Articles tagged rpg

Released in 2004, Vampire was the second game to use Valve's source engine. Heavily criticised at the time for its weak combat system and graphical glitches, Vampire rarely received any perfect scores, and due to weak marketing and Half-Life 2's monopoly of contemporary sales, it didn't break any sales records. Yet, four years on such flaws are no longer apparent since combat and graphics in modern games have evolved so far that many titles of the time could be heaped with such criticism. It is in this light that Vampire's qualities truly begin to shine.

War, it's fantastic. We love it; we can't get enough of it. It's all over the media, film, art and especially videogames. Despite the horror, destruction and poverty it causes, we're all over it like barbarian invaders, crazed emperors and Republican presidential candidates. The Fallout series takes its influence from 1950s cold war culture, an aesthetic more recently found in Bioshock. Fallout told the tale of some idiot actually nuking the planet, forcing humanity into vaults, deep below the earth, away from the irradiated surface. The first two games revolved around survivors leaving their own vaults to explore the land above in a 2D isometric RPG tale of discovery. The world was filled with small communities of survivors, mutants and 'radscorpions'. What made Fallout stand-out, however, was its scalpel-sharp sense of black humour, creating a game simultaneously hilarious and self-aware.  It showed how, in the face of annihilation, all one could do was laugh.