Blessed by the Potato

I really enjoyed Fallout 3. So much so that I think I’m going to reroll a new character and play through it all over again. So even though I may be my own critical self and focus on the parts of the game that freaked me out, I did really enjoy it.

First off, you might as well start by watching the Yahtzee review at the Escapist since he is a professional.

Right, so first off that part about the characters being in the uncanny valley… well, it gets worse. Not only do they stare at you weirdly rigidly when talking, and not only is everyone covered in a layer of itchy-looking, radioactive grime, but they glow. If you talk to a NPC in a dark area you’ll see that their eyes and mouth are self-illuminating. I wasn’t sure if that was a way of trying to make them look more life-like in the regular lighting, or a product of the radioactive fallout, but it was pretty creepy. Plus as photo-realistic as the broken terrain is, the characters don’t seem to ever quite touch the ground.

Ok, to start a little closer to the beginning: Fallout 3 is a hybrid between a role-playing game and a first (or third, depending on your camera preferences) person shooter. You level up, assign skill points, rummage through things, and go on quests like an RPG, but also can fight it out and go for headshots like a first-person shooter. The game takes place in the area around Washington, DC sometime around 2277 — about 200 years after a nuclear war broke out. Things are, to put it succinctly, post-apocalyptic.

My faithful readers will recognize that I have a soft-spot for post-apocalyptic fiction, and Fallout 3 snuggles up in there quite nicely indeed.

The world is broken and everyone is focused on survival, except for the vault-dwellers, who live beneath the ground in massive fallout shelters, largely ignorant to the plight of the world outside after generations of electricity and safe water. Of course, things are starting to run down beneath the ground too, and throw in a bit of a political crisis when your dad (voiced by Liam Neeson) does the unthinkable and leaves the vault. Forced outside to find him (and escape the insanity of the vault’s overseer) you have to survive in the ruins of DC. The game takes itself fairly lightly, with lots of humour around and cutesy 50’s-style cartoons and billboards (and cars with fins), and home-brew steam-powered teddy bear launchers. Highly advanced nuclear powered levitating robotic butlers are controlled by monochrome text-entry computer terminals. There are numerous entertaining small touches to be found throughout the game world.

I found the game to be quite hard at first: resources were so scarce that I would quite often run out of ammo when exploring (and not all that far from town, either), which was doubly damning because early on my small arms skill was not very good so a lot of shots missed their target (for the min-maxers, I have to say that small arms is probably the most important skill to level up). Every half-full clip of ammo was a treasure. On top of that, the world is just run down: the vendors have very poor stock, and are themselves nearly broke, so even if you do manage to load up on vendor trash in your explorations, they may not have enough caps (bottle caps — the currency of the Fallout world) to buy it all from you. And even if you have the caps to pay for ammo instead of finding it, you may find the vendor only has a half-dozen bullets themselves.

Of course, by the end it was one-shot one-kill, and I had a mountain of ammo (though the traumatic experience of the early levels kept me paranoid so I never went anywhere without at least 3 guns that took different bullets and a melee weapon). I continued to play long after I hit the level cap of 20, partly to finish off the main storyline, and partly just because it was fun to explore the world, meet the quirky characters, discover the unique weapons, and set giant mutant ants on fire. It helps that the game world is very pretty (better than most of the characters), though this is also the first game I’ve played on my new PC (all settings were on max).

You can effect fairly sweeping changes in the game world with your choices, one of the biggest of which you face very shortly after escaping the vault (spoiler warning!): you come across a town built around an unexploded atomic bomb. You can choose to detonate it, destroying the whole city and leaving nothing but a radioactive crater behind, which was very pretty to watch. You can be nice and help those in trouble, or you can just bash their heads in and take their stuff. I haven’t tried murdering the characters central to the storyline, but no one else is sacred: you can go on a rampage and wipe out virtually any settlement you want to.

