Puzzle @ Argfest on a cup.

Puzzle @ Argfest on a cup.

Chinese Takeout pt. 2

I was merrily following the main plotline, and checking off my little To-do's, when I come to a part where I have to rescue some kids from some slavers. Here are the little twerps:


Yeah, they're cooling their heels in a slave pen. That's fine. I could just walk through the camp gunning down all the slavers and set them free (that's what Joe did, except with his sledgehammer), but I have to go around and talk to all the slavers first. I find out I could go round up some slaves. Heck, I could even just go out and capture "evil" people (and I get to determine who is evil), and sell them into slavery. I don't want to have anything to do with slavery, aside from freeing slaves, but wanton slaughter seems to lack finesse. I can sneak into the somewhere and hack a computer and that'll probably work (I'm very good at both sneaking and hacking).

But first I meet this guy:


Yeah, I know. Vanilla Ice is now starring in his own videogame. It turns out that Pronto here runs the local gun shop. It's kind of a crappy gun shop, but he's got grit and spunk, and the boy wants to make something of himself. If he could only get his hands on 20 Chinese Assault Rifles, he could break them down for parts, and he could expand the business.

1. Get 20 Chinese Assault Rifles
2. Break them down for parts
3. ...
4. Profit!

A little bell goes off in my head (ding!). "Why Pronto, I know exactly where a wasteland wanderer could get 20 Chinese Assault Rifles. I've got a friend who found a whole factory full of Chinese zombies who were all armed with Chinese Assault Rifles. I'll bring you the rifles lickety split, and we'll be in business together!"

Now, faithful reader, Chinese Assault Rifles are pretty scarce in the wasteland. Basically every small gun seems to have a Chinese counterpart that does a bit more damage. The history here seems to be that America went to war with the Chinese when they invaded Alaska (via Russia? Who knows!) and there are Chinese infiltrators lurking about. I could just wander the wasteland and hope that I'll run into things (some Super Mutants can be armed with CARs) that shoot me with them, but they're really few and far between.

No, I'm going to head down to where Joe found the factory. From watching over his shoulder I remember it was even somewhere along the southern end of the wasteland. I even remember finding a radio signal that was broadcasting in Chinese when I was trying to get to the Arlington Library. I'll start at the library and work my way west.


I do so. It takes me a week of real time. Along the way I find a Nuka-cola plant, a hotel, various Enclave camps, another Vault, a metric butt-ton of Raiders, and even some zombies. What I don't find is a radio signal broadcasting in Chinese, or a single Chinese zombie.

This is going to require some research. I can't just go wandering the wasteland willy-nilly. I'm going to need some help.

Fallout 3: Chinese Takeout pt. 1

I got Fallout 3 over Christmas when everyone else bought it, but it sat, unplayed, until May because, based on my experiences with Oblivion, once I started journeying in the Capital Wasteland, I wouldn't be coming out anytime soon. That's exactly what's happened.


Fallout 3 has a different quest structure than Oblivion. Actually, it has the same structure for some quests, but different structures for others. Oblivion had quest chains, where you talked to someone, they gave you something to do, you did it and went back to them, then they said, "Come talk to me again when you want something else to do."

When you had a quest, it showed up in your quest journal. You might have subtasks to do on the way to the main task, and those would show up too. That way, if you put the game down and came back after awhile (or just got sidetracked with some other quest chain), you could check your journal and pick up on a quest at any point. If you finished a quest it would disappear from your "Active Quests" page and go to the "Completed Quests" page, and if you didn't want your active page cluttered up with tons of things, you could not take the next quest from the quest giver until you were ready. This gives players a satisfying To-do list at all times, and a feeling of accomplishment as things were checked off. You could even look back through your completed quests to see all the things you had done and get a further sense your progression in the game.

Fallout 3 has quests and quest chains, it has a journal where your To-do list is kept, and it keeps track of your progress in the main quests. It also has many, many things to see and do that aren't listed in any quest chain. It has random encounters that may lead to other discoveries, it has buildings that tell stories, and many of the things you do change the world, just a little bit. It even has real moral choices, but I'll get to that later.

The largest quest I've done doesn't appear on a quest chain. It isn't contained inside a building (in fact, it takes place over most of the capital wasteland). It doesn't appear on any of the strategy guides or FAQs, and I'm not even sure the designers ever intended to make it a quest.


