a unit full of the elite troops i had on offer, shinobi... tank busters... those tengu things, the tanks that destory other tanks... I thought it would be easy, i also had some units sat round guarding the base.
Here is where Red Alert 3 really *shined*. I sent my awesome squad off towards a simple enemy structure, then came some tanks... well no worries i thought... ive got troops for any task. Oh how wrong i was, my units all stopped moving as soon as i targetted the tank apart from one or two tanks up front who just kinda wheeled their way towards the enemy, im not sure if they were trying to melee their way through the tanks, but it was embarassing. The other units just stood there watching as my main tank division just rolled towards the enemy getting chunks blown out of them, then when the enemy had destroyed my anti tank vehicles they turned to my other useless troops, luckily 1 troop had the brains to attack the enemy back when they opened fire, however the rest were not as lucky and just stood there to die. Unfortunatly this happened in the base defenses too, enemies would shoot at my troops and they would not fire back unless i specifically told them to, and it would only work properly if ALL troops were of the same type, mixed batilions just had a picnic when engaging the enemy. I tried swapping tactics, i even tried to find some waypoint system to set them to patrol or something, but nothing seemed to work.
Ultimatly RA3 feels like a rushed RTS game with flimsy AI and bad design, on the plus side it has some really crazy units available, like massive 3 legged samurai robots and crazy transformers, but regardless of how you dress up your units, they will still have the combined intelligence of a dead gopher...
Now fallout 3... here is a gem... its like you have just gone down to the shops and you find £20 on the floor. Now i didnt really care too much about the game a few months ago, i knew it was being released and had heard it was going to be good, but after playing stalker for a few hours and not enjoying the whole *open world FPS stoyline explorer* thing, although i think it was mainly down to the text based interactions with NPCs and there was sooooo damn much of it that i just didnt bother reading the missions and ran off towards a waypoint and didnt know what to do.
ANYWAY fallout 3 came into the house friday night, but we waited till saturday morning to play it. The game started off as us being born into the world and designing our character. Then your dad teaches you to walk, and you wander round a bit as a baby, then you grown older and have a party, then older again... anyway you keep getting older until you have finished the tutorial and you come of age and it all goes a bit pear shaped for you.
Then you are thrust out into the post apocalyptic wasteland of DC... and what a damn fine wasteland it is...
First thing we did was turn on the radio, if you are in a post apocalyptic world and you are scared for your life, whats the first thing you do? Yes, tune into the radio and hear your president filling your head with propaganda! Oh he is the man... "Hello Amercia, this is your president John Henry Eden". There is sooo much i would love to go into but there are enough *real* reviews online that explain better, so i will just skim over the game as a whole.
Graphics are superb, the way the ground looks barren and rocky to the way the towns and abandoned settlements look rundown and like they have been surviving by the skin of their teeth in that harsh world. The VATS system is one of the best inventions ever in FPS/RPG games, you just stop time, lock onto a part of the enemy (or friends) body, and it will tell you what the chances of hitting it are, then you just open fire in a cinematic bloodfest.
The storyline is acctually enthralling unlike most other mediocre RPGs these days, usually open world games dilute the main storyline a bit because of the amoutn of quests and alternative storylines available, but this game keeps reminding you of the main storyline, be it the man on the radio updating listeners of your progress in the world, or people in town telling you about how they know things about you and your father. It just does it all so well, and you just find yourself wanting to help people in the world or nuke small areas for some reason.
All in all its a brilliant game, we are only about 10 hours in so there is alot for us still to do, but things are heating up and we have managed to scavenge some pretty decent armour.