Went to check out SideFX 2024 at aMBUSH Gallery with Nanami today. What a show! On display were wild pieces by 30 Australian practical effects experts including prosthetics and animatronics. The show ends tomorrow, Sunday the 8th of September. Free entry too, visit aMBUSH Gallery for more information.

First The Sandman, now Fallout. Pinching myself that they’ve made a live action TV show of a game series I consider to be one of, if not the best games I’ve ever played. I actually feel lucky to have lived long enough to see this become a reality!

Truthfully I was going to love it whether it was good or crap, but the series delivered way more than I expected. Shot so beautifully with tonnes of depth of field and gritty saturated grading, the attention to detail in the props and set design was amazing and the writing whilst starting out a little slow picked up the pace real fast and by the end I was left wanting more. And holy shit there was so much fan service from start to end. Giddy!

I thought I’d try to put together a list of my fave games of all time.

My top 10 games of my time (in no particular order):
– Fallout 4
– Black Desert Online
– The Division
– Destiny 2
– Skyrim
– Warframe
– Gran Turismo 5
– The Last Of Us
– Monster Hunter: World
– Elden Ring

Honorable mentions:
– Prey
– The Surge
– Remnant: From the Ashes
– Remnant 2
– The Witcher 3
– Horizon Zero Dawn
– Nioh
– Quake I
– Quake II
– Marathon

And if I was stranded on an island, well… if I could only play the one game for the rest of my life it would have to be Skyrim.

Marathon, Destiny 1 player and Day 1 Destiny 2 player here (currently 3,168 hrs in D2 on record).

I stopped playing Destiny 2 after The Witch Queen (which I absolutely loved and still think was Bungie’s best D2 DLC to date), mainly because I got sick of complaining about the state of the game so much. IE: I loved the game so much that I hated it.

For the past 2 years I’ve been playing Diablo Immortal, II, III and IV, Starfield, Fallout IV and Starfield. It’s been a good break (much more chill gaming experiences than Destiny grandmasters and raids that’s for sure!), but more recently I played through Remnant 2, and replayed through Remnant from the Ashes too which got me back in the mood for more pew pew pew action again.

A friend I was playing these games with wanted to give Destiny 2 a go (and a friend who never left D2 has been trying to get me to pick up the game again for years now). Initially I was dead set on never playing D2 again as I was certain that I was getting more enjoyment from regularly checking in to this reddit and YouTube for all the Destiny 2 drama, but a part of me wants to put the final nail in the coffin with The Final Shape, so I thought fuck it. I’ll re-install it.

The first few hours of returning to D2 was fucking savage. I was bombarded with pop-ups enticing me to spend money on this and that. I had forgotten just about everything; How the fuck do I bring up my sparrow again? Ohhhh, bring up the ghost first, then the sparrow… how do I do finishers again? How do I upgrade weapons and where do I turn in bounties? The UI is an absolute mess, not to mention my friend who was new to the game was even more lost than I was and my mate who never left was absolutely decimating everything on the screen in every activity we were doing.

I started doing what the seasonal quest tab was telling me to do, then the game was trying to get me to do an activity I didn’t have access to, so I bought the season pass, then the game tells me the activity is part of Season 22 and I can’t do it unless I buy the annual pass?! Fucking what?!

So fuck me dead. I pay for Lightfall + the annual pass (despite watching ALL the negative review videos on YouTube). I start out at 1600 light level and can’t grind for the Gyrfalcon’s Hauberk (Void Hunter for life!) as I’m WAY too low for legend lost sectors. OK I gotta level up. Then it hits me… I have to grind bounties (lots of them) and do the same old shit I’ve been doing for the past 10+ years. At this stage I was just about to rage quit again, but then it happened. I started grinding bounties, then strikes, then the crucible and even fucking gambit and dares of eternity, and just like smoking the first cigarette after quitting for months I was hooked once more.

Fuck this game!

Posted on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/18qqc97/returning_player_just_like_that_im_hooked_again/

130+ hours into Starfield and for sure it’s my least fave Bethesda game in my steam library.

