Since I usually don’t post on Saturdays I decided to wish you a happy Independence Day today. It’s sort of a tradition here – I say a few words about the holiday and post the picture of the heroes whose deeds we are celebrating on that day.

A vector image of the infection vector which saved the world

Let me explain this uniquely American holiday to the new readers from other parts of the world. Back in 1996 bunch of Aliens blew up the white house and so the American Government sent Will Smith and Jeff Goldbloom into space in order to blow up the alien mothership with a computer virus. Or something like that. I don’t really know.

The point is, that we commemorate this event by barbecuing and blowing shit up all evening. Or at least some of us do. I think in some states people actually get to blow stuff up for them. If you are like me and you live in NJ you can only watch professional people blow stuff up for you. That’s the law. We don’t get to pump our own gas, and we don’t get to blow shit up. In fact, I’m begging to suspect that those two rules might be somehow related.

Anyways, now you know about Independence Day, and knowing is half the battle.

Enjoy the holiday if you happen to celebrate it (even if it’s totally wasted due to being on the weekend) and avoid blowing yourself up!

The Symptoms

The game worked great while I was in the vault. My issues started when I got out of it. My first crash happened literally seconds after leaving the vault. I turned around to see how the vault entrance looked behind me an BOOM! The game crashed to desktop giving me the extremely descriptive error message:

Fallout 3 has stopped working

Really? It did? Hey, thanks for letting me know! If you didn’t I would be sitting here wandering why Capital Wasteland looks exactly like my desktop background.

Actually, I take that back. This was after all a generic Vista dialog that shows up whenever something really, really fucked up happens inside a program. It means that the game itself crashed hard – it was not an exception or a runtime error that someone forgot to catch. It was a “holly shit, this was not supposed to happen” type of thing.

Whatever – I thought – shit happens. After all, Oblivion used to crap out on me like this every once in a while but it was otherwise totally playable. So I launched the game again, and this time I managed to explore a little bit of the wasteland without a crash. Until, that is, I reached the abandoned school and the game crapped out on me again. This was probably after 20-30 minutes of me aimlessly exploring the wasteland. Same stupid message.

I restarted the game, leaded it, explored the school and went outside and the game crashed again. That was it. After that, every time I would load the game from that auto-save outside the school’s door it would dump me back to the desktop. Something was seriously wrong here.

My first instinct was to google the error message but as you could imagine it was pretty much like searching for a needle in a haystack… of other needles… at night… blindfolded… and wearing mittens. Everyone has seen this message and wrote a blog/and or forum post about it. Adding “fallout 3″ to the search query didn’t really improve the results.

It did give me back a lot of forum discussion threads but I quickly realized it is one of those vague problems that everyone talks about on the internet but no one has a solution. It’s like that damn irql not less or equal shit which can be triggered by just about anything – hardware, software, the phase of the moon, or the color of your underwear.

It was clear to me that I was not going to find a solution this way. So I decided to dig deeper. So I opened event viewer and almost immediately found the culprit:

Fallout 3 Error Message - check out the DLL

If you can’t figure it out from the screen, let me spell it out for you. This error log, clearly implicates the file called nvd3dum.dll as the one causing or facilitating the crash. The naming convention seems familiar, isn’t it? Who would name their DLL’s with an nvd prefix? Why nVidia of course – the maker of my video card.

So I found the reason for the crash – my video card driver and Fallout 3 were not playing nice. Armed this information I did some more googling and came up with a solution.

The Solution

Using the name of the DLL in my research yielded much better results than before. For example, this forum threadwas extremely helpful in pinpointing the exact issue.

This is what helped me:

1. Start Fallout via the FalloutLauncher.exe
2. Go to Options
3. Click on Advanced
4. Change to the Water section
5. Set Water Multisampling to Low

Presto! No more crashes! Well, for the most part. The game still sometimes bugs out in V.A.T.S. but it is very rare now. I have no clue what Water Multisampling is but I’m assuming it makes the puddles and rivers in the game look more liquidy and watery. There is something in the way they go about it though, that causes Fallout 3 to crash to desktop.

Interestingly enough it only happens with the recent drivers. So if you have an older card and an older driver you will be fine. Downgrading the drivers also works. But I found it easier just to crank that feature down to low and enjoy the game without it. Frankly I can’t tell the difference so the multisampling effect was evidently lost on me anyway.

Now the million dollar question is, who to blame for this. Is this yet another Bethesda bug? Or is this yet another case of a badly written 64 bit driver? Initially I assumed it was a bug in the game code. Now I’m not sure.

Either way, if you are experiencing this crash, the way to get rid of it is to disable that multisampling feature. I hope this will get indexed by google and will show up in search results where people can find it and get on with their game.

Every once in a while some of you complain about restrictive spam control here. Sometimes comments get blocked because they have too much links. Not so long ago, quite a few people got blocked just because they were behind a proxy. These are unfortunate glitches and I try to work around them and massage the spam tools to be nicer to people. They are effective, but they lack the much needed people skills… And intelligence. But we are working on that.

In the meantime I wanted to show you this graph, that illustrates the ration of spam comments to non-spam comments on this blog.

Spam vs Ham on Terminally Incoherent

I didn’t just make up this chart. It came out of my Akismet panel based on the data it collected. Since December 96.73% of comments posted to this blog were pure spam. Can you imagine that? Ninety seven fucking percent! It’s insane!

How many of these spam comments did you see?

None! They were all silently blocked and hidden away so neither you nor I have to deal with them.

Of course, you could say that this graph could be based on only few dozen comments. But it is not – let me post another graph to prove it:

Spam over time - note the recent spikes

All in all, I think I’m averaging few hundred to a thousand spam comments each month. Some months seem to be worse than others. For example May and begging of June seem to be particularly bad. I’m not sure if this is just a local fluctuation or an increasing trend. Either way the amount of comments collected over time suggests that the 97% is probably not skewed by a small sample size.

I guess this comes with the territory. Terminally Incoherent seems to be one of the small blogs that are popular enough to get spammed, but not popular enough for the big comment threads to offset the spam-to-ham ratio. Not that I’m complaining.

I’m actually thrilled that I managed to build this small community. I love the fact that I seem to have gained few regular readers who stop by frequently and post insightful comments. I’m also always amazed at the high quality of the discussions we have here. Funny thing is that only time the comment threads seem to degrade is when I get dugg or reddit-ed and we have a temporary influx of new readers.

Anyways, I just wanted to thank you guys for making the delicious ham comments we have here. You make running this blog worth while. And if my spam filtering friends seem annoying sometimes, give them a break. They are doing a great job keeping out all the crap from our comment sections. Without them, spam would drown out any legitimate comments in an endless torrent of unsolicited advertisements.

Fast Travel is Better than in Oblivion

Fallout 3 uses a fast travel system that works similar to the one in Oblivion. As you explore the wasteland locations of interest are marked on your map. At any time you can instantly “jump” to one of those map markers. An appropriate amount of in-game time passes by, but for you the trip is instantaneous. As in Oblivion you cannot jump from withing a building, when encumbered or while in combat.

