So I, like every other red-blooded gaming American, spent some time in the last few weeks playing Fallout 3.  I haven’t spent much time with the first two fallouts, having only discovered PC games much after their youth.  I did pick up the first Fallout something over a year ago, but a combination of poor saves, old graphics, and outside distraction kept me from playing it much, even though I know it’s in the cannon of Good Games Every Serious Gamer Should Play.  I still feel a little bit secretly guilty that I wasn’t so enraptured with it at first blush that I was drawn, nay, compelled to run back to it, finish it, and emerge the other side feeling like I had started as a girl, and left a woman.  Fallout causes these kinds of delirious reactions from gamers.  Given this, with Fallout 3, I felt like I had a chance to redeem myself.  To make up for past Fallout related sins, and to finally, for once, play the same game everyone is playing without skulking away half way through “because it isn’t pretty enough” or “the combat is too hard, and who wants to shoot everyone anyway”.

Alas.

In my defense (or perhaps Fallout’s, maybe both), it WAS damn purdy.  It helps that Dave and I have super shiny new computers and that we can FINALLY run new games on the highest settings.  It also helps that my standard of graphic excellence is WoW with allllllll the sliders down to the lowest mark.  ANYTHING can look pretty after that.  Regardless.  I did enjoy the 1950s thing.  I have always enjoyed the style of Fallout.  I was able to make a female avatar that didn’t make me wince.  All these are good things.  This part is easy.

The next bit is harder.  I… I don’t know quite where things started going wrong.  Part of it is that I am now of the generation of players who are soft. We never got hardened up by years of no quick-saves, of poor decisions ruining hours of your efforts, of machines fritzing out and losing your saved games, of pixel perfect accuracy and the reaction time of a ferret on uppers.  I am the squashy new breed who expects auto-saving, respecing, do-overs, and rainbows and puppies in my inventory, which, by the by, should be more or less bottomless.  kthks.  I know this.  I was not so naive as to go in to Fallout not expecting that I was going to make irreversibly bad decisions with my points.  I knew going in that part of the nature of the beast is doing it wrong the first time so you can go back and do it more better the second.  However, it turns out that knowing and expecting a thing is not the same as then enjoying doing that thing.  So the fact that I muddled along with a poorly constructed character for the whole thing is no one’s fault but my own.

But given all that, I think the thing that broke me finally is how VERY NEARLY Fallout 3 was to being a game I really wanted to play.  It was just that the rest of the game kept getting in my way.  Like, you know, the shooting.  And the dying.  Mostly, I wanted to run around and talk to people and sneaky-sneak in to locked areas and get fun things to sell and… uh… decorate my house.  (sigh).  I wanted to make the silly recipes and be a do-gooder and talk my way through everything so I didn’t have to go shoot stuff.  I also wanted to keep my damn puppy alive.  He refused to let me do this.  So I have the added guilty weight of having killed my pet OVER AND OVER AND OVER again until I finally abandoned his poor, fluffy corpse in the wasteland.  Bethesda, don’t make me kill my dog.  I know pathing is hard.  I get it.  But please.  Also, do not set him on aggressive.  I’m trying to sneak.  And, if I want to send him back somewhere safe, just magically teleport him or something, rather than have him run in to a wall in his feeble attempt to get from point A to point B and get killed in the trying.  All this would be swell.

Anyway.  So, when I was able to do the stuff that I liked, like pick locks and get gear and sneak around and chat with people and use my superior powers of conversation to talk them in to giving me free things and talk them out of needing me to go shoot stuff, I was having a blast.  I could do that all day.  And I’m not unrealistic; I don’t mind a certain amount of combat.  Especially with VATS.  I play WoW after all.  I’m even a DPS class.  I like the pew pew.  That said, it is always a means to an end for me, and I was excited that in Fallout there were so many ways to build a character outside of just being the strongest guy with the biggest guns.  I didn’t realize though, that you still really, no really, need to keep at least one combat style up.  Sneaking does not replace dmg.  Sneaking is in addition to, and modifies the style of, your damage.  Oops.  Dur.