I’m a huge Bethesda fan and a few weeks ago I started a new Fallout 4 playthrough. As soon as I heard that soundtrack on the main menu I was in the zone, then tuning into pip-boy radio just hooked me right back into the world once more.

I also just re-installed Skyrim too, and in the past few days playing Skyrim again has been such a wakeup call to everything Starfield does wrong, primarily a lack of immersion due to the insane amount of loading screens and lack of reward for exploration, not to mention copy paste dungeons which I’ve never experienced in Skyrim in all my years playing it.

I’ve never been able to play more than one game at the same time, but when Diablo IV ran dry of end game content I picked up Starfield, then when I ran out of content in Starfield I started to pick up Diablo Immortal again. At the same time I did another playthrough of Fallout 4 (which was great!).

I played through the new Cyberpunk DLC (loved it) and I also installed Skyrim again! I’ve installed an immersive collection for Skyrim which includes over 400 mods (installs them all at the press of a button!) and I’m really enjoying that too. I’ve also re-installed The Witcher which is looking better than ever. Turns out the devs have updated the game with community created mods (so awesome!), a new photo mode and new gear from the Netflix series.

It’s an insanely good time for gamers, we’re totally spoilt for choice!

Spotted on George St. in the city. Fallout 4 Vault-Tec rep!

Black Angus. The Morrison is now my go to steak place.

Spent the day out in the sun with Nick Turner yesterday (I needed to touch the grass!). AGNSW (there’s a new building there now!), walk through the gardens, Opera Bar for a beer then The Morrison for a steak!

20hrs in, it’s been a slow burn, but it’s kicking in SO hard now! Obsessed!

Yesterday I decided to pay for the premium edition which has given me early access to play the game today. I built my PC in 2017 and it only just meets the minimum required specs. I’m honestly surprised it’s lasted this long, so earlier today I finally bit the bullet and bought a new PC too.

This time around I decided to buy something pre-built from Aftershock in Melbourne. I ended up buying the ZEAL: LVL 10 AMD R7 7800X3D/RTX 4090 which will run games in ultra settings in 4K (excitement!). It should get to me next week.

Specs:
Gigabyte B650 Gaming X AX | DDR5
AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D | 5.0GHz | 8 Cores 16 Threads
32GB ADATA Lancer RGB DDR5 6000MHz (2x16GB)
Gigabyte RTX 4090 Windforce V2 24GB
Aftershock Glacier Mirror 360mm
2TB Gen4 Lexar NM790 M.2 NVMe SSD (R 7400 | W 6500)
10 x 120mm Aftershock Fans (7 x RGB | 3 x Black)
1000W FSP Hydro G Pro | 80+ Gold
Windows 11 Home 64 Bit (Activated)
Next Gen Intel WiFi 6 & Bluetooth 5.1

Starfield runs perfectly fine on my old PC with graphics set to medium setting at 1080 res. 2hrs in, it’s got me hooked already. VERY much like Fallout 4 all over again, but in a space setting, but similar vibes.

No bugs so far, everything has been really smooth. Gunplay/combat is actually great! Combat in space is AOK too! Dialogue stuff is very Fallout 4/Bethesda so far (quirky). I like it and can’t wait to play more of it at max graphic in 4K next week.

Still gaming! I’ve gotten to the end game in Fallout 76 and have nothing left to grind for so I’ve been playing other games. I logged in to Destiny 2 for a couple of sessions but despite there being some new content there I just felt like the grind loop hadn’t changed, and that if I got back into it I’d be up for more of the same so I turned to the Steam store and found a few titles I had been curious about on sale.

I tried Rage 2 as I loved the Mad Max game by the same devs. Sadly, as expected, the story was so cheesy I had to put it down. I bought Control, a game I’ve always wanted to play (I never bought it as it was on Epic Games and not on Steam). Super stylish, great gameplay but the story lacked an emotional I’m always looking for in a game, and it didn’t quite do it for me. I then tried something a little different; Wasteland 3, an isometric CRPG by the people who created Fallout. I loved every minute of it and was so sad when the game ended some 50hrs in (I definitely wanted more!).