There is one significant difference though. When you first start the game you don’t get any map markers. By default Oblivion opened up all the major cities for you allowing you to jump to any of them right from the get-go. A lot of people (including me) thought that this was a bad move as it really cut down on initial exploration and robbed you of the feeling of achievement when you discover these places for the first time.

Fallout 3 avoided this issue, and finding places such as Megaton, Tenpenny Tower or Rivet City is fun and rewarding. In fact, the Fallout 3 map doesn’t really reveal any useful information at first. It does have shapes, and outlines and you can sometimes guess that the lighter areas signify denser ruins – which may or may not contain human settlements (but are also likely to be Raider and/or Supermutant heavens. The map is vague enough to require a bit of guess work when you are just blindly exploring – but detailed enough to navigate properly when you know where you are going.

The Minigames

Apparently all the new Bethesda products are required by law to include mini games. Similarly to Oblivion, Fallout 3 includes two of them. One is for picking locks, and the other one is for hacking terminals.

I previously mentioned that I consider these things to be idiotic. Once you figure out the lock-picking game in Oblivion for example, you can open any door or container even at level 1. This made the skill associated with that activity redundant and unnecessary. It also forced Bethesda to introduce plot driven doors that would open only after certain conditions were met.

It seems that Bethesda understood the error in basing lock picking solely on player skill rather than character skill. Fallout 3 combines the minigame with a simple skill check. This means that some locks and computer terminals are inaccessible until you get better at cracking them. This is a far superior approach. Sadly this didn’t remove plot driven doors – but greatly decreased their number.

I have to admit that the lock picking game is done well. Instead of being a nuisance it actually adds to the game play a bit. It is a great example of a mini-game done right. It’s easy to learn and intuitive – you instantly know what to do. Best of all, it does not feel like a random logical puzzle – actually looks and feels like lock picking. I mean, look at this picture:

Lockpicking

The hacking mini game on the other hand is endlessly pointless ant tiresome. It’s essentially “guess the password in 4 tries or lose” exercise. If you fail the terminal becomes locked and you never get to use it again. Rising you science skill does not make it easier – it just gives you access to more secure terminals where you get to play this game with a longer list of words to choose from.

The only reliable way to beat it is to exit the terminal after 3 guesses and start over. The word list reshuffles and the password changes so you are sort of back to the square one of course, but at least you get another crack at it. If you are lucky, you will guess it on a first try. If you are not it will take you multiple trials.

Hacking Mini Game

The worst part is that it is not really a bad representation of “hacking”. It’s almost as if you were searching through the page files or live memory dumps for recently used strings to uncover the password. Still, it’s just a luck based guessing game. There is really no way to get good at it. And if you can’t improve your game over time, why even bother with it and waste your time? Just replace it with a dice roll and have it over with.

I have no clue how could they get one mini game so right, and the other one so wrong.

The Level Cap

Capping your character at level 20 is downright criminal. It means you don’t get to pick over half of the interesting perks. One of the DLC’s raises the cap to level 30 which is still quite low. I mean, I barely started playing this game and I’m already level 14, which means I only have 4 level ups to go.

Fortuntely there is this mod which I plan to apply as soon as I hit the level cap.

The Karma System

Did the old Fallout games have a Karma system? I haven’t played them so I don’t know – but I assume they didn’t. I mean, I always hear people talking about “The Original Fallout” with reverence. Therefore they couldn’t have had a morality system.

Here is the problem: no one has ever implemented a karma system that was not stupid. It’s just that morality can’t really be put on a scale and measured or distilled down to points. If you want to make a game that is morally ambiguous, and which forces the player to make difficult decisions then you can’t hand them out good or evil points each time they make a decision. If you doing so reduces the choices available to the player and dumbs down the moral dilemmas to simple black and white choices.

You either play a knight in shining armor or a homicidal maniac. Fallout 3 is like this too. You see a wounded man bleeding out in some ditch and when you click on him you have two options:

1. Heal his woulds, give hims some of your supplies, one of your guns and some money
2. Steal all his stuff and set him on fire

There is nothing in between these two extremes. Sometimes you get a third option which is to just walk away. But you can’t always do that – sometimes the game forces you to make that choice in order to complete a quest objective.

In Morrowind and Oblivion I always used to play a very morally ambiguous characters. I would generally help people out if they seemed to need help. I would defend the poor, rob the rich (and give to myself), and kill the wicked. It was fun – and I was able to set my own boundaries.

Fallout 3 sort of forces your hand. If you want to get good karma you need to do things certain way. Your own moral compass be damned. Sometimes it’s not even clear what is the “good” choice. Case in point, the infamous Tenpenny Tower quest. It offers you 3 alternate resolutions: and as Shamus demonstrated in the linked article, the lest reprehensible one yields bad karma, while the morally correct (according to the game system) one has very disturbing repercussions.

I will give you another example where this system breaks down. You can try this if you want and I promise there are no spoilers in this little experiment. Simply visit the Tenpenny Towers and go to the balcony where the owner of the establishment (Alister Tenpenny) usually hangs out. When I first met him I decided to have some fun and jump off the balcony. So I saved my game and then decided to really go out in style and shot Mr. Tenpenny in the face with my combat shotgun before I jumped. To my surprise the game awarded me positive karma for this action.

Now, in most societies shooting an unarmed man in the face in cold blood would be considered amoral and downright evil thing to do. I mean, if the guy is a vile criminal such an action may be justified. If he is unpredictable and dangerous it could be argued that killing him is a benefit to society as a whole. But I wouldn’t describe it as “good”.

In the Fallout 3 universe though, Allister Tenpenny is flagged as an evil character and murdering him gives you no the same type of good karma as healing a dying man, saving Supermutant captive and refusing the reward or sending an orphaned kitten to college.

Some quests are so one sided that it is hard to imagine why anyone would even want to choose the evil alternative. The Power of Atom quest is a prime example. You get hired to destroy a prominent town killing all of it’s inhabitants. Why? Because some dude wants it gone. It’s obstructing the view from his balcony or something.

Can you see Megaton from here?

I mean, it’s awesome that I can set off a dormant nuke and destroy a whole fucking town in this game. Seriously, it’s great. But why? Motivate me to do it! Make it worth while. On one hand I have a really good town with lots of shops and bunch of quests associated with it. That in itself is an incentive not to blow it up. What is my incentive to destroy it? I don’t know… Explosions are cool? Dude, I accidentally the whole town? Really? That’s it?

That’s not even evil! That’s is Chaotic Lazy! I mean yes – I sometimes like to destroy things or kill important NPC’s just for the shits and giggles. But I usually reload the game after I get that stuff out of my system. It’s nice to have that option, but it just doesn’t seem like a valid game choice. There is just no reason to do this. I mean, Fallout 3 is supposed to be an RPG. That means we are at least in some way role playing our character. Both good and evil characters need motivations. No one is evil for the sake of being evil, save for cartoon villains – and even those usually have their own reasons for doing what they do.