There are a lot of subway tunnels to explore, most of which are mandatory for the downtown DC area (which you will need to thoroughly explore for most quests, including the main storyline). Fortunately, once you’ve navigated the tunnels once, the areas appear on your map for fast-travel (which is a godsend). These parts of the game in particular were a little freaky, I found. Things can jump out at you, and if you find Dogmeat, then his growling in your ear does not help. The game can get pretty gruesome, with bags of skulls, bodies hung from the ceiling like meat, and cannibalism, along with the splatter and decapitation/dismemberment physics of combat.

The game is a little slow at the beginning when you’re in the vault, and then it whipsaws up to what I thought was the most difficult right after you get out: you go from being in this small, contained space with clear objectives to being in this huge, open, visually stunning world to explore, and no direction at all. You have essentially no resources, no “home base”, no allies, very little ammo, and only a few levels under your belt.

My biggest wish for the game is that it had a multiplayer co-op component, I think the world they’ve created would be a really fun place to rampage through with a buddy. Beyond that, I found some of the clipping and character animations immersion-breaking (at least the sentry robots were supposed to be robotic), and the difficulty curve wasn’t very consistent through the game, with few challenges left after hitting level 20 and having a full arsenal. I also found the big guns and energy weapons a little lacking: even in the end game I found very few uses for them (although ash piles were much tidier than gore splatters). The AI isn’t great, and seems to rely a lot on super-speed running if you catch it off-guard, though some (scripted?) encounters feature some enemies trying to flank you, etc. The teammate AI is even worse, they love to go charging in to any situation. I played through the first time without patching, and actually found it pretty stable, with the main exception being the VATS turn-based combat kludge (which I try not to use too often, except to score righteous decapitations or to instantly wipe out one enemy when faced with several). I got the patch and the Operation Anchorage expansion, and it’s been crash city since.

Anchorage is a fun little add-on, focusing more on the first person shooter aspect (you can’t even try to loot the bodies), and it was a neat storyline to play through. However, aside from the power armor and gauss cannon you get at the end, the content’s only good for about an extra hour or two of commie-busting fun. Since my main complaint is that I didn’t want it to end, I think I’ll be getting the Pitts expansion as well when it comes out.

The level editor/mod kit has also been released, so there might be some decent user-generated content coming soon. One thing I would like to see is a “rock climbing” ability — ruined overpasses and waist-high cliffs blocked my path far too often.

I just got back from seeing Jorge (interestingly, it doesn’t rhyme with “George”) Cham of PHD comics give a talk on the Power of Procrastination here at UWO. It was quite a good talk — funny, entertaining, and maybe a little bit inspirational too. If he’s coming by your school, I recommend you stop by (this means you, UBC readers!). There was a bit of time for questions-and-answers at the end, which was to my surprise a little slow (not many questions), so I stuck up my hand and asked if there was an update to the economy and grad school enrollment graph to reflect the recent economic troubles. I got dissed for daring to ask a question of the PHD comics guy while wearing an XKCD T-shirt. It was fun.

Note that this is not the question I had burning in my mind going in, but rather “Who writes Cecilia’s blog if she’s a fictional character?”

Anyhow, take-home points:

-Powerpoint is cool.

-Bulleted lists are cool.

-Those are probably the 2 most useful real-world skills you will learn in grad school.

-Grad student mental health is not good: 95% report being overwhelmed (what about the other 5%?), 67% feel depressed, 10% contemplate suicide, 0.5% attempt it.

-In the US, the average grad student makes $15 more per year than a minimum-wage worker at a California McDonald’s. Based on the new $9.50 minimum wage (next week!), at 48 weeks/year an Ontario McDonald’s worker could take home $17100 pre-tax; a PhD student in our department without an external scholarship gets $15050 to live off of.

