Tag: Fallout

My Nerd Holidays

Fandom

A friend of mine has fallen in love with The Last of Us, primarily through the HBO TV show. She has played a little bit of the game but I don’t think she’s finished it. All of this is preamble to her texting me a promo last week for Outbreak Day 2024 from Naughty Dog, the developer of the game series. She had thought it meant that Season 2 was coming sooner than previously announced.

I had to explain that Outbreak Day, traditionally 26 September, was the day in-game that the cordyceps infection reached the US. And because it’s a specific date, fans have made it a day to celebrate the game, story, and characters. The TV show is still not coming until next year; but fans will absolutely be celebrating Outbreak Day. She undersstood, though she was a bit disappointed.

I realized that there are lots of holidays on the Fan Calendar; dates that specific fandoms choose to talk about the stories and worlds they love. Here’s an incomplete listing of the fandoms I participate in, its meaning in-universe and in the real world, and whether or not it’s one I celebrate.

First Contact Day

In-universe: 5 April 2063

In the Star Trek universe, Zephrem Cochrane invented anti-matter/matter powered warp drive, taking flight in Earth’s first starship, the Phoenix, from Bozeman, Montana, United States of America, on 5 April 2063, an historic event. His flight attracted the attention of a Vulcan science ship, leading to Earth’s first recorded contact with extraterrestial life. Star Trek fans the world over celebrate every April on this day.

Star Wars Day

The Fourth of May

I’ve written before about how much I hate that a universe I love so very much gets it’s special universally-recognized day of the year from a foolish pun. Yes, yes, May the Fourth be with you. Ugh. By all rights, Star Wars Day should be May 25, since the original movie was released into theaters on 25 May 1977. But I don’t get to make the rules. May 4th is Star Wars Day.

The Last of Us Day (formerly Outbreak Day)

In universe: 26 September 2003 / 2013

This day celebrates the game and television series The Last of Us. The cordyceps infection reached a critical mass in the United States, having spread from South America (game) or Indonesia (TV show). In the real world, Naughty Dog renamed the day The Last of Us Day after the actual global pandemic of COVID-19 made outbreaks hit a bit too close to home.

The Great War

10 October 2077

The Fallout game series gives us the date of humanity’s Great War. In a single day in October, nuclear war destroyed the United States, turning the entire continent into a radiated wasteland full of mutants, ghouls, and leather-clad survivors. The bombs fell and it was all over very quickly.

Mass Effect Day

7 November

In the Mass Effect universe, Earth’s special forces can achieve an N designation, of which there are seven levels. The best of the best are known as an N7. Fans of the sci-fi series have taken that designation and declared November 7 “N7 Day“, and the developers and fans use the day to share fan art, stories, and raise donations for various charities and causes.

My entire Rose City Comic Con 2024 experience

Joy

I went to Rose City Comic Con Saturday. My co-worker and team lead, J., very graciously gave me 3 day badges they and their spouse couldn’t use. They’ve been sick with Covid-19 all week, maybe longer, and they were not feeling up to the convention. So their loss is my gain! I do love going to the convention.

I wanted to do a cosplay but I wanted to do a subtle one. I didn’t want to go all out. So I put on hole-y jeans, a ratty t-shirt, my well-worn Dodgers cap, and beat up Chucks, and strapped my Pip-Boy on my arm. I was a random wastelander! Just the thought of it made me smile.

If I was really doing it right, I’d have dirt on my face and clothes, and a pack full of odds and ends, like a caps stash, a stimpack, some Rad-X and Radaway, stuff like that. Maybe next year! I could make a backpack with those items hanging off them. It’s too bad Andy & Bax closed; military surplus gear is perfect for stuff like that.

Also need protection. After all, the wasteland is a dangerous place. Something small, like the Delivererer or That Gun or a 10mm pistol. Could I 3D print one of those? I still have to make use of my co-worker’s 3D printer at some point.

I wish I could have gotten a picture of my dad’s face when I walked down the stairs and posed, arms akimbo, and announced I was doing a subtle cosplay! His flash of confusion, spotting the Pip-Boy, and his snort of laughter was just perfection. He’s never played the Fallout games but he did watch the TV show and liked it well enough; he recognized the thing on my arm.

I spent probably a good 20-30 minutes trying to find legal parking near the convention center. I ended up parking at Lloyd Center and walking. Technically illegal but I wasn’t the only convention-goer parking there. They can’t tow us all! OK they could probably tow us all but the likelihood of that is low.

