Chey’s Top 25 – #9 – Fallout 3

Genre: RPG
Platform: XBox 360, PS3, PC

I had no idea what Fallout 3 was about when I picked it up. The back cover looked interesting, so I decided to give it a shot. I played it that night starting around 7PM and was still playing when Matt got up the next morning at 7AM. I had no idea what time it was and didn’t really care. This game will suck you in and keep you engaged until someone makes you stop or you pass out, hopefully not at the same time.

The game has a neat tutorial and character creation process. You start as a child who was just born. You are allowed to pick what you are going to look like when you grow up, but the character creation process doesn’t matter much as you will rarely ever see your character throughout the game. As you grow through your childhood, you select more attributes that shape your character. It’s pretty creative and a bit more fun than other tutorials.

Once you complete that, the story starts and you find yourself outside of your home, which as been a nuclear-safe underground vault. You leave this comfy home and are out in the wasteland and sure enough, it has been ravaged by nuclear war. You’ve got radiation to worry about as well as a myriad of mutated creatures. Humanity is few and far between, but the people that you will meet need help. They will send you out on missions and you will find the rewards helpful. They also seem to be stuck in the 1950s.

Once again, this game makes my list mostly due to the engaging story. You are trying to find your surviving family, but you get wound up in a fairly deep controversy. This game gives you a lot of choices and they matter later in the game. If you help one guy destroy a city, you’re going to make some enemies.

I am typically not a fan of first-person shooters (FPS), but this game has a combat system that takes out a lot of the “twitch” aspect. It’s called VATS and allows you to target specific parts of your enemy. It’s very clever and made me look forward to battle instead of dreading it. I would call the game more of an RPG than FPS, however, as you level up and pick attributes to strengthen your character. There are so many options to choose from that you will likely never create the same character twice.

Fallout 3 VATS

There is a lot to this game including a basic crafting system. There are things to collect (yay!) and it is just a lot of fun. It’s also an open-world game, meaning that you can go and do what you want when you want. The game doesn’t force you down a certain path, although I do recommend playing through the main story. I’m including Fallout 3 New Vegas as well as all expansions in this Top 25 as they are all fun and add to this game. New Vegas is its own stand-alone game, but it runs off of this same engine. Look for a post on Fallout 4 later on.

The graphics in this game are great, the soundtrack is awesome and the sound effects add to the game. You will be singing music from the 50’s for a long time after playing this one. The controls are great and everything about this game feels innovative. This is by the same company that makes the Elder Scrolls series and I’ve been told it just feels like an apocalyptic version of that, but I think it feels different enough. I strongly recommend that you play this one.

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Chey’s Top 25 – #10 – Phantasie

Genre: RPG
Platform: PC

This is the oldest game on my list by far. It’s a DOS-based RPG. It was like no other game I had played at the time, but I spent a lot of time on it and still play it, thanks to a little program called DOSBox, which allows you to play old DOS games on modern computers.

In Phantasie, you create characters and assemble them into a group. There is a surprising amount of customization in the character creation. It’s old-school DND rules, so you “roll” your character and get random stats. Don’t like them? Roll again. And again. And again until you have stats you can live with. For example, you’re not going to want a fighter with only 4 starting hit points and you’re not going to want a wizard with 2 intelligence points. Once you have your team assembled, you leave your starting city.

Phantasie Play 3

Once you are out of the city, you enter the scary world. You just kind of wander around, kill monsters and bad guys, gain experience and money, go back to town to train and do it all over again until you are high enough level to handle some of the more challenging areas of the map. The map consists of multiple screens and is all blackened out until you explore it. Exploration is always one of the more fun elements of a game for me, and this was my first intro to that.

Phantasie Play 2

There are also dungeons to be explored. These are large concentrations of mobs and have good gear just lying around. There are copyright checks built into the game, however, and can ruin a game if you don’t have the online manual readily available. Sneaky early developers. There are often specific tasks to complete in a dungeon, but since there’s no explanation of this in-game (I’m sure there was in the manual), you are left to your own devices to figure out what to do.

