Monday, March 02, 2009

Threads of War Tapestries

Harry Knowles likes Zack Snyder's Watchmen movie with some reservations, which is a sign to me that the movie is absolutely horrible. It's so rare to see that guy anything but ecstatic about any Science Fiction or Fantasy movie.

I suppose I really ought to wait to see the movie, though. Just because I found 300 dull, just because the stylisation in the trailers for the Watchmen movie seems counter to the point of the comic, just because Terry Gilliam believed the comic couldn't be properly adapted into anything shorter than a miniseries, and just because the viral marketing people are saying looks like authentic late 1970s/early 1980s contains obvious CGI and isn't particularly clever, doesn't mean the movie must be bad. Nope.

Last night I went to Tim's and played more Fallout 3. I'm having a lot of fun with it--it feels pretty much like Oblivion but with guns. I love the targeting system carried over from the previous game that allows you to target specific parts of your enemies' bodies, though I was disappointed to find you're unable to target people's crotches anymore. Nothing beats the sadistic pleasure of some gangster calling you a sick motherfucker after you've blown off his junk. It's an interesting reflection of the morality at play--Fallout 3's perfectly happy to let you blow someone's head off, cripple them and leave them alive, but the genitals are off limits now. I wonder if it's even possible to become a prostitute or a porn star as you could in the previous game. Somehow I doubt it--the game's rated M, but there's so far no hint of any sexuality. You can't even take all your character's clothes off, and people won't even react to your character differently if he or she is running around in his or her underwear, the way they would in Morrowind.

And, yes, I miss the killable children in Fallout 2. I suppose the idea in Fallout 3 is that it's okay to influence people to kill adults, but killing children is going too far? It gave the world a real feeling of brutality in Fallout 2 that children might pick your pocket or accidentally get caught in crossfire. I mean, when a game has something like that that automatically makes you feel sort of bad, I find that interesting. And it's added potential for immersive motivation. But when you see an indestructible child hanging out around the mutilating corpses of his parents, and he behaves no differently than when they're alive--well, that's interesting in a way that's not exactly immersive.

But it is a good game, especially for how difficult it is. I was wandering around some ruined buildings yesterday with one hit point left trying desperately to evade the bandits and hermits with sniper rifles as well as the mutant moles, dogs, and berserk robots. The strange 1950s atmosphere is in tact from the previous games, too--I think the concept is that, though the nuclear war which devastated the planet took place in something like modern times, it was a version of modern times based on projections of the future in the 1950s. Which means fedoras and stiff hairstyles, yes, but also that there are atomic engines in all the cars, which can be another interesting element in a fire fight.

I watched the first half of the two part season finale of Battlestar Galactica's third season last night. Which was good. It was a great idea to put Baltar in black clothes. I like Lee sort of losing his mind.

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