Another oldie but goodie, this circa 2001 shooter was a blast, letting you play a campaign from each different side: Marine, Alien, or Predator.  Each campaign had 7 missions, and there was an overall storyline that linked everything together, although even after playing I don’t completely understand all of it.  An old CGW review of the game included a blurb about how to play the missions in linear order; this consisted of switching between campaigns frequently, which I found confusing and more trouble than it was worth.  By playing each campaign separately, I think the story flows better and makes more sense since it focuses on one person/creature’s perspective.

Of the campaigns, my favorite was the Predator, mainly because of all of his cool weapons.  You get to use his claws, retractable spear, mounted targeting laser, net, sniper rifle, boomerang blade (from Predator 2),hand-held pistol (seen in AvP:Requiem), and some grenades (these names are not accurate, but you get the idea).  The Predator also has all of his cool camo and different visions for different creatures.  The Marine has the standard Aliens weapons like the assault rifle, pistol, grenade launcher, shotgun, auto-targeting rifle (like Vasquez and Drake used in Aliens), and later a mini gun and sniper rifle (both of which see very little, if any, action).  The Marine also has a light and night vision later on.  The Alien is the least fun stuff since it cannot use weapons.  It has claw and tail attacks, bite attack (which it uses to heal by chomping people’s heads), and a vision mode which lets it see in the dark.  The Alien can also climb up and around walls, but it gets a little confusing sometimes because of the way the system was designed.

The campaigns include a lot of scripted scenes in game which move the story along.  These are well done because you feel like you are still in the action as opposed to a cutscene (which it has also, but between missions).  The Alien and Predator each have a human nemesis they go after later in the campaigns while the Marine fights mostly Aliens, but also a Predator and other humans.  The sound is excellent in the game and really adds tension with a lot of surprise sequences.

The missions are mostly linear, but there are some optional things that can happen depending upon your actions.  There are also a few missions where you have to backtrack that get a little confusing.  The worst, I think, are the first Alien mission and the last Predator mission.  The Alien starts as a facehugger who needs a victim to hatch an Alien baby.  So you sneak around a ship looking for a chump and then you hug him.  Then the Alien baby breaks out of him and has to sneak around (it is very vulnerable and has weak attacks) until it finally finds enough food to eat to become a regular sized Alien.  The last Predator mission was an annoyingly long maze-like run through some tunnels which finally ended in a lame battle with your nemesis which you can kill easily with a little stealth and trickery.  The last Alien and Marine missions are very fun by contrast, with a lot of tough battles.

While the graphics are not state of the art by today’s standards, I still found this to be a very fun game to play recently.  If you can find it in the bargain bins, I recommend you give it a shot.

I picked up this first expansion a week or so ago though Games For Windows Live (not by choice).  We already had an account because my kids play XBox Live so that made things a little easier.  I added money for the dumb Microsoft points so I could purchase the content (which is kind of a rip-off since I had to put in more than I needed because of the choices you have to purchase points) and then attempted to download the game.  After several attempts which did not appear to do anything, I waited a few hours until it was later in the night and tried again.  The GFW client now told me I was downloading the game, but I never saw anything added to my Fallout 3 folder.  I tried several times with no luck.  Time to do a little digging around.

I checked under C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\GFWLive\Downloads folder and didn’t see anything.  I then started the download again and saw a 300+ MB file already in there, even though it said it was downloading.  I made a copy of this file and waited until the download finished.  I saw the file it was downloading turn into a cab file, but before I could copy it it disappeared.  Using a little ingenuity, I changed the name of the file I duplicated earlier into a cab file, opened it in WinZip and Voila! I could see what looked liked the expansion files.

Since I wasn’t sure if these files would work (I had a pretty good idea of which ones I needed, but you can never be too sure), I decided to search the Internet for info and stumbled across a Fallout 3 page on wikia.com.  They talked about playing the expansion offline by copying certain files directly to your Fallout 3 folder (see Operation: Anchorage, Playing Offline).  The funny thing was they said the files you need are located at: C:Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\XLive\DLC (gee, I thought this was Games For Windows Live, why would I look under a folder obviously referencing XBox Live?).  Anyway, the files were there, so at least I have them.  Since I paid for them, I wanted to find the files so I could back them up;  I certainly don’t want to have to download them again sometime in the future if I want the expansion again.

So now that have the DLC downloading figured out, the next two expansions should go a little easier.  Check out all the Fallout 3 info at wikia.com to get more info about the other two expansions coming out for Fallout 3, one in February and one in March.