Phantasie Play 4

I’m sure we all have these really old and nostalgic games that we still play from time to time. The simplicity of it is refreshing and the lack of awesome graphics and sound leaves you to focus only on the good game play. This is an RPG at its most basic and is a lot of fun as a result. There were a couple of follow-ups to this one and I did play the second for a bit, but I only play the original now.

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Chey’s Top 25 – #11 – Diablo 2

Genre: Dungeon Crawler
Platform: PC

We are now entering the “not kidding around” part of my top 25. I’ve sunk more time than I care to admit into all but two of my remaining top 25. I’m talking YEARS of actual game time, all combined. Coming in at number 11 is Diablo 2.

This game was released in June of 2000 and I think I started playing it about a year or so later. I was immediately sucked in. This was a very revolutionary game as it really created the genre of dungeon crawlers, which are often called “Diablo clones”. There was a first Diablo, which was a good game in its own right. There was also a Diablo 3, which is another great game, and there are rumors of a Diablo 4. Blizzard, the developer, takes so long on their games, however, that we’ll likely not see it for a good five years, if it even exists.

I loved Diablo 2 for many reasons. The game play is just fun. You are constantly clicking on things on the screen. There is quite a bit of strategy in this game as well as you have a lot of different spells and abilities you can pick from, but can really only have two active at any given time. You also have to keep a close eye on your mana pool and your health. This game has a robust tech tree, which makes every play through unique and every character fresh.

Diablo 2 tech tree

The writing is really good. I have a tendency to ignore a lot of the lore in games, but I read every bit of this that I could. It’s a story of good vs evil and keeping balance in the world. Heaven vs Hell. One of the oldest stories there is. But let’s not kid ourselves here. This game is really about the loot. It’s so satisfying to see gold and items spew from the body of dead foes. And when you see a really rare piece drop, you really get excited. However, my biggest issue with this game was a seemingly arbitrarily limited inventory space. You could not carry much and your bank wasn’t that large, either. That made for some difficult decisions when seeing that phat lootz drop on the play field.

Diablo 2 inventory

To make inventory matters worse, the game had charms that had to stay in your inventory to have an effect. Some of them only took up one inventory slot, but some took up three! This may have been an annoyance, but it also really added to the depth of the game. The result was keeping different sets of gear for different types of mobs.

This game features some awesome battles, great environments and graphics that are a bit out-dated now, but the game is still wildly popular and fun. The soundtrack really adds to the tension in some areas. The maps are different every time you play, too, so it feels different every time you play it. If by some chance you’ve never played it, DO!

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Oldies but Goodies – Jezzball/Qix

Genre: Puzzle
Platform: PC (Windows 3.1)/Arcade

Jezzball was a wonderful time waster which came bundled with Windows 3.1. As a kid, I spent a lot of time playing this one late into the night. Your goal was to section off as much of the screen as you could by avoiding the balls on the screen. You drew a line that went out in opposite directions from the place you clicked on. If one of the balls hit your line, you lost a life. It sounds simple, and it was, but it required precise timing.

Jezzball was actually inspired by the game Qix for the arcades and later NES and Gameboy color. It was the same premise. There weren’t a lot of frills about either game, but they were both very entertaining to my math-inclined mind. I don’t really have a lot else to say about these, but if you never had the pleasure, I’m sure you can find Jezzball for free online somewhere.

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July 7, 2016

Cheyenne

Genre: Simulation/Builder
Platform: PC, XBone

I have been playing Prison Architect on either the PC or XBone for a long time now. I was an early adopter of the game and it’s been neat to see the changes as it neared its release. The game has finally been officially released to both PC (Steam) and XBone. I’ve played both versions and I’ll discuss the differences. If this game has staying power, it may very well find its way on to my top 25.

In this game, you are the designer of a prison. The game now has a few different modes. I just finished story mode last night and it’s well worth the play through. The game doesn’t hold punches on issues such as death row and the philosophies behind solitary confinement. There were a couple of times that it actually stirred some emotion in me. That’s good writing.

