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Congrats on the saved game being found! Remind me never to curse the thing that is Steam ever again....

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Believe me, the 360 version plays as smooth as butter compared to the PS3's.

I think I've had one crash on the 360 where I got stuck in a house and couldn't get out so just reloaded the previous autosave. This is after at least three playthroughs.

As well as having a poorer framerate, no AA and noticeable pop-in, the PS3 Fallout 3 is also fundamentally broken and Bethesda haven't fixed it. The game just randomly decides to freeze...

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"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan

I am still playing it I went trough the first part for PC few years ago it is one of the best games I ever played and the scariest for sure if you want some thrill thats the game for you

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I've finally put my horse out to pasture in RDR. Replaying with expert targeting is still kinda fun, but the mission repetition/travel-length becomes a grind (I prefer the hunting/marksman skills, but there a comes a point where you can't really proceed unless you complete a big whack of missions, or cheat).

So gone old school...



Orange box for a tenner. Can't go wrong. Loved every glitchy-female-HAL minute of Portal. There's even a 'makers commentary' option, which was kinda fun to browse through after completion - makes you realise how they made it so intuitive.

Hope they manage the same with the sequel, coz the vids make it look mindbending...

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On my second playthrough Megaton was already blown up and all the side missions were half done.

Had to upgrade this ...



to this ....

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Really? That's a shame - It's great fun robbing the place blind before finally blowing it up.

Sounds a bit like corrupted save data, the thing that plagues the PS3 version. Incidentally, now that you've got a new PC some of the F3 mods are a blast. There are some HD texture packs too, and there's a Darnified UI floating around by the same guys who did the one for Oblivion - Excellent for higher PC resolutions.

Fallout 3 Nexus link

FOOK and Mart's Mutant Mod (again, the same guy who did the monster mod for Oblivion) are good places to start. FOOK, especially, because it tidies up a lot of stuff.

I see that EA/Bioware have released ANOTHER Dragon Age DLC. I'm not biting.

Honestly, I'm not...

After another day with the game, I am pretty over the moon about it. It took me a little while to get into it, but the atmosphere and ridiculous level of detail has me hooked at this point. At first, I wanted to fall into a typical Shooter style of play, but the game offers so many options and approaches to any given situation, I was limiting myself. The game feels like a cross between Oblivion and Deus Ex, the latter being one of my favorite games of all time.

Last night I completed one quest, which got me an apartment (a shack, really) in one of the towns, and then I wandered off into the wastelands exploring what seemed like endless locations. Again, the level of detail in the environments in uncanny, and the environment on a whole is quite unnerving.

The sound design is extremely well done; the player is never assaulted by slamming beats or licensed music. Instead, the developers use minimal music and realistic sound effects to fully immerse the player in the desolate game world. Lisa has remarked a couple of times about how the game seems a bit too realistic, and has her concerned about what would happen in an actual disaster of this nature. It's one thing to play something like Mass Effect and explore a desolate planet in some fictional universe, but quite another experience when you are wandering the nation's capital after its devastation.

Rumor has it you can beat the main story in about 18 hours, however, people have spent literally hundreds of hours on the side content, of which there is a ton. So one can get as much or as little out of the game as they like. The quest design also deserves a mention, as it is quite strong, as well.

I plan on spending quite a bit of time in the Capital Wasteland, myself.



I found my little doggy buddy last night - Dogmeat!

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I prefer the Wasteland to DC, personally. Don't like the way that the city is divided up into so many separate cells but that's probably a restriction of the game engine.

One of my favourite side quests is The Republic of Dave, dunno why.



Then there's Harold the tree...

EDIT - Anyone encountered Rebecca Mayes before?

Link

Gnarled and twisted old soak that I am, I wanted to hate her and her twee little ditties so badly.

But I couldn't.

There are actually some really nice and well-structured little songs there. That Rebecca's taken a few too many Kristin Hersh pills following the Kate Bush quarterpounder with a side order of Bjork only succeeds in making her all the more charming in my book. Cute too.

Kristen Hersh + Bjork? Sounds right up my alley...

Did Blood Ties last eve, as well as some wandering about exploring again. My doggy buddy is a great lil tank. making things quite a bit easier. Still have yet to find any Bobbleheads... I presume many of them require some thieving to find? I'm a good Karma guy, so I might have to skip all that if so...