I accidentally the whole A-bomb

Not all quests are this bad. Quite a few of them start with an interesting investigation/information gathering process. But whenever the writers try to make you a moral choice the whole built up intrigue falls on it’s face and turns into a shallow nice guy/evil jerk choice. But I can’t just blame the karma system itself.

Bad Writing

The Tenpenny Towers and Megaton quests I mentioned above are just examples of bad writing. They are both good ideas that were doomed by poor execution. One They could have worked – if someone sat down and really fleshed them out taking stuff like character motivations into account. Perhaps if Mr. Tenpenny had a real reason to want to blow up Megation his quest would make more sense.

The Roy Philips quest would probably work better if it was happening in a karma free system. Then the choice between aiding a dangerous terrorist vs working for rich capitalist would be just that – you’d pick sides based on your moral compass. But the game insists on handing out karma points for these choices and they can be immersion breaking disappointments.

What ticked me off the most however were some the dialog choices. Out of all Bethesda games I played Morrowind had the best dialog system. Instead of putting words in my mouth it simply gave me a list of topics to choose from. You would pick one (eg. The Fighters Guild) and the NPC would give you a longer or shorter monologue about it. IMHO it worked well. It was more like reading a book than playing a game – you could skim though the conversations or read them slowly at your own pace.

Oblivion traded the long winded, descriptive conversations for short deeply nested dialog trees. To sweeten the pot a little bit they introduced the voice acting. The system was mostly serviceable – sadly most of the lines were read by the same 3-4 actors making it a bit surreal expereience.

Fallout 3 reintroduces the same type trees and introduces more voice actors. Sadly the lines they read mostly insufferable. It is not even about bad voice acting. It’s just that the lines themselves are bad. You know who is the worst offender though? You! The worst lines in the game are the ones that show up as options in your dialog trees.

Half the time your lines are rude, crude and unrefined. The other half they are just plain insulting. And it’s not like I was playing a speech impaired warrior type. I’d expect that. But my character was rather refined. I was consistently pumping points into my speech skill at each level up hoping to unlock better dialog options. But alas, that was not what this skill offered. Even after my speech was over 70 I sounded like a halfwit most of the time. The high skill level did unlock new dialog options but they were not any better.

Fallout is Oblivion with Guns

Time to wrap up this overly long review. I know I haven’t said anything about the ending – that’s because I didn’t get there yet. This means that I have more to say about the game in the future.

I feel that Fallout 3 is to Oblivion what Oblivion was to Morrowind. A little smaller, shallower game that nevertheless has some improvements over the original. You have probably noticed that throughout this review I treated it an Oblivion sequel. That’s because it’s exactly that in my mind.

It is a flawed game with many shortcomings – like the silly karma system, particularly bad writing in several spots and a long list of game breaking bugs. It does have some great improvements over Oblivion though. The inventory interface and fast travel are done right, the lock picking game is huge improvement over the the previous annoyance. The radio stations add incredible amount of flavor to the game world – even if they keep looping the same content over and over again. The combat is bloodier and more visceral than before and the ability to blow off people’s limbs with particularly well aimed shots makes for much more cinematic battles than the simple rag doll physics of Oblivion. The V.A.T.S. system brings the much needed serenity and strategy back into real time combat situations. The setting is great too – the unique mix of humor, seriousness, overexerted violence and the retro atmosphere make this game an incredible experience.

Not only that but Fallout 3 is a sandbox game first and foremost. The world you will be exploring is huge and there are hundreds of interesting locations to see and visit – and most of them are tied to some sort of a quest line. If you take your time to explore and do the side missions you will get hours upon hours out of this game. As the previous Bethesda games it contains an incredible amount of original playable content that can be unlocked and experienced in any order or skipped altogether. This makes it an incredibly attractive offer compared to the torrent of disappointingly short video games hitting the market these days. You will definitely get your money’s worth here.

All these things help to balance out the flaws, creating a game that is at least as good and as enjoyable as Oblivion was (and one that crashes just as often). I really liked Oblivion and really like Fallout 3. I’ve been playing it for several weeks now, and I’m nowhere near being done with it – and nowhere near being bored. If I didn’t enjoy it so much, I wouldn’t spend 4 long posts complaining about it. Fallout 3 gets my thumbs up, with one caveat: if you played the original Fallout you should simply consider it a “Fallout Flavored Oblivion” – rather than fully fledged sequel. From what I heard Fallout 3 is to Fallout 1 and 2 as Planet of the Apes remake with Mark Whallberg is to the original movie with Charlton Heston. Some people went to see that movie and like it. Some people hated it with a passion. Others went “WTF, that’s not even Planet of the Apes“.

Fallout 3 is the same way – it is not exactly a spiritual successor of the original, but it does have a good deal of an entertainment value in and off itself.

The Followers

Both Morrowind and Oblivion had a follower system that allowed other characters to join your party and assist you in combat. In both of these games this was an endless nuisance. The followers would constantly get stuck on terrain features and be incredibly trigger happy. Very often the character you were supposed to be escorting would detect an enemy you haven’t even seen yet (for example, a monster hiding behind a corner) and recklessly abandon you and run to fight it. This usually happened when you were looking the other way.

The only reliable way to deal with followers was to tell them to sit tight, scout ahead, clear the area of enemies and then come back for them.

Fallout 3 seems to worked out several kinks out of this system – at least for some of the follower characters. As far as I can tell the human followers still act like idiots most of the time. But they hardly ever clip on the terrain and become stuck – at least from what I checked. If they do get stuck, all you need to do is to travel to a new cell (ie. exit or enter a building) and they will get magically transported to you – kinda like in Oblivion.

Fallout 3 introduces something new though: a pet follower. This is something that was done in countless mods to previous Bethsheda games. Clearly, people always wanted to have a dog following them around on their adventures. Now you can. Fallout 3 features a pet follower called Dogmeat. I believe he was featured in the previous Fallout games as well. He is a non-hostile NPC that you can meet around the scrapyard area.

Me and Dogmeat

Rather than being a nuisance however, Dogmeat actually adds to the game play. For example, he is very good at spotting enemies but he doesn’t usually run up and charge them. Instead he stays at your side and growls at them which is an excellent early warning system. I can’t tell you how many times this has saved my skin. Ever since I met this dog, I have never been ambushed from behind by an enemy I didn’t see.

When you do get close enough to the enemy and engage him, he will swoop in for a kill. This is usually desirable since it will usually provide a great distraction. It allows you to actually run up to the enemy as it is preoccupied fighting off an angry dog and get a point-blank head-shot with a shotgun or other high powered weapon. I especially liked having him around during the stupid fire-ant mission. He would engage the ants head on, and I would flank them and kill them from close range without getting barbecued.

