As promised, here’s my review of the new Fallout 3 DLC – Operation: Anchorage. Since getting hold of it is a less than simple process, I’ve also written extensively on how to buy it/get it running here.

Anyway. As you who were here at The Reticule’s founding will know, I really liked Fallout 3. As those of you who read my post the other day, I really hate GFWL. The latter is truer than ever. And in all honesty, Operation : Anchorage fails on almost all accounts to live up to what made Fallout 3 such a good game, even despite faults.

As everyone knows, a Fallout game is made up of a few crucial aspects. First, and foremost in my mind is the setting. Everyone knows that setting by now – it’s a bleak, stereotypically stylised picture of a world fallen, with hints of retro-futurism lost, juxtaposed with dark, satirical humour. The second crucial design point is the comparitive freedom by which you can approach the game’s various quests and situations. The 3rd is character design. For the most part, O:A either captures distant glimmers of them on the horizon, or fails utterly to include them.

The addon starts well actually. You pick up a distress signal from my favourite faction in the game, the Brotherhood of Steel Outcasts. After fighting off some supermutants with them in the ruins of DC, you come across a building site housing a bunker that has technology the Outcasts want to get at. The voice acting is of the average to good kind, and they’ve clearly made an effort here, with new textures and assets from the get-go. As soon as you jump in the virtual reality pod, you’ll either crash due to a corrupt save game (I can’t help but feel there’s a line of code in there by one beleagured developer screaming at you not to bother trying), or find yourself shivering on a cliff side with a flat, dull American soldier as your companion. You then proceed to move through a complex of cliffs, caves and commies. It’s by and large one of the least interesting levels in any modern FPS.

Escape this dull world of horrendous blue and grey, you’ll find yourself in… another horrendous world of blue and grey. Where Fallout 3 is pretty well stylised in this respect – it looks like a stereotypical barren wasteland – O:A is simply just horrific. The “squad choices” amount to little more than talking to that dull US soldier friend from the start of the simulation to choose what weapons they have. If you want squad control, go download the Enclave Commander mod. Hell, Bethesda even advertised it themselves weeks ago, clearly in anticipation of their failure. You then proceed to have the wonderful world of choice dangled in front of your eyes, only to realise you’re basically choosing little more than the order in which you follow a small number of linear paths. There’s a few nice touches along the way. It’s nice seeing the T-51b’s given their proper place once more especially. But nothing truly justifies either the financial cost. It’s not particularly long either – there’s a lot of people understandably annoyed at how short it is on the Bethesda forums. The rest are obviously having fun getting the darn thing running.

It’s not entirely without redemption. I love the new weapons and equipment. Especially the Gauss Rifle’s return. It’s easily my new favourite weapon. The Hei-Gei armour is similarily excellent, and I can’t wait to try it out a bit more in the main game. There’s the occasionally brief satire – though never more than a few lines from the characters. It has no sense of bombastic jingoism that’s so present in billboards and the like in the main game. It’s a missed opportunity by all accounts.

I think ultimately, the new gear and art assets will prove useful in the modding scene. In this respect, I’ll be quite glad I’ve got it. It’ll be nice to use some of the new stuff in the main game some more as well. But there’s not nearly enough, and the new levels are simply bereft of all that makes Fallout, Fallout. They tried to make an action RPG into pseudo-Call of Duty. By all accounts they have failed. It is simply not worth the £8.50 they charge, nor the extensive trouble you have to go through in order to play it.

As for future DLC, I’m sure I’ll still be getting it. I genuinely think the problem here was the decision to make a brief foray into the land of scripted shooters. Bethesda have shown this is an area they are not strong in. The Pitt and Broken Steel already look like they’re planning to return to Fallout 3‘s open world strong points. But Operation: Anchorage? Just don’t buy it folks. It’s simply not worth it.

Friendly Fire! Friendly Fire!

If, you still think you want to get it, I urge you to read my second article of the day on this DLC which will cover the distribution and other issues that plague this release that will no doubt hinder the buying process.

My review of Operation : Anchorage is not a positive one. Read it here. If you still think you want to buy it, I’ve put together a guide on how to do so – because this in itself is not simple, and a few things that may come in useful if you do.

—Buying The Darn Thing—

You need some Microsoft points first off – as in, the same points (no, not Gamerscore as I’ve seen some people asking in various forums) you use to buy stuff on the X-Box marketplace. Buying these online is restricted to users of Visa, Mastercard or AmEx, which is of course quite restricting to those of us who actually know how to look after our money. You can buy points cards from various retailers. I personally ordered mine off Amazon. They haven’t arrived yet, and won’t for a few days, so I sought out another method.

The website http://www.gamesbite.com/ looks dodgy, but they have good E-bay ratings where they also deal, and having done a bit of googling they seemed legit. Buying off Pay-Pal, you’re not giving anyone any details, so I’ve given them a try, mostly because I want to make sure I get the information about this thing out to you guys. They do cost a bit more – overall, 800 points have cost me £10.30, plus the £17 I’ve spent for 2100 on Amazon (at least I’ll have them for future purchases).

Once you’ve got a code, either from somewhere like Gamesbite, or from a retail card, you load up Games For Windows Live, and select “Redeem Code”. Whack your numbers and letters in, and you’ll add your points to your account.

