“It’s common knowledge that irradiated cats have 18 half-lives”

I think something that is pretty infamous about me is that I don’t like western RPG’s. When I mean western RPG’s, I’m talking about open world games which have many RPG elements to them. You know like the Witcher, the elder scrolls, stuff like that. But it was never a case of ‘oh I just hate those types of games cause I feel like it and I’ve actually never tried them’ I’ve tried western RPG’s many times. I tried the Witcher 3, and hated it. I tried Skyrim and found it boring and pretty tedious. I also tried fallout new vegas but didn’t find much inspiration to continue it after the first few hours. However, a friend of mine pushed me to try and give the fallout series another try and recommended me fallout 4…and I really didn’t like that either. I was pretty much ready to give up. Ready to throw in the towel and declare ‘western RPG’s just aren’t for me’. But then there was one last game I hadn’t tried yet: fallout 3. I’d purposefully stayed clear of it because let’s just say it has a pretty infamous reputation for being not the greatest game ever made. However, there was a part of me deep down that wanted to like a western RPG and there had to be a game that I’d like. So I caved in and decided to give it a go. I was hoping to try just an hour and see if it hooked me, that hour became 2 and then before I knew it I’d spent around 3 hours on it and it ended up becoming a game I’d play each day for around 2 weeks. So after giving it a go and finishing it, these are my thoughts on Bethesda’s fallout 3.

“Democracy is non-negotiable”

The story I think is probably the most simple and basic story I’ve probably ever seen. So in this you play as Liam neeson’s son in his quest to find his dad after he left vault 101, where you both lived, without saying anything. This sends you out of the vault and into ‘the capital wasteland’ which is the land in and surrounding Washington DC after a nuclear bomb hit it. The story sends you kind of all over the place where it’s revealed that Liam neeson actually wanted to finish off a project he had started years ago to purify the water in the wasteland. We then find him and he tasks us with helping him set up the purifier but everything seems to go wrong when the enclave show up, kill Liam neeson, and take over the purifier. After joining up with the brotherhood our mission after that is to find a thing called the G.E.C.K. which would then help us have an advantage over the enclave, however they take the G.E.C.K. from us as we end up having to do a last stand against them. The story then finally ends with either us or someone else turning on the purifier and sacrificing themselves. To be perfectly honest, how this main story ended up winning the gdc award for best writing is kind of beyond me. It’s fine, it’s serviceable but I wouldn’t exactly call it a masterpiece in modern fiction. I also kinda dislike the fact there aren’t other endings that aren’t tied to the main quest line. It put the wind out of my sails a little bit when I realised that every ending no matter what stems from whatever you do at the end of the main quest and to me it doesn’t really work? This is just my opinion but if you become a slaver the last thing you’d probably want to do is help your dad with a purifier but I digress.

“You must like having such a good looking butt”

I think with the lack of a great story, fallout 3 makes up for it with really good and understandable gameplay. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t the greatest combat out there but it certainly gets the job done. I do admire how easy it is to grasp. One of the systems that definitely makes fallout…well fallout is the V.A.T.S. System. This is a system where time freezes and you can pick a certain part of an enemy to shoot out such as a leg or an arm. This can be really helpful actually as if you shoot, for example, the right leg enough, it’ll cripple that certain body part, giving you a further advantage in the battle. To be honest I’d go on to kinda say that vats is kinda broken in this game because with the right weapon and the right distance you can essentially get through an enemy encounter very quickly. Weapons also have durability to them that affects their damage output. So if your weapon has very low durability, its damage will be very low compared to when it had a very high durability earlier. There’s also the radiation system but it’s not really a part of the game I ever notice much surprisingly. You’ll have a secondary meter that shows how high your radiation level is, which usually comes from eating radiated consumables or being in an area with high radiation levels. This ends up increasing your radiation level and can end up making you radiation sick, although I never really had trouble with it nor did it stick out. The gameplay isn’t too bad and honestly I quite enjoyed it. It gets the job done and it has some aspects I kinda like.

“My experiments are of a complex nature and would take a scientist to explain… oh wait! I’m a scientist! How marvellous!”

