Since I've temporarily retired ST-urday for the new year, which isn't to say I won't ever bring it back for one-offs, I've been wracking my brain for a new weekly series I can focus on. What began to take over the ST-urdays were the pre-amble sections where I briefly discussed what I'd been playing and doing on the Giant Bomb wiki, and with the new Sunday Summaries feature I hope to continue with those updates. Just so I'm not spending the whole time fostering a nascent narcissistic personality disorder, I'll also go deep on a specific game I played that week and write one of those detailed introspectives which covers what I particularly appreciate about the game, or a topic that the game has inspired me to write about. This was how most of my blogging went in my salad days on this site, and Austin's recent (and fantastic!) Off the Clock series has inspired me to return to it this year. Hopefully I can build up to articles as insightful as his later on in the year.

I'll still be keeping up with the usual daily series too - May Mastery will make a return, as will December's Go! Go! GOTY and the monthly Comic Commish - and I'll be peppering a few other non-Sunday articles here and there as well, one of which I hope will go up later this week. It'll still be mostly business as usual for the most part; I'd make resolutions but I never keep the more interesting ones. Be aware that for the next three months at least I'll be bludgeoning my way through a heap of 2014/2015 AAA games I acquired after an uncharacteristically prosperous birthday/Christmas season. I'll keep an eye out for those out-of-nowhere important Indies that tend to show up every month, but I probably won't be opening Steam to play a new game for a while - though I do fully intend to finish off Citizens of Earth and Apotheon this month. They deserve it.

Game Updates!

This week I have been mostly playing Bethesda's Fallout 4.

I'm a complete Bethesda junkie, though I'll be the first to admit that I'm almost always completely burned out by the time I complete them. I'm the type of game enthusiast that has to play every game to completion. I think it's largely a psychological thing, but there's also an element there of not feeling like I can truly appreciate a game until I've seen it to its conclusion. If I've not seen everything it has to offer, it doesn't feel like I've properly experienced it nor can talk about it with a necessary level of authority. Of course, that's a specious statement to make with a game like Fallout 4, or really any recent open-world game, as there's so much content that it's inconceivable to ask any rational player to spend the hundreds of hours necessary to see it all. It's a testament to the designers' dedication that they put so much effort into their world that they end up creating more personal experiences for the players as they pass through areas that a significant number of their fellow wanderers won't ever touch.

Anyway, I'll get into more detail on Fallout 4 specifically below. Other updates for this month include:

Awesome Games Done Quick!

The game release schedule's more or less still taking the holidays off, but we have the first of the Speed Demos Archive's biannual speedrun charity marathons to keep us busy until it starts picking up again. I always spend in an inordinate amount of time glued to the various speedruns, though I've been getting a little more judicious in later years: in a sense it's like the Steam sales, in that I ignore the ones I'm familiar with and the ones I have no interest in, and I usually end up with about four or five hours' worth a day that I try to see live. It's all archived, so if you're a passive fan I'd recommend watching live anything that looks interesting and then check our discussion thread to discover any highlights that you missed. Personally I try to fit in any big races, the Awful Games block and whatever they have planned for the TASbot crew.

New Games!

As said, the schedule's looking kinda dry as of the first week of January, but it looks like the second half has some potentially curious business. The reboot of Amplitude is the only game I can see on the site's "new game" schedule of any note this week, and while I am curious to see how that plays I'm not sure I'm as invested in Harmonix now that Eric Pope, Aaron Trites and the inimitably irritable John Drake have left its environs for pastures new and/or Canadian. I sort of wonder if Harmonix isn't just going to quietly fade away, leaving only the barest of skeleton crews necessary to put out the occasional Rock Band DLC to keep it solvent. That seemed to be the take away from what Rock Band 4 was going for, providing more a framework for content than a brand new incarnation of the venerable rhythm franchise. I want to give a special shout-out to last week (and a bit's) The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel. I don't imagine it'll get a Quick Look once everyone at GB's back in the office (whenever said offices happen to be finished), but it looks to be a PS3/PSV 3D take on the Trails in the Sky series, the first of which I was way into when I played it in 2014. There's also the matter of The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky Second Chapter which was also recently localized for US and Europe. You know how it is with JRPGs - I can really only afford the time for the cream of the crop, if that, because I tend to spread myself thin over a heap of other genres. The "Trails" TLoH games definitely fall within the upper echelons of JRPGs, as far as I'm concerned, though I'm sure it'll be fighting for my attention this year with Xenoblade Chronicles X, Bloodborne, Dark Souls III, the two or three Tales games I own, and that new Ys sometime later this year. I'm giddy just thinking about it. Man, 2016's already great!

Wiki Updates!