First Bobble head you can get is in the area you start,on your fathers desk I believe. I don't think I have any bobble heads.

Dragonage 2 seems like it's been announced.



Could be an Expansion, but this image



Makes it seem unlikely. Never played Dragon Age: Origins, but people here like it, so thought I'd share the news. There's more images, or art, but I won't post them as they are huge. Also trailer to be shown in August.

First trailer will be released during gamescom on the 17th of August.

I still have not been able to find him yet. I know about where he is supossed to be.

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I heard him barking while I was hunting around near Minefield and followed the sound into the scrapyard. Several folks have found him just randomly walking around, as well.

I've been in love with Kristin for 20 years so, yeah, Rebecca Mayes is an interesting gal.

You'll get the (I think) Strength bobblehead in the sheriff's house in Megaton. If you don't want to lose karma by picking the lock he's in there a few times each day so you can walk right in - it's in a room upstairs - and lift it without any penalty then display it in your shack.

There's another easy one in the locked house in Arefu (you'll get the Arefu quest from Lucy in the bar in Megaton) but you'll need a good lockpick skill to nab it. If you're worried about karma hits from picking the lock just give some pure water (which you get free from your robot at home) to the guy outside Megaton who's thirsty, or the one outside Rivet City. I think that ups your karma.

Back to playing Mass Effect for the first time in ages.

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Always wanted to play Portal but never did. I'm going to grab the second one though.

And Yoda, I would be super pissed if my saved game file was gone. That's happened to me in the past with Zelda.

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Finished up the Arefu stuff the other night - I will head back to snag the bobble when I get a chance.

RE: Purified water - From what i can tell, this is a severe bug/exploit in the game that pretty much destroys the karma system. Do a bunch of neg karma stuff to get extra loot until you start to get into karma trouble, then stop looting and begin the following loop: Ask for free water from your butler, head out of town and give it to the begger - Rinse, repeat. Jack Karma back up to proper levels, then go kill a vendor for all his loot and schematics, then reset karma with water.

I am not doing this, but clearly it messes with the intended use of the karma system. So far that's the only thing that has bugged me/seemed broken with the game.

I guess you could rig the system but I remember a beggar getting up and walking away after I'd given him 2 or 3 bottles once. Dunno if that's a failsafe or if he just ran off when he sensed a raiding party (which they do, and usually end up getting smoked anyway).

That's Bethesda, I guess. They make brilliant rpgs but never seem to road test them properly. Reminds me a bit of Troika (my favourite game studio of recent years), who were made up from a group of guys who'd coded the original Fallout and always complained of being under pressure to release their games (because they didn't have much money they ended up flogging their game ideas to outside studios) on a certain date and the quality control suffered.

Dunno what Bethesda's excuse is.

EDIT - Oh yeah, there's another bobblehead on the table in the science lab in Rivet City. No karma loss for picking them up, just for breaking the law getting to where they are - and I think it's only the Arefu one which works out like that, the rest are just in out of the way places.

Now that there's no football on I booted up Final Fantasy XIII again and picked up where I'd left it a month ago. 40 hours, back to Cocoon, ready for the endgame. I think.

The game's much less of a slog this time round and even though all you're really doing is running down beautiful corridors battling fantastic looking monsters I'm enjoying it. The veneer of quality is more than skin-deep.

I'd previously thought that the gang's arrival on Pulse was the best FMV I've ever seen in a game but their return to Cocoon might just trump it.

If you're not worried about spoilers (and there aren't many), check it out, the first 5 minutes anyway. The rest is gameplay.:



EDIT - On an FF note, I got my FFXIV (PC) Beta invite this morning but, man, its taking a long time to download the game client.

Don't bother with Risk: Factions, if you're tempted. Decided to download the whole thing after finding the demo cute and functional. Unfortunately there's no skill level option, so once you've beaten the (very easy) campaign, you just get various maps to beat the (very easy) AI opponents on. No amount of cartoon cut-scenes, additional abilities or feline ferocities can make up for that. (You can add in little issues like the inability to jump out of 'fast attack' once you've started it, but really the AI pretty much kills the game from the off.)

Online might be fun for all I know, but I'm outta gold at the mo.