Breaking News: Angry People Online Angry At Other People! (NSFW)

People are angry.  And not just angry, violently angry.  I brought this up briefly at the beginning of the month regarding Konami's cancellation of Silent Hills and the outcry regarding the destruction and imminent failure of the studio due to disappointing their most fervent (violently aggressive) and devoted fans.  This morning, Bethesda Softworks tweeted/instagrammed/social media'd a 12 second teaser of a Revenant shooting/screaming at something it apparently is not rather fond of.  And let me tell you, the outpouring of support for a new game in this beloved franchise has been so incredibly heartfelt.

Just a warning, the rest of this article will contain language, both taken directly from the interwebs as well as general sentiment interpreted and reworked by me in order to make a point.  I feel odd to mention that I do not, in fact, agree with genocide of any magnitude upon anyone.

And it's not even that those who apparently only want to see Fallout 4 released by Bethesda to be announced/released at E3 this year as being the game, that for lack of a better and friendly term, unfriendly people here really want to see/hear about.  Even some of those in favor of the development by id Software and release by Bethesda Softworks of Doom by taking a defensive position are just as crass in their response to people complaining about no Fallout 4 announcement.

I can only imagine what Tumblr, Pintrest, 4chan, digg, fark, forbes and reddit all have to say about the people on the other side of their personal opinion.  And no, I am not going to be looking.  I can only take so much of people yelling at their screens about their displeasure expecting a sudden 180 in a company's decision.  Like someone at Bethesda and id will be scratching their heads in a years time wondering why no one said anything about their bad decision to develop and release an updated vision of a game that kickstarted the fps genre.  If only they had bothered to actually listen to what the rest of the world and not the people tasked with writing and designing their own product.

I genuinely wonder what occurred in these people's lives that have made them believe that demanding that what they want is what everyone else wants.  That by making demanding in a derogatory manner will give them what it is that they so desperately crave.  Has yelling "I want General Mills to release the Super Mario Bros. cereal again fucking-damnit!" ever worked out?  For anyone?  At the end of a relationship, do they yell "If you leave me I'm going to commit genocide on your mother fucking family!"  Has company ever been thankful for the "Hey, leave them alone for making a game you don't want to play you whining bitch faggots!" comments that are left in their defense?  When has ever threatening a company or complaining like someone whining while online ever given someone their way?

The comments that really get me are the ones that sound like "No one cares about Doom, everyone wants Fallout 4!  Why don't you listen to your fans!?"  Which are usually followed up by some conglomeration of "Shut the fuck up whining fallout fanboy piece of shit!  Doom is amazeballs!"  Meanwhile, Bethesda is over in the corner drinking themselves into an early grave wondering why they didn't listen to their real fans and publish a game that real gamers actually want to play and not this Doom shit.  Sarcasm.

I saw similar fallout (eh?) when The Chinese Room announced that their upcoming game Everybody's Gone to the Rapture was announced as a Playstation 4 exclusive, which included infuriated statements.  I read statements wanting The Chinese Room to fail with their game resulting in the closing of the company and that people would cancel their pre-order of Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs as a sign of protest against PS4 exclusivity.  As a fan of both Dear Esther and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, I was saddened to hear that EGttR was going to be an exclusive, but I wasn't up in arms wishing for the failure of the studio and death upon everyone associated with the company.  

Granted not everyone wanting Fallout 4 wants to bomb Bethesda back to the stone age until they create Fallout 4 (or Elder Scrolls VI: [Insert Name of Desired Geographical Tamriel Province that You Think Everyone Will Only Want to Play in and Everyone Can Suck a Bag of Dicks Because They're Wrong, Obviously]).  Some people just leave "Fallout 4" as a comment, and while it can be annoying to see a page full of a game's title on a teaser video for a different game, at least those people are not threatening to set a person's dog of fire (Bioware helpfully suggests not to pet them).

I'm just going to stop as I know that I could just go on and on (and on some more) often repeating myself and how I view the people who apparently feel that complaining in the above referenced (and shown) manner will get them what they want.  See, I was just about to do it again, but I stopped.  That's called self control.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

How Blind Can You Be, Don't You See?

Whatever Impressions: Fallout (PC)

I say "Whatever" not because this game came out 17 years ago or because its graphics are dated, but because I have started various characters in Fallout, the first being about four years ago after Vorlynx bought the game for me while we were browsing around Best Buy (I have since forgotten our reason for being in Best Buy in the fist place though).  

Anyway, my first run through, I thought I had beaten the game when I acquired the computer chip required to fix the water filtration system and brought it back to Vault 13 before the 150 day time limit expired.  People who have played before know that this is not the way to win the game.  I then did something very stupid.  I found a gun that I did not really care for, only later realizing that said gun happened to be one of the rarest guns in the game and can only be found by a random encounter with an alien saucer.  That gun, I sold for a paltry sum, so I created a new character, intent on finding that gun again.