I'll keep this short, since I want to carve out a big space this week to talk about Fallout 4. The article I'm putting up later this week is the culmination of my wiki work for the PC Engine's 1989 releases - I've talked about the TurboGrafx-16 and TurboGrafx-CD in a similar capacity, but the PC Engine (its Japanese equivalent) saw a considerably higher volume of games during its tenure. The TurboGrafx was to the US what the Xbox has been to the Japanese: a system that barely managed to get a foothold due to strong competition, and is generally not too highly regarded if it's regarded at all. Going by Japan-exclusive HuCard-format games released for the PC Engine in 1989 alone, we're talking forty-five releases. It's not a huge number, though it's worth considering that the TurboGrafx-16 only saw ninety-four HuCard releases in total. I'll do the usual top ten "most interesting" games by whatever semantics I choose to apply to that nebulous accolade, and then move onto the seventy-two Japan-exclusive HuCard-format releases of 1990 a little while later. I'm presently at April 1990 with that. (PCE-CD games take a little more work when it comes to acquiring screenshots but I don't intend to leave those behind, no worries.)

However! The PC Engine Wiki Project have been put on hold temporarily to address the schedule of the 2016 Awesome Games Done Quick event. A speedy appraisal of the games they have listed on their schedule has fortunately shown that we have pages for everything besides the usual wiki-exempt fan games and ROM hacks. The singular exception was the surreal Famicom platformer Utsurun Desu.: Kawauso Hawaii e Iku, which has since been added. I still want to tweak some of the more busted and empty pages we have, though, as I'm sure folk on the stream's Twitch page and GBers following via our community-driven ExplosiveRuns stream/chat venue will be regularly checking the wiki for information on whatever's being played that moment. I'll be bouncing between the wiki, the AGDQ streams and Fallout 4 for most of my free time next week, I'm sure.

Fallout 4

So it's very easy to come into Fallout 4 and feel a little disillusioned because it's Fallout 3 with an equal amount of jank and an equally weak story and critical mission path - You live in a vault! A family member disappears! You leave the vault to find them! There are factions you can join that hate each other! It's set in a region of the US filled with American history, warped both the world's slightly fascistic pre-war society and the resulting post-apocalyptic irradiation in equal measure! - but Fallout 4 definitely has its share of smaller, incremental improvements. It feels like Bethesda made the game for the series' fans - or the fans of Fallout 3 specifically, since I'm sure the Fallout 1 and 2 diehards left a long time ago - addressing their concerns without actually making significant changes to the game and its engine to render it a whole lot more accessible to those of a less zealous attachment to the series. Almost like they've been conferring with Fallout 3's modder community and fan forums for the whole time this game's been in development, eschewing the usual focus groups who would need to be told what Fallout is (or what a video game is, going by how most focus group-tested games turn out) before being shown the pre-Alpha footage.

When I say that the game is incremental, I mean that Fallout 4's differences from the original are small but innumerable, and that can make them harder to spot. Most players would immediately notice a sense that the general gameplay has improved, but would be hard-pressed to say how and why when asked for examples. At least, beyond the big overt changes like the new settlement building and its streamlined interface and character progression system, the latter of which I'm sure came about because of the warm reception Skyrim saw for uncomplicating the Elder Scrolls series's skill trees. I know I'd be similarly flummoxed for inspiration if I hadn't been focused on the task and jotting down my observations for how Fallout 4 does things a little differently. I'll go through a few of the bulletpoints I've noted, keeping a fuller appraisal for a later time when I'm done (or all but done) with the game:

