So, some crybaby wrote a letter to the Washington Post describing his distaste for the Fallout 3 ads in the D.C. Metro, according to Shacknews.  The ads feature a war-torn and decaying future vision of Washington D.C., where the game takes place.

“The people of our city do not need a daily reminder that Washington is a prime target for an attack,” wrote Joseph Anzalone, who was probably wearing a diaper at the time.  “We do not need a daily reminder of what our worst fears look like.”

He continued, his face red and streaked with tears:  “The ads should be removed, and the appropriate office at Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority should be directed to exercise better judgment regarding what can be displayed in our transportation system.”

Wahhh,” he added.  “Wahhhh wahhh wahhh. I’m a whiny asshole who has nothing better to do than complain about video game ads.”

The article does not mention if he stopped crying after being given a lolly.

I spend most of my workday wishing I was home playing games, but somehow, when I actually have the time to play them, I tend to do other stuff instead.  Weird.

Award-Winner “Tom” Francis, however, has been playing  Far Cry 2, and rather than just griping about the things he doesn’t like about the game, he’s made a great post about what he’s found lacking and what would have made the game more enjoyable for him.  It’s a thoughtful post with a lot of great ideas, and it’s even drawn the interest of Clint Hocking, Creative Director of Ubisoft.

You know, I’m pretty good with predicting things on this blog, and when I read Tom’s post I came up with another prediction, even before I saw Clint had commented on it.  We’ve recently seen some game journalists get recruited to game development:  it happened with Jeff Green and Shawn Whatsisface from 1up.com a couple months ago.

My prediction: Tom Francis is going to get snapped up by a game developer in the next few months.  He’s a smart guy with good ideas and a real passion for gaming.  It would suck, to be sure, as I’d really miss his game writing, but on the plus side, hey, maybe he’d  get to hand-pick an assistant.  Not naming any names, but maybe it’d be an American with a blog that rhymes with 1blort.

Did this just happen?  How did I not know this?  I had it in my head I’d have to visit a store to buy Fallout 3, but no, it will be available over Steam on October 28th.  Friggin’ awesome.

EDIT:  There are some trailers up now, too.  And a few more to come, looks like.

EDIT:  It’s available for pre-purchase already!

EDIT:  Official announcement.

EDIT:  Again, dates are for North America.

Commenter “Blob” posted a fix for the fake widescreen issue in Far Cry 2.  I haven’t test this myself yet, but if the cropped screen is bothering you, as it is me, give it a try and let me know if it works in the comments.  The fix was created by “Racer_S” of the Widescreen Gaming Forum.

You can download the fix right here.

Played some more FC2 last night.  Some bullet-pointed thoughts to celebrate all the bullets in the game, but mainly because I’m too lazy to write proper paragraphs.

• They did a great job with the world’s clock, the weather, the sun rising and setting, the night and day system, all that.  The noonday sun feels especially harsh after playing a night mission.  It just feels hot out there.  The days are really long and you tend to not notice how the lighting changes unless you’re really paying attention or you sleep for a while in the safehouse.  I love the timelapse effect when you sleep for a few hours.
• Don’t ever pick up a fallen enemy’s gun.  They jam more than jammie-clad Jamiroquai in a jam factory in Jamaica.  Last night I was in a gun battle that consisted of me basically shooting one guy, my gun jamming, grabbing his gun, shooting another guy, my gun jamming, grabbing his gun, and so on.  I must have gone through twelve guns in that fight.  The last two guys I had to kill with my machete.  I also had a sniper rifle explode in my hands when it got too damaged.  Which was cool, but, sniff.  I loved that damn sniper rifle.
• I’m starting to think there’s a bug that does not allow for a pause between sentences when NPCs talk.  A lot of chatter from enemies last night went “Hey do you hear something what’s that I see someone hey there he is where’d he go who is he I think he’s CIA he’s coming for someone he’s coming for you let’s get him come on let’s go I’ll cover you there he is you’re dead we’re gonna kill you look out run where is he where’d he go I can’t see him get over here” and so on.  Everyone talks very quickly in general, as Tom has noticed.
• I threw a Molotov cocktail at a guy.  It hit him square in the face.  He seemed annoyed but it didn’t set him on fire.
• Respawning guards at checkpoints are getting annoying.  Got a mission, drove through a checkpoint on my way to the arms dealer, killed everyone.  Went to arms dealer, got weapons and ammo, went right back past that same checkpoint.  Everyone was alive again.
• You can’t seem to accept more than one mission at a time.  That sort of sucks, since if I’m already crossing Africa to do one mission, and then crossing it again on my way back to get paid, it’d be nice to get a couple other objectives done along the way.
• Blowing up stuff will never get old.  Took out one vehicle with an RPG and the resulting explosion blew up three other vehicles.  One was mine.  Worth it, though.  At one point, I raced my boat past an occupied bridge, hit land, jumped out, and turned just in time to see an enemy rocket sizzle by just under my chin and hit my boat.  Kablooie.
• I chased down a gazelle and ran it over with my car.  Then I felt bad.  I’ve run down probably forty humans but not felt bad.
• Saw an in-game beer ad on a billboard.  Didn’t bother me — the billboard looked dirty and the ad looked old and faded, so it fit in pretty well. I don’t think it worked, though — I didn’t have a beer after seeing it.
• My rescue buddy, last seen saving my ass every fifteen minutes, died somehow.  I don’t know how.  He seemed fine the last time I left him.  Now I need a new rescue buddy.
• Pet peeve from every FPS ever:  when an enemy is a mile away shooting at me with a shotgun. Switch to pistol, you dope.  You’ll never kill anyone that way.
• I wish there was a way to throw a Molotov over your shoulder while driving.  That would solve my major irritation with the game: being endlessly chased by another vehicle.
• Enemies should retreat sometimes.  Standing in my jeep, gunned down three guys with the mounted machinegun.  The fourth, who witnessed this all of this happening right in front of him, apparently thought my luck couldn’t possibly hold out and ran right at me.  Now he’s running right at Jesus.  In heaven.
• There’s a town in the midst of a cease-fire.  I love the NPCs there.  They’re suspicious of you, make nasty remarks, casually yet pointedly unholster their guns when you’re around, and feel far more threatening than the guys in the game who shoot you on sight.
• I wish for just one RPG element: allow me to get better at sprinting.  I’m a smoker who never exercises, but even I can sprint more than five seconds without my vision blurring.
• Man, I’d really like a beer right now.  Wonder why?
• So far I have not seen a single mutated gorilla monster.