Several people complimented me on my Pip-Boy and I told every single one of them “Oh, this thing? I found it on a dead jerk in a blue jumpsuit.” I wasn’t just proud of this cosplay, I had a ready-and-waiting joke to open a conversation with.

And then… the convention itself. Inside was fucking jam fucking packed. There were so many people, and it was so warm in there. I was drenched in sweat, and I was just wearing a t-shirt and jeans. I couldn’t imagine the people in full costumes with masks and cloaks and all that. My wrist under the Pip-Boy was soaked; sweat dripped down onto my hand. Hated it.

So many people. I was never comfortable in crowds, being a neurodivergent introvert, but today was more people than I’ve seen in a very long time. The pandemic really has cooked my brain. I masked up inside, and wandered around the show floor, and looked at the cool costumes, and then after maybe a half-hour or 45 minutes, had to go outside, drink some water, take my mask off, and sit in the shade under a tree.

I did that cycle one more time, and then just could not bring myself to go back inside. I left; walked back to my car, and drove to Kay’s Bar for a beer and a giant jalepeño burger, before heading home for a nap. How exciting. I can’t be in a crowd anymore. Great.

Couple of Early Tips for Fallout 3

Gaming

I’ve been playing Fallout 3 for a while now, inspired to get back into a Fallout game when the TV show turned out to be good, actually. I’ve got two saves going, one for streaming where I’m trying to play as myself and make decisions I would make in the game, and another save that’s just for goofing around, testing things out, finding good ways to resolve quests, and figure out where to find all the good treasure and loot (and be evil if I want to.)

Side note, you should definitely subscribe to my YouTube channel and come watch me play. Right now I’m aiming for streaming at least twice a week, on days I have named Wasteland Wednesday and S.P.E.C.I.A.L. Sunday, unless I stream on another day. It’s fun watching me mess around, and sometimes the game or my streaming set up or my home internet breaks in hilarious and not-at-all-angering ways while I’m trying to be smooth and professional and fun and not angry. Come watch!

But because my stream playthrough is only a couple of hours a week but I can play the other save whenever I have some downtime while I desperately look for a day job and struggle to pay my bills and make sure my dad is comfortable and entertained and healthy while he’s staying with me… where was I? Oh, right, my offline save is far more advanced and leveled up than my stream character. And I’ve figured out some good early things to do. Here’s some basic advice if you want to be better at things.

Bring tech to the Outcasts. Find Fort Independence, make the deal with Casdin, and then get as much 5.56 ammo you can get. Ammo doesn’t have any weight so you can carry all of it whereever you go, and having 1000+ rounds for your assault rifle (or, if you can find one, a Chinese assault rifle which does more damage but breaks faster and is a little less accurate) makes taking on raiders and ghouls so much easier. I managed to take down a couple of Enclave soldiers and you can get, like, 600 rounds for the armor and helmet from Casdin. It’s great!

Get the dart gun schematics! You can buy them in the shop at Tenpenny Tower. If you don’t want to go there, there’s a power station way up in the northwest of the map at a power station (MDPL-05) but it’s way out in the wasteland and might be hard to get to at lower levels. Tenpenny Tower is close to the Robco factory you have to go to for Moira’s wasteland survival guide quests. Dart gun will cripple the legs of creatures, which makes them slow and prevents them from closing with you.

I’m having a lot of fun roaming around the wasteland, even though I’m burdened with narrative dissonance from not caring about the main quest, which is to find my dad who sort of abandoned me for reasons. But that’s normal for the Bethesda Fallout games (strangely it’s not an issue in Skyrim or Oblivion or Morrowind.) I love the feel of the Capital Wasteland and it’s evocative; lonely, blasted, eerie. That mood is what Fallout 3 does well.

Wasteland SCIENCE!

Gaming

Scheduled my next live-stream of Fallout 3: 4 PM Pacific on Wednesday 1 May 2024. Click the link and the bell to get a notification!

And I’m sharing this thumbnail because I’m ridiculously excited how well my in-game toon looks!

Screenshot from Fallout 3 of a bespectacled brown-haired white young man in an armored Vault Suit with a 10mm pistol, with a blasted desolate wasteland behind him. Words superimposed: Lunar Obverse Part 2: Wasteland SCIENCE!
Join me on YouTube – 4 PM Pacific Wednesday 1 May 2024

Currently trying to find royalty-free music so I can listen to Three Dog on-stream without getting my video hit by the Gods of Copyright. Should be able to pull something together. Found a mod that lets me replace the music which helps a lot!

