fallout 76 will have a battle royale mode!

Woke up this morning with a real feeling of punditry on the breeze, normally i wait till later in the week to knock out one of these bad boy’s much like my pre-bed shower game; which i will not, sigh of relief, be reviewing…this week. The smart move would have been to take my bank of cashiers checks, (my little white spurts) and sit myself down in front of the electronic entertainment expo for god knows how many hours, cranking out words with my hand while i simply sink into the cringe of it all. I know some who did, but they don’t have blogs, nor do they possess the sheer indifference to reason needed to spit one of these things out. I could ask what they thought but that might give me something to write about, ruining this paragraphs implication that all i have here is a steaming pile of wank.

After a friend send me a link to the preorder for fallout 76 power armour edition retailing for about 175 pound sterling i decided that a ounce of grandstanding is in order, nothing short of total smug can be invoked for the tidal wave of cosmic level miscreance on both his part and the part of the infamous satanic figure: todd howard, who will use the revenue from said collector’s edition to fuel his industrial scale psychic hive-mind of kidnapped children to driver us ever closer to an actual nuclear apocalypse.

Such charges ought not to go unsubstantiated. In print such words could be liable, but sueing is the last thing todd howard would do. In order to sue he’d have to prove to the judge that i was wrong and that were was no hivemind of kidnapped children locked away in the basement of bethesda studios right between fallout: new vegas 2 and the smouldering puss soaked remains of Brink (2011). All things big todd would never let see the light of day. Hence i feel we are at something of an impasse, these words alone can’t stop the apocalypse but maybe they might make BIG T lose some sleep in between re-releasing skyrims.

I’m beginning to wonder if the apocalypse would be that bad, for one thing it’s most certainly mean the end of my more powerful and popular rivals platform’s, i off course would survive unlike the ninety percent of people who would die in an actual apocalypse. I’m still too naive to consider my death a given certainty and as a result i approach nightmare scenarios like some brave new world being stripped of the shackles of conventional morality so i can made so called HARD CHOICES! But then the alternative is choosing between sweet corn brands; can anyone really blame me?

With all the meaningless speculative waffle this could be loosely compared to a kotaku article, if i had actually read any and not just heard about them through cultural osmosis. So let's get back to something more real. The friend i mentioned earlier, the one you might rightfully construed as an entirely fictitious element, undermining my proposition of returning to the real but which is in actual fact a person i know. Yeah? That one? Well he preordered the game, a preorder! Blatant blasphemy in internet circles. The dam thing was barely announced a week ago and has not been subject to the least critical appraisal, unless this counts, and already he has brought copy albeit not the ‘can’t pay rent now’ edition

So what exactly has he brought into, what is it people are buying when they pre-order. It’s really quite simple. Like a gold prospector staking their claim to some wasteland marsh my friend believes here be gold. He has purchased ownership, in an age of digital distribution where there is no scarcity, so all that’s left is ownership and even that’s watered down. A rather ironic paradigm for a fallout game in which everything is scarce and their really is no strong form of legal ownership, where preorders are replaced with not knowing where the next meal comes from. He Has brought ownership of a thing with certainty, wherein there is neither. If that doesn’t make your neck spin your joints aren't quite as flexible as my own but i’m firmly of the belief that you’re all trying.

Have i read the list of features they plan to put in the game? No! When a child draws their dream castle and puts the carmel pool right next to the man eating alligators one generally pays it little serious consideration. Until the child has achieved their masters in architecture that is. At which point i would do like to do nothing more than sit down with a brew and chat alligator logistics. You can tell a gator from a croc on the basis of whether it will see you in later or in a while. How i wish that joke was the product of my own mind, true envy lays therin.

Maybe that’s just it, this half cocked slapdash scrawl, just some cheap cash in on E3 an envy fuelled ride to gawk at those uncynical enough to put their money where their mouth is for things they unambiguously want. William hague, a tory posh boy, decided the other day that the war on drugs is a bust, maybe it’s time i too conceded that the war against nothing in particular has also failed to curb the rampant elephantiasised unwieldiness of nothing in particular. Then again the steam sale are right around the corner, maybe i might find some glimmer of salvation on that sea of green.

Bioshock the many: Apolitical storytelling at it’s finest.

There are two kinds of narrative, or there could be if one took proposition A: there are two kinds of narrative, to be true; then it logically follows that there are two kinds of narrative. What are those two kinds of narrative, well we can’t know with proposition A alone so let's introduce another element quickly before i loss your attention and through analysis we might discern what those kinds of narrative are. Bioshock: infinite is a the sequel to bioshock that strips away the tight, claustrophobic and thrilling atmosphere of the first game, Set underwater; and swaps it out for a the open sky, which admittedly is much harder to make feel claustrophobic.

The game takes place in the floating city of Columbia, seemingly idyllic with it’s wholesome christian veneer; only it turns out there all a bunch of racists, who’d of guessed. I had it in my head that when i was forcibly baptised on a arrival that things could only work out well. Mistake numero uno, that’s number one for our non spanish speaking readers, they built a city in the sky Acrophobia puts one in an awfully jumpy state, ironically enough. Just when the bathophobia fleeing from the city of rapture thought they were safe, BAM! Dunked in water quick enough to make your head spin, which we will call mistake number 2.

The list goes on until one realised it’s probably okay to start gunning these people without so much as a second thought, which is when the game hands you a gun and tells you to go nuts. Gyaliaphobia is not very common, so nuts most people tend to go. So far we’ve been talking about the interactions of an individual with society but there’s more… there are characters too. That being said just because there is a thing doesn’t mean they’re particularly worth talking about; unless that lack of interest, therein, is a point i can use to sledgehammer my misgivings, which this sentence is doing while also describing its own purpose. D E E P

Cognitive dissonance aside, the game has another more interesting aspect to itself. The so called ‘infinite’ part of the title. This isn’t some cheap attempt at sequel naming you’d see from the likes of the game industries resident puss bloated sequel behemoth. They’re instead playing the ace high of all stand alone ideas that make whatever their applied to really deep and meaningful for some reason… The mindfuck multiverse. If you can hear me sigh when i say that, it’s probably you’re end, i’m not tech savvy enough to rig that up. I’ve got a real fear of technology, which makes me, you’ve guessed it, a luddite.

As Stephen king once said hypothetically in my head, “what if all my stories were one big story, that’d be sick init.” the multiverse, in scifi terms, is time travel +1. Any story that takes place across multiple independent realities is automatically a meta deconstructionist satire and can be used to hand wave or link up just about anything: Like the reappearance of the freaky power ups from bioshock. The only downside is you’ve played the highest card in the deck and so there’s not a lot one can do in terms of escalation. 

I myself, sat here with toes curled up to shield by aching feet, have been wondering just that and as i do i create two branching realities, each their own narrative both rather Geliophobic in their own rights. It’s amusing that at the time of bioshocks: infinite's release The moral choice stuff was still quite prevalent, and that in a world of infinite branching realities the game and narrative are extremely linear, except for some backtracking in both. Apart from some meaningless coin flips, which when you think about does make it rather satirical in a sense or it would were it not played straight.

Quick fire round:

Gives the feels? it’s got some spicy notes here and there.

Do things get edgy in the dlc? what a leading question! You seem to already know.

Why did you avoid major story spoilers to shield to more interesting aspects of the narrative from scrutiny, thereby ruining your ability to answer your own initial question? no one expects me to answer it plus my tautology is invincible, it proves itself.