And this is all fine and good, right up until it stops being fun.  Which, for me, were the fire ants.  I managed, through a series of poor auto-save timings, and even poorer real saves, to get myself more or less stuck in the caves with the ants, with dozens above me that I’d have to fight through to get out, and dozens below me that I couldn’t kill to complete my quest, with 2 stimpacks, crappy small guns skill, a handful of shotgun shells, and what little ant meat I could get off of what few ants I was able to kill.  Four hours later, having completed the quest once and then dying to an unlucky shot before saving (sigh), and then retrying and failing a quadrillion more times, I turned off the game and went and cried.  Ok, I didn’t actually cry, but I wanted to.  I was left with the worst taste a game can leave in your mouth, that of having TOTALLY wasted precious leisure weekend hours.

If I didn’t like Fallout at all, this wouldn’t have been a problem. I would have made a rude gesture in it’s general direction and proceed to feel superior to it.  But I do like it.  I want to play lots more of it.  And, I now feel kind of betrayed by it.  Like it was this really nice guy I was seeing, who I thought was totally sweet, and then one night he flips out and hits me.  And I can kind of rationalize away the hurt, but do I really want to go back to an abusive relationship?  No, not really.  He’ll just make me feel bad about myself again.  But not going back and giving it another try, this time with appropriate protective gear and the ability to shoot the shit out of people, well, that just seems petty.  Ok, this analogy is going from bad to worse.  But do you know what I mean?  I want to earn my gaming chops, and I keep hoping that a sort of mainstream, single player PC game is going to do it for me.  And I worry that I’m just not hard-core enough, and that my tastes are way more biased by my experience of gender than I want them to be, and sigh.  I just really want to ace this game and not whine about why it wasn’t fun.  And yet here we are.

In addition (because this isn’t quite long enough), I think it’s interesting that I kept noticing, over and over again, what a Guy game this is.  I think it was so obvious because in many ways, it’s very close to being, well, less Guy.  The RPG aspects and the exploration almost ALMOST take off that edge that, to me, says “developed for a key market audience of men ages 18-30″.  I almost felt like it was developed for, well, me, for example.  And then little things would happen and, oops, nope, we’re back in solid dude territory.  Things like pronouns being wrong in text and audio.  Things like the only sexualized character in the game being a woman who interacts with all gendered characters the same.  And mind you, I have no problem with a little lesbian love in my games.  But I do have a problem when that means that all male characters can only be straight, and all female characters are lesbian.  Give me a male hooker npc too; have him respond the same to male and female characters.  Because that would be awesome.

So, if you made it to the end of my rant, here we are.  I don’t know.  Fallout has broken my heart a little, and it’s at least partially my own fault.  I’m not sure whether I’ll go back to it. I’m just left feeling confused.  Are the reasons I didn’t have fun with it legit?  Should I try harder?  Am I missing the point?  Do I just have horrible taste?  I’m not sure, and I don’t know how I feel about a game that’s causing me this much of an existential crisis either.  But I can say honestly that I’m glad I tried.  I’ll let you know if I take a second stab.

So we ran out and grabbed Warhammer a couple nights ago.  We’ve only put in a handful of hours, but here are a couple of very early impressions centered around the way Mara and I have been playing together:

The Class, Race, and Gender Bugaboo: I’ll let Mara expand on this, but the core annoyance is that she can’t be a female Squig Herder.  In addition, most of the women avatars are not very appealing to her (either super thin, scary, tiny-armored hussies or dwarves.  Not much in between).

XP Drift: This may be because we are new to the game and haven’t figured out the best way to stay together like we have in other games, but PvP seems to skew our XP far more than in, say, WoW.  Even though we’ve been playing together in a group for our 6ish hours, I’ve managed to get ahead by several tenths of a level.  This is a minor annoyance and one we’ll probably be able to get a handle on given some time in the game.

Kinda Crappy on our Older Machines: We have 2 year old budget machines with decent video cards that are at or slightly above the minimum requirements.  We were expecting poor performance and/or needing to run on lower settings, but even on the lowest graphics settings, we get very, very choppy performance.  This could be due to our CPU being very close to the minimum requirement and WAR being a CPU heavy game - we have plenty of RAM and our video cards should be doing fine.  This is something we’ve been looking to address anyway, so we’ll see.