From Birth to the Wasteland

Gaming

I spent most of the afternoon getting things ready to stream Fallout 3, as mentioned previously here. I think I’m ready to go. I’m nervous that it will be a disaster but, hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

As my bestie Tracy said, and I quote, “OK, you might have to not be a perfectionist at the very beginning. Just sayin’. People do tend to improve over time.” Wise words and I hope I can follow her advice. But it’s hard, y’know?

I’ve got OBS set up, I think, to stream the game properly. I’ve scheduled it, and announced it to the world on YouTube and Instagram, as well as let my friends know if they feel like dropping by. I made some slides for transitions, went into StreamElements and set up some chat bot commands and got a nifty overlay for the countdown and to notify if anyone subscribes or tips me.

Let’s do this. If you’re reading this before 4 PM Pacific on 28 April 2024, go to the link below and click the bell to get a notification. And come over to my YouTube channel if you can. If you’re not familiar with Fallout 3, the game literally starts with your character being born. It’s bonkers, not gonna lie.

The Power of the Atom – Installing and Modding Fallout 3 in 2024

Gaming, Tech

As a funny follow-up to my post a couple of days ago, Saturday morning I woke up and decided to install, patch, and mod Fallout 3 to make it somewhat stable, look better, and be a bit more modernized, in anticipation of streaming a playthrough of the game at some point in the near future.

And so did apparently everyone else.

The primary site for downloading mods for games like all of the Fallout games, as well as many others, is Nexus Mods. And on Saturday morning, Pacific time, by the time I got going, it was struggling. I kept seeing Cloudflare checks to prove I was human; a tactic to slow down high levels of use for websites. And sometimes, even then, the pages I was trying to reach did not load, and required refreshing. It was frustrating but also a little hilarious.

I am glad that there is interest in the Fallout games. I’ve said this before; I love the universe and the lore and the games, so having more people playing and learning about the world is amazing. You will never catch me gatekeeping people being excited about something cool.

I didn’t do a lot of mods; I think my list stands at 22 or so. Heck, for the record, here are the mods I installed:

I have a hankering to write up a current How To for this. The list above is sorted alphabetically and doesn’t reflect the install order or the load order. Let me know if you think that would be useful; I was going by my own experience and a lot of google searching for best mods and order. And most of the how-tos I found were for Mod Organizer or NexusModManager, not the newer Vortex, which is what I used.

There are more than enough gotchas in there to trip someone up. I can confirm that; I was that someone and I got tripped up several times. Had to wipe, uninstall, and start over at least twice.

Some tips for anyone trying this themselves:

Get a nice clean install of the base game first. Open the launcher, let it auto-detect your graphics settings, launch the game and let the opening title cards play, maybe start a New game, then exit. That creates the base files.

Install Vortex from Nexus Mods. You’ll install most (haha, no, not all) of the mods through here.

If you’re installing from Steam, it has an update that removes Games for Windows Live, which is broken since it was intended for WinXP, and Fallout Script Extender doesn’t work with that version (1.7.0.4). You’ll want to downgrade the game to 1.7.0.3. Luckily, the community has provided a patcher that will downgrade Fallout 3, as well as patch it to use more than 2 GB of RAM, and other helpful things. Download and manually run the Fallout Anniversary Patcher first before anything else.

Next thing you want to install is Fallout Script Extender. Don’t use the button in Vortex; manually download it and manually install it.

At this point, you can start installing other mods. You can use my list above as a starting point. My philosophy was – I wanted lore-friendly stuff, no major changes or new questlines, bug fixes and modernization, and just a hint of upgrades for modern graphics and displays. I did succumb to the temptation of making the 2008 Bethesda faces look a little better, but I did not install any body mods or new weapon or armor textures. I might, still, but for now I’m fine with it looking the way it did back in the day. And I am experimenting with re-done NPC animations.

I may still tweak or remove the persistent green tint in favor of third-party lighting and colors through the use of an ENB, or I might not. Again, part of the reason I want to play this is nostalgia. The look and feel of original Fallout 3 is a majority of the charm, to me.

It’s worth it, though, to have a clean, pretty game to play. And my computer, while it hasn’t been top-of-the-line for a good while, is still plenty powerful enough to run this game at 1080p and 60 frames per second. I’m looking forward to revisiting the Capital Wasteland.

Comment or contact me if you’d be interested in a full How-To write up. And stay tuned if you want to see me stream my playthroughs. That is definitely coming soon.

Big Iron on our hips

Daily Story Project, Gaming, Tech, TV

With the release of Fallout on Prime, the new TV show set in the Fallout universe, interest in the post-post-apocalypse wasteland has never been higher. I mean me, my interest, mostly. I want to reinstall and play all the games, now. And I have at least reinstalled several of them (Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and Fallout 76) but haven’t yet found the time to start a new journey in that wild far future.

