Fallout 4

Photo credit to gamespot.com

Nerds from all over the world have been prepping, stockpiling food and water. Parents are spending their final meals with their kids, girlfriends, and wives are spending their final moments with their significant other.

It’s just a few more days until bedroom doors seal shut and it will be months before they resurface. The long-awaited sequel to Bethesda’s award-winning Fallout series will come out November 10th.

The release will be crippling social lives everywhere. Gamers will enter their bedrooms, seal their door shut, and play. Fallout 4 was announced less than one year ago; it was a great surprise when it was announced to come out so soon.

Fallout 4 will take place in Boston, 200 years after a nuclear war turned the world into a wasteland. The player will create a custom character who they play for the entire game. The character emerges from Vault 111, a fallout shelter made by Vault Tec during the war, as the sole survivor.

Bethesda decided to let the player figure out what happened after release rather than spoil major parts of the plot. After leaving the vault, the player now has to decide what to do. The game is entirely open world, meaning the game is not forcing players to follow a certain path.

The player can go build a home or even a town. They can join guilds like the Commonwealth Minutemen, pursue the main story, make power armor to defend against the mutant and savages in the wasteland, and upgrade their arsenal. The options are endless and that’s what makes Bethesda and their games so unique.

The game uses a perk system called S.P.E.C.I.A.L. which represents the character traits strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility, and luck. With high charisma, the player can literally talk their way out of anything; it also helps when leading a town. Endurance is essential for the true wastelanders, as it makes the player capable of taking a lot of damage.

It can get to the point where bullets don’t even hurt. The biggest use of endurance is radiation tolerance, eating irradiated food results in high medical bills or death. With an iron stomach, there is no need for doctors because the irradiated food doesn’t make the player sick.

The S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system is so unique because the player has to decide where to put their 21 points at the beginning and this determines the abilities the players can unlock throughout the entire game. S.P.E.C.I.A.L. is similar to real life in the sense that if someone is low in intelligence and high in other areas, like strength and agility.

The dialogue option will be very basic and it will take longer conversations to learn something. Low intelligence can result in stupid dialogue options; sometimes the only option will be to ask “what”. The perk system plays out in the game world which has been seen in previous Fallout games but not even close to the same level.

The games Bethesda develops maintain endless “replayability.” Skyrim is another one of Bethesda’s biggest hits. Skyrim came out in 2011, but it’s still my all-time favorite game, and no game since has been able to meet the depth and level that this game has reached. Bethesda is a rare gem in the gaming industry.

They put quality above profit, and they spend years making games when most games are made in less than one. Oddly enough, quality games profit. Fallout 4 will be Bethesda’s first single-player game since Skyrim, and it is looking like it will be their best.

52 hours later…


Skyrim…Skyrim…SKYRIM!  To much dismay from my girlfriend and my family I am still playing Skyrim. In fact I just passed fifty two hours of active gameplay.  Yes that’s right. In the last 19 days, two of those have been utterly devoted to killing dragons, backstabbing elves, and committing paltry genocide ( that then involves a village of angry peasants chasing you).

From that I would like to segway into talking about just how great this game is and some of the things one can do in the world of Skyrim.

When in doubt: Incineration.  With the ability to throw exploding fireballs from your hands and also use your body as a human flame thrower, what could be better than setting a wide assortment of things on fire.  This will really work with most anything, from a villager to his chicken to a dragon.

If you are one for a more relaxing game experience, working the saw mill is always satisfying, especially when you culminate your day sitting in a tavern listening to a bard sing the tale of Ragnar the Red.  Quite satisfying.

However you may choose to play Skyrim will win your heart and soul for many…many… hours.

So sorry to all who know me but they claim there is around 200 hours of gameplay. I intend to find out.

There goes reality


Last friday, a brand new video game game out, The Elder Scrolls 5 Skyrim was released.  It is the fifth game in the huge RPG series based on the fantasy province of Tamriel.

One of the best things about this game is the vast amount of things one can do.  For instance killing a chicken becomes a moral dilemma that will usually follow by a mob of angry townsmen.  One could also become a dragon slaying enemy infested spelunker

I have now logged about 22 hours of play time and I have only completed about 14% percent of the game.  You could literally spend hours just wondering around the game going from the wind-swept peaks to the deep marshes.

Basically this is the one game to rule them all. Period.