Dogmeats life regenerates in between combats so you actually don’t have to worry that much about his maintenance. You can however give him a stimpack by talking to him if his health is getting low during a prolonged fight.

You can also ask him to search for items such as chems, weapons, ammo or food. This can sometimes be useful when you are trying to locate something specific. If he is getting in your way (or you are on a mission that requires stealth) you can always order him to go back to Vault 101 location and pick him up later.

His path finding algorithm is pretty good and he is usually able to follow you just about everywhere. Then again, when I was doing the Germantown mission I chose to enter the fenced off area from one direction while the stupid dog ran all the way around and entered it from the opposite side engaging the two supermutants that were patrolling the area. In the end it worked out fine since it created a great diversion. Still, it shows that the much improved path finding does not always work.

The Combat System

The combat in Fallout 3 is similar to what I was used to from Oblivion. Only now it has guns. One great addition to it is the V.A.T.S. system which allows you to pause the action and take carefully aimed shots. Each of them takes several action points which regenerate over time.

Some people hate this system, but I personally like it very much. It makes the combat less about frantic circle strafing and more about tactics. For example with V.A.T.S. you can try to disarm the guy with the bazooka by shooting at his arms. Or you can conserve your precious ammo by shooting Mirelurks in the face instead of bouncing bullets off their hard carapace.

The V.A.T.S. System

Also, it makes for some fun, cinematic events. Whenever you kill someone in V.A.T.S. mode their death will be shown in a slow-motion closeup and more animated than normal. Great example of this was battle with the sniper in Minefield town. I hid behind a rock, took a V.A.T.S. shot at the crazy guy at the top of the ruined tower with my hunting rifle and… His head fell off in slow motion. It was almost like a bullet-time animation with the spinning camera following my round as it exited the barrel of my gun and hit the target. How awesome is that?

When you are out of V.A.T.S. the combat is still fairly fun. Melee feels just like Oblivion with the RMB used for parry. When using a firearm, RMB is the “aim down the sight” mode that many FPS games employ these days. It zooms in at the target a little bit and gives you better accuracy but it makes you move slower.

The Setting

When I first emerged from the Vault all I could say was “Wow!”. The Capital Wasteland is positively stunning. There is a certain sublime beauty to the desolate, ruined landscape you see at the begging of the game. And it only gets better from there.

The Capital Wasteland

The game looks and feels much different from the Elder Scrolls titles that preceded it. It has a bit of a Mad Max vibe, a little bit of modern Scifi and metality and definite retro style making it a unique mix. All the the robots look as if they were taken out of old TV shows such as “Lost in Space” for example. The music that plays on the radio is a collection of old classics which are almost perfect for this settings – especially the very apropos “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” track which was so effectively used in the trailers for this game.

I don’t know – there is just something unreal about walking around a burned ruins of DC, carrying your laser rifle and fighting with supermutants while that song plays in the background. It is something that must be experienced.

Ruins of DC

I’d say that this game is worth playing just for the experience. There are the stunning vistas of ruined cities, the old music on the radio, the modern sounding DJ who comments on your actions and completed quests, the retro robots, the post apocalyptic setting, the funny Fallout Boy graphics, the humorous signs and billboards. It is an incredible and unique mix. Soon after I started playing this game, I got sucked into it’s atmosphere and totally forgot all of it’s flaws.

Capitan Cosmost FTW

I can’t say how much does the game deviate from the setting portrayed in the two original Fallout games since I haven’t played them. From what I heard it is rather shallow and only exposes a fraction of this fascinating setting. Still, I love it nonetheless.

Setting wise, this game somewhat reminded me of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.. It featured similar irradiated wastelands and combat situations. The two are actually very different. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is modern, gritty and serious, while Fallout 3 is retro and often campy and/or funny. It is also much more polished with better interface, better map, better NPC interaction and a world that is much more open.

Ruins of Washington Monument

Fallout 3 has almost no insurmountable waist high fences but it does make a liberal use of rubble and ruins and occasional un-scalable chain link fence. The walls around some of the towns (like Big Town or Paradise Falls) often look as if they were about to fall over but at least they are tall enough to give you an idea that scaling them is probably not going to be easy. That said, with some careful well timed jumps you can often bypass these artificial walls.

Once you start visiting the DC area however things change. The whole city is designed as dozens of cells that are interconnected by ghoul infested metro tunnels. It took me hours to find the radio station because I was trying to find a surface route there. There is none. To get to some parts of the city you need to hit the tunnels and/or sewer systems. It’s difficult to navigate this maze, and you will be lost a lot. Fortunately after 3 or 4 hours of aimless wandering you will find enough DC based map markers that your quest destination areas will be at most one tuner crawl away from a fast travel point.

Another thing that bothered me in this game was the fact that the world was so full of loot. I’m not complaining or course – I was happy to find ammo and food strewn all across the floor in each building and ruin. I mean let’s face it – the game takes place 200 years after the nuclear war. As far as I can tell no one is really producing anything and yet canned goods, bottled beverages and ammo is can be found literally at every step. Where does it all come from?

You are telling me that despite the fact that most people in the Capital Wasteland live of scavenging, the ruins are still full of edible food? I’d expect the people of the wasteland to live mostly on iguana meet, fried squirrels, dogs, rad roaches and occasional brahmin meat. But hardly anyone eats these things. Instead every household has at least couple of unopened cans of Spam, Pork & Beans and bunch of Nuka Cola bottles – despite the fact these items were out of production for two hundred years. It’s baffling, really.

Similarly, the car wrecks that litter the streets still explode when you shoot them. How the hell do they still have gas in their tanks after 200 years? I’d think that someone would siphon it out shortly after the war – and if they didn’t it would simply evaporate over time.

For comparison, try reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It describes a similar post apocalyptic setting – a burnt out, desolate wasteland. His story takes place only few years after the (nuclear?) apocalypse but finding supplies is already a problem. When his characters find a new town they realize that every abandoned building been meticulously searched by hundreds of people before them. The best they can hope for are scraps that others passed by or missed. In fact, the food shortage is so severe many communities turn to cannibalism. In Fallout 3 food and ammo is so plentiful that no one even bothers farming, and only few people keep livestock (if you can call a single brahmin tied to a stick a livestock that is).

This doesn’t detract from the game play of course. It was just a minor thing that kept bothering me initially. I learned to tune it out though.

I think I only have one more post in this series. I still have to complain a little bit about the writing, the karma system and give you my conclusion. All of that should fit in a single post – so those of you sick and tired hearing about fallout can rejoice.

Redundant copies of your data – this is the only way to go. Hard drives fail – it is not a question of “if”, it is a question of “when”. Remember that folks. Never trust your hard drives!

The external device looked intact. The owner swore up and down that it was never dropped, submerged under water, rinsed or put in the microwave. But you know how it is – I bet at least one of these things did happen to the device – presumably the first one. Still, that did not seem to be the cause of the failure.