It’s been fun going through the process of getting a nice clean install, patching the older games to run on modern hardware and software, and picking out a few good mods to make it more stable, improve the graphics and gameplay, and fix the more egregious bugs. OK, again, that’s probably just my own quirky tech-focused kind of fun; your mileage may vary. For Fallout 3, it took maybe an hour’s worth of googling, downloading, and a scosche of trial-and-error. But I got it all running.

Stay tuned to this channel for the possiblity of me streaming a playthrough of Fallout 3, playing as myself… I’m working up the nerve to try it.

Screenshot from the game Fallout 3, opening credits: an old TV test pattern in black and green saying "Please Stand By" in retro-futuristic text and graphics.
Coming soon: me making a fool of myself in the Capital Wasteland

That being said, my nephew also wants to play some Fallout, excited by the new show and especially for it being set in the game’s continuity, being a true follow-on to the game chronology. Max and I have been texting each other questions, theories, and memes about Fallout since the show dropped. This is actually fun for lots of people, not just computer geeks like me! Surely anyone reading this has one or several friends they share memes with, right? Not just me? It’s a universal thing these days?

The other day, though, he sent me a link to a Steam Community guide about how to install and run Fallout: New Vegas and asked me if it was a good how-to. I took a look and it seemed pretty comprehensive, and offered to help him out if he ran into any troubless. I felt a bit of a duty; I had helped him build his current computer a couple of years ago. Mostly though I’m excited to see him play and happy to help him get the most out of his rig. He’s been mainly a console player; mods aren’t a normal part of his gaming experience; whereas I’ve been modding games since Skyrim. I may not be an expert but I would consider myself a competent modder.

He started to get it going the other day but I didn’t hear anything more. When I pinged him to ask how it went, he said he got distracted, totally understandable. Today, though, he had the energy to get it going, and I was able to screenshare with him and walk him through the trickier parts, like making sure to back up the default files and folders before messing with them, which saved us in at least one instance. The instructions for the mod that enables scripting support, NVSE, said to copy the entire contents of its mod to the main game folder, it wanted to overwrite the Data folder already there. I backed him out of that, had him rename the old folder, and then copy everything.

Once we got the mods installed, though, the game crashed to desktop on launch, throwing the error “missing masters.” When I had Max launch the game normally, it didn’t appear any of the DLC was available; turns out they all lived in the old, renamed Data folder. Copying them to the new modded Data folder fixed the issue.

Then I spent over an hour watching him start a new playthrough, MST3K-ing and joking and googling things for him (like what is a hot plate used for, anyway? And did the Brotherhood try to take over Hoover Dam (they got distracted by Father Elijah’s fixation on HELIOS-1)). Fun times!

I’ve spent so much time in these worlds, playing, learning the characters, maps, and lore. Even making up my own wasteland lore (which has yet to be contradicted by the official material, yay!) Fun times, indeed. And I’m so glad that non-gamers are learning how rich and weird the Fallout universe is. I welcome new fans with open arms.

Feel free to ask me any questions. Love to help.

Fallout is not a cartoon

Gaming, TV

A squad of Brotherhood of Steel knights in T-60 power armor approaches the camera.

Credit: Courtesy of Prime Video

This isn’t a spoiler but a funny story I wanted to share. My dad has been staying with me since his apartment got flooded and they found asbestos. His normal TV viewing is procedurals like NCIS or The Rookie, or westerns.

When Fallout on Amazon Prime came out earlier this week, I showed him the trailer to see if it’s something he’d like to watch and his response was “I’m not a big fan of cartoons.” He is entirely unfamiliar with the games.

So I started watching it anyway and now, three episodes in, he’s just as hooked as I am. I think he likes the dark humor and ultraviolence.

That being said, I, too, like the tone of the show as well as the fact that they’ve spared no expense in making the digital world of recent Fallout games into real actual props. Seeing T-60 power armor in action is amazing. There’s a scene near the end of the first episode where someone is being interrogated and they just have the power armor pacing back and forth menacingly. You don’t even see the whole thing, just what passes behind the person being questioned, and the sound effects. Just amazing. Yeah, I imagine that would be intimidating as fuck.

I’ll write a fuller review when I’ve finished it but so far it’s great. I hear the people who whine about things whining about this and The Lore but fuck ’em. I’m not a slave to the lore and neither is Bethesda. Just tell a fun story, that’s all I ask.