Fallout 3

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The appeal of Fallout 1 & 2 stems from their combination of strategy and light heartedness.  After a fight that turned sour multiple times and you got out by the skin of your teeth, you get to meet a character who makes you laugh out loud (looking at you Harold).  Quests littered the landscape and you could complete nearly all of them through multiple paths; combat, speech or stealth.  You skill sets gave you a percentage chance of each.  You had choices, plenty of choices.  There was HUGE replayability because of it.

Fallout 3, clearly and unfortunately, segregates these playstyles from the outset.  Almost every quest requires combat in some fashion.  Some quests even tell you not to fight but force you into combat at every turn.  Delving into speech serves no purpose other than to get more quest information at the beginning or to start a fight.  Want to help a town beset by flame belching ants?  Kill 40 of them on your way to a scientist who says “kill 5 more but don’t kill their queen!”  Where’s the option to program a robot to do the dirty work for you?  Or convince the scientist to go do it himself?

Humor.  Listen, you’re in a wasteland, everything is depressing.  People NEED humor to offset the eternal pessimism throughout the game.  Sure, I want my decisions to have impact but I also want to find stuff that makes me giggle.  Do a quest to find dirty laundry.  Meet a dumb criminal whom I can convince to turn himself in.  There’s a delicate balance required here and the humor provided is done with a heavy hand.  Sure the Adventurer’s Handbook chain is funny while you’re talking to the quest giver but while you’re doing the quest, there’s no punchline.  Heck, you can even LIE your way through the entire thing and never do anything but listen to her schpeil on…  The realism just isn’t properly tempered with the humor.  It’s like they are two roommates who don’t get along.

Combat is interesting.  The old turn based combat is gone and replaces with VATS and realtime combat.  The former allows you to pause the game, select body parts and attack with action points.  They regenerate over time, allowing you to use VATS again within 10-30s.  Real time combat is just that.  Think Call of Duty or Halo.  Shoot until you kill them.  The problem here is ammo.  In other FPS games, you easily find ammo everywhere.  Taking 200 bullets to take down 5 guys isn’t even a concern in those games.  Taking more than 20 shots to kill something in Fallout is a gigantic waste of ammo.  Training the skill doesn’t really do much for realtime combat, it’s all twitch based.  Skills do help in VATS and by a very large amount.  Taking 5 shots in VATS at close range can kill pretty much any enemy with ease.  The chance of hit is clearly written.  The only reason to use real time combat is when you’re out of action points to get into VATS and the enemy has a sliver of health left.  Otherwise, just run and hide while your points regen, then finish the job.  Very defeating.  All that being said, VATS is incredibly rewarding.  Slow-mo kill shots are great to watch.  This part of the game is done exceptionally well and the fact that it’s so good only shows how poor real time combat is as an alternative.

I mentioned skills early and I need to address them here as well.  You have a couple dozen skills to choose from; lock picking, small guns, science, etc…  Each has a benefit, large or small.  Repair lets you fix your gear for free (see a trader for them to do it for you for a cost), science lets you hack terminals (used nearly solely for quests), lockpicking lets you open doors, and so on.  The skills are great.  I love repair.  It’s very well done.  Sneaking is great too, pure chance of detection.  Lock picking and Science however, they are horrible skills.  There are 4 types of locks in the game, those that require 25, 50, 75 and 100 skill.  If you have 33 Lock picking, it’s the exact same as 25.  The physical difference between a 25 and 75 lock is negligible.  They take the same amount of dexterity to open.  Science works similar to Lockpicking, with terminals with skill levels needed to operate.  The game is essentially Mastermind, where you need to guess a password from a list of 20.  The easier ones have 5 letters, the harder ones near 10.  You have 4 chances then you lock out but if you keep quitting at 3, you can restart the game.  Essentially turns into a game of luck at that point, where with enough time you are guaranteed to open the door.  Only an idiot would lock out a terminal.  This skill seems unfinished.

Now don’t get me wrong, the game is a lot of fun.  I will finish it and make sure all the side-quests are over with as well.  There’s just missing that special something (pardon the pun) that the first games had.  I’m not engulfed in a story.  I can easily just finish a quest, save and quit.  I don’t have that “just one more quest” feeling and that’s too bad.   After 10 years, I feel really let down.

Liberals/Democrats vs Conservatives/Republicans

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I try to avoid politics.  It generally causes conflict.  Hah!  First.  History lesson.

Conservative = staying the course, reticent to change, stable

Liberal = embraces change, risky, fast paced

Historically, it’s been in many people’s best interests to be conservative.  This has allowed people to grow within confines, reduce environmental variables and generally assist in the growth of population.  ie: make more people, grow stronger.