-Guilt is a big problem for grad students. Even though we have the freedom to mosey on in to the lab at the crack of noon and run experiments all through the weekend (depending on equipment availability and our own inclinations — or to even blog while running experiments on the weekend — I have someone in the MRI right now, BWAHAHAHAHAHA), the flip side to that is that there’s never a point where you shouldn’t do work, so you always feel guilty when doing something else. At least people with real jobs often get to leave it behind at the office.

-Procrastination is needed since people are less creative when stressed or forced to do something, etc. Procrastination is what you do when you’re doing what you want to be doing (or what your OCD demands you do), so you need those breaks.

-Procrastination is not laziness. Laziness is when you don’t want to so something. Procrastination just means you don’t want to do it now. And of course the whole concept of grad school is one of procrastination: the process of putting off joining the real world. Laziness is something you need to watch out for.

-Eventually something will come along that will spur you to finish: a job offer, a family issue (wife moving, kid on the way, parents’ disappointment), or just getting sick of being a grad student. At that point your motivation will come back and you’ll rush to finish.

-Everyone is eventually in a rush to finish. No one is 100% happy with their thesis. Git ‘er done.

Jorge has a great understated comedy delivery method. He makes good use of his powerpoint slides, but doesn’t rely on them like a crutch; they’re more like a good team. He has good comedic timing and likes to let the audience fill in the blanks sometimes (sometimes we’d yell it out, sometimes just think it and cry). It was a lot of fun. It may seem like I may have stolen some of the better points that stuck out in my mind here, and so now have spoiled it so you don’t need to go… but it was an hour long lecture, so there’s lots more in there and well worth the price of admission. Be sure to wear an XKCD shirt.

The Western Research Forum that preceeded it wasn’t quite what I was expecting. It’s sort of a mini conference on campus where grad student showcase their research. I figured there would be undergrads and junior grad students in attendance as well as members of the public to see what kind of research was going on (and for undergrads, who to apply to for summer research positions/volunteer positions)… but there was nobody there who wasn’t speaking as far as I could tell. In fact, they didn’t even seem to pretend that other people would come, since the rooms we were in were barely big enough to hold the speakers of each session. Since it was a non-specific conference all the presentations were kept quite general so that a non-specialist could follow, and everyone in my session at least gave a quite good, enjoyable talk.

I went into this movie figuring it would be a very juvenile concept comedy (two people get drunk and married in Vegas!) and would be pretty dumb. But my sinuses were full and I just wanted to put something on while I went to the “nothing box”. Now, this opinion was doubtlessly helped by the facts that 1. I had zero expectations for what this film would deliver and 2. I had taken a lot of cold medicine, but I actually liked it.

It was exactly what it was pitched as: a silly situational comedy where two people get hitched and then have to live with each other. There were a few cheap laughs, but they didn’t resort to over-the-top gross-out stuff, it seemed to stay fairly tasteful and funny. And towards the end, it actually turns into a pretty sweet rom-com. It was surprisingly good (not as surprisingly good as Stranger than Fiction or Dan in Real Life turned out to be, but certainly “not bad”, which is way more than I was expecting). I don’t know if I should bother for a movie this predictable, but…

spoiler warning…

… So these two people get married, and win the jackpot in Vegas. Now with $3 million to split they end up going through divorce rather than a quick annulment, because each wants to claim the new marital property. The judge (Dennis Miller) goes on a bit of a rant about how it’s not the gays that are ruining the sanctity of marriage, but people like them who get hitched in Vegas and want out the next week. So he denies the divorce and sentences them to “6 months hard marriage”. If either of them gets caught not making an effort of making the marriage work, they lose their share of the $3 million.

They start off nearly at each other’s throats, playing silly little pranks, and trying to get the other to break the marriage. As can be expected for a rom-com, they start to see each other’s points of view and start falling for each other. Now the point where this movie really started to work for me was right where we can see that they’re actually starting to make it work, and they’re in a hotel room for a getaway, and there’s actually some chemistry, some spark in the air. So as they get undressed for bed there’s this tension, and you figure ok, this is a Hollywood movie, so this is the point where they’re going to sleep together and have a happily ever after. But they don’t — after a meaningful glance, he goes to sleep on the couch, she on the bed. The divorce goes through the next week. Finally free of each other, they then seek each other out again to start over, properly, slowly. I found it to be a very satisfying ending, it seemed a lot more real and meaningful to me than the quick and easy ending that I saw possibly happening in the hotel room.