My favourite part in the game by far has to be the atmosphere and the world created for fallout 3. Ok sure, the screen does look like someone pissed all over it but how do you expect to look after a couple of nuclear explosions? The world feels absolutely desolate and yet also very desperate as there’s never a place that can’t be discovered and heck those places are extremely unique. From the child run town of little lamplight, to the completely rebuilt and functional tenpenny tower, the whole world feels like it’s brimming with different stories just waiting to be discovered. It would also be pretty bad of me if I also didn’t mention the ruined city of Washington DC. Going through it is actually quite unsettling. You see a city that’s almost completely destroyed with many of the once famous landmarks being nothing more than parts of a greater battlefield.

Fallout 3 isn’t perfect. But it definitely surprised me. Me and Todd Howard might not get along but I have to admit, this is one of the grimmest worlds I’ve ever seen, and I like it. It truly works in the context of the game. The story, whilst basic, does have a little charm to it. I don’t know who I’d be if I didn’t dedicate a sentence to my favourite companion Fawkes. And the gameplay, while pretty basic, was very easy to pick up and understand (although vats do make it real easy but I digress). Overall, fallout 3 was def a game that made me realise how wrong I was about western RPGs, and I hope I can give new vegas another try.

Ok story, easy gameplay, grim and clever world, unique locations, Fawkes

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Not crash twinsanity, insanity.”
- Albert Einstein

It was a pretty big surprise for naughty dog to move on from the crash series and begin on a completely new ip. So, with universal owning the property, they still wanted to make money off of the series. They approached the developers called traveller’s tales and asked them to develop a new crash game without any of the developers from the last three games (and it shows). After a decent amount of development, they eventually shat out crash bandicoot the wrath of cortex. There hasn’t been a more disappointing game since pac-man on the Atari 2600. But to be fair this isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever played, there are some aspects I quite like.

The good:

For starters, the game is in 60fps. I know that sounds like a pretty weird thing to praise the game with but with how developers a lot later just gave up trying to optimise it to that, I still think it’s quite admirable they did it here. Secondly, I like how some, and I mean some, of the levels are actually pretty decent. Like I would probably recommend those specific levels to someone who enjoyed the original trilogy. I’m more-so talking about the normal platforming levels and not the ones where you’re in a ball or in a plane. Also, it surprisingly controls pretty well. There are some specific situations (which we will discuss later) where it doesn’t but I’d say that crash actually controls really well here. Uhh…what else…oh yeah, I like how there’s a mask that is played by the same actor as biff tannen, you know Thomas f. Wilson. So for his lines I’m pretty sure they just told him to bring out his inner biff tannen. Mark hamill, the late R. Lee Ermy, and Jess Harnell also play the other masks which has always been pretty funny to me.

The bad (or what I thought was pretty mid):

For starters, why are we collecting crystals…AGAIN. We’ve done this 2 times already and you want us to do it AGAIN?!? Supposedly we have to collect them again because it would help ‘banish the evil masks away’. Then why can’t we use the crystals we collected from the last two games? And in this game it isn’t even fun to do in places.

In some levels we also get to play as coco, you know crash’s really smart sister. So why is she in the bad? Because her levels are ass. She literally only has the spin attack and none of the other moves crash has. Thats right, she doesn’t have the slide ability, the double jump, SHE HAS NOTHING. Like what did they to her. In crash 2 and even crash 3 she was always presented as a nice opposite to crash, not useless by any means as she was still very helpful. Her brains compared to crash’s brawn was a very nice contrast. But here it kind of feels undermined, possibly not intentionally but it kind of feels that way. Oh and also when she jumps you can’t see the shadow of where she’s about to land sometimes…

Crunch feels like a pretty useless character in my book. This is probably just my opinion but I really don’t like what he signifies. You know knuckles in the sonic franchise? I feel like crunch was meant to be crash’s version of that but it kind of doesn’t work in the context of what crash is if you ask me. Crash bandicoot isn’t like sonic. It isn’t like Mario. It isn’t like any of the other platformers and that was something that was drilled into people’s heads in the first 3 crash games. It stood out a lot more. So to essentially create a character and basically just repeat a certain plot point from sonic 3 & knuckles feels…wrong? Or at least it doesn’t feel particularly right. I don’t know, it’s pretty harmless.