When the drive was connected to the computer, it took a really long time to show up in My Computer. When it finally did, Vista did not display that neat little capacity bar. When you right clicked on it and tried to check properties, the OS reported that the drive has 0 bytes of free space, and 0 bytes of total capacity.

When you tried to access it, an error message would pop up saying:

H: is not accessible. Parameter is incorrect

Not encouraging. I wasn’t very positive about prospects of data recovery from this drive. I formed a plan in my head:

1. Run chkdsk on this machine if possible
2. Plug it into my laptop and see if Linux can see any data
3. If all else fails, give it a Viking funeral

Running the Check Disk app from the Properties menu did not work. I got another error message saying the disk is not accessible. Curiously enough running it from command line, did work. In Vista however, you need to remember to run it as an Admin.

1. Type in cmd in the Start Search box
2. Right click on cmd.exe that shows up and choose Run as Administrator
3. Run chkdsk command on the faulting drive

I used the following line:

chkdsk /F /R /X H:

Make sure you substitute H: which whatever letter your drive is using. That’s it. The scan itself took several hours – I don’t know how long exactly – I ran it overnight and went to sleep. When I woke up, the drive was working fine again. I unmounted it, mounted it again and it was running like new.

If you ever see this problem happening on your external drive, try chkdsk before you give it the Viking funeral (cause, you know – you always give hard drives Viking funerals). You have to burn it and drown it to make sure people don’t try to recover your pr0n from it.

It’s either that or disassemble it, take out the cool magnet and hang the platters on your lamp or something.

Yes, I know, I know. Yet another dry and boring HOWTO post. Tomorrow I’ll post something more entertaining… Maybe.

Character Creation

Just like in Oblivion and Morrowind the character creation process takes place in many stages during an extended tutorial that introduces you to the game mechanics. This is naturally a good idea since it eases you into the game and postpones making big decisions (such as which skills to invest into) until you get a handle on how the game works.

In Oblivion this intro level seemed a little forced and silly and pretencious in how it paired you up with Jean-Luc Picard the emperor of Tamriel himself, who proceeds to die in your arms and begs you to avenge the world and save his death.

In Fallout 3 your reason for adventuring is a little less grandiose. Your dad skips out of town (and by town I mean hermetically sealed vault where no one enters and no one leaves) and in the process pisses off a lot of people who then decide to take their frustrations up on you. It is all explained in detail, and the extended tutorial actually allows you to get to make a few friends and few enemies inside of the Vault, get the lay of the land and etc. The game starts literally at the moment of your birth when you pick your gender. Then your dad rolls in the “Genetic Age Projection Machine” aka the Face design tool.

The design tools are similar to those used in Oblivion. You get bunch of interlinked sliders that make certain features bigger and/or smaller. Sliding one of them will often reposition several others which makes me wonder why haven’t they consolidated them. It is fairly flexible but similarly to Oblivion the haircut choices are atrocious – especially if you choose to play a lady (for a dude you can always go with a buzz cut or a bald head and call it a day).

I must ask a question here. Is there a reason why Bethesda forces us to design our characters in a murky artificial light setting? In Oblivion you were in a dungeon lit only by flickering torches. In Fallout 3 the machine interface uses a retro CRT display that dims in and out. Both games give you a finely tuned control over your skin tone, shading, blush, eye shadows and etc. Sadly, the light conditions during character creation are poorer than the ones you will be experiencing 80% of time during the game. A face designed in that light may look very different in full sunlight. Some skin tones and shading choices that seem fine in the murky twilight look horrible under proper lighting. Is being able to design your facial features in a bright environment really that much to ask?

Fallout 3 Character Designer

Since you take control of your character at different ages (11 and then 16) there is some sort of reverse aging algorithm that tries to figure out how your face would look taking what you designed as a base sample. The results are usually pretty…. Creepy. While it worked pretty well for NPC’s the reverse aging plunged my character deep into the uncanny valley. Fortunately this was only a temporary inconvenience.

The System

The S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system that governs the skills, attributes and perks is very different from the one used by Morrowind and Oblivion. I believe it was transplanted directly from the previous Fallout installments with little or no modifications. It is an old school approach that has you earning XP points for doing quests and killing things and then picking up skills points and perks when you level up. You can spend these points however you want. For example, you can earn a level by running around and shooting things, and then pump all the earned points into skills such as science and medicine. I sort of liked the advancement system from previous Bethesda games that increased skills that you were actively using. It made sense to me. I’m not complaining though – Fallout 3 is standard approach seen in hundreds of RPG’s and it works well.

The S.P.E.C.I.A.L. Screen

The perk system is a little silly though. Each time you level up you get to pick up one special bonus or ability. There is a wide range of interesting perks to choose from, but to me they all seem like inherent talents, or character background stuff that you would pick at character creation rather than as you advance. For example, perks like “Dady’s Boy/Girl” (gives you bonus to science/medicine skills) or “Educated” (get more skill points on level up) seems like stuff you would have picked up in your childhood rather than during your adventures in the wasteland.

But that’s just my opinion. The perks are a carry over from the previous fallout games and are part of these series’ flavor I guess. I don’t dislike them – I just find them a bit odd.

The Inventory Interface

Morrowind had a great inventory screen. It was mouse+keyboard driven and most actions could be accomplished via drag/drop actions or hot keys. Your stats, inventory, map and magic were all opened in separate windows that could be repositioned, re-sized and pinned to any area of the screen. You could arrange them the way you wanted and most importantly you could have all this information on a single screen. So for example, you could observe how your stats change when drinking potions or equipping items.

Oblivion inventory on the other hand was designed to be game pad friendly. It spread the information across multiple tabs and minimized the amount of information displayed on the single screen. A console player can navigate such menu very rapidly – the left analog stick flips through tabs. The right one scrolls the screen up and down, and buttons initiate different actions. Navigating it with a mouse however is tedious. A simple action such as equipping a magical ring and then checking how it affects your stats takes at least 4-5 clicks and switching through 2-3 different screens.

Fallout 3 continues this tradition and gives you an interface divided into many screens, sub-screens and sections. It was clearly designed with console players in mind and as a die-hard PC gamer and mouse enthusiast I should hate it with a passion. But I don’t.

The Pip Boy Screen

The best thing about this interface is the style. The sheer awesomeness of seeing my character raise the arm-mounted Pip-boy screen to her face made me completely forget how awkward and difficult to use it really is. The interface has clunky retro buttons with that characteristic “old electronic device” snap. It uses a green monochrome screen that flickers each time you press a button. The whole thing sometimes sways up and down or side to side as your character moves her hand. It has a genuine look and feel of a classy retro hardware – and you can almost write off the awkwardness of the interface as an inherent design feature of the Pip-Boy. This is how you turn a flaw into a feature.

The Leather Jacket of +5 to Mele

Let’s talk about the inventory system itself. I noticed that with each game Betsheda reduces the amount of clothes and armor your character can wear. In Morrowind you could mix and match clothing (shirts, pants, skirts) and armor components for each body part (chest plate, helmet, greaves, two gauntlets, two plaudrons, etc…).

