Found: One Troll

True to my word, since I earned my certification earlier this week I’ve been spending most of my free time playing Fallout 3 (again). The last time I played Fallout 3 was just after release, and I completed the game before there were any well-made mods or official DLC available for it. Unlike a few fans of the original Fallout series, the previous canon entry of which was released in 1998, I thought Fallout 3 was actually a pretty damn good game. I’d go so far as to say it was the best game of 2008. It captured the feel of the original games sufficiently well, although I thought it could have been thematically darker.

On my current playthrough, I decided to wade into the pool of mods available at The Fallout 3 Nexus. There are a lot of really great mods out there, so I figured I’d compile them into a list.

• The first mod you’ll want isn’t a mod at all, but an application to manage the rest of them. The Fallout 3 Mod Manager gives you some great features that the stock Fallout launcher does not, including the ability to change mod load orders to avoid conflicts and to compile and decompile the archive files used by BethSoft to store their texture and sound files.
• The first real mod you’ll need will be either ArchiveInvalidation Invalidated or Archiveinvalidation Validator. Many mods include custom textures or sound files. In order to use these new files you need to add lines to the ArchiveInvalidated.txt file in the root Fallout folder as well as flipping a variable in another game file. Both of these mods take care of those steps for you, but they go about it in different ways. The first completely bypasses the process, forcing Fallout 3 to load new textures and sounds in place of the originals by default. The downside to this method is that for any textures that you haven’t replaced, Fallout 3 assumes that you want to use the lowest resolution textures it has. The second mod automates the process of generating an ArchiveInvalidated.txt file, but it isn’t perfect and an improperly built text file will crash your game. Personally, I use so many texture replacers that I opted for the first option.

The list continues after the jump.

(more…)

Via one of my co-workers, who in his “free” time runs the gaming website GamingTrend, I found two new (to me) projects by one of gaming’s funniest developers, Tim Shafer. Tim Shafer is responsible for such awesome video games as Day of the Tentacle, The Secret of Monkey Island, Full Throttle, Psychonauts, and others.

Over at the GamingTrend forums I found the short flash game Host Master and the Conquest of Humor, in which you play Tim Shafer himself in a SCUMM-like adventure game. The objective of the game is to find all the jokes for Tim’s speech at the Game Developers Choice Awards, which are hidden in the room. It’s a fun little diversion that captures the feel and frustration of the old adventure games fairly well.

The other, bigger, project is Brütal Legend. From the press that I have read about the game, it looks like a cross between Metal culture and Grim Fandango (another Shafer game). To quote a press release:

Brütal Legend tells the tale of Eddie Riggs, played by Jack Black, who is drawn back through time to a mythical world dripped in Rock and Roll folklore; where great Metal titans once ruled and power chords rang from the countryside for all to hear. When an oppressed people request Eddie’s knowledge of modern warfare, he pulls from his own experience in the only occupation he’s ever had, a roadie for a Heavy Metal band. From this springs the most hellacious army man has ever seen, and thus brings this ancient world into the Age of Metal.

I’m not really a big fan of Jack Black, but his involvement in the project isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I don’t know what it is about him, there’s just something about Black that makes it difficult for me to take him seriously, even as a comedian. Regardless, in addition to Black, several genuine rock legends have signed on to voice the game. Not only does the trailer feature music by Judas Priest (The Hellion/Electic Eye), but Rob Halford voices the main villain. Also on board are Lita Ford of The Runaways and Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead.

Supposedly the game will be released in the fall of this year, and it now joins StarCraft 2 and Bioshock 2 on my “games to buy” list for this year.