Oh yeah did I forget to mention there are nitro crates everywhere. Like holy shit they went absolutely crazy with it. It’s not like it even adds much either, it’s pretty annoying to be perfectly honest and kinda makes the game and some of its level design kinda uninteresting for me personally. I don’t think it helps that the new ability crash can use is a tiptoe. This is used to go over nitro crates without getting hurt and it’s not terrible but feels kinda basic. I just don’t like the overuse of nitro crates here.

Did I also mention some of vehicle levels don’t control the absolute best, or at the very least aren’t particularly interesting. The mech doesn’t control the best and you SLOW DOWN when jumping which is crazy. The submarine is really annoying because unlike any scuba diving level you don’t get a spin attack: instead you have to use these weird projectile things that shoot out and feel incredibly unreliable. The plane levels are also really uninteresting for me. At least the ball levels are fine?

Overall, I’d say my main problem with the game is that, it really doesn’t try anything new. It’s inoffensive sure but that’s not what I want it to be. If you don’t have any particularly new ideas for it then why bother making the game? I’d make the argument it’s crash 3 but with less interesting boss fights, nitro crates everywhere, and a knuckles rip off that really feels forced in. Again, it’s not the worst game I’ve ever played, but it’s nowhere near the best either. Crash bandicoot the wrath of cortex is quite possibly the definition of one of the greatest words to come out of the internet: mid. It’s fine in places, but it’s not a whole lot interesting either and that’s its problem. Take crash 3 again for instance: it did use the same sort of level structure and ideas from crash 2, granted. But it also improved it and made more interesting levels in the process that controlled pretty well. I’m not saying the original trilogy is a masterpiece, probably pretty far from it. But it was at least designed well and gave players new experiences for each game. The wrath of cortex doesn’t do that, and that’s probably my greatest disappointment with it.

Eh gameplay, pretty decent music, controls are fine, pretty uninteresting, “what are you looking at fuzzhead?”

So are tomatoes really fruits?

You know, I really miss alpha dream. The Mario & Luigi games are quite possibly some of my favourite RPGs. They are absolutely full to the brim with great stories, charming original characters, incredible jokes, and some of the best music to ever grace a Mario RPG. So you can probably imagine my reaction when I found out alpha dream had been forced to close due to bankruptcy. Thankfully, the series ended up being picked up again by Nintendo and recently a new game in the series was announced (with hopefully the same staff who made the games at alpha dream). But that begs the question: what about alpha dreams other series? No not that one, I meant the other game. Yes that one.

So before there was Mario and Luigi superstar saga, there was actually another RPG made by alpha dream. Yep, this game was called tomato adventure, a little game made for the game boy advance targeted towards young children. In the same vein as the Mario & Luigi games, tomato adventure is also meant to be a sort of “kids gateway into RPG’s” kinda game. In fact this game is actually the reason why Nintendo chose alpha dream to create the Mario & Luigi series in the first place so uhh…thanks tomato adventure. But this also begs the question: does the game hold up just as well as the Mario & Luigi games? Well the game was only released in Japan but thanks to the work of the legendary localiser that’s ‘tomato’ we are able to play the game in English. So let’s hop straight into it shall we and experience the alpha dream’s odd and quirky RPG.

Did I mention the story is pretty strange? So the game is set in the ketchup kingdom which is ruled by the evil king abira…who is a baby. Our protagonist: DeMille, is a young rabbit who absolutely hates tomatoes, because he doesn’t like tomatoes he is known as a ‘dropper’ and is basically sent to live with other ‘droppers’ who hate tomatoes. DeMille ends up escaping the village he is stuck in with his girlfriend patharan to look in a place known as the toy ruins. They end up not being able to find what they’re looking for and pasaran gets taken by brikky and grikky (two henchmen of abira’s) who end up using her to try and power abira’s super weapon. So with that DeMille ends up going on an adventure to try and save her. Along the way DeMille also meets other characters: Alesa (a young girl who is obsessed with Abira and joins DeMille in the hopes of meeting him), Sofubi (a tailor who wants to lose weight and decides to join the party), and Rellek (a journalist who joins the party in hopes of finding a good story to report). All of the party members have uhh…interesting motives to say the least but they are pretty funny.

