Fallout 4!
Kia ora, friendos!
So I finally finished the main storyline in Persona 3 Portable a few weeks ago, and I just wasn’t quite in the mood to jump right into Persona 4 Golden just yet, so I’ve been kinda just bouncing around between a few different games and trying to find something that would stick while I work up the energy to get into P4G. I’ve played a bunch of stuff, but nothing really clicked… until…
Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition has been out for a while on PC, but it recently (finally) made it’s way to console and of course, because it’s a Xbox Game Studios game, it arrived day-one on Game Pass. I adored this game when I was a kid, and, don’t tell the cops this but, it was the very first game I ever pirated. I still remember the disc, it was so cool. It was this beautiful gold colour (the images below don’t really do it justice) and it felt really neat to have a game I liked so much on this rad gold CD.
So far I haven’t played a ton of the new remastered version, but I’ve played a few skirmish matches against the AI and it’s still a lot of fun - some of the best matches happen when you make the map as big as it can possibly be, set the population limit to maximum (500 vs the 200 in the original!) and then go off to build your empire, and next thing you know three hours have passed. I haven’t dared to venture into the online multiplayer matchmaking stuff yet, but I was looking at it the other day and I saw that you can play co-op with another human against the AI, and I thought that sounded really cool so I will probably give that a go sometime soon.
So that’s been one of my timesinks lately. Another is Cities: Skylines Remastered! This also recently came to Xbox Game Pass, supercedeing the Xbox One Edition version, which you can still play, but this one just looks and runs a bit better on the Series X|S consoles and on Cloud Gaming. And no, it does not include all of the DLC like the name kind of implies - that stuff is all still locked away in the Xbox Store. I don’t know for sure, but I would bet that it’s the same deal on PC, too.
If you’re into simulation games, I probably don’t need to tell you about this one - it’s basically the answer to the question ‘What if SimCity, but good?’ Cities has taken over that whole genre for me nowadays, I don’t know if I’ve even thought about SimCity at all until writing this and thinking about how to describe Cities. But I digress. This game is great, and it is one of the biggest timesinks out there for me personally, with its never-ending gameplay loop of expand, add infrastructure and zoning, make the people happy (or don’t 🤷🏻♀️), rinse, repeat. I can spend many hours in a row playing this game without noticing, pretty much the very definition of a timesink. This past week I turned on a bunch of “cheats” so I could just mess around and not have to worry about money (I do that enough in real-life lol) or space and build whatever I felt like, whenever I felt like. But that’s enough about that.
Now for the big one: about a week and a half ago, I was going through my (ridiculously large) library of digital Xbox games, looking ostensibly for something I had not played yet, but when my eyes tracked across the screen and spotted Fallout 4 my brain said “We haven’t played that (in several years)!” and so I said “Fine.” And the rest was history. I’ve since completed the main story route with the Brotherhood of Steel, blew up the Institute, built a number of small settlements, and killed a lot of raiders, robots, and feral ghouls. At the time of writing, it is currently 3:30am because I stayed up all night playing this game. My cat is now very mad at me and wants me to go to bed.
Fallout is great. But this one is my favourite, because of all the endless opportunities to scavenge in the Commonwealth for resources, and then go back to your bases to use said resources to build buildings or craft weapons, gear, or ammo. I can spend hours not even doing quests at all, just collecting garbage and turning it into something useful and cool. Plus there are so many great little easter eggs you can find around the world, which is why I decided to include two screenshots instead of just one.
If you’ve never played a Fallout game, I think this is probably the best one to start with. A lot of people will argue with me and say that Fallout New Vegas is the better game, but those people are wrong. It’s at its core an immersive sim. Think things like Deus Ex Mankind Divided, or the more classic examples from Arkane; Dishonored and Prey. Except this one is set in a post-apocalypse some 277 years in the future. I really can’t recommend this series enough, and if all you have available to you is 3 or New Vegas, those are still really great entries in this IP.
Okay folks, that’s gonna do it for this week. Thanks, as always, for reading. Y’all are the reason I keep doing this. Stay safe out there, and I’ll talk to you soon. Ka kite anō au i a koe. 💚