Right now I’m playing Mass Effect Andromeda, a game that launched with really harsh reviews, but the community has managed to save the day with mods, and man I’ve modded the hell out of my game and I’m loving it!

Just a quick tour of all of my Fallout 76 player C.A.M.P.S. None of them are 100% finished (I need more plans!), so please consider them all W.I.P.

Much thanks to AquaNova for the inspiration, especially on the first cylindrical build. Her work is amazing! Be sure to follow her.

I’m really REALLY enjoying Fallout 76!

I was a massive fan of Fallout 4 (check out my previous Fallout posts here). I fell in love with the world and the characters and I put a lot of hours into that game. I modded the hell out of my game too (being able to modify a game was new to me, it still blows my mind). I even bought and played all previous Fallout games too (yes New Vegas was amazing).

When Fallout 76 launched late 2018 it received a LOT of negative press. One of the things I loved about Fallout 4 the most was the NPC’s and to find out that Fallout 76 wasn’t going to have NPC’s really put the nail in the coffin for me. Fast forward to 2020 and Bethesda has introduced NPC’s to Fallout 76. The game was available for purchase on Steam, discounted too, so I pulled the trigger.

My initial thoughts: I felt like I was playing Fallout 4 again. Same graphics, same janky gun play (coming from Destiny 2 the gun play in Fallout was never going to be great). I instantly missed the theme song from Fallout 4 when launching the game, but the radio still works, and that awesome Fallout 4 vibe of being alone and playing the radio whilst roaming the map was still there.

I started doing the NPC questline and before I knew it I was hooked. So hooked that I stopped playing Destiny 2 all-together and Fallout 76 is now my main game. Within a few weeks I got 2 characters to the level 50+ end game, and both builds are worlds apart. One a bloodied stealth sniper, the other a full health melee build. And speaking of builds, the new perk system is awesome (so too the mutations) and working on a min maxed build to suit my playstyle has been a really rewarding process.

The community is pretty active too, and I’ve spent a lot of time watching great guides on YouTube and checking out other people’s builds on Reddit.

A few days ago I decided to subscribe to a 1 month trial of Fallout 1st. A service which grants Fallout 76 players some pretty huge benefits like currency to spend in the shop, an unlimited junk stash box, the ranger outfit from Fallout New Vegas (this is really why I paid up tbh!) and even a private server. I’ve just managed to influence a few of the boys to also buy the game and we’ve just started playing as a crew on a private server.

Gamer for life? Maybe. Sometimes I game hard, sometimes not at all, but I always feel a little guilty for gaming too much when I do. Either way, right now I’ve got the bug, that’s for sure!

42!!! I had a huge breakfast at The Pool Cafe with Mum in the morning and spent the rest of the day gaming and avoiding calls to go out. Under the radar is just my style when it comes to birthdays!!!

2 games were released May 16th. “Injustice 2″, one very polished Mortal Kombat style beat’em up featuring Superheroes and another called “The Surge”. Had to buy at least one of them and since I’ve been eyeing Dark Souls 3 (everyone’s comparing this game to it) I thought why the hell not.

I love it how every game I buy now I just go: Full Screen, 4K, Ultra! So so good! This game features low res textures throughout, but I love the art style, which feels low tech grungy and very Fallout 4 as you’re in a mech suit at all times.

39 hours in and I now truly understand what Dark Souls is all about. It’s about dying… LOTS! The RPG elements are great so far (I’m killing things over and over just to gear up before progressing) and the map makes you go a long way out only to give you a very quick alternative way back to base (surprising and welcoming each time).

The first boss was a bitch but the 2nd boss took the cake and had me crying in frustration as I died at least 30+ times before beating it. The 3rd boss made me quit, then watch tutorial vids on tips to pass. I’m on the 4th boss now and I’ve just about had enough! I know what to do… but I just can’t get past him! The maps/world is starting to get all samey and my research tells me there’s only one more boss to go after this one I can’t pass, so if that’s it then I have to say yup. The Surge got me good. 100% would recommend. Trailer above, some screen grabs to come!