Carefully picked out of the discount dustbin, Sid Meier’s Railroads! is a fun little minigame to keep yourself busy and relax with when you’re home with a head cold. There isn’t much depth to the game: you have cities with industries and sources of raw materials; build train tracks and buy trains to bring one to the other (and to move goods and people between cities). You can play with just your own model railroad, or compete against others (humans or AI) to see who can become the biggest railroad tycoon first.

While there are maybe 20 different industries in the game, they’re segregated by scenario so you can only encounter 8-10 of them in any given game you play. Like I said, there isn’t much depth to the game: you can choose to deliver to industries and make money on the shipping, or buy them up to earn it manufacturing as well… but not a whole lot to play with beyond that. Whether industrial output grows or not is a function of how long the industry has been active; you can’t choose to pay to upgrade. Sometimes it feels like I should be playing it through a flash-enabled web browser.

The game’s scale is way off: when playing the midwest scenario for example, a single 8-car train stretches nearly the entire 400 km distance from Toronto to Detroit; it’s impossible to route a train from Toronto to Niagara Falls because the “turn is too tight”. You’re constantly battling the terrain in this way, a gameplay mechanic that by all rights probably should be there, but stands out as silly at certain times (trains really don’t have a 300-km turning radius in real life). The biggest complaint I have about the game is that the train routing is really, really dumb. Since routing trains is just about all the game does it’s especially aggravating that it does it so poorly. Each track can only take one train at a time — despite how far out the game map seems to be zoomed from real terrain, you can’t take things like sidings for granted. Each city can only have 3 unloading tracks in it. So once I start having a large number of trains I like to spend the money to build parallel tracks — an eastbound and a westbound lane if you would. I put crossovers through the network so trains can shunt around as needed, and so the two travel tracks can split to the 3 station platforms… and the trains still get stuck. If there’ s a single train moving between two cities in a setup like this, it will invariably take every crossover (slowing itself down — trains move fastest when going straight ahead) instead of just going straight on the clear, open track it was on. Most of the time, the trains will manage to split up and make the most of the 3 station platforms, but not all the time. Every so often you’ll look at a city, see an open platform, and a train just sitting there, perfectly capable of switching over to it, but instead waiting and waiting for the occupied platform to open up.

Laying track goes easily enough: the game automatically throws in bridges or tunnels as needed to get from point A to point B. Most of the time, branching works fairly well… but again, it’s infuriating when it fails. You can click from one track to another to build a connection, and sometimes it just simply won’t see the second track and you’ll be left with an orphan piece running under the track you were trying to connect to. Sometimes, in the brilliance of the train routing, the trains will take this piece of track to nowhere, get stuck for a few seconds, then magically teleport to the other track. So I guess in a sense those “connections” do sort of work… kinda… and slowly.

However, there’s something about watching the electronic trains make their way around the map and tooting their steam whistles that appeals to the child in me.

Continuing with my efforts to get free food from President’s Choice PC Points, I tried PC Organics microwave popcorn, the butter-flavoured variety. It was actually pretty tasty, however when looking at the nutritional information on the side after getting it home I saw that it had 10 grams of fat per serving (50 g). That’s a crazy amount of fat! Sure, it didn’t have any of the weird chemicals associated with other microwave popcorn (just lots of palm oil and butter flavour), but I typically associate popcorn with the lighter side of the salty snack spectrum, but that’s right up there with chips and nachos bad! And I’d rather have the nachos all else being equal, since they’re less hazardous to my gums. Just another reminder that organic does not equal healthy.