If you recall the last time I reviewed Operation Anchorage DLC for Fallout 3, I was less than happy about it. It was short, boring, and I felt like I was ripped off after completing the new content. That was alittle over a month ago, and we have now been given a new set of DLC for Fallout 3 called “The Pitt”. Is this new set a letdown like the previous DLC, or has Bethesda learned from their mistakes and made it worth our wild? Hit the jump to find out.

Just like in Operation Anchorage, you are given a distress signal from an unknown source, and you walk your funky butt to the top of the map to see what all the hub-bub is about. After taking out some Slavers, you end up saving the life of a slave who comes from The Pitt. Your new slave friend explains what he was doing creating the distress signal, and then asks you to come along to help him flush out a plan that he has, which will save the dying citizens of The Pitt. Unfortunately the rest of the story is all spoiler from here on out, so I can’t say much more. What I will say, is that The Pitt’s story and set up are vastly improved to what was given in the Operation Anchorage DLC. Instead of a VR sequence, it’s actually your character that you are controlling the entire time you are in The Pitt. The story is the saving grace of the DLC, as it lets you be the goody-two shoes, or complete jerk off that you are in your regular game. There are also some interesting aspects to the story, such as what the cure actually is, but that is a major spoiler in its own right.

Just like in the previous DLC you’re going to get good armor and weapon sets which were not accessible in the original release of Fallout 3. Unlike the previous DLC though, the armor and weapons are actually pretty awesome to use. From a melee chainsaw weapon, to a machine gun that doubles as a sniper rifle, all the extra goodies that you get are greatly appreciated. There are even more armor sets that you can get if you want to complete the fetch quest that has been included in the DLC as well. You once again receive an extra 100 achievement points by completing the story missions, but 20 of those points come from completing the fetch quest I just spoke of.

Where the DLC takes a turn for the worst again, is because of the same points I made in my last review. Once again, the DLC is set at 800 MS points ($10 dollars), and once again it is very very short on completion time. Clocking in at 2 hours and 17 minutes, I beat the game faster than the Operation Anchorage DLC, and there is even more things to do this time around. What’s even worse is the fact that if I wouldn’t have bothered with the 100 Steel Ingot fetch quest, I would have completed it in an even faster run. I do also want to point out that I’m running around looking for odds and ends when I did my review run too, and I still finished in the 2 hours and 17 minutes I just spoke of.

The worst problem with this DLC by far goes to the glitchy issues that came up from the moment I started the DLC. Frame rate issues were a small issue in the original release of Fallout 3, but the problem gets turned up to the max when you’re playing in The Pitt. There was one time the frame rate was so awful, I ended up dying because I fell off a roof that I didn’t even know I was on. Then there were the freezes. Dear lord the freezing was a major issue for me. The game would just randomly lock up whenever it wanted to. During loading screens, during conversations, just about any time was a good time for the game to just not want to work. I ended up saving literally every two minutes or so, just so that I could ensure I would be able to get to the end without having to start a section all over again. What’s even worse is the fact that this version I downloaded is the “good” version that has been released on the XBL marketplace. Look Bethesda, if something clearly isn’t ready, don’t release it to the public. You’re going to create more of a backlash from the public by putting out something that is garbage, rather than just delaying it a few weeks.

Rounding things out, we come to the point that I made in the last review for the DLC, and honestly it’s still the same issue as the last time. In fact, I’m going to just quote what I said before because it still stands. Quote:

“Finally, this DLC is only available if you are actually IN game. For those who may not know what I mean, let me explain. Fallout 3’s last section of the game locks you into a room, in which you cannot exit from (hence why I said it locks you in). If you have tripped this event, there is no going back to the Wasteland, and you have to start a new game if you want to finish side quests you may not have found, such as this “Operation Anchorage/The Pitt” download. Lucky for me, I had an extra play through save ready; otherwise I would have had to start a completely new game in order to access this content. The next series of downloadable content comes with the release of Broken Steel, which will increase the game’s level cap and get rid of that locked room problem which I just described. My question is, why the hell wasn’t the locked room issue not cleared up in this patch? Why am I forced to start a new game if I want to play the content? It is, in a word, unacceptable.”

Final Verdict:

This time around the story, extra items, and general fun of the DLC much higher terms of a rating than its brother Operation Anchorage. The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree though, because the price, length, and general bugs/issues from Operation Anchorage carry over to The Pitt. The verdict this time is more of a crap shoot, because you can’t “rent” DLC. Despite the issues, I would say that it is an ok piece of DLC, and that you should probably look into it if you’re a fan of Fallout 3.

-J

Welp, it took me a while, but it had to happen. It’s probably no surprise to those who know how much I loved Oblivion, that I’m kind of obsessed with Fallout 3; so much so, in fact, that I took the time to make this little video. Maybe you Fallout fans might appreciate it.

