I'm back after a few weeks of nothing with some stuff that amounts to a little bit more than nothing, but at least that, is something I guess (damn, I have been playing too much Oblivion: Shivering Isles). Alright enough insane drivel and more inane rambling for this edition of Now Loading Update. There is actually a bit to cover so I probably get right to the point, so the agenda then: Fallout 3 DLC: Mothership Zeta Final Thoughts, Oblivion: My Strange Obsession, Stuck In a Loop (of Games) and Closing Out. We have intercepted a strange radio signal, follow your map markers to...

Fallout 3 DLC: Mothership Zeta
I love Fallout 3, I've played it for probably over 200 hours across my few characters, my main character has over 115 hours and most of that was spent playing even though I was stuck at the level 20 cap and the other 20+ hours stuck at the level 30 cap... but I just keep playing because they just keep releasing new things to do. First it was Operation: Anchorage with it's focus on combat, then it was The Pitt which brought back the moral choices (and one of the toughest at that), thirdly we got Broken Steel which brought us out of the purgatory which was the level 20 cap with a new set of missions and a level 30 cap, fourthly came Point Lookout which gave us a new explorable area and a double-barreled shotgun... And now we have the apparent final DLC: Mothership Zeta which actually makes use of the downed Alien craft that has been crashed there the whole time in Fallout 3.

One of the coolest things about Fallout 3 is the realization of the concept of the 1950's future utopia but with the dark tones of a post apocalyptic catastrophe marring it, so a storyline where you are captured by 1950's style space aliens and brought aboard their 1950's styled spaceship should be the coolest thing ever... IT'S NOT. This is cookie-cutter shit right here, the aliens are generic, the ship looks kind of tacky and there is almost no storyline other than the 25 recordings of captured victims and get off the ship alive. You don't get any information on where these aliens come from, what they are really called; it mostly boils down to that they are just the typical human experimenting / want Earth for resources kind of green spacemen. There is even an interesting hint at something the aliens are doing with the robotic horse toys from all the in game posters, but it never delves past self speculation as to what the connection is. That is the first problem of Mothership Zeta it doesn't follow through with a great concept or any of its plotlines.

The second problem is that it is too combat focused, which is the main reason the story is killed, all you do is have shootouts with aliens and sometimes their robot drones. The little buggers have shields and can take a crap-ton of punishment... to the point of tedium; they also have impeccable aim they just stand still and blast you repeatedly with their ray-guns while you are trying to reload. It got to the point where I moved the games difficulty down to Very Easy (from Normal) just to get through all the boring ass tedious combat, it sure as hell wasn't because it was difficult.

The other thing I did not like is this DLC is kind of willy-nilly with the loot, it's all good stuff (which we will get to in a moment), but it just seems placed randomly. I didn't find the best alien rifle the "Distablizer" until my third time through the DLC and it was just sitting on a shelf just like any other gun. I also never found the fabled "cryo-grenades" and I searched every room of that ship three times. Did you also know that you could get a perk for being better at using alien weapons if you mess around in an alien shooting range? Don't get me wrong I like discovering secrets, it's why I play Fallout 3 (and games like it), but the biggest kicker here is... you don't get a second chance at this stuff. If you complete Mothership Zeta, while you can still come back to ship and there is a section that isn't sealed off where you can fight aliens for more ammo (and the super useful Alien Epoxy), all the other rooms of the ship are off limits. So if you don't find all 25 voice recordings, all the weapons and gear the first time through you are going to have to play through it again. Not to mention that there are three OPTIONAL sections of the ship and each of those contain cool stuff and a few of those recordings that you want to find (for completeness/achievement purposes). I had to play through it 2 full times before I finally found all off the stuff worth pinching from that ship.