• Companions: All right, so the companions still walk in front of your shot and offer very little but extra carrying capacity and a perk at maximum affinity level. That they're now invulnerable is a big important step (and one of many reasons why I feel Bethesda listened closely to its community this time around) and I actually think the personalities are better this time. Dogmeat and Cadsworth are fine as workable but dull defaults, but then you have: Nick Valentine's a cool-ass mofo who goes on detective missions with you and does the hacking game on your behalf if Mastermind isn't your thing (I still find them very easy, even with the "secret" dud removals); Piper Wright is the feisty news gal who won't take "you're trespassing" for an answer; Curie's a nurse robot with a French accent and a flamethrower and there's no part of that I dislike; Hancock's the badass party mayor of Goodneighbor with a tricorn hat stuffed with illicit drugs; and I'd hate MacCready for residual Little Lamplight resentment if not for the fact he operates just like I do: anything I can't loot, I shoot from a distance with a high-powered rifle.
• Cities: The cities and settlements are about on par with Fallout 3's in term of imagination, though there's some room for creativity when creating your own little towns. I will say that Diamond City, which repurposes Fenway Park as a Blade Runner-esque slum marketplace complete with a noodle bar in the center run by a Japanese robot, is a pretty cool idea.
• Weapon and Armor Mods: Love that you can disassemble weapons/armor and use those mods on your own gear, or simply deconstruct them for their parts. That there's weapon and armor benches almost everywhere helps if you're juggling inventory space and need to break down some gear for their valuable components. There's very little value attached to weaker armor, for example, but I can take all the crappy armor from the raiders I just killed and hobble over to a workbench for the valuable leather they have. You can also find a moderately powerful yet heavy weapon, take its mods off and then dump the weapon itself and sell the mods. Obviously it involves more inventory micromanagement than most players would care to deal with, but as I've said a few times now: Fallout 4 knows its core audience and panders to them almost exclusively.
• Enemy Intelligence: This is perhaps the most pertinent evolution from the Fallout 3 format, in that beastial attackers are far more distinctive and dangerous in how they attack. Ghouls use a lot of stealth, sneakily crawling out of hiding places or from their "playing possum" states before lunging at you. The way they run at full speed and sort of tumble/tackle you makes them not only hard to hit, but exaggerates how uncoordinated they are due to mental and physical degradation from the radioactive fallout. I also like that they can lose their limbs and still press on, since they've long since lost the use of their pain receptors. Mirelurks ape rocks in the water and burst out when you pass by, and now come in various breeds from crabs to lobsters to "The Creature from the Black Lagoon"-esque Mirelurk Kings. Much better designs than the vaguely alien creatures from 3. Molerats and Radscorpions will ambush you from below, making them a lot trickier to deal with and requiring the use of short-range weapons. It's actually kind of weird to think of molerats as a threat again, but they'll quickly pummel you in large groups. In spite of all this, humans are still dumb as hell - I got too close to booby-trapped raider camp, and the raiders themselves tripped all the frag mines trying to reach me - and Super Mutants are every bit as unpleasant as they've always been. Nuke-wielding "Suiciders" and giant roided attack dogs don't make them any more fun to encounter.
• Settlement Construction: Odd application, but gives certain items more value than whatever their bottlecap price happens to be. It's fun in the same way something like Terraria is: you can choose to take five to build up a town and then jump right back into the exploration and combat aspects. It needs to be a little more featured than it is, and I'm not sure that having dozens of settlements that are all built up the same way is necessarily better than a handful of settlements you can do something creative with. I've set up in an alleyway near Diamond CIty, allowing me close access to vendor and all the necessary workbenches, and I'm not sure how much more constructing I intend to do.
• Auto-Saving: It can be spotty, but will automatically save for you if you drop in and out of the Pipboy interface and haven't saved in a while. Ditto for transitions to new areas. Exploring the wilderness without checking in too often can lead to some upsets, but I've been happy with it. I appreciate that it keeps a fairly long log of past auto-saves too, though maybe it's acknowleding too much about how iffy its bugs can be. I know I've been stuck a couple of times, and at one point all my weapons went invisible. We all know this game's buggy on consoles though, and I'm thankful that it hasn't been too bad in my case. Knock on wood though, hey?
• Weightless Objects: A quirk of the encumbrance system. Folders, pens, pencils, a lot of light stuff can be collected for no loss. I'm getting into the habit of grabbing all these I can find, because they're free money that I can cash in at any time. Most of the paper stuff occupies a different inventory menu from my junk too, which is handy. I would also recommend to folk to pick up anything that weighs "0.1" like tin cans or test tubes, because even if you only get one cap for them apiece that's ten caps per unit of weight. That's better value than you get from most items. Then again, with the right perks you'll never want for money anyway, so you might as well just take anything that has components that the weapon/armor mods might need and leave the rest.
• Pencils: Just a fun little detail, but every pencil you find contains lead. As in, lead the poisonous metallic element. It would be an amusing take on that common misconception concerning graphite, except you then consider the sort of atomically and chemically irresponsible world of pre-war Fallout and you can imagine that they actually put real lead in all their writing utensils. I mean, it's not like you aren't also finding asbestos everywhere and discovering that powerful addictive drugs were commercially available at one time (which of course mirrors how that was once the case for heroin and cocaine). While Fallout 3 had its satire about how shitty the old world actually was, especially Vault-Tec and their inhumane experiments, Fallout 4 continues to double-down on it and it's the source of some of the more entertaining incidental details you discover about the world.
• Lighting: The game makes great use of lighting, occasionally cheating by having sunbeams/moonbeams entering interiors at dramatic angles at all times of day and night. I appreciate that the weather in general's a bit more varied too, including potentially fatal radioactive storms that will hit you with rads with every clap of thunder. No acid rain that I've seen, oddly, though having your health (or item endurance, which thankfully isn't a thing here beyond turrets at bases) constantly drain probably wouldn't be conducive to fun times.

Anyway, I'll be striding through the Commonwealth for probably a whole extra week at least, so I'll try to scrounge up more things to talk about before next Sunday. Thanks for stopping by, and welcome to 2016.