I just now realized that I seem like I’m totally high in this video. I’m all slurrin’ and my hair is disheveled and crap. Well, I’m not, I swear. It’s just that people who saw my last video suggested I should be more natural, to go with the flow and be myself. Well, this is what happens when I don’t have a script–I just seem like I’m on the wacky tobaccy. Plus, I totally don’t know how to do my own hair. Good job, me.

Before I even start, I want to just say that Fallout 3 was one of my favorite games from 2008. I had it right behind GTA4 as my game of the year, and I actually went back into it recently to achievement grab some of the stuff I didn’t pick up yet, and it still amazes me how big the game actually is. Flash foward to last night when I downloaded the “Operation Anchorage” downloadable content, and my feelings about the game at the moment are less than happy. Hit the jump to find out why.

The back story on this DLC is that you stumble upon a distress signal from the Fallen Brotherhood of Steal members, who are asking for backup. After helping them out, they explain there is a VR mission set up which allows the VR player to liberate Anchorage from the Chinese. If you agree to help them, you go on a series of short missions in the VR sim. If you complete the sim, you are awarded with a weapons cache and one of the better power armors in the game.

Now that the back story is complete, lets talk about the positive aspects of the DLC. To start, if you are playing the game, you get some good armor and weapon sets which were not accessable in the original release. On top of the new weapons and such, you also get an extra 100 achievement points by completing the story missions, which is always nice to see devs include achievements after the fact. Outside of those two things though, you’re not going to find much in terms of content, or you giving a shit about the liberation of Anchorage.

Moving onto the negative aspects, the first point we’re going to touch down on is the price. Coming in at 800 MS points ($10 dollars for you and me), this is some pricey DLC. Yes, it adds in a few more missions/achievements, but you’re going to complete them in a short amount of time. My time completion was around two and a half hours, although your mileage will vary depending on how quick you walk through the content. Even that said though, there isn’t much in terms of exploration to do in this DLC, so you would probably average the same. I just can’t justify the spending of ten dollars on such a small amount of content, when that same ten dollars can buy something from the Xbox Live Arcade which will give 20x the amount of fun and time played (I’m looking at you Geometry Wars 2).

The content itself is well, boring. The liberation of Anchorage is not as much fun as it the game runs it, and it’s quite shocking if you’ve played some of the other missions in the main portion of the game. While running through the VR Sim, there are just way too many health and ammo points along the way (which end up making the sim too easy) and in turn adds to the bore factor. I wouldn’t want the game to be down right hard for no reason, but less check points along the way would increase the tension a tad. When I initially heard that the section was going to be a VR sim, I immediately thought back to the Tranquillity Lane simulation, which I was hoping it would be similar along those lines. I won’t spoil it for you if you haven’t played through the main quest of Fallout 3, but the Tranquillity Lane simulation was one of the best parts of the game. Alas though, this DLC was not like that, and was painfully boring at times to just have to wade my way through enemies in order to finish.

Finally, this DLC is only available if you are actually IN game. For those who may not know what I mean, let me explain. Fallout 3’s last section of the game locks you into a room, in which you can not exit from (hence why I said it locks you in). If you have tripped this event, there is no going back to the Wasteland, and you have to start a new game if you want to finish sidequests you may not have found, such as this “Operation Anchorage” download. Lucky for me, I had an extra playthrough save ready, otherwise I would have had to start a completely new game in order to access this content. The next series of downloadable content comes with the release of Broken Steel, which will increase the game’s level cap and get rid of that locked room problem which I just described. My question is, why the hell wasn’t the locked room issue not cleared up in this patch? Why am I forced to start a new game if I want to play the content? It is, in a word, unacceptable.

Final Verdict:

I can’t justify the purchase of this DLC to anyone out there. The length, price, and the general lack of fun really make it hard for me to. Bethesda should have just rolled out one giant update, with mounds of content for users to eat up. Instead, we’re left with a short, expensive, boring snippit of gameplay which will remind gamers of the 2006 horse armor fiasco that Bethesda pulled way back when. After this DLC update, I’m going to really have to wait and see if the next sets are going to be worth my money. For now though, just stick to the regular game.

-J

War. War never changes. It’s been years in the making, but Fallout 3 is finally here for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC. While some would be quick to call the game an Oblivion clone from Bethesda, there is enough changed and added to the gameplay to make Fallout 3 worthy successor to the name.

Story:

Set in a post-apocalyptic Washington DC, your character is literally born into the world of Fallout, which sets up brief tutorials and character customization for you to partake in. Cut into a series of specific meaningful times in your life, you will learn about your father, life in Vault 101, and watch yourself grow up into the character you’ll become. Your “life as you know it” will be thrown to the way side when your father mysteriously disappears from Vault 101 one day, which has sent the entire place into a ravaging death trap. You eventually decide to try to find your father, which means leaving the Vault, and exploring the world. What comes after this opening story section, would be littered with spoilers, so it would be best to leave it at that.