It starts, fittingly, on Memorial Day, while I was over at my friend Joe's house for a cookout. We got to talking about Fallout 3, which he had played, but abandoned because it was a lot of the same thing over and over. He hadn't progressed very far on the main story, he had just been wandering the wasteland killing people and taking their stuff. We ended up at his computer, so he could show me his character build. Basically he could hit just about anything with his sledgehammer and it would explode. He cursed another friend who told him to take the Bloody Mess perk, because he ended up having to scour the landscape looking for bits of his victims in order to take their stuff. In the low scrub covering most of the wasteland, it was a pain in the ass.

He showed me. He happened to be inside a factory full of zombies. He walked up to one as it shot him with an assault rifle, hit it with his sledge, and boom, it was pulp. Other zombies spotted him and started screaming things... in Chinese.

"Is that Chinese?"

"I guess so."

"So these are Chinese zombies?"

"Yeah, this whole factory is full of them."

"Huh."

I didn't think anything more about it. There are a whole lot of weird things out there in the wasteland, and Joe had found a factory full of Chinese zombies. But that day started my quest, even though I didn't know it at the time.

A Final Word on Far Cry 2

I finished this last night and I wanted to talk a little bit about the endgame.

When we think about designing a game, we go through three basic steps:

1. Define what you want the user to experience.
2. Describe a mechanic that will lead to that experience
3. Write the rules that will lead to that mechanic

In the previous interview (scroll down) Clint Hocking said:

However, this high level of power in the mid-game is supposed to be the peak… in the end game, after you get your supply of malaria medicine cut-off, you are supposed to get weaker and the game systems should force you to be more brutal – using more and more powerful weapons and confronting enemies who are more and more easily and frequently wounded.

I never ran out of malaria medicine. The malaria was only a nuisance that either made me stop for a second and pop some pills when I was traveling, or made me randomly die if it popped up during combat. So whatever mechanic you had in mind, Mr. Hocking, it didn't work. Sorry.

But there was another mechanic that did work.

There comes a point in the endgame of any shooter where you have access to all the weapons, you've seen all the various types of enemies, you've fought in pretty much all the terrains, and you're good enough at the game that you're somewhat going through the motions to get to the end. This is why there are boss monsters where none of your normal weapons really work and the rules are changed. This is why you have to push buttons for endgames to set up the big lightning machine, or somehow jump into the giant babyhead, or have some sort of race against time. The normal mechanic of the game has become so repetitive (see enemies, avoid their shots, shoot them) that the designers need to change it up to keep you interested.

I like to call it "shooter ennui."

I think it might have been an accident, but Far Cry 2 uses shooter ennui as part of the story. By the time I got to the endgame, random checkpoints were more bumps in the road than actual challenges. I had an exploding projectile gun on my jeep most of the time and could kill any wandering patrols before they could shoot at me. I had a .50 caliber sniper rifle that could one-shot anyone without a head shot. I rarely even got close to running out of ammo. I started to feel bad for the guys repeating to themselves, "He's just one man. One guy. I can do this. I can get him," before I'd kill them.

I was getting sick of the killing. It seemed pointless. Nothing was going to change. There would always be more guys manning the checkpoints. There would always be another warlord stepping up to fill the shoes of the guy I assassinated. Would it ever end?

Which is exactly what the designers wanted me to experience. I became the world-weary killing machine that was all the character definition they had given me. They did it through increasing the power level of my weapons without necessarily increasing anything about the enemies I was fighting. The game actually got easier in the last third, which seems counter-intuitive for a design, but it translated into the correct user experience.

And then they finally gave me an out. So I took it. I'm not sure if there's a "bad" ending. The ending I had was bittersweet. If I didn't bother finding Jackal tapes and giving them to the reporter would he not be my ally? If I had let the reporter die? If I had gone back for my buddies instead of saving the helpless at the end of Act 1? I think my ending was the best I could hope for given the circumstances of the game. Is there a better one? I don't know, but I'm satisfied with the one I got.

Only Africa won.

Ricros & Boulder vs Hookface the red dra

It looks like the dragon is crapping Starbursts, but those are actually commoners who are about to either run away or be turned into red paste. You can just see Stan and Slashgoule behind the dragon, and you can't actually see Ricros at all because he's riding on the dragon's back.