Then go to Marketplace, Select the DLC, and click buy to begin the transaction. Once that is done it will begin downloading.

—Other Issues—

If any of you read Rock Paper Shotgun, you’ll notice a post by John Walker describing just how bloody difficult getting this thing running is.  In summary, it’s an absolute nightmare. In my experience, if you add up the time it took me to get GFWL running, that’s at least 8 hours I would say – though I was trying to get it running for the Dawn of War II Beta as well. Add onto that the expense of buying Microsoft points, I’ve spent £10.30, as opposed to the £8.50 it actually costs – OK, so maybe that’s partly down to my poor planning of when I bought the points, but the point stands, that if Microsoft had more payment options, as available in Steam, I wouldn’t have had that inconvienience.

Once I actually got it running, I got to the VR Room where the content really gets going, only for it to crash. Turns out my save, having started from Vault 101 and gone straight to the content area, was somehow corrupt. I will add at this point, that the Bethesda staff seemed keen to get on top of it, and within a few minutes of my post going up, they did contact me asking if I could send them my corrupt save. So at least they appear to be looking into problems with a commendable degree of promptness.

You will have to copy any non-GFWL saves into the GFWL save folder if you want to play on them. Simply copy your saves in “My Documents\My Games\Fallout 3\Saves” into the corresponding GFWL profile folder in that same path. Easy, but it shouldn’t be an issue all the same.

So what’s my point? Getting this thing going is a farce. The distribution method is atrocious, and the content itself is buggy. You could potentially spend twice the amount of time getting it running as you do playing it if you suffer the same misfortunes as myself and some others.

—Playing the DLC Minus GFWL—

One useful little nugget of information for you all is the location of the actual game files. Following this procedure will allow you to play without GFWL running. Bliss:

Go to C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Xlive\DLC

From here, copy the .bsm files into C:\Program Files\Bethesda Softworks\Fallout 3\Data

And there you have it! You’ll be able to do everything normally as per the good old ways. Still, this is how it should be by default. Not this GFWL malarky.

Addtional Buying Method

As Krakn3DFX has pointed out in the comments, you can buy points off Zune at 400 points each. Buy two of these, and you have your 800 for Operation : Anchorage.

Woooooo! The legendary Rick Flair, a 16 time World Heavyweight Wrestling Champion is making an appearance in the forthcoming Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 expansion, Uprising. Flair will be featured alongside Malcolm McDowell from Clockwork Orange, Holly Valance from Neighbours and many more.

Read the full story

What with the moderate success of WAR, and the big success of Dawn of War, it’s kind of cool to like Games Workshop again (not to imply I live my life by trends. That’d be ridiculous, and shallow. Don’t you think? Please agree with me!), and thus the upcoming Blood Bowl game is looking suitably awesome. There was always a much more lighthearted tone to Blood Bowl than the rest of the Games Workshop games, in that the sole purpose of playing wasn’t entirely about killing each other, instead about scoring with the ball and killing each other.

Cyanide (who are developing the game) have released a goblin-centric little video, showing off the brutality and batshit crazy nature of the game, both of which seem to be accomplished rather well. I for one hope that the final troll throw will be in the final game. Even if it’s hopelessly in accurate, it’ll be hilarious. Here’s the video:

Blood Bowl is hopefully coming out in the ‘next quarter’, which means probably near June-ish.

To begin with, I was thinking I could do some really cool stuff and compile all the information currently out on Subversion into a handy post for those not in the know, with some intelligently educated guesses about just what the game will involve. Unfortunately, there really isn’t that much out in the wild, even with Chris from Introversion releasing 15 (count ‘em!) different updates about stuff they’re doing with the game. So far, I’ve figured out it will feature procedurally generated cities, and may have people in it. Apart from that, all I can tell is it looks fucking awesome. Some slightly more detailed analysis through the jump.

Read the full story

That’s Lionhead mane man Peter Mole News, fair reader – nothing to do with partially-blind dirt dwellers (and you leave my aunty out of this anyway, she has a condition). Shacknews reports that some guy at Lionhead says that there’s currently no port of Fable 2 in a suitable deep-water harbour and that the district governers will tell us if that situation ever changes. What a coincidence it is that people who make games so often feel uncertain as to whether or not they’ll release a PC-port until the console sales start to dry up.

Read the full story

This is the fifth in the series where I’m slowly going through the finalists for this year’s IGF awards. This time I’m going to take a look at Mightier, the level drawing platformer that pretty much lets you craft anything in the game, from the levels, to your player, to the jetpack on his (or her, if you can draw anything remotely attractive) shoulders. And it’s pretty damn nifty. Impressions through the jump.

Read the full story

Offworld tipped me off to this; Pacman, done in the style of a text adventure. Of course there are limited options (essentially choosing whether to go North, South, East or West when those options are presented), but that doesn’t stop it from remaining tense, fun, and adding a layer of amusement that may have been lacking from the original.

Of course by making the game turn based you’re far more able to deal with those pesky ghosts, but by limiting line of sight I suppose they remove that advantage somewhat. I only wish that once you had been somewhere, it didn’t stay visible. Maybe that would just make it too hard. At least the music is ‘being great fun’.

You can play The Pac-man Dungeons here.