Brief book review: Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Last weekend, I took it upon myself to read Cormac McCarthy's The Road, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Having read it, I can't understand what all the fuss is about. Also, it was apparently an influence on Fallout 3, and that influence is responsible for all the stupidity I complained about in my game review.

Basically, the Road is a rip-off of JG Ballard's early sci-fi novels, most notably Drought. The novel is startlingly similar to Ballard's stuff, but with the imporant difference that it's stylistically decisively inferior. McCarthy writes a very simple, down-to-earth style, which he occasionally interrupts with ridiculous flights of purple prose. The impression is occasionally very jarring. Overall, the writing and plot is captivating enough that it keeps you reading, but the purple prose is sometimes so awful it reminds me of Andy Remic. Seriously.

I didn't think the book really had any theme or message. Of course, I could be wrong. From the Wikipedia article:

British environmental campaigner George Monbiot was so impressed by The Road that he declared McCarthy to be one of the "50 people who could save the planet" in an article published in January 2008. Monbiot wrote, "It could be the most important environmental book ever. It is a thought experiment that imagines a world without a biosphere, and shows that everything we value depends on the ecosystem."

Oh, for crying out loud. You needed a novel to tell you that we would find it hard to live without any plants or animals at all? That, though, really is the sum total of the environmental message of the Road.

On a Fallout note, this is apparently the reason there isn't any vegetation in the Capital Wasteland in Fallout 3. Having read the book, I now understand that the makers of Fallout 3 were trying real hard to give the game a "Road" vibe. I wish they hadn't, frankly.

To rant for a moment, I feel like these days, entertainment and art only comes in one of two varieties. Either it has no theme at all, no message, nothing to say about anything, or it has a single message that it bludgeons you senseless with.

The Road is firmly in the first camp. I didn't think it had any meaningful theme. Overall, it's captivating enough to make you read it through, but it's short enough that that isn't any challenge. It's a forgettable, mediocre novel. I can't for the life of me understand why it won awards.

Verdict: don't bother. Read J.G. Ballard's Drought or Drowned World instead.

Fallout 3: Enclave Deathclaws

Okay, so this is weird. The Fallout Wiki says:

Deathclaws make another appearance in the game as the Enclave camps begin to appear. These camps are likely to house cages containing Mind-Controlled Deathclaws, which are just the same as regular ones with the exception that they will not attack Enclave forces.

Is that the way it's supposed to work, then? On my XBox 360 version of the game, fully updated, the Deathclaws held in Enclave cages attack the Enclave soldiers almost as soon as they've been let out of the cage.

In one memorable incident, the Enclave officer outside Dukov's Place was shooting at a Radroach and decided she needed help, so she opened the Deathclaw cage. The Deathclaw killed the Radroach, stood around for a moment, and then killed the officer.

So far, every time I've seen the Enclave unleash their Deathclaws, they've turned on the Enclave soldiers. According to the Fallout Wiki, they're not supopsed to do that. I wonder which is wrong? The game is so loving buggy that I wouldn't be surprised if it was a bug, but it's not in the wiki's list of bugs.

It's been funny, yeah, but I'm just wondering. I mean, the Enclave aren't meant to be that stupid, are they?

On reflection, my theory is that when the Deathclaw is released, it doesn't attack Enclave soldiers. If there's no-one else around to attack, however, it will attack the Enclave. This would explain the behaviour we've been seeing.

The question remains, though; is that supposed to happen? It makes the Enclave officer releasing a Deathclaw into a lose-lose situation for the officer; either the Deathclaw loses, and anything tough enough to kill a Deathclaw is also going to kill them, or the Deathclaw wins and then kills them.

So it's either a bug or really dumb game design. Hey, wait, I've just accidentally described most of the game. Oops.

(okay, I'm exaggerating, but if you've played it...)

Fallout: New Vegas

The first next Fallout game was announced last month, but I managed to miss it. It's going to be called Fallout: New Vegas, and is being developed by Obsidian. Due out in 2010.

I confidently predict that Fallout: Knights of the New Vegas II: The Enclave Lords will have a breathtakingly epic plot that totally falls apart and abruptly ends halfway through, missing quests and locations, and it will be amazingly buggy. There are two reasons for this. First, I've played Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II, also by Obsidian. In addition to that, Obsidian was founded by ex-Black Isle developers, the people who brought you the two original Fallout games, which were, erm, amazingly buggy...

Coming to your console in 2010: Fallout: Epic Crash.

Game review: Fallout 3

Great game, shame about the plot. 8/10

The good part is that Fallout 3 is a tremendously enjoyable and somewhat addictive game. Most of the game mechanics work just fine, as does the user interface. As a level design issue, I'd just like to say that I got really tired of the practically identical dark, ruined buildings after the third one, and there were still, what, 500 more left? Okay, you don't have to explore them, but still, there's been a tremendous amount of level design done, with nothing to show for it except dozens of identical levels. That's a bit lame, really.

The bad part is basically almost all of the writing. In parts it's good and even engaging; in parts it's so embarassingly bad you need to steel yourself to keep playing. I'll keep this spoiler-free, so I'll not treat the main plot other than to say that at times it's so mind-blowingly stupid it makes you want to bash your head into a wall.

There are two glaring flags of disbelief that the game can't help but make you hoist. The first, and most serious, is the claim made in the game that the events take place 200 years after nuclear war. When you play the game, it very quickly becomes obvious that that doesn't make any sense at all. In places they're trying to give the impression that it really has been ages since our civilization stood; in other places they give the impression that the bombs fell just last year. It feels like they can't make up their minds, and at times the discrepancy is really bothersome.

Another serious problem I have with the game, which might not be so bad if you don't know about these things, is that none of the damage you see in the game is in any way consistent with nuclear weapons. If I played the game without knowing it was called Fallout, I'd never guess they were trying to present a picture of a world after nuclear war.

There is radiation present, for example in bomb craters. This is totally ridiculous as no nuclear warhed would create radiation effects that persist for 200 years. Most of the radiation one encounters in the game, however, comes from barrels of nuclear waste or some other radioactive goo that seem to be basically lying around at random. There doesn't seem to be any reason or explanation for this, but apparently in the dystopian future of Fallout, people used to, um, store nuclear waste in subway tunnels before the war...

The game is set in the "Capital Wasteland", supposedly the ruins of Washington, D.C. Apparently nuclear war has dried up the Potomac river and turned DC into an arid wasteland where it never rains. Only it must rain, because there are pools of stagnant water everywhere, and that water has to come from somewhere. An easy guess would be those numerous clouds in the sky, but during the entire game, never once do you see it rain.

I can't for the life of me figure out how a nuclear war would turn the DC area into a desert or dry up the Potomac river. It should be pretty much exactly the opposite. But as we know, the earlier Fallout games were set in a desert, so maybe they felt this one needs to be in a desert too. And as we know, it's a generally accepted rule of fiction that postapocalyptic stories are set in the desert (Mad Max), where it doesn't rain. Therefore it can't rain in Fallout 3.

Overall both the plot and the overall writing of the game is designed to give you certain impressions and rather ham-handedly prod you into feeling emotions for your character or other characters. All of the writing places giving impressions far above realism, consistency or even sense. This is even more blatant because mostly the game is very atmospheric and great fun to play. You just have to grit your teeth and think of England when the cutscenes start.

I really wish this had been a better game. As it is, I really like it. It just saddens me to see such hideously bad writing in an otherwise well-executed game.