As for gameplay, I actually quite like what it’s going for in a way, but the execution leaves quite a lot to be desired. As soon as you get into fight, DeMille and one other party member fight enemies using their ‘gimmicks’. These come in the form of toy like weapons that require different tasks to be performed. For instance, the yo-yo like weapon makes you have to stop a moving bar in a certain zone to get the maximum amount of damage. There are many different gimmicks with different tasks that need to be performed with some being more powerful than others. Although, you can power up these gimmicks in 2 different ways. Firstly, you can use different things called ‘cells’ to power up the gimmicks which raises their attack. Secondly, you could also just change the difficulty of the gimmicks which is a thing you can also do. This makes the damage of the gimmicks much higher but the problem is it also makes performing the gimmicks much much harder. While it does push you to put the gimmicks at a higher difficulty, they end up being super hard to perform. You even get more powerful gimmicks from the hanzo brothers as the game goes along so there’s no real point in raising the difficulty and putting cells into older gimmicks if newer ones will outperform them anyway.

There are also awe points that you can get in battle. What are they exactly? Well if you successfully perform a gimmick you’ll get awe points. Once you get enough, you can then successfully pull off a very strong attack against an enemy. However, if you fail a gimmick your awe points are gone and you have to start all over again. The amount of awe points is also linked to the difficulty of the gimmick and can you see where I’m going with this? This can be a problem because then, if you’ve put the difficulty pretty low, and you slowly get awe points, and then you lose them, you have to start all over again and it can get pretty annoying. Although the normal attacks are just fine. Something I will admit is I do like the amount of choice when it comes to gimmicks, some are exclusive to some party members but they all feel very fresh and different and you can easily pick and choose which ones you like and don’t like.

We then have the music which is pretty fine. You can tell that this game uses the exact same sound font as superstar saga because some songs sound very very similar to it. The overall quality though is just fine. I mean when there are bangers, they are pretty good, but most of the other tracks are kinda meh. Supposedly this is actually the first game the composer did work on and you can kinda tell, but if you ask me: he didn’t do too bad of a job. Also, before I forget, the visuals of the game are absolutely amazing. I don’t care what anyone says but I think it looks really nice. It feels like they aren’t afraid to make the world and areas of it really wacky sometimes. I’m happy superstar saga followed a similar style cause what they did here actually kinda impressed me.

The game ends with us finally taking down Abira and everything seems great: Alesa hasn’t gotten over Abira and is now in love with Sofubi (in the most awkward way), Sofubi has accepted that being fat is ok, Rellek is happy to be with everyone, and DeMille is finally reunited with Pasaran. So what could possibly go wro- THERES A CLIFFHANGER??? So after you do everything, the party accidentally end up in the pepper kingdom and this time Alesa is taken away by the king of the pepper kingdom: Pimara. So the party end up having to go on yet another adventure to save Alesa.

Unfortunately, the game never received a sequel or much recognition. As I mentioned before, it was a Japan only game so we never saw a release in the west, supposedly due to Nintendo considering the games audience being ‘too young’ for westerners. In Japan the game was pretty well received and sold decently well but never seemed to raise much attention. There were supposedly rumoured plans for a sequel and there was even some art found on alpha dream’s website of an updated DeMille and Pasaran but since alpha dream’s closure, and plans have probably been scrapped.

So what did I think of the game overall? I think it was a pretty nice change of pace from most RPG’s and definitely excelled in different aspects than what I was expecting. The visuals and designs of the world feel really vibrant and unique and the writing was really funny. The gameplay, whilst allowing for many possibilities, ended up kinda feeling annoying at points. But I think people should definitely give this game a go. It certainly isn’t a masterpiece but if your a fan of the Mario & Luigi games then I’d certainly recommend it. As for where the series will go I have no idea. Here’s hoping that maybe Nintendo will pick it up and be interested in making a sequel, or even a remake. Since the Mario & Luigi series did finally come back, you never know. Here’s hoping.

Unique visuals, ok gameplay, decent story, great characters, funny writing, kaizo genuinely scares me