Circumvention Edition
I can’t quite decide how I feel about the fact that I used Goozex to acquire the Fallout 3 Game Add-on Packs, which are basically discs containing the DLC extensions for Fallout. The discs themselves are no more expensive than the DLC if purchased separately (nevermind the MS Point tax), but since I got them from Goozex and they function identically to the DLC in that they install to your hard drive, I only need to possess the discs for roughly 55 seconds and then I can turn around and re-list them on Goozex at or near the exact point price I paid. My cost for $20 worth of DLC? $1 per disc and maybe $2.50 shipping on each to get them out the door. For the two discs currently in circulation, that’s $40 worth of game content for $7. My penny-pinching side does this little jig that looks like Gumby doing the Irish jig when I think about it, but my sense of justice kicks in simultaneously and makes me feel like I’ve gamed the system somehow and taken advantage of Bethesda’s good will in trying to get their add-on content out to the non-broadband-owning populace.
I guess my final judgement will be reserved for when I work my way through all that content. If it’s as solid as the Oblivion DLC was, I’ll probably feel a little guilty and try to make up for it by actually purchasing a copy of the next game they put out (Elder Scrolls V?).
I’ve pretty much been stuck back on Fallout 3 since I picked it up last week. I play mostly in short one or two hour bursts at night after my wife and baby have gone to sleep: Even with the sleep deprivation of having a newborn I can’t bring myself to retire for the night prior to the witching hour. And ultimately I find that my lifetime struggle with sleep as a constant interruption to my leisure activities has left me accustomed to operating more or less efficiently on a generous average of five hours sleep per night. Since the household tries to call it a night around 23:00 and I typically don’t have to wake up for the day until 08:30 at the earliest, that’s nine and a half hours for me to try and squeeze in a bit of shut-eye. If I doze through half of it, I feel more or less the same way I did before the birth.
Most of my efforts to this point have been focused on getting a character returned to the point at which I consider the game “fun” rather than “interesting.” Early stages in the game involve frequent trips back to whatever you establish as your home base to offload accumulated loot and repair the copious damage dished out by the wasteland’s various foes, and trying to advance in level so you can ultimately get some sort of reliable combat strategy going. Basically this means dumping points into some kind of combat or circumvention technique because you really can’t try to get through the game being a generalist. When I played through before I was a Small Arms expert who did massive damage in VATS with assault rifles and shotguns; this time I’m a stealth expert who can more or less one-shot-kill anything weaker than a Super Mutant Brute so long as I remain undetected in stealth mode before I fire. For the most part it doesn’t matter what weapon I use.
The rationale for this is to get to a point where I can appreciate the DLC, although I did run through Operation: Anchorage early on because I read somewhere that the loot was better served being acquired by a mid-level character. In many ways that was very true, and it in fact influenced the direction I eventually took my character. I thought the add-on was pretty cool, the snowy areas were a nice change of pace from the oppressive brownness of the rest of the game. I did think it felt a bit padded, like they had a pretty cool concept but they made each section of it longer than it really needed to be I guess so people who downloaded it felt like they got their money’s worth.
Anyway, the other game I put some significant time into was Picross DS. Basically it’s a puzzle game that owes a great deal to Sudoku but the resulting grids are treated as canvases for pixel art. Rather than determining a sequence of numbers within a set of parameters, the row and column heads describe a particular pattern of shaded coordinates. For example, a column may have the number 3 over it indicating that somewhere in that column there are three consecutive shaded cells. If there are two numbers, say 3 1, that means there are three consecutive shaded cells followed by at least one unshaded cell and then one shaded cell, all on that same column and in that order. From this you can deduce through process of elimination which cells are shaded and which are not. The result when you are done is some kind of pixelized art, not unlike a favicon in a browser tab. They start out simple at 5×5 but quickly get up to 18×18 and bigger which makes it much more difficult from a logic standpoint but the resulting pictures—which really shouldn’t be much of a reward at all but somehow totally are—are more intricate.