Sold as an open-world action role-playing video game, but in reality it’s everything but. I was super happy to give Nier: Automata a miss despite the rave reviews (people out there literally calling it a masterpiece, 9-10/10’s and reviewers saying they were literally brought to tears with the storyline, or at least very deep in thought about it post game.

Man have these guys played Fallout 4?! To me, Nier: Automata feels very Japanese in an old school Indie Sega Mega Drive game kinda way. It’s story is cool, but nothing new in the post-apocalyptic gaming world. The soundtrack is getting HUGE praise, but I always turn music off in games, that’s just how I play. The graphics are really low definition and over-stylised, it’s such a low saturation and hazy environment which doesn’t look good despite running in 4K and on max graphics settings. I suppose it’s just not that kind of ULTRA high res textures gaming experience (with a full screen bug and laggy cut-scenes I’d say it Nier would have been better on the PS4 than the PC).

The gameplay is super arcade style. The game goes from 3rd person to 2D side and overhead like old school coin operated games like 1942 and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (which I sank lots of 20c coins into as a kid!). It’s hilarious that Nier is blowing people’s minds as it’s just old turned new again. Think iPad, and how Angry Birds blew minds (but in reality it’s a really simple game). Old platform games came back to star on “new” technology (tablets). I see it as a low-tech, going back to go forwards kinda thing.

A quick dip back into Ghost Recon had my PC’s fans on full blast minutes in, and I found myself in the dying light, in the rain, gawking at the detail on my Ghost’s wet backpack.

I’m a vampire. I swear. I’m 41, and feel like I’ve done so much and lived forever. Where I have lived on, my friends have gone, so I keep making new young friends in life, but eventually they all go too (“Going” in this case probably means getting married and having kids and moving on with their lives rather than dying, but you get my analogy?!).

Something that many might not know about me is that I am a huge vampire fan. I grew up on Anne Rice novels, and loved everything she wrote (later on I read her erotic novels which she published under a fake name, they were super fucked up!!!). Her novel “Interview with the Vampire” ended up becoming a pretty successful movie, one which I’ve watched a few times, and enjoyed (but ultimately I love Bram Stroker’s 1992 Dracula starring Garry Oldman as the Nosferatu the most).

I was more punk than goth when I was younger, but I hung out with goths all day long as my long term girlfriend Caryn at the time (we dated for 7 years) was sister to Sydney’s King Goth Charles Gillespie, who ran and owned Club 77 for years, had Marylin Manson hang out at his house, which has so many dead animals hanging on the walls you’d think you were hanging out at an abattoir!

I collected and read the entire Sandman series of graphic novels by Neil Gaiman too, love his artwork, love the fantasy world he has created, love Dave McKeon’s heavy layered photoshop work (a huge inspiration to me back in high school). I’m still hopeful they will one day make a movie on The Sandman, the lore is there for the taking!

Somewhere along the lines Twilight happened, and maybe Twilight killed the vampire for me just like Fast & Furious killed car culture. Either way I’ve not really felt attached to any kind of vampiric love for a while, until now!

Enter Vampire Bloodlines. I stumbled upon this title when searching for the best Role Playing Game (RPG) of all time. It came up time and time again. Made in 2004 (it’s old!), it was a rushed release and on release it was so broken that people could not play it. The game died in the ass on release, but over time a community of fans fixed the game to the point where they’ve released an unofficial patch which realises much of what the games developers wanted to do with the game in the first place.

Isn’t that just amazing?! I’ve seen it with Fallout 4 and the community of modders who not only fix bugs in the game, but make everything about the game better, from textures through to gameplay mechanics. What you have to realise is that it’s not the developers who are shit here, it’s the fact that there are a shitload more amazing ‘developers’ in the world than in one studio, so when a game developer releases a game which the community can mod, it’s only fair that there will be better coders/designers/artists out in the world (in comparison to the smaller pool of talent in one dev team).

