Tags >> Fallout 3
 Fact: Winter happens no matter what a groundhog says, and
it's time for another installment of the Community Spotlight.
Bitmob member Brian Biederman likes mashing buttons and seeing what happens.
This new age of super-focused and pseudo-realistic gaming isn't much fun for
him, so he'll stick with his Dynasty Warriors, thanks. Ross Adams expands on
the idea of actually having fun while gaming by imploring exploiters to take in
all the available weapons and options before charging ahead in the easiest
-- and often least entertaining -- way possible.
Finally, Sam Bardelson breaks down the world of games
into two types, heralding games like Fallout 3 for their degree of choice and
exploration. Is the future really all about karma levels?
The Ancient Art of
Button Mashing
By Brian Biederman
Button mashing works for Brian. As games become more complex and insist on trying
to simulate real combat, simply hitting random combinations ceases to work, and
that just isn't fun. Experimenting with crazy moves that he can hardly ever
replicate is just part of a relaxing gaming experience.
Pry yourself away from that black-and-white, rabbit-eared, wood-grained TV set of yours for a sec. Did you know the world of strategy guides and user-created walkthroughs has come a long ways since the days of traditional maps and the ASCII ways of GameFAQs.com? 
Most games generally fall into two camps. One camp is filled with choices, and its worlds will change based on your decisions; the other camp has no choices, and its stories will end the same way no matter who plays them.
 Though better examples may exist, I am going to focus on Fallout 3 to represent the choice side and Modern Warfare 2 to represent the “on rails” experience.
The type of game with very few choices tends to be shorter and is mainly represented by shooters and action games.
Various obstacles populate these games, and they usually just have one way past them.
In Modern Warfare 2, that means killing bad guys, and sometimes you have a time limit.
Moral choices in video games seem to be a big thing lately, and there are some developers that just get it right. In this blog I hope to bring to light some of the better examples of moral choices in video games (although you probably won’t be surprised by any of the choices on the list). This WILL contain spoilers for the following games: Mass Effect, Grand Theft Auto IV, Fallout 3, and Fable 2.
With Burnout Paradise getting no more DLC it makes me wonder is that a good move. I know developers want to work on new IP's, but it just seems wrong. The life span of a game can live or die on DLC for any type of game.
Hiya Bitmob. Our name is Kevin John Frank. We are a complicated guy. One could say that we are of three minds. The following article will allow you to meet each one of us separately. In it, each of us takes a turn answering whether the existence of achievements is an achievement for gaming at large. We have taken a few liberties with the format but we hope that doesn't undermine your enjoyment. Cheers.
Editor's note: As a former strategy guide author, I figured free online walkthroughs (and later, wikis) would've killed print strategy books long ago. They haven't, although it may still be a matter of time. Brian takes a look at various game strategy resources, and, as usual, adds his own excellent photography to his post. -Demian
Paperback books full of all-text TIPS! and TRICKS!, game booklets with a friend's older brother's method for beating Star Tropics scribbled on the 'notes' page, that Battletoads map from Nintendo Power -- these were the strategy guides of my youth. The discussion in Mobcast episode 36 and a serendipitous find at a local Half Price Books got me thinking about different kinds of strategy guides, and how they do what they do. 
Editor's note: I know my tolerance for drudgery in games isn't anything like what it once was -- sounds like Allistair's having more trouble just saying no, though. How about you? -Demian
I just spent a wonderful and painful week with Link's latest adventure, The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks. It has all the addictive puzzle-solving, dungeon-exploring, and excruciating world-traversing you expect from a 3D Zelda. You know, the fun stuff, like dying every ten minutes in the final dungeon only to spend three minutes climbing back to the top of the tower each time, taking half an hour to go back and forth in the world map only to discover you forgot something (make that an hour), and running over to the closest item shop whenever a sand worm eats your shield.
For every setback, I also had an incentive to venture on: It’s Zelda, and it’s really great. Yet I kept asking myself, “Why am I choosing to suffer so much just to have fun?”
Buckle the F up, this train ride is about to get leisurely.
Editor's note: Everybody loves a good glitch story, but Allistair makes the case for intentionally bad A.I. as the next unexplored frontier in game design. Crazy enough to work, or just regular crazy? -Demian
As much as we collectively pan bad A.I. and glitches, they've all made us laugh at one time or another. Some of my favorite moments involve me breaking a game -- or the game breaking all by itself.
Star Wars: Masters of Teras Kasi was half-broken to begin with, and the source of one of my most cherished game memories. A friend and I were playing another not-so-noteworthy round in that terribly janky fighter, when all of a sudden Luke kicked Leia, and she somehow shot off at lightspeed across the map and into the distance, endlessly spiraling and growing fainter by the second.
"Screw this game," we imagined her saying, as she embarked on her spirit journey. We laughed, and didn't stop for a good while. And we continued to play, hoping for another unscripted moment of hilarity that never came. Masters of Teras Kasi turned out to be a run-of-the-mill fighter rather than the embodiment of random physics and A.I., and I've been waiting for the latter ever since.
About to happen: nothing intentionally fun.
I heard about the idea of keeping track of every game you play over the course of a year on a recent 4Guys1up, but Stephen Totilo’s recent post on Kotaku really solidified that I needed to try it. If not to get a gauge of how many games I played this year, then also to get a better idea of the quality of games that I had played in 2009.