Questing is Good: So far, questing is really fun and easy as a duo.  Objectives are clearly marked, quest items are automatically picked up, and public quests are fun and easy to do as a duo.  We miss some of our WoW mods that track both of our objectives and announce to each other when quests are complete, but hopefully these are possible with WAR mods (haven’t really looked into it yet).

Crafting: We haven’t quite figured out what to do with crafting yet.  From what we can tell, each crafting profession requries materials from two gathering skills.  We will probably end up having me take Salvaging so I can provide Mara with the fragments she needs to makes talismans leaving me with a semi-worthless crafting slot (unless I want to buy all my mats which I really don’t).  Also, OMG bag space issues.

So far, we’re having fun.  Although we also got our pre-ordered copy of World of Goo last night and the hour of playing that may have been more fun than our first few hours in Warhammer.  It could be because Goo is awesome.

So, last night we stumbled upon something really quite compelling.  See the title for the full expansion of AACC.

So, Rock Band 2 has the gameplay mode Battle of the Bands.  These are generally relatively simple little setlists with some constraints (e.g. play these 3 songs, you must have a guitarist, the battle is ranked by your score).  The contests are up for anywhere from a day to a week and you can play them over and over again, trying to beat your best score (though your last attempt is always the one used in the leaderboards).  When you start the competition and while you are playing, you see the score of the next highest band (I know some XBox Live Arcade games use a similar mechanic).  Pretty simple overall.

It’s incredibly fun and very addictive.  It also handles a lot of issues that we run into when playing together: not wanting to compete against other people (don’t want to be bad at the game, don’t want to deal with people in our little world of two), being able to play cooperatively and having that cooperation make us better than playing on our own, and having an objective that is achievable (competing against the next best score, not the highest score).  We can also play on our time since we’re really only competing against the scoreboard, and not some live people on the other side.

Last night we played one battle about half a dozen times (the Shooting Star battle, I believe).  Each time, we got slightly better at the song, went up in the rankings, and just had a blast.  In many ways, we were just competing against ourselves, but you get the illusion of competing against another band while in the song and you get the real overall competition of everyone playing that battle.

Highly recommended, lots of fun.  We’ll talk more about this concept in the future, I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff there.

So we’re (finally) engaged.  I popped the question about a month ago and Mara said yes.  Might still need to get a ring for her (and one for myself as well to buck some trends), but the fact that intent is stated is the most important aspect of it all.

Been super busy - our roommates finally got married at a gorgeous weekend in Montana, big project at work has been sucking up all my time, and the final planning for the wedding was taking up an inordinate amount of Mara’s time.  So we haven’t been up to much of anything relevant for this site.  Though we do keep thinking about it and trying to come up some plans and steps to actually get something done.

Not sure if we’re going to hop into Warhammer before the new WoW expansion due to both time constraints and Mara’s aged computer.  We’re interested in hopping in pretty early in the game but it’s looking like we may not play WAR until later on, sadly.

Rock Band 2 is awesome, however.   The new drums are an order of magnitude better than the first kit, the game interface is tighter, the music is very, very fun.  I’m on board with just about everything positive that’s been said about the game everywhere else.  One of the things I’ve noticed that I haven’t seen much commenting on is that Harmonix really keeps the song charting fresh - I’ve been playing on expert drums and they keep throwing new patterns and ideas at me.  The game seems so simple and I have a hard time imagining what else they can fit into 4 drum pads and a bass pedal, but they keep surprising me and making me learn new patterns with the new songs and new downloadable content.  Overall, super awesome.  We do need a new guitar/bass, so we’re trying to figure out if we spring for the new RB2 guitar or bass, get a second wireless Guitar Hero 3 guitar, or wait to try out the Guitar Hero: World Tour guitars - in general, we both like the guitars made by Red Octane for the Guitar Hero franchise, but we have been hearing a lot of good things about the new Rock Band 2 guitar, so we may give it a shot.  I think it often comes down to personal preference, so we’re hoping to get a chance to play around a display kit at a Best Buy or somewhere at some point.

Also, things are maybe looking like they may slow down a little bit in our lives, so we’re tentatively and cautiously approaching the idea of a podcast again (oh noes I spilled the beans on our project).  I think it’s best if we sneak around the peripheral vision of the podcast so it doesn’t see us and run away like it did last time, so that’s all I’ll say for now.