Oblivion simplified this prohibiting you from wearing normal clothing under the armor, making plaudrons integral part of the chest armor, and making gauntlet pairs inseparable. It also introduced one-piece armors that covered all body areas except for the head.

This concept returns in Fallout 3. There are only two types of clothing in these game: head gear, and full body costumes. You really don’t get to mix and match different clothing items which is little disappointing. I was sort of looking forward to making an unique looking mad-max style combination of battered armor plates, street clothes spikes and etc.. This is not possible – you only get one piece suits. Granted, there is a variety of them in the game (for example Riders have 4-5 different armor variants) but it is a little bland.

On the upside, Fallout 3 implements something that I talked about in one of my previous posts: it makes wearing the right clothes for the right job beneficial. You see, each type of clothing offers different bonuses. For example wearing a lab coat will boost your science skill. Wearing a business suit will boost your speech and barter skills. Wearing hockey mask and a leather jacket will make you better in melee.

This means that visiting the local merchant while wearing your combat armor is less profitable than strolling in a nice business suit. It makes you want to keep all these different pieces of clothing that you’d normally sell and discard as you get better armor from looted foes.

Bussiness attire boosts your barter skill

Sadly, the clothing still has no impact on how the NPC’s treat you. For example I was able to stroll into Megaton wearing looted Rider gear and was greeted by the locals with open arms. These locals then proceed to warn me about the evil Riders in the wasteland who wear armor that looks just like mine.

So we are still not there. As far as I can tell, none of the recent RPG games uses clothing to modify how NPC’s react to you. I’d really love to see someone implement this.

Hidden Features

This post is already running a little long, but let me mention another “feature” of the interface: hidden functionality that is never explained in the game. During the tutorial you are taught how to use the Pip-Boy and how to interact with the game environment. Three important lessons were somehow omitted:

1. Repairing Items
2. Holstering your weapon
3. Using the flashlight

Repairing your items is important. The merchants charge you an arm and a leg for even minor condition improvements. Using their services is really just a huge waste of money. If you pump a few points into your Repair skill you should be a able to keep most of your gear in shape by yourself.

Sadly no one ever tells you that you can open the repair screen in Pip-Boy by highlighting an item and pressing R. This is mentioned in the manual booklet but not in the game itself. This is problematic, since no one ever reads the manuals anymore. I mean, this game has like an hour long, un-skipable tutorial section. You’d think that reading the 15 page manual wouldn’t be necessary after that. Sadly it is.

Same goes for holstering your weapon. No one ever tells you that you accomplish it by pressing and holding the reload button. Manual mentions this off-hand when it talks about yielding but if you gloss over that section, you will never know.

Finally, the flashlight which is activated by holding down the Pip-Boy key. It is never mentioned in the manual, never even alluded to in the game and not listed in the key-binding menu. It is a genuine hidden feature. Go figure.

That’s all I have for today. Next time I’ll talk about the followers, the setting, the quests and the writing.

Yes, it is true – I am a Fallout virgin. I have not played the first two games. Please keep this in mind when you read this review. I have considered playing the previous games – especially since you can legally buy both of them for next to nothing at Good Old Games. I figured I could take a crack at these games before tackling the Betsheda release. Then I heard that this is actually a horrible idea.

Apparently if you approach Fallout 3 as Oblivion with guns, you will have a rather positive experience. If you approach it as the third installment in the epic RPG saga you likely won’t enjoy it as much. So as I do often in situations like that, I set my expectations to the lowest setting and decided to give the game a chance to entertain me on it’s own terms. This way I don’t suffer yet another crushing disappointment and you don’t need to listen to yet another blogger ranting about how F3 did not live up to his expectations.

Let me preface this post by saying that so far I’m actually enjoying Fallout 3. Still, before I can talk about the actual game, I really need to go through this laundry list of whiny complaints that have little to do with actual design, plot or game mechanic. These are purely usability and customer experience gripes that I need to get out of the way.

The DRM

I purchased Fallout on CD rather than on Steam which means I got a fist full of Securom with it. I mention Steam because I think that the version distributed via that system is Securom-less. Feel free to correct me in the comments if this is not true. As you may imagine I was not happy about this surprise DRM getting installed on my brand new system.

So I wanted to use this occasion to say: thank you Bethesda for infecting my brand new computer with the nastiest shit on the market. I could have pirated this game, but I didn’t! I actually went and bought it because you guys made Morrowind (my favorite game evar) and Oblivion (my other favorite game). Yes, I wanted to give you my money so that you can make more games that I can add to my favorite list. Way to betray my trust! See if I buy another one of your games, assholes!

And don’t give me that “we only use it for a disk check” crap. I don’t care what you are using it for. The fact that you are using it is enough for me to re-consider ever buying your product again.

That said, since my computer is already infected with evil DRM I might as well play the damn thing and enjoy it.

Windows Live

In addition to DRM my copy of fallout included Windows Live integration. I was not exactly sure what this meant, but I gathered that Windows Live the PC version of that silly X-Box system that let’s people have gamer tags, earn achievements and etc. It’s a bit like the Steam achievement system, but worse in just about every aspect.

Initially I chose to ignore this whole Live thing, but then I realized that signing up for it is the only way to actually get the downloadable expansions. How do you sign up for it? Well, you launch the game, then you click on the Live button, then you navigate through some menus, then the game minimizes itself and opens a browser. You have to fill out registration form in the browser, submit it, close the browser and then maximize the game again. Then it does some authentication, and it tells you that your Live version needs to be upgraded.

How do you upgrade it? Well, the game minimizes itself, opens a browser aaaand… Do you see the pattern here? I think the whole process took me in and out of the Fallout menu screen 4 times. I’m not sure who is at fault here but this is pretty shitty user experience if you ask me. I mean, sure – I could probably start this process online without the game running in the background and cut the number of sudden context switches in half, but no one told me that when I started. If you already have a Windows Live account the process is much simpler I guess – you just sign into it within the game and that’s it.

In fact, once you associate your Live account with your game it will ask you to sign in every time you wish to play. If you fail to log in, or if you don’t have internet connection handy, the game will use the local profile which is different from your Live based profile. This means you won’t have access to your saved games and configuration settings.

Windows Live - No Internet Connection, No Saved Games

It gets better. Let’s say you ignore Live like me and play with the local profile for a few days. Then you decide to check out the DLC’s and sign up for Live, create a profile and sign into it. When you start your game for the first time with your Live profile, you will be in for quite a shock – all your saved games will be missing.

You see, by default the game keeps your saves in the \Documents\My Games\Fallout 3\Saves folder. When you associate your Live account, it creates a subfolder in that directory. To restore your saved games, you simply need to manually copy the saved games into it.