You might notice that this list is full of a lot of bad titles. Too many in fact. Part of this can be chalked up to me taking liberal use of the GameStop check-out policy.
A large part of how I managed to play this many games was by using a finely woven tapestry of game pre-orders, trades and in-depth planning in advance so that I would be able to play as many games as possible over the course of a year.
I should also note that I started the year as a freelance video game reviewer for my local paper, but was let go thanks to the awesome economy a few months into the year. This job was really just to fund my gaming habit, and all the money made (about half the cost of a game) went into paying off games for later in the year. This worked out well when I started my own website with some friends and had a ton of games reserved to review, but the site died after half a year. Live and learn!
2010 looks to be a great year for games… but I am going to have to scale back my game purchases greatly because I am not working at the moment and am back in school in a Masters program to be a Middle School teacher. A large part of this scale back will be made up for thanks to a full year’s membership to Gamefly that I received for Christmas. So, while I might not get to play every game I want to, I will have a chance to play a good bit of them… if my son’s sleep schedule does not completely wreck my ability to stay up late. I guess I won’t find that out till he is born, in March.
But, back to 2009 for now. While I did get to play a ton of games, despite my best intentions I was not able to write about (or finish) all of them. I decided to make this list to make up for all the ones I missed writing on, and provide links for the ones I did write about.
Take a deep breath- this post is a doozy!
Editor's note: Daniel wants developers to shy away from long games in favor of shorter games with high replayability. I couldn't agree more -- the prospect of shoehorning an 80-hour RPG into my schedule makes my head hurt. That's why I've lately found myself playing quick six-hour campaigns I can finish in a weekend. What's your game-length sweet spot? -Brett
One thing I've found myself disagreeing with a lot these days is peoples' contempt for short games. I think there's a lot more that goes into a game's value than just the time it takes to beat it once.
I understand wanting to get more for your money. Only getting about five hours of entertainment for $60 sounds like a rip-off compared to 30 or 60 hours, but what's the real gauge for that time? Is that kind of thinking compatible with every consumer?
A lot of people obviously don't have the time for a game that requires 30 or 60 hours to be considered "beaten" in any capacity. Furthermore, for some people the best experience might be one that garners additional polish from its concise length.
Editor's note: This post had over 4,000 views before we even put it on the front page, so I think it's safe to say the Internet loves a good list. And probably a bad list, too, but this one's definitely good.... -Demian
I thought about posting my Top 100 Games of the '00s list here, but considering the dedicated group of gamers at Bitmob, what's the point of recommending the same stuff that everyone has already played? The thing I love about lists isn't cross-referencing them with my own taste, but hopefully finding new gems that slipped under my radar. The games I present here have all sold poorly, received minimal coverage, and failed to accumulate a fan base over the years. These are games you not only haven't heard praised, but maybe haven't heard of at all.
It can be a pain to seek some of these out, especially the PC titles, but it's well worth the effort, especially if you consider yourself a gaming connoisseur. Enjoy, and please share some of your favorite, little-known games in the comments!
 Soul Blazer (SNES, 1992)
Caught between the superior Actraiser and Illusions of Gaia both chronologically and gameplay wise, Soul Blazer was another overlooked classic of the '90s from developer Quintet. It was another Zelda-esque adventure, but told with a more dynamic narrative and responsive world. While Zelda's dungeons mostly stayed the same, each area of Soul Blazer was incredibly different and inventive. From fighting on an island to fighting on a giant game board, Soul Blazer made the same old grind feel new. Each enemy nest you defeated revived a villager, which kept the combat rewarding and worked into a strangely esoteric narrative.
Plays like: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Actraiser, Alundra.
Seekability: Absolutely. The mood and atmosphere of the game was haunting, and the controls spot-on. It's a very unique game that aged wonderfully, just like the rest of Quintet's catalog.
Because that’s how we roll!
As I look at my gaming calendar it appears that in 2010, my gaming time is going to be dominated by Role Playing Games or RPGs for short. Now I am certainly not a hardcore RPG gamer, in fact I tend to steer clear of Japanese RPGs (JRPGs) all together, focusing mainly on the Western style RPG. Now that is not a slight on the games produced there, but when your RPG background consists of Questron and the Ultima series, you may understand why my leanings are to the West. If the hours I invested into Fallout 3 in 2009 and other games such as Fable II and Oblivion in the past, the majority of my gaming hours in 2010 will have me on an RPG of epic proportions.
You've ripped the wrapping off of all of the things you will be returning this week, and the mess has been cleaned up. Time to sit back, relax, and enjoy something you actually do want -- the best reviews the Bitmob community has to offer.
This week we have a less-than-stellar look at the single-player campaign of Modern Warfare 2, an in-depth analysis of another wartime shooter from the winner of our Operation Flashpoint contest, and impressions of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories for the Wii. We also have reviews of Borderlands: The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned, the demo for Resonance of Fate, Killzone 2, and some classic reviews as well.
Silent Hill: Shattered Memories Review
By Allistair Everett
Shattered Memories is a re-imagining of the Silent Hill series, and Allistair is mostly happy with the results. Although the game is a very "on-rails" experience, and it runs short of surprises after just a few hours of play, he concludes that "...there are so many great ideas at work that you can only imagine what it would have been with the resources of a bigger project."
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