Liberal movements come into play when you have a sound foundation.  You have surpluses of food and money.  Lots of people.  Lots of ideas.  Liberal thoughts allow a culture to grow.  ie: allows innovation, grow smarter.

The first web browser was made available in 1991.  So if you think about it, people born from 1980+ are initimitely familiar with the internet.  Younger you get, the more so.  The speed and information on the net is inherently liberal.  Everything has to be new.  It gives everyone a soap box.  People born before 1980 or people who can’t afford a computer and internet access are traditionally conservative.  They were brought up during recessions, hard times, wars.  They require stability.  These are simply generalizations, there are definitely exceptions.

What am I getting at you ask?  Simple.  Where tradition states the older you get the more conservative you become, this is become less and less so with the advent of mass communication.  40 year olds are adapting to new ideas and structures at a pace never seen before.  People are getting used to constant change and flux.  The Canadian election is proof of this.  The same old same old pushed away 40% of all voters.  There’s no change, therefore, no interest.  The US elections are similar.  Obama’s line is all about change and he’s pulling out people left right and center to vote for it.  This, in the middle of the worst economic recession in 80 years, the perfect time to BE conservative.

I find this all very fascinating.

Dow Drops

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I’ll start off by saying, I’m not an investor.  I don’t pretend to know the complexities but I have read enough and taken courses to have some slight idea in the matter.

Over the past 12 months, the Dow Jones index fell from a high of 14,000 to less than 8,000.  More specifically, in the last month alone, 3,000 points were lost.  People who are selling now are losing their shirts.

Quick backstory, the US economy has been in an upswing for 15 years.  This is unnatural, especially after the IT bubble burst in 2000.  The economy should have corrected itself but the government propped it up to avoid a mini-recession.  It’s like supporting a house with a crumbling foundation with sand.  Holds for a bit but if it gets wet, everything goes.  Well, I’ve been saying for 2 years now that the housing/mortgage issue is going to destroy the US, here we are…

The silver lining in all of this is such.  When it finishes tanking (6 months or so) there will be huge opportunities for long term investments in sound businesses.  Renewable fuels?  Yessir.  Grains?  You betcha.  Bio research?  Nothing but the best.  Intangible, insoluable items?  Hell’s no!

When everything is scraping the bottom, that’s the time to find the diamonds in the rough.

Little Big Planet – Calculator

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Holy shart.  This is incredible.  He made a calculator with over 600 moving parts, like an old computer from the 50s.  I am blown away at the ingenuity.

Outsourcing Issues?

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Link

Since I used to work for HP (through Sitel), I have some familiarity with outsourcing.  First off, no one wants to talk to someone with an accent so thick you can’t tell the difference between on and off.  Be it Indian or someone from Newfounland.   Clear communication is key in any client service centre.  Fine, out of the way.

Back when outsourcing was the “in” thing, companies just shut down local business and shipped it out overseas (or to Canada for a while).  Made sense, it cost 50-80% less to host it elsewhere.  Of course, the main problem is that you’re now “exporting” money into another country, reducing the amount of cash available in yours, which is where your product is sold.  Moving on…

Outsourcing is bad for a few reasons.  First, technical expertise != client skills.  You have your engineers working for the company and you have to hire people off the street with no knowledge of your products or client needs.  All of the people with those skill sets are in another country, working for another company.  You’re fine for about 5 years but when people start retiring or finding another job, you have no one to replace them and become “top heavy” due to the sheer amount of managers you have compared to regular workers.

Second, there are haves and have-nots.  Think of it this way, every country is a cup.  The americas are a full cup, India (for example) is 10% full.  India will do a lot of work in order to fill their cup.  Eventually however, their cup fills up and the benefits diminish.  People have higher education, more expesive lifestyles and therefore require more money.  As long as the money out is less than the money in, you win.  This range is shrinking daily.

Third, expectations.  We live a life of first world luxury.  I mean it, even the poorest Canadian is 1000x richer than most other people on the planet.  A panhandler makes more money than a doctor in Africa.  As we outsoruce money, we are in fact increasing the third world expectation to live in first world luxury.  Plain and simple, the world cannot handle that.  We don’t have enough resources.  I’m not saying we need to keep other countries down, what I am saying is that it took us 400 years to reach this point.  You can’t expect an entire country of near billion people to do that 400 years in 15 and NOT have huge consequences.

What I’m really trying to get at is that it’s a very complicated system.  Companies do not excel at quality, they excel at quantity.  If their products were more reliable and intuitive (Apple support is local for example) they would need 50-75% less staff for support and be able to keep the local economy strong.  Outsourcing is at best, a temporary solution and one that in the long run, hurts everyone in a company.