For the past month or so, I’ve been doing a poor job of keeping up with my blog posts. I’d like to blame school as the main culprit, although I’m sure there’s a degree of laziness on my part to blame as well. Nevertheless, I’m planning to work on my writing this summer by posting much more often. Hopefully this comes as good news for those reading.

I’ll start this summer off writing about something only a few people actually care about--what I think about the games I’ve been playing.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been playing a gross amount of Fallout: New Vegas. I got the game late last year but thanks to technical horror stories involving lost save files and owl-people, I decided to hold off on delving into the nuclear wasteland. Once patch 1.3 rolled out on steam, I began my 40+ hour adventure filled with looting, questing, and slow-motion head explosions. Unfortunately this adventure was also filled with bugs, ranging from minor annoyances to game-breaking.

The minor bugs didn’t bother me too much. After spending many hours with Oblivion and Fallout 3, I expected character models to be clipping halfway through a boulder. I didn’t expect to encounter 15+ game crashes. A highpoint of the game for me was finally completing a quest that caused my game to crash about six or seven times. The quest (“Beyond the Beef” for those wondering), involved me meeting someone in a sauna at 4pm. When I met up with the person at around 4pm, the game would crash without fail. Loading an auto save usually gave me another 15 seconds before the game would crash again—if it didn’t freeze while loading.

I eventually cut my losses and loaded up a save that was a couple of hours before I started the quest, determined to finish what I started. After retracing my steps while tapping the quicksave key, I restarted the “deadly sauna quest” for the fifth or so time. Taking the Internet’s advice, I waited until around 4:45 pm before talking to sauna man and managed to finish the conversation (as well as the rest of the quest) without booting up task manager. Overall, I enjoyed the time I spent exploring New Vegas. The dialogue is truly impressive and you never know what you might find in that game. I’m sure there were plenty of stones left unturned when I finally beat the game, but I was content with what I had accomplished when the credits rolled. Also, I would have punched my monitor if the game launcher locked up one more time.

The next long rpg on my list was The Witcher 2, which I played around 15 minutes of before I stopped and bought The Witcher (enhanced edition). Like Vinny, I wanted to be familiar with the Witcher universe before diving into the sequel. My friends thought I was crazy (and perhaps I am), but I’ve been enjoying the 23 hours I’ve spent with the game so far. The narrative isn’t exactly unique for a standard RPG, but the rich universe has kept me glued to my monitor.

The only thing bugging me is the sheer amount of backtracking I have to do. While backtracking didn’t bug me in New Vegas, The Witcher doesn’t have a fast travel system to speed things up (there are a few teleport locations but they hardly solve the problem). Running to a location I’ve been hundreds of times before shouldn’t be 70% of a quest. Period.

So that’s been my summer so far. I’ve been doing plenty of other things, but I don’t need this turning into a book. You don’t need to spend any more of your summer reading about what I’ve been doing with mine.