A woman who was virtually married in the online game “Maple Story” virtually killed her virtual husband after he virtually divorced her.  She was arrested — not virtually, but for real — after accessing his account without permission and killing his character off.

Apparently, she was angered when he ended their e-marriage without so much as an e-mail.  Their virtual divorce, which he probably enacted by using a drop-down menu or hotkey, prompted her to access his account and e-slay his ass.  Talk about ragequitting.

The article doesn’t say how she killed his character, unfortunately, and I don’t know how the game works enough to posit a guess.  Maybe she just deleted his character, but hopefully she was more creative, perhaps by making him undertake a deadly jumping puzzle.

There’s also no mention of what prompted the insta-divorce, but it was probably cyberproblems in the cyberbedroom.

I wonder if she’ll be charged in circuit court.  Yeah, I went there.

Good Old Games, a promising new source of old, cheap, downloadable, DRM-free games optimized to run on current systems, is now open to the public.

Have at them.  Here’s their catalogue.  I may check out Fallout 1 and 2 one of these days, maybe when I’m done with Fallout 3, which hopefully won’t be for a long, long time.

There’s nothing like a good adventure!   And this is nothing like a good adventure:  another post is up on Living in Oblivion.

Read Ghosts and Doldrums if you’re into that whole Nondrick scene.  Also, I’m now realizing that “doldrums” sounds nothing like “goblins” so it ain’t much of a pun.  My bad.

Wow.  Neat game!

Great game?  Dunno yet, I’ve only played a few hours.  But it’s definitely neat.

First off, no problems getting it to run, so those haters who bitched about me bitching about S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky not running and dissed my “toaster” and my “brain” can get bent. The only hiccup I encountered was that Far Cry 2 warned me my video drivers were out of date.  I ignored it (I’d updated them during the Clear Sky fiasco) and started the game, but a few things weren’t rendering properly.  I quit, updated my drivers (Nvidia released new ones on the 15th of this month), rebooted, and didn’t have a single problem the rest of the night.

The game runs very smoothly and looks great despite me running everything on medium (I may try to jack up some of the settings to high tonight).  I’m not quite sure how they did it, but they’ve presented us with an immense gameworld that never seems to have to load portions of itself.  I’ve driven and run from one end of the map to the other and it never seems to pause to load itself in sections anywhere.  There’s no draw distance problems, either — even at top speed rocks and trees aren’t popping up out of nowhere in a hurry to exist before you pass them.  Even the initial loading of the game doesn’t take very long.  It’s pretty astounding.

They’ve also taken great pains to keep you in the game at all times.  If you want to check your map (and you will, often), instead of pausing the action and bringing up a new screen, the guy you’re playing will simply hold up a map and GPS to his (your) face.  It’s such a simple little touch but it really works well.  Instead of lifting you out of the game and putting you on a map, it keeps you in the game and lifts the map to you.  You can even have the map out when driving around in a car, as many of us have in real life.  It’s just a neat little touch that does a lot for the game’s immersion.

