If you look at the pic, I don’t really see how the Chinese words 明家快 translate into “The Brass Lantern”… Maybe people after the apocalypse have no clue what the Chinese words really meant… hmmm
Ok I admit it. I’m weak. I gave in and got Fallout 3 too. Lord knows what I’m going to do with 2 new games and both of them having just “started out”.
Going by Bethesda’s reputation, this should be one heck of an RPG. Bioware (or Black Isle) did the first 2 Fallouts. They were 3D isometric, turn-based RPG. Years passed in between Fallout 2 and Fallout 3.
Now Fallout 3 sports FPS gameply and RPG elements, very much like Oblivion. In fact, at character creation, you are brought to the same face-construction interface like in Oblivion. Speaking of character creation – true to Bethesda’s reputation, their character creation scenarios are excellent. In Fallout 3, you are born, literally, into the game. You are shown to be delievered from your mother’s womb, where you get to pick your name and then make your face for “when you’re all grown up”.
Then the tutorial starts. The part where they teach you to use the WASD keys to move is funny – you’re a tiny little 1 year old learning to walk 🙂 The video clip shown here is for the next stage of the tutorial – when you’re 10 years old and having a “coming of age” kind of party in Vault 101.
Now, for the first time in a Bethesda title (in my experience anyway), the game is buggy. I couldn’t get past the launch screen and it keeps telling me it needs “xlive.dll” which it cannot find. After scouring the net for a solution, it turns out I needed to install some stuff by Microsoft called “Games For Windows – Live Redistributable“.That struck me as a little odd since “Live” is usually associated with the Xbox and not the PC. I have no clue why Fallout 3 needed something like that. Even better, I was wondering why the installer didn’t install that too, since it forceably tried to install DirectX for me even though I had the latest.
Anwyay, after I’d done that, the game crashed right after the intro. Gaaahhhh~~~!!! More scouring of the net happened, and someone on the Bethesda forums said he fixed THAT with a simple install of the K-Lite codec pack. I thought, why the heck not? I installed it, and yes, he was right – the K-lite codec pack fixed the crash.
So now I’m able to play Fallout 3. I was pleased that the game was able to recognise my embedded video chip and set graphics to “Medium” settings. Again, I went in to the configurations and did some minor tweaks, and brought some options up while lowering others.
Now, I haven’t gotten very far into the game. In fact, I saved just right after I captured the video shown above, and exited the game.
You know, sometimes there are no good games released for a while, and you’re stuck playing the older games which you’ve got.
Then there are other times like these, where a few good titles are released within the span of a few days from each other. Far Cry 2, Dead Space, and Fallout 3 have all been released, and now I’m just scratching my head and wondering if I should get them all.
For starters, I got Far Cry 2. I remember playing some parts of Far Cry 1, but I didn’t finish it. At the time I remember that it was slightly confusing and I have no idea what I am doing, just running around and shooting stuff. There wasn’t any sense of me “accomplishing” anything.
Far Cry 2, upon first load up, was impressive. The game auto-detected my graphic settings as “LOW” (dammit!). Then again, the embedded graphics chip on my motherboard usually isn’t in the “supported graphics card” list anyway. So I went in manually and tweaked everything up to medium, except for shadows and post-processing. No noticeable hit on my framerates, as you can see from the video clip below:
However, I did notice that it starts to stutter and slow to a crawl (like in Assassin’s Creed) when there are lots of particle effects on screen – smoke, and fire. Unfortunately I can’t do much about those. I have already set post-processing down to low and it can’t go any lower than that.
Currently I’m still at the beginning stages of the game. I haven’t gone much further than just exploring the immediate surroundings and taking out the outpost during the “tutorial” part of the game. I have already entered the first “town” but didn’t stop in there – just zoomed past it to get to the weapon shop which, by the time I get there, is already closed. The weapons dealer has already gone for the day and the trade terminal in there did not list anything that I can purchase at this stage.
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