So, back onto vampires, goths, and games. I decided to download Bloodlines off Steam (it was $25AUD), I downloaded the official patch, installed it without issues and the game is running fine so far. There’s no way of using a controller as there are a LOT of keyboard commands you can use, it’s going to take a while for me to be completely fluent with them all, but Bloodlines isn’t exactly an action first person shooter so I’m sure I’ll feel more comfortable with the controls over time as it’s a slower paced game.

When you launch the game you’re thrown into character creation, definitely one of my favourite parts of starting any new game (and I love that dark Massive Attack like track on the home screen! Sets the mood right!).

Like Fallout New Vegas’ start with the Doc. Bloodlines starts with a psych test to help figure out what class of vampire suits you best. I loved the psych questions right away and I answered them as honest as I could, this gave me the class of “Malkavian”, the crazy ones, which I’ve read over and over again as one of the most fun play though characters in the game as their dialogue is totally whack and almost nonsensical (which then makes for some fun unexpected results when you’re forced to make a choice). The Malkavian character is one that a lot of Bloodlines players suggest as a 2nd play though just for the sheer fun of it. It’s probably not the best character for a first play though due to the fucked up dialogue, but hey it’s what I got so I’m sticking with it.

If you answered in other ways you could have gotten Nosferatu for example, these guys are so ugly that gameplay would force you to always be lurking in the shadows and underground tunnels for the entire game. Talking to other NPC’s to gather info from them becomes impossible as you’re so not human looking that most of them will scream and run away from you. Unlike Skyrim where it almost doesn’t really matter what class you choose as in the end you can get any class to work once you’re levelled up enough, with Bloodlines classes it really seems to matter which class you choose and that’s an awesome thing (especially for game re-playability).

After the character creation screen you’re thrown into a cut scene which really shows how dated the graphics are, but you know what? Despite a low polygon count the expressions on the characters are better than this year’s 2017 Mass Effect Andromeda. Far from realistic, but the expressions are there and the voice acting is bang on. The tutorial at the start throws you into the basics, yup there’s a lot you can do in this game and surprisingly it’s not just a point and click RPG but much more dynamic than I originally thought.

It turns out you can play first person and 3rd person, and you have all the controls of a FPS, and that’s because this game has been built on an early Unreal engine (blew my mind and makes so much sense as to why I’m loving it right now). Bloodlines worked originally as a turn based Dungeons and Dragons style board game of sorts, but when it went digital it didn’t do the RPG point and click Fallout 1 style game, but went right into open world FPS, much more like modern Fallout games. Really impressive.

What I’m sincerely loving the most is the general goth vibe of the game. It’s so bang on I can’t believe it, and it’s surely the real reason as to why so many people out there think the writing in this game is so good. I don’t think it’s the writing. I think it’s the fact that the guys who made this game had to be goths, or at least were mates with goths, because some bits in this game are just SO goth it brings me back, hard!

Just seeing goth guys dance on the dance floor, IT’S BANG ON! If you’ve ever seen goths dance, it looks like they’re invisible sword fencing, or they look like gorillas going through the mist.. the game nails it, and seeing other NPC’s randomly joining in on the dace floor was cool, then when I randomly decided to have a closer look at the dancers a prompt appeared for me to start dancing too, BANG ON! This is just the kind of explorative mechanic that gets me in a good game.

SO I’m barely out of the tutorial, but I’m somehow I’m already hooked. This is amaze as most games usually start out super slow and boring, especially tutorial bits. I’ve only met a couple of NPC’s so far but the ones I’ve met have been fucking amazing. One vampire by the beach I stumbled into had an Aussie accent, and a great bit of dialogue to go through. Pretty sure he wasn’t anyone special in the game, just filler, but fucking good filler at that as he was super engaging.

Really looking forward to more Bloodlines, mainly because the culture of it all feels so bang on, respectful and legit. I literally feel like I am hanging out with my old goth mates again, for real! Will post up a final review at some point I’m sure.