Driving is fun and easy to control, and there are a number of vehicles to hop into.  Cars, jeeps, boats — I even found a hang-glider and took a pleasant little float off a clifftop.  Another nice little touch I noticed is that, when driving, if you slam on the brakes, you’re pitched forward a bit toward the windshield.  Just another nice little detail.  If your vehicle is damaged (and it will be), you can pop the hood and fix it, which is, frankly, awesome.  There’s nothing worse than being out in the middle of nowhere and having to abandon a busted vehicle.  Well, okay, genocide is worse.  But only marginally.

I made some friends, NPCs who give you help and missions and, excitingly, rescue you if you’re shot down, another great touch that keeps you playing the game even if you’ve fallen to enemy gunfire.  Healing yourself is fun and gross: you’ll watch yourself extract shrapnel from your arm with your teeth, jam drug-filled syringes into your wrist, bandage your bloody leg, dig bullets from your flesh with a knife, and even yank dislocated joints back into place.

Fire is fun, too.  Chuck a Molotov cocktail into something and it’ll explode.  The flames will engulf everything that can burn — buildings, dead grass, and trees.  Soon your little campfire will be a huge blaze, spreading in whatever direction the wind is blowing.  It eventually dies down leaving scorched earth and skeletal plants.

Annoyances?  Sure.  For the first hour or so, everything was going great — I completed my first few missions and had a lot of fun.  I felt free to explore either in a vehicle or on foot, and didn’t have any trouble finding my way around or reaching my objectives.  I had some firefights and the enemy showed some decent AI by successfully flanking me twice.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was the “tutorial” section of the game, which taught me how to move around the world and kill people.

After the tutorial, however, things got a little rougher.  There are guardposts seemingly every few hundred yards on the roads and rivers, which is great if you’re looking to start a little static.  If, on the other hand, you’re trying to reach an objective to complete a mission, it can be a bit of an annoyance to have to stop and fight every step of the way.  I had some luck just stomping on the gas and plowing my way through the checkpoints for a while, but toward the end of the evening I was being chased and hounded every step of the way.  The enemy has a great tactic: shoot your vehicle until it gets so busted it up you have to get out, then run you over with their vehicle (this happened a couple times).  There’s no rear-view mirror in any of the cars I drove, and you can’t turn all the way around to see if you’ve lost your pursuers or how close they are to you, so stopping and jumping out is risky, but generally necessary.

The result is, by the time you reach your objective, which will require you to fight a bunch of enemies, you may have used up a lot of your ammo, health, and patience by fighting a bunch of enemies on the way.

Also, as with open-world shooters like Crysis and Just Cause that give you the freedom to explore the beautiful world around you, once you start exploring there seems to be nothing but that: a beautiful world.  It’s great that it’s there, and it’s nice to look at and be in, but what are the rewards for exploring it?  The scenery is fantastic but it appears all you’ll really find is gunfights, time after time. Granted, it is a shooter, so plenty of shooting is expected, but with such a great big world it seems like they could have squeezed in some more stuff.  There are never any citizens in these places — just angry men with guns and orders to shoot you on sight.  Of course, I’m only a few hours in so maybe there’s more to do out there in the wild.  At least there are animals.

The AI started to show some holes as well.  I was sniping an outpost, and again, someone tried to flank me to my left.  Unfortunately, to my left was a large lake.  To the left of the lake was a steep rocky hill.  The guy started running around the lake and then around the hill and didn’t stop until he was out of sight.  He never came back.  I guess his order was to flank at all costs, even if it required crossing the entire continent.

Also, something just felt a little… off for the entire session last night.  I couldn’t really get comfortable.  I felt too close to the screen, though sitting back in my chair didn’t seem to help.  I thought maybe it was because I haven’t been playing any FPS games lately, and maybe I just wasn’t used to it, but that wasn’t it.  It was the same feeling I got playing Bioshock last year, that something was just a little… wrong.  And sure enough, Far Cry 2 does the same thing Bioshock did — they gimmick the widescreen by cropping the fullscreen.

I friggin’ knew it.  I could just tell something wasn’t right.  I don’t honestly know why this is a problem, I can’t really quantify the weirdness of how it feels to play like this, and I know people are going to discard it as a real problem and call me a crybaby, but I know it does make a difference to me, it’s something I can feel, and it’s something that bothers me.  I hope they patch it quickly.

Still.  For the most part, I’m enjoying the game so far.   A lot.  Like I said, it’s neat.  Hopefully it will stay neat and even perhaps become great.

• Removed consistency check for some particle systems that players like to customize

Damn straight.