The story is pretty straight froward as far as RPGs go, but how you want to tackle it, is 100% up to you. In the playthrough that I completed initially for this review, I actually skipped over a HUGE story point, just because of how I explored the game. In the end, it didn’t leave me with a gapping hole in the story, and allowed me to come back to the mission later on with points being somewhat relevant to the events that I had already completed. Similar to the story that was in Oblivion, if you decide to plow through the story and not take any time to do anything else, you can probably finish the game in about 20 hours or so. While not great, the plot keeps you interested to complete story sections to finish the game, and just see what happens. Unfortunately, the endings pale in comparison to the game that you will put the time into completing, but they do allow for some closure depending on if you played the game as a good, bad, or neutral character.

Gameplay:

Fallout 3 is set up just like Oblivion, which is why most people make the immediate comparison for the two games. You are in a gigantic open world, have a main story quest, and then are also aided by side quests that are at your leasure to complete… just like in Oblivion. Generally, if you are a good character, you’re going to try to stick to the positive outcomes for missions in order to not lose karma in the game. The Karma system is set up so that if you do things like save a person in the Wasteland by giving him water, you’ll gain good karma. Randomly kill a woman who just said hello to you, will obviously gain you negative karma. The karma does not have an immediate impact to most things, but it will affect the dialog tree’s that appear, as well as other quests that you might take. While you can be good and bad, you can also be neutral in most cases, by just not doing something that would be considered good or bad. The outcomes… well I’ll leave you to find out what happens at neutral karma to not spoil the fun. Side missions are generally the way to level up your character, but the main issue here is that they don’t provide a variety of fun things to do most of the time. The Megaton “Power of the Atom” mission was great because it gave you an option… ok, that’s spoilers, so lets just say that the outcome is pretty neat depending on how you beat it. Other missions just don’t live up to what you just completed in Megaton, and then just drop off to “go here, get this, bring it back, fin” structure that has been present in too many games recently.

So while there is a giant world to explore, you’re going to have a different variety of enemies hunting you down to kill you (it is a wasteland after all), and you’re going to have to dispose of them in some sort of way. Enter once again, the similarities to Oblivion in terms of how combat is played out. Your basic set up is that you are in first person mode or third person mode to take on an enemy on screen. You can use the first person mechanics, but a first person shooter this is not, and one should not go into this game thinking you’re going to get a Halo or Call of Duty style of play out of it. The first person aspects are very clunky, and result in using the RPG element called VATS. While in VATS, you go into a type of freeze mode to where you can take aim at specific body parts on enemies. This helps you cripple enemies, knock guns out of their hands, or straight up shoot ‘em dead in the face (which is the best course of action at all times). Immediate thought that would come to mind is that one would just use VATS all the time, but it has a certain amount of ability points that need to recharge before you can use it again. So a good 50-50 relationship from real time fighting to using the VATS system is how it plays out, and for the most part it works pretty well. The hang up with the combat system is that you always just aim for the head in VATS, because it hurts the enemy the most of course. This leads to lots of running up to an enemy dead to their face, turn on VATS, aim for head, and then INSTADEATH. The third person aspect of the game is completely and utterly useless. Not only is it terrible for battle, but you can’t properly see what you are doing because of the angle of the camera whenever you go into third person. It’s just something that is just there which adds nothing to the game, and I advise to not even bother trying it.

While the review probably sounds like it has a very negative tone to it, I should talk about some of the great parts of the gameplay. Easily the best thing about the game is the sheer scope of the world that you are in. Once you leave Vault 101, and get that first look at the Wasteland with DC off in the distance, the size of the game really hits you. I don’t know what it was, but I always seemed to gravitate towards where people were in the game, and when you were alone, you felt alone. There were also a ton of moments within my two playthroughs of the game, which made me actually think to kill someone or not, and more so than how it was in Bioshock when you had to save or destroy the little sisters. I knew that taking out that one person may have an impact later on in the game, and I always had to think out things, which was an interesting morale issue with ones self. The choices may be limited in what you can do, but doing things have repercussions, which doesn’t happen in some games with similar “choices” you can make. The perks that you get when you level up, always added a new way of playing the game depending on what your choices were. During my first play through I was a fairly balanced character, which made it harder and easier in some spots. During playthrough two, I poured all of my abilities into weapons and talking, and just completely dominated everyone I talked to. The leveling system leaves the door open to your own style of play, while leaving the door open for replayabilty.