It would be nice if there was a button somewhere that would do this automatically. I mean, how hard would it be to include a “import my saves” checkbox somewhere in one of the menus? It seems that no one really thought about that. The Live system seems forcefully grafted on at the last minute and completely untested.

From what I heard though this is a typical for this system. Next time I see the Live logo on a box, I will steer clear of it and wait till the game is released on Steam instead.

Note that this is strike two against Bethesda and I didn’t even start talking about the actual game content. I am merely discussing user experience of actually installing and configuring the game.

The Bugs

The list of Fallout 3 bugs is quite impressive. You should probably do yourself a favor and download the 1.5 patch before you even launch the game for the first time. Even after you patch it, the game still has all kinds of strange glitches and problem areas.

Most notably, the Fallout 3 has major compatibility issues with recent nVidia and Realtek drivers. I mean, who even uses these two brands? Am I right? It’s not like these audio and video cards were popular and virtually ubiquitous.

Chances are that if you have a fairly new computer, you will experience frequent driver related crashes. If you have an older computer with older version of drivers you will merely experience degraded performance and frequent glitch related crashes.

My game crashed so frequently that I considered just abandoning it until I found a workaround. I will post about it later though. That issue deserves it’s own post, so that it can be properly documented and indexed by Google. The game worked fine until I left the Vault and then it was crash central. Every 20-30 minutes I would get brutally dumped back to the desktop.

I can't tell you how many times I've seen this error

Oh, and did I mention the game has issues with Vista permission system as well? For some strange reason you need to run the Falout 3 executable as an admin. Usually, the game will allow you to run it with low lever privileges the first time around, but it will crash as you exit it. From there on, it won’t even launch unless you run it as an admin. It’s silly, dangerous and, what is most important an undocumented behavior. The box says the game is Vista compatible, which is clearly a lie. Or most likely, the game was Vista compatible before they have stapled Securom and Live to it. Yes, I suspect that this bizarre privilege escalation issue is caused by the DRM.

This really makes me wonder why I actually paid for this game. So far all I got was a half baked, buggy software crippled with nasty DRM crudely stapled together to a broken expansion download system that insist on calling home before it lets me play. I got a product that disappears my saved games without a warning, and constantly dumps me to desktop just because I decided to go with nVidia rather than with ATI. I got a game that wouldn’t even start until I went online and found a workaround solution somewhere on the forums. And that’s after I patched it!

Getting this game to run was actually a chore. Do you know how many times I had to do online research just to be able to use it? Three times! First time to discover the privilege escalation bug. Second time to figure out what happened to my saved games after Live ate them. Third time to fix the Nvidia related glitch that kept crashing the game to desktop.

If Fallout 3 was a meal, I would send it back to kitchen and tell them it is undercooked. I hardly even started playing the game, and I’m already pissed off. This is really not a good way to win customers Bethesda.

I do realize that Oblivion was also very buggy but I could accept that since I played it on hardware that was barely meeting the minimum requirements. So I could forgive occasional glitches and crashes caused by a flaky video driver. Now that I’m actually running a game on hardware that meets or exceeds the recommended specifications (for the first time in years btw) I sort of expect more.

I’m going to stop here, before this review turns into another 5 thousand word essay. In the next post I will try to cover the character creation, the stat system, the user interface, and the inventory. I promise I will to much less whining in that one. Once you get past the bullshit above and get the game to run for you, it’s not half bad actually.

30 Days of Night

Hollywood has been writing stories about both of these supernatural creatures for many years now. It is a well explored topic, and as such it is hard to screw up. Over the years we have sort of figured out what works and what doesn’t.

Zombies are best when they are ferocious, mindless and served in great numbers. They are ferocious, bestial, seemingly unstoppable and they are everywhere. A good zombie movie will depict protagonists either trying to outrun the hungry hordes, or hole up and fortify somewhere and try not to kill each other in the process. It will also depict a moral dilemma of a survivor who has been bitten and is slowly turning into a zombie. How will others treat that person? Will they isolate him? Will they shoot him? Will the infected hero sacrifice himself for good of others? Or will he sabotage their defenses out of spite? Will he succumb to the illness sooner than expected and go berserk?

The movie scripts just write themselves.

Vampires movies are a whole other ballgame. The blood suckers are at their best when they are sexy, cunning, conflicted, mysterious and morally ambiguous. The most interesting characteristic of a vampire is it’s dual nature: half man, half beast. Some vamps embrace their bestial side, and become evil monsters. Others struggle to maintain some level of humanity, while dealing with the necessity of feeding on human blood.

A good vampire movie will depict this internal conflict, and show vampires as social beasts. It will depict complex relationships between vampires and their mortal kin, and the ever-present political intrigue, cunning plans, betrayals and century old feuds. Ideally, you need a vampire who strives to be good, a vampire who strives to be evil and bunch of mortals forming a complex social web of romantic, professional and supernatural relationships.

If don’t deviate from this standard, the worst you can do is to make a bad zombie/vampire movie. It won’t wind many awards, but the fans of the genre will still lap it up.

The only way to fail, is of course to deviate from this formula. Curiously enough, this is also the only way to really succeed and get good reviews. The safe thing to do is to take a working formula and introduce original effects. Alternatively you can try to shake things up and abandon the usual schematics and try to do something different. This exactly the path taken by 30 Days of Night. The movie seems to be an attempt to combine the Zombies and Vampires together to form something even more frightening. On the surface it seems like a great idea. Take the ferocity, stubbornness and horrifying appearance of a Zombie and give it the cunning and intelligence of a vampire as well as it’s only weakness as a counterbalance. What you end up is a fearsome bestial hunter that lurks in the dark, and then pounces on it’s prey with a horrifying shriek and rips it apart spraying blood everywhere.

It is quite an interesting concept which wasn’t really implemented that well. These new blood sucking beasts are indeed ugly, ferocious and brutal – but they are nowhere near as effective as a real zombie horde, and nowhere near as fascinating to watch as real vampires. They are stuck somewhere int the middle, trying to be both, and failing. This shows in the script. The writers couldn’t really decide how to use these new monsters since the standard approaches did not apply. In one scene they function as a small zombie horde running around, grunting, shrieking and attacking everything on sight. Then they switch to vampire mode when they actually rummage through people’s houses, or lurking on the roofs stalking their pray. The have conversations in some odd language and seem to have some sort of agenda, but they quickly forget about it and go into berserk frenzy every time they spot a new group of people they could rip apart and devour. They seem like a very confused lot.

Maybe the movie would work better if we could at least try to relate to them. But they are to bestial for empathy, and to human to be truly frightening in the way the dehumanized walking corpses can be. The only vampire that actually seems to have some sort personality is their leader. He has actual speaking parts, and facial expressions that do not include bearing fangs, howling or laughing like a maniac. Sadly his range his range seems to be between surprised, intrigued and angry. Still, it’s better than most of his charges. He actually reminded me a little puppy – he would crook head from side to side with this wide eyed stare all tie time. This is exactly what my dog used to do when she heard me saying a word he remembed – usually her name, or something about food or going for a walk. Is this really the sort of image you want to project as a fearsome leader of vampire gang?