I also encountered a game-breaking bug... on my second attempt at completing the quest. One of first major missions is to destroy three power generators (you'll be doing this a lot throughout the DLC), then talk to the little girl Sally and then go on a spacewalk (the coolest part of the DLC). I discovered that if you fail to do it in that order and neglect to talk to Sally and still take the spacewalk you get to a point where you are supposed to activate a teleporter for them to get to your level, except it is already active and they won't beam up... you can't go back to where you came from and you can't progress because you need the little girl to open the door, so you are screwed... if you hadn't made a hard save before that point or saved over a recent save much anger would ensue, so BE CAREFUL.

As for the gear, it's a tad disappointing, but there is a alien rifle that does almost 200 damage (with the alien gun perk and 100 in energy weapons, I guess), there is cool 1930's comic book style spacesuit, a samurai costume (complete with sword), a new plasma pistol (that does 90 damage at maxed stats) and the gun you never thought you came for, Paulson's Revolver... this .44 Magnum revolver (without a stupid scope, for once) can dispatch Giant Radscorpions in 2 shots and Albino Radscorpions in 5, I tested this quite a bit (on various higher difficulties), but it seems that nearly every shot triggers a critical hit making it better than every single gun in the game, IMO. Though it is terrible at long range, which is it's downside. The only strange thing is to get the revolver (and the samurai gear) you're going to have to kill the survivors if they didn't end up getting killed by themselves. Finally, the other cool item is the Alien Epoxy this item repairs your currently equipped weapon by 25%, where normally you would have to have a pair of related guns to do the repair... handy indeed, especially for those guns that don't have compatible pairs, like the Gauss Rifle and the Tesla Cannon. Though, I haven't yet confirmed if it works on your currently equipped armor.

If you are a hardcore fan of Fallout 3, you probably already have this, but if you are a more casual fan, this isn't the pack you want. Get Broken Steel, The Pitt and Point Lookout or just wait for the GotY edition. It could have been great, but just like I said waaay back in my Op:Anc review, this does not play to Fallout 3's strengths which are story and moral choice.

Oblivion: My Strange Obsession
I have spent almost 100 hours with my latest Oblivion character that I started a few weeks ago and I got sucked back in to Oblivion. The reason that I call it my strange obsession is that I don't really like how Oblivion does things. Auto-Leveling enemies mean that you never get more powerful making leveling pointless for the most part. Tons of useless skills, like Speechcraft and Mercantile which end up being point less, you can just bribe everyone making speechcraft pointless and you have sell over 25000 items to get your mercantile skill to Master, by that time you'll have probably a million gold. Not to mention the character building system is pointless, sure you can play ANY character you want, but you won't be able to complete the game with them... making powerful melee characters the only really viable character unless you read a guide to how to play as a pure mage. Trying to play as a 50/50 character leads you to either not having enough strength (mostly to carry things) or not having enough magicka points. But for what ever reason... I can't stop playing, sure I have to turn down the difficulty slider to simulate gaining more power after leveling up and sure bunny-hopping all across Cyrodiil to get your acrobatics skill up is the most ridiculous looking thing... but the adventure, the exploration and getting lots and lots of sneak attacks keep me coming back.

Stuck In A Loop (of Games)
I haven't been making much progress in my backlog, why? It's because I can't stop playing a few specific games, they include Call of Duty 4 (which I have been avoiding the best I can recently), Oblivion, Fallout 3, NHL 09 and Rockband 2. I have lots of games I want to complete but I am stuck in a comfortable zone with these five games and I have been having a hard time breaking out of it. Oh, well, I'm sure it will change soon enough, but I just wanted to get that off my chest and it is mainly the reason that I haven't really wrote much in the blog.

Closing Out
That's about it for now, we're into August now that means we are only about a month away from seeing the first of the fall line up hitting shelves, so I hope that will speed things up. Though I have really failed to capture the quality that this blog used to have, I have been slacking on the impressions and stuff like that a lot. Anyway, I am out of here for now, hopefully it won't be another three weeks before I write again. Loading Complete!