There is also Prison Warden mode, where you play pre-made prisons and clean them up. I will be starting on this mode today, so I can’t comment on it much. There’s World of Wardens, which allows you to download and play prisons made by other players. I find most of these to be ridiculous and not fun. I could do without this mode. For me, the heart of the game is Prison Architect mode.

In this mode, you just design and build. There are objectives you can meet if you choose to, and they give you the funding necessary to build bigger and better. After you are satisfied with your prison, you can sell it and start a new one. You get to keep the cash from your sale and go even bigger.

This game is not for kids, though. The story mode is graphic and there’s quite a bit of blood and violence in the game. The game has a surprising amount of depth, however. You can schedule every hour of your prisoner’s day and there is a tech tree of sorts. You hire your staff and decide how many and what types of prisoners come in each day.

Prison Architect 2

I preferred playing the game on PC. The mouse makes it a lot easier than trying to play with a controller. It’s also hard to read some things on my TV versus my monitor. The PC version has a workshop on Steam, where other players made modifications to the game and you can easily download them. I found some good ones there such as a garden. I would recommend playing on both, however. In fact, if you like building games, you are probably going to love this game.

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June 29, 2016

Cheyenne

I spent a lot of time playing Diablo 2. I’m not going to get into it too much becase there’s a future post coming about it. But today in 2000, Diablo 2 sucked us all in and had us trying to abolish the devil and his brothers from the world. Great, great game. The gif below is actually Baal and came from here.

Diablo 2 baal

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Stinkers – Civilization V

Genre: Turn-Based Strategy, Simulation
Platform: PC

It’s been a couple of years since this game came out, and it still hurts to have to put it on this list. I wanted to love this game so much. I have played A TON of Civilization over the years between Civ 3 and Civ 4. This game was a monster disappointment.

Civilization is a turn-based strategy game, which means that you take as much time as you need on your turn (you’re playing either other players or the computer). Once you are done, you end your turn and the other players do the same. Then it’s your turn again. The goal of the game is to win the world – peacefully with a cultural, space race or democratic victory or by force with a domination or conquest victory. You build up your civilization with new cities, buildings, technology and military.

There are many out there who say that this was the best Civilization game yet. I just can’t agree with them. It was not a fun game for me. They took out a lot of what I found fun about Civilization 4. First, I could not adapt to the new combat method. In Civ 4, you could have “stacks of doom” on a single tile, which had its advantages and disadvantages. It provided a lot of defense bonuses to your army, but if you were flanked, you could take heavy casualties. I HATE the new system. It forces me to play a new way, but I just couldn’t adjust.

They also removed religion from the game. Now, if you know me, you’ll find it ironic that I have a problem with them removing religion from anything. However, it really added a deep strategic element to Civ 4 and I really missed not having that as a tool. Now, they did add this in an expansion, but I had no interest in buying it.

There were some good changes as well such as ruins in exploration, natural wonders, barbarian changes and city-states. These were not enough to keep me playing, though, and I never finished a full game. If you’re a fan of the Civ series, I would recommend playing it and making your own judgement. It just wasn’t a good game for me. I’m a bit nervous about Civilization 6, which is coming out later this year.

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Oldies but Goodies – Neverhood

Genre: Puzzle
Platform: PC

Once upon a time, I moved out of my parents’ house and into the world. I had a decent paying job, so one of the first things I bought was a shiny new Packard Bell computer (I didn’t know any better yet!). And the first game I bought for that computer was The Neverhood.

This game was made entirely from stop-motion using clay. It was beautiful, funny and HARD. Back then, we didn’t have much of an internet to look up help files or forums. We had to figure things out for ourselves. This is why a lot of us didn’t finish many games back then, and this was one of those for me. It was a puzzler through and through. There were always levers and buttons that did some unknown thing. Your next step usually wasn’t obvious and you would get all frustrated and AAAAHHH.

I’ve pushed this damn button 15 times and NOTHING HAPPENS!

I digress. This was actually a fun game. I haven’t played it since way back then (1997ish). I don’t think I would play it again as I want this one to remain a happy memory. Sometimes, when you play old games, they are just not as good as you remember.