I usually enjoy zombie and vampire movies even when they suck. Sadly I can’t say I enjoyed 30 Days of Night. The concept for the movie itself, is great – it’s the execution that killed it for me.

Picture this if you will: due to it’s geographical location a remote town in Alaska gets plunged into darkness for 30 days every winter. Most locals choose to use up all their vacation days during that month and escape the depressing perpetual night. So the town is half deserted, and most facilities are running on skeleton crews. Since it is a middle of Alaskan winter, strong snowstorms roll over the town every couple of days making travel and communication with the outside world difficult. During one of such tough polar nights, the town gets invaded by a band of ruthless vampires. They cut the phone lines, sabotage the airport, destroy the satellite complication relay and kill all the sled dogs. Then taking advantage of the 30 days of darkness they take over the town. It is up to the town’s Sheriff to round up the few survivors and figure out a way to stop the invasion or escape from the doomed town.

It sounds cool, doesn’t it? Sadly, as I mentioned above the zombie-vampires fail to be anything but laughable. Same goes for the human part of the cast. I really found it difficult to care about any of these characters. I don’t know if it’s bad acting, bad directing or bad script. Probably a combination of all these factors.

Josh Hartnett seem to be incredibly uncomfortable in the role of the flawed experienced, honest, wise and world weary sheriff. The way this character is written, it makes me think he should be played by someone much older. He walks around town brooding over his broken marriage, dispenses little nuggets of insight to everyone he meets, exhibits excellent judgment of character and can always tries to diffuse situations without even drawing his gun. The only problem he cannot solve, is his broken marriage. You know the type – Tommy Lee Jones played that character in just about every movie he has ever been in. Hartnett is the last person I’d suspect being cast in a role like that. Poor guy tries as he might, but this role is just not for him. Thankfully, when the vampires show up he can switch to the action-hero mode with which he is much more comfortable.

Not only that, but he has no chemistry going with Melissa George who plays his estranged wife. There is not tension between them. No spark. In fact, I sort of detected the opposite – this sort of sucking social void that you sometimes detect between people. The overpowering ambivalence and lack of interest toward each other. I imagine that if you would put these two in a room, and left them to their own devices they would probably sit there in silence being profoundly uncomfortable after trying and failing to strike up a conversation. Or maybe it just their acting…

Same goes for most of the other characters. They are bland and uninteresting. To compensate for that, the level of violence and gore is ramped up to the maximum. The vampires walk around literally covered in blood. When they feed they rip and rend their victims spraying their bodily fluids all over the walls or into the snow. The only way to kill vampires seems to be decapitation with an axe rather than the quicker an more humane head-shot known from Zombie films. It is depicted repeatedly in more and more detail. It always takes the hero 3 or 4 swings to actually finish off the vampire. Initially the camera cuts away during the first swing and shows reaction shots. Later in the movie, decapitations are shown explicitly. There is even a scene where the survivors decapitate a little girl who turned into a vampire. I presume this was supposed to be edgy and controversial, but it struck me as unnecessary and tasteless.

What bothered me the most about this movie is the behavior of the vampires. At the beginning of the movie they seem to be incredibly stealthy and fast. They disable town’s communication and transportation network, and pick off bunch of unsuspecting people without ever being seen. They seem to be incredibly adept at playing this cat and mouse game where they bait and lure their victims into a trap and then attack with incredible speed and ferocity to disappear into the shadows again. At some point this ends abruptly – they abandon their finely honed stealth tactics and simply go berserk killing everyone in town. They are not even feeding – they are just slaughtering people left and right. Why?

I understand that they are monsters and they are supposed to be evil – but they are also intelligent. They are wasting food! Instead of organizing a huge orgy of violence they could have just laid low and piked off the unsuspecting townspeople one by one. They could move from house to house, feeding on a different family each night and the sheriff would be none the wiser. It would have made for a much more suspenseful, and interesting movie.

Or they could have used their speed, strength and invulnerability to round up the humans like cattle, put them in some holding pens, feed from them and torture them at will. They could also live in their houses and play on their Wii for fun. Seriously, the whole bloody rampage made no sense whatsoever.

Neither did the ending for that matter. It was stupid, and inconsistent with respect to what have we learned about the vampires up until that point. But I’m not going to spoil this part for you in case you are planning to watch the movie. I’d recommend against it though.

Despite all the gore, violence and explosions it is a very bland movie. I was actually bored to tears while trying to watch it. Halfway through actually left the couch and wandered off to my desk to browse the web for a bit peeking at the TV screen over my shoulder every few minutes to see if something interesting was happening.

30 Days of Night fails as a Vampire flick, fails as a Zombie filck and fails as a movie in general. It was a huge waste of my time, and it almost put me to sleep. At most give it a rental, but you will likely regret it afterward.

Sure, you can blame my router, but you know what? No other OS had any problems with it. So screw it. I blame Vista.

If this was not enough, I recently discovered even more networking issues. Since this was a clean install of Windows, I have been downloading all kinds of software that I commonly use. IDE’s, SDK’s, tools and what-nots and it’s been taking forever. The other day I grabed a 60MB file and it took almost half an hour to download. I was sitting there staring at the Firefox download progress dialog and the speed has never actually exceed 100Kbps. Most of the time it has been oscillating between 20 and 30Kbps. It was like being on dial up again.

I knew something was wrong here. So I googled it and realized that hundreds… Nay, thousands of people had the exact same issue. It is most commonly traced to two of new Vista “features”: TCP Auto Tuning and Remote Differential Compression.

I won’t bore you with the technical details, but if you are interested this article gives a pretty solid overview of the auto tuning feature. While seemingly useful and desirable it is really just an over-optimization that may backfire if your router does not anticipate it. Unfortunately it is enabled by default. To disable it you need to issue this command as an administrator:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=restricted

The second most common issue is with Remote Differential Compression which does what it says – attempts to compress the amount of data that is to be transferred over the network interface. It does that by comparing files on both sides and only moving the ones that changed. In theory it should speed up transfers but it can create unwanted overhead – especially if the remote computer does not support RDC. You can switch it off from the Programs & Features panel by clicking the Turn Windows Features on or off link on the sidebar:

Disable Remote Differential Compression

I did both. I disabled auto tuning and killed RDC, then rebooted my computer and boom! Transfer speeds were once again being measured in Mbps.

I seriously have no clue how technology-illiterate people deal with this bullshit. It no longer surprises me that tech-neophytes hate this OS with a passion. I mean I hate on Microsoft out of principle – but I was always surprised how people always told me how they dislike the new incarnation of Windows. I always figured it was mostly fear of the unknown. I doubted that they could actually understand the technical reasons why Vista is a POS.

Stuff like this made me realize they don’t have to understand it. They experience it every day – and unlike us, they don’t have enough know-how to google this shit and fix it.