Welcome to the return of NLU Weekly! It seems I can't be trusted to blog more than once a month without it so it has returned. I have a few things to talk about, so let's get right down to it. On the agenda is Fallout 3's latest DLC: Broken Steel and I am going to talk about some Tales of Symphonia 2 on the Wii. So let's get started.

Fallout 3 - Broken Steel
The last two Fallout 3 DLC packs have not have smooth releases. The English 360 version of The Pitt was completely corrupted and was replaced within a day... now Broken Steel launches messed up on Games for Windows and the achievements were not updating properly for a while on the 360 version. If you got an achievement before the achievement list was synced the only recourse to get those points added to your Gamerscore was to recover your gamertag from Live and get those achievements again. I had to do that with first Broken Steel achievement, which wasn't too much of a hassle, but it would be a bummer if you had to play through all three quests of BS AGAIN to get the achievements, which you already earned.

But enough of that, on to the impressions. After you finish the original quest line of Fallout 3 you are teleported to TWO WEEKS LATER and you discover the purifier was a big success and their is now pure water in the tidal basin around it. But things aren't over yet, the remains of the "evil" Enclave are still roaming the wastes and the Brotherhood of Steel wants them gone. You then head on three major quest-lines to help do just that, the first quest has you attacking a satellite relay station, then you need to find a part to build the awesome Tesla Cannon, finally, you will take the fight to the last Enclave base and destroy them once and for all.

These quests will take about 5 - 6 hours to complete. You will also get some great new weapons and items, including the Enclave Hellfire Armor, the Heavy Incinerator (which shoots powerful fireballs), the aforementioned Tesla Cannon (which shoots a powerful beam of electricity which leaves a damaging ball of electricity) and then there is the Tri-Beam Laser Rifle (which is quite like a laser rifle shotgun). To top all this off there are brand new enemies: the Super Mutant Overlord, the Albino Radscorpion, the Enclave Hellfire Trooper and the Feral Ghoul Reaper. These new enemies are super powerful and will take a lot of work to take down, you will need your most powerful weapons to even make a dent in these guys. The most interesting is probably the Reaper which can actually throw grenade like projectiles. Personally, I think these new enemies are a bit over powered and have too many hit points. Mind you these enemies don't appear until you reach level 20+ so you should be mighty powerful.

Finally the level cap has been raised from 20 to 30. It takes a bit of work to get to level 30, it takes 4300+ XP to get from Lv29 to Lv30, which considering you get only 50 - 60 XP from most enemies and hacks that's going to take you awhile. Broken Steel is the best of the three packs, mostly because of the level cap raise, but the new weapons and armor are pretty cool to. The quest missions and areas are also worth seeing, it is also nice to be able to continue adventuring forever. If you get just one Fallout 3 DLC pack this is the one to get.

Tales of Symphonia 2 Impressions
I picked up Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World back in November 2008 and I played it for about 2 hours and then stopped, you know how it is with me J-RPGs. I have started again, because I mostly felt like I should play a game on my Wii. I have made it about 12 hours in to it... and... while it has a crap-ton of fan service to fans of the first game, but it has a few problems. First there is no overworld encounters, so you better do all your leveling in dungeons and second and the WORST problem is you CAN NOT play as the characters from the first game. It is also really tough to enjoy the characters you play as because they start off hating the original characters, especially Lloyd and Collette. I don't understand why you'd write a story like this in a fan service game. As a fan of the first game, I liked the original characters a lot, so it just makes me frustrated to see them treated as the "bad" guy or when these naive new characters start making judgments about the original characters when they have no clue what happened to those characters in the original adventure.

I'm going to get through this one soon because I want to move on to Tales of Vesperia, which I also grabbed last year and have only maybe put 6 hours in to. The new characters are coming around to accept the original cast, but it has been a slow progression.

Closing Out
That will just about do it for the return of NLU Weekly, I will have more to say soon as I near the end of Tales of Symphonia 2 and I want to say some stuff about X-Men Origins: Wolverine (360) which I picked up but have only played for an hour or two (it's been fun so far). I'm also planning on picking up Klonoa for the Wii and I will talk about that when the time comes. That's it I will talk to you soon, next week at the very most. Loading Complete!