We’re still here, just not doing a ton of site stuff recently.  Our roommates are getting married very soon and quite a lot of time has been intertwined with that <s>debacle</s> lovely event (just kidding J+T, <3).  I’m also swamped-ish at work with some super cool stuff that I’m really excited about.  Our super sikret site project may be on hold until after that wedding and my project is done.

As to what we’re up to otherwise, we’ve sort of whole heartedly fallen back in love with WoW and have been playing at a good clip.  Our warlock and priest are up to 70 and we’ve been finishing off quests, batteground- and arena-ing, and even went on a couple dungeon runs (including a somewhat surprisingly successful raid to Karazhan).  So that’s a good time.

We picked up Braid on Xbox Live Arcade last night and got through a good bit of that as well (through World 5, I believe).  Pretty awesome game.  Tough and fun puzzles, fucking gorgeous visual style, good music, and a pretty decent ability to controller-swap.  Looking forward to playing that a little more this weekend.  As well as lots of dungeon runs in WoW with our roomie who wants nothing more than us to play with her.

That’s it for now!

Our audio equipment has failed us.  The super secret project we were planning to release tomorrow has fallen on its face.   We have new equipment and shall be delivering on our secret promise soon.

Grr.  More later.

Despite appearances here, we’ve been hard at work on a new aspect to the site.  We’re gettin’ pretty close and are pretty excited about it.

Otherwise, our priest/warlock duo in WoW just hit 53 tonight and we’re having a pretty good time just levelling in WoW again.  We’re on the server we’ve played on for a while so it’s nice to hang out with friends (both real and virtual), play some classes we haven’t played in a long time, and just generally destroy some monsters.

Mara was also out of town for most of this week, so I putzed around in a few other places.  Played a little Team Fortress 2 which is always fun, finally got access to Heavy Assault Ships in EVE and bought my first Ishtar, and spent a little time in WoW.  While it was nice to have some of my own time, it really made me realize how much we do together and that’s it generally more fun when you’ve got someone to play with.

So, we’re now Gamers in Bed.  Got the domain, changed the blog, and we’ve got some plans.

New URL (gamersinbed.com)should be DNS propogating over the next couple of days and hopefully this blog won’t be too broken while it’s transitioning (it might get broked if you visit the site).  I think all old links *should* still work but I’ll be putzing around and checking to make sure it all works.

Keep an eye here for our new project that should be showing up relatively soon…

PS - I may or may not go back through and change the text of the posts to have our real names.  We are doing away with our pseudonyms of Sally and Harry.  If you’re a first time reader and you go back in the archives, you should be able to figure it out.

So, Sally and I bought EQ2 over 2 years ago after we quit WoW the first time.  With the new Living Legacy promo going on, we decided to hop in and see what it looked like so many years later.  Patching and all that wasn’t too bad - we just let our clients download over night.  Character creation always takes us (read: Sally) some time, so we played around with that.  We went back and forth between good and evil, human-like chars or furry chars, and eventually settled on the evil fairies, because, c’mon: evil fairies.  So we logged in with visions of grandeur of toppling heroes and making lives for ourselves in Norrath.

We quit about 5 minutes later.

Now, we know EQ2 is a well-loved game by many.  We are just totally and absolutely unable to get past the UI and visual style.  And I mean totally.  We both logged in, ran around for a minute, picked up our first quest, killed a few monsters, went outside to take a break, and both agreed that we should immediately quit upon returning.  To us, almost everything about being in-game “feels” wrong.

I actually have a lot of similar complaints about LotRO.  Things like floating names above NPCs, the style of the interface windows, the fonts used, and the size, shape, and design of the tooltips always bother me.  These games always tout the “immersion” factor as big selling points, but I find badly designed UIs one of the fastest ways to break immersion.  For me, immersion is more about not really thinking about the fact that I am playing a game so that I can just *play* the game.  Ornately decorated bag panels, floating names about NPCs that I don’t really care about, tooltip dialogs that are badly formatted and huge, and really ugly, badly rendered “fantasy” fonts all really put me off.

We might be back to WoW… again.  We also briefly played with DDO and played a decent little bit of Mythos, so we’ll have more to say on that stuff.  For now, back to work.