Graphics and Sound:

If someone said that Fallout 3 looked like Oblivion, it would be hard to disagree with them. Reason being is that Fallout 3 is using the same engine from Oblivion, bugs in tow and all. This is not to say that the game looks bad in any sense, in fact, it is one of the best looking games that I have seen. The sheer scope alone really puts other games to shame. Looking out over DC to see everything in ruins, while still making out famous landmarks, it’s really just a sight to be hold. Unfortunately with all that massiveness going on, the game does some weird things at random. I experienced frame rate skipping from the moment I turned the game on, until the credits rolled. I also experienced a couple of freezing issues, all of which were random, and I contributed to the game just freaking out due to everything that was going on while I was playing.The color pallet in the game is brown, brown, and then a darker shade of brown. With a setting like this, it’s hard to move away from anything but dirty colors, so get use to sitting there and looking at brown textures, muddy water, and other items of that nature. Character models are straight out of Oblivion with a new coat of paint, so don’t expect anything new there.

The voice acting in the game is top notch, with all the main characters and side characters giving their lines perfectly to you, as if you really were the character. You have the occasional person who is alittle to over happy for the character, but it still fits (and boy is it great to shoot them in the face when you don’t need them anymore). The sound effects are pretty standard, with gun shots and lasers sounding just like the should. I will mention that the game doesn’t have any real “music”, with the exception of when you come upon enemies, or if you’re listening to the Pipboy 3000’s radio. There is more of an overtone which fits with the setting very well, and after hearing some of the radio songs for an extended period of time, you’ll be happy you can turn it off and listen to nothing at all.

Yaaaaaaaays

-Massive open world for you to explore
-Great voice acting
-Combat Shotgun (oh yeah)
-Replayability out the ass

Boooooooos

-Shares many of the same aspects to Oblivion
-Interior levels can get confusing at times
-Ending is kind of a bummer

Final Verdict:

Buy it.

War. It never changes, but Fallout has. This is easily one of the best games that I have played in a long time, and while there are some gameplay issues and bugs, the amount of things to do and sheer scope of the world make it easily recommendable. Stop what you’re doing, and go pick it up now.

-Justin

FALLOUT 3:
Holy shit. This game is fantastic. Getting the Oblivion+Fallout analogy out of the way, this is yet another great installment in the franchise and another tick in the positive box for Bethesda. No frame drops from loading, seemingly huge universe, and mature as (to keep the theme) fuck.

For those of you worried about the V.A.T.S. system being over-powered, once you’ve chosen your targets, the action progresses in a slow-mo representation of real-time. You WILL take damage. However, this system contributes to the tactical backdrop of the Fallout franchise. Plus, you get the most amazing deaths this way. Just like Oblivion, though, don’t bother using the third-person perspective for anything but looking at your kick-ass sheriff’s duster. It just doesn’t work that well.

Character customization, freedom of action, and choice of gameplay style ensure your game will be different in some way from your friends’. I’ve been talking with other people that have played the game and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard in response to one of my excited stories, “I didn’t go that way,” or “Oh, I killed that guy,” or “Really? Because I can drink blood now and regenerate limbs. Can’t you?”

If you only kinda want this game, I’ve made up your mind for you. You want it If you already want it, call off work tomorrow.

GUITAR HERO WORLD TOUR:
Don’t mind IGN, I was very impressed by this game especially the track list and note-blueprint. I’m a Harmonix fan all the way and was very let down by Guitar Hero after they left, but Neversoft really stepped it up with World Tour.

The new features like the extended sustains, tap sections, and open-hand bass notes are satisfying and fun. Character creation outshines Rock Band by a country mile, to mix metaphors.

The Instruments–
Drums: Bouncy, quiet, and well-placed. The pedal is cheap like the old RB set.
Guitar: Feels slick, but I still like the RB one better. The slide bar is interesting and useful, but VERY hard to master. You probably won’t be using it as much as intended.

The music creation is way too complicated for what piddly little sounds it produces. The ones you get from other users may be interesting, but in no way will they ever compare to what’s on offer on the disc.

It should be noted: I have experienced just about every problem with the peripherals that you have heard: sticking buttons, sensitive drum pads, and the slide bar registering strums when I’m not doing anything. Activision is replacing everything for me, and you, too if it happens with your stuff.

I know a lot of this sounds bad, but trust me when I say it definitely rivals Rock Band. I’m not going to complain about two great band games that have different things too offer, though it won’t be long until they end up just blending together.

For arcade purists, Konami came out with their game and it’s not that great. So, grit your teeth and pick up a GH or RB.

CASTLEVANIA: This is simple– better than any of the 3D iterations, but very much the worst Symphony-Clone.

LITTLEBIGPLANET: If you own a PS3, there is absolutely no reason not to own this game. It comes into stores for general sale Wednesday, so if you haven’t picked up an early copy this weekend, snag one up like your life depended on it.

This ended up being a long conference call.

-Arlo