That was when I found out that the gun could only be found by random chance and was not a static item in the world.  Needless to say I became a bit discouraged having scrapped my first character and now finding out that the super awesomely powerful alien gun was simply random.  So I continued playing until I reached an underground military-type facility full of things that wanted to kill me that I could not escape.  I think it had to do with the Brotherhood of Steel.  So I had to start over.

My third character, I did a lot of similar actions and stories that I did with my first two characters, but this time I found a dog as a companion that fought along side me.  I went on a mission to oust a bandit that was raiding in the nearby area.  At some point during the umteenth time I tried taking out all the bandits, the dog was killed.  I of course did not realize this until after I had been successful in taking out all of the bandits.  I was seriously at a crossroads as to whether or not I should restart for the sake of my digital dog.  After some time to grieve, I decided that the death of the dog was a character building moment and went on with my life.  The last I saw of this character, I was in town that had some kind of rad-creature infestation in a warehouse area that I was trying to clear out so that I could potentially have better gear/weapons/money.

Then Conklederp and I moved up to Portland and I rediscovered Diablo II.  A few months later I poured a pint of Guinness on my computer.  I have not played or attempted to play Fallout since that dark time.  Until today (today being October 23rd as opposed to the 27th).

What I have noticed so far, and it is something that is leftover from the previous times I have played, is that I am constantly afraid that I am going to do something that will fuck up the story.  I am not referring to the 150 days I have to fix the water filter in the vault or the extension you can buy from the water supplier, although those deadlines do not help.  I am referring to the many stories and side quests that exist within this game.  I want to be successful.  I want to save the people in Vault 13.  I want to not have my dog (wherever it may be) die.  I want to explore the world and I want to build the best character I can without the help of a "Build the Best Fallout Character to Have the Most Fun or You Suck at Gaming" guide.  

Wasting time in Junktown, or finding a way to save the people back in Vault 13?

I just feel that I am doomed from the outset.  It probably has a lot to do with the time limit established at the beginning of the game, and even knowing that I can extend that time limit by an extra 100 days.  I honestly do not know what happens when Vault 13 runs out of water.  Does the game end the same way as if you were killed?  Do you just go on exploring the world knowing that everyone you grew up with has died from dehydration?  But I love this world.  I want to know what happens to the people in Vault 13 and all the other Vaults that I have yet to come across.  However, there is this constant nagging feeling that I am wasting time and that I have not done something correctly.  That is probably not the best feeling to have going into a game for the fourth time.

Yet on I play.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Like Pawns On A Distant Shore

One Thing Leading To Another

I had an interesting experience the last two of the three nights and no, it doesn't end like that, whatever that is.  On Friday night, because I sooo extroverted, I started playing Dead Space, a game that I've wanted to play for quite some time, only recently purchased and having finished Penumbra: Overture, I wanted another horroresque game to start up, which is what I did.  I've only played the first 35 minutes, which means that shit just went downhill and Isaac is separated from his superiors.  So only 35 minutes into the game (really only 30 minutes as I spent about five tweaking the the video and control settings: always have to invert the y-axis!!) I began thinking about Doom 3, Alien and Event Horizon.  

This thought wandering had nothing to do with the quality of the game and I wasn't losing interest, I was having a lot of fun, at least as much fun as one can have defending oneself with a space-nailgun against horrific looking creatures then stomping their limbs off.  I was thinking about other space horrors where I had experienced "fun" because I was having fun stomping the limbs off of (hopefully) dead creatures.  I also quickly thought that if I was ever offered a job on a interstellar mining vessel, I would turn that job down in a heartbeat!  Okay, I probably wouldn't.  It's space after all.  But yes, Event Horizon won out in the thinking process, so I turned off Dead Space and watched what I still feel is one of the best science fiction, space, horror movies around.  Yes, I know that Paul Anderson directed it, but I don't care.  It's an awesome movie that still gives me chills.  And it has Sam Fucking Neil in it.

The next night I decided to watch Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome because I'd never seen it (!?!?! I know right, considering my penchant for post-apocalyptic anything) and I wanted to get the disc back to Netflix, which I obviously have yet to do.  So within the first 20 minutes of Thunderdome, I began to feel that I wanted to play Fallout.  One of the characters even says "What's a little fallout, huh?"  The rest of the movie I was comparing what was going on in Thunderdome to the design and feel of the first Fallout game, which is the only one in that series that I've so far played.  I did not however start playing Fallout again after finishing the movie as it was around 3:30am.  

Instead I ended up putting on Skyrim as a conversation I'd had with Conklederp earlier provoked me to create a new character.  The character is a Khajiit, the feline (furry inspired??) race.  And yes, I created this Khajiit to be somewhat, visually based off of our cat, whose name in life as in game, is Joey Mjölnir Explosion.  So now, on this, the eve of Chirstmas, I present to you, the Internet, Joey Mjölnir Explosion in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Not Really a Crazy Cat Man

P.S.  Merry Christmas!