While playing Fallout 3, I came across an interesting situation that shows the limits of game realism.  First let me say I totally respect the hard work of the men and women who create these games.  But like any rigid system, the programmers and writers cannot envision every choice a player will make so they plan for they can and maybe pick up some more in play testing.  Some things that allow cheating or break the game can be fixed later in patches.

Now the situation I ran across did not break the game, nor was it cheating per se since I had no idea the actions I would take at one point would make a later quest a whole lot simpler.  The case I keep going on about involved my going into a certain location in the game and cleaning it out (collecting loot and eliminating enemies, monsters and human alike).  Not too long later, I received a quest to plant an obsevation device in the same location so an NPC could gather information about certain monsters in their natural habitat.  I was supposed to sneak into the location and plant the device; I would receive a bonus if I killed none of the creatures.  But the thing was, I had already killed all of the creatures!

So here’s where we run into the problem: I go back to the location, plant the device, and return for my reward.  Well since I had not killed any creatures while doing the quest (how could I since they were already dead), I received the reward for the quest and the bonus reward.  And having eliminated the creatures made the quest much easier since I did not have to sneak around but simply walk in, plant the device, and walk out again.

The point of this post is to show the limit of the game’s logic.  As much as the game creates a sense that I am participating in a realistic environment, the environment cannot handle certain actions and reacts to them only in the way it was programmed.  Realistically, of course, I would not have received the bonus since I had killed the creatures, but the programmers either did not plan for this contingency, did not think it worth planning for, or simply gave me a free pass.  Either way, it just shows that we are much closer to realism than the old text-based adventure games (which I had to mention since there is one you can play on a computer in Fallout 3 – too cool) but still not quite there yet.

I found out a few days ago that Bethesda will be releasing some expansion material for Fallout 3.  They’re calling it downloadable content (DLC) and it will be available through XBox / Windows Live and directly from Bethesda.  The first DLC will be called Operation Anchorage and will be a prequel involving a battle during the war with China.  It will be released on January 27th for $10.  There will be a total of 3 DLC expansions with the final one expanding the main quest from Fallout 3 and raising the level cap to 30.

I’m still playing Fallout 3 and it’s still a lot of fun.  The game is huge, but throws so much at you that it is not boring.  If you start getting bored, you can change direction (for example, I had been exploring the wasteland not doing any quests, and I decided to go back and advance the main quest and a side quest).

I picked up the Collector’s Edition game guide a couple of days ago.  It is  a nice hardback guide with everything you would want to know about the game.  It includes a fold-out map of the wasteland with major and minor locations noted and cross-referenced in the book.  The only difference between it and the regular game guide (besides the $10 price difference and the regular guide is soft cover) is I think it includes some material about the development of the game like the Collector’s Edition of the game does.  Check out one or the other if you want to know every nook and cranny of the wasteland.

Here’s another 10 or so year old game of high quality.  This WWII flight sim features action from both the Axis and Allied sides.  It includes 10-15 single player missions (including a few training missions) and 20-25 campaign missions for each side.  The flyable planes include the BF-109, FW-190, and ME-262 for the Axis and the Spitfire, P-38, and P-51 for the Allies.  The graphics and damage models are very nice and hold up well for a game this old.

The game centers around the Battle of the Bulge, but there are a variety of missions including air and ground.  Air missions include attacking or defending bombers and fighter patrols against random or set targets.  Ground missions include attacking air fields with planes or vehicles on the ground and strafing runs against columns of enemy vehicles.

I had some difficulty properly controlling the aircraft using a joystick, but tweaking the settings helped.  There are various settings from how the planes fly to difficulty of enemies to  fuel and ammo limits.  Make sure you install the patch as I read this adds many settings to the original game.

My only complaints, very minor, are about the boring flying parts of missions.  Usually you fly a certain distance to different waypoints before you get into the action, and sometimes have to fly to certain waypoints after the action to beat the mission.  It would have been nice to be able to skip these parts with a hotkey for those (like me) who didn’t want to wait a few minutes for the action to start.  There was a flight sim I played years ago that had something like this where you could press a button to skip to the next waypoint.  The only other complaint I have is that in some missions you are supposed to kill a certain number of planes but sometimes I wouldn’t see enough or find them.  Then I’d be flying to waypoints for several minutes until I realized I’d obviously missed something.  One nice feature is that the game would tell you if there were mission objectives remaining, and if not, you could immediately end the mission.

Overall, Jane’s WWII Fighters is a great WWII flight sim with good graphics, nice pilot chatter, nice damage models, and many options that let you fly as realistically as you like.