4Gamers – A pile of shame

A documented attempt by Uberkamper to reduce his personal pile of shame to zero.

At the beginning of this year, Uberkamper made the good decision to reduce his personal pile of shame to a freshly plowed field in the lands of Moeren (until further notice, still the flattest piece of land in Flanders).

53. Fallout 4 (2015)

There’s an old rumor that a quarter of a century ago, two isometric role-playing games were the foundation of the fairly expansive Fallout universe. Uberkamper can actually confirm that this isn’t just a myth, as he personally ran these things on his own Pentium 166 with 32MB of SD RAM. In those days, Fallout was among the best games out there… but there weren’t as many of them as there are today.

The power of Fallout has always been largely present in each game’s exciting opening premise: a lone wanderer is forced into the desolate wasteland left after humanity finally managed to completely destroy everything and everyone by using nuclear power to help. After a comfortable and pleasant life in a shelter of atomic atoms, the first hesitant steps are taken on the scorched earth, and then nearly a hundred hours pass as in a dream until every corner and meter of the world is explored and secured. The question of what lies beyond the next hill, in the basement of an old fish factory or in a village full of crooked huts and bandits, is the driving force that drives players further and further away. What lurks behind virtually every corner, door or mountain are countless forms of monsters and spoils, of course, with the latter helping to remove limbs and organs from the former in increasingly violent ways.

Significant in all of this is that these early Fallout games are sometimes maliciously dismissed as post-apocalyptic versions of Baldur’s Gate, while conversely, Skyrim is sometimes referred to somewhat pejoratively as Fantasy Fallout. The truth is that without Fallout, the world would be doomed to pseudo-medieval picaresque narratives, complete with the occasional dwarf or orc fighting with a bow and arrow and a handful of blunt weapons. Having spent a few hundred hours traversing Skyrim’s dark dungeons, an Uberkamper can attest that it’s quite a liberating experience to break out the double barrel for a change and blast some rogue invaders head-on under a shining sun (and an added nuclear backdrop). radiation). It’s the kind of catharsis that everyone needs every now and then that Fallout excels at.

It seems as if a largely fantasy world yet to be built in a kingdom filled with caves and caves of thieves and a largely destroyed world after nuclear demise are two sides of the same hard disk that complement each other seamlessly. Both are filled to the brim with unprecedented expectations, dreams and possibilities, ready to be shamelessly discovered and seized. Both have their indisputable place in the world of escapist fantasies that Oberkamper, and with him almost every other normal person on the planet, is trying to survive in real life.

Fallout 4 brings a whole new part of a devastated America to mutated and distorted life. Graphically, this offers a bit more color than in the hitherto unsurpassed Fallout 3 (which, ironically, New Vegas later easily surpassed). However, it can be argued that the differences are mainly cosmetic, as everything else looks equally dismal and similarly dead under a hail of bullets and missiles. Fallout 4’s story events (a convoluted Freudian plot and some factional bickering) lag a little behind the completely crazy adventures of its predecessors, but that’s a matter of personal taste, of course. Moreover, looking at the previous parts, Uberkamper can only conclude that it may have missed an important story here and there and countless narrative details. Even those who have played everything cannot call themselves experts in this strange world. Pair this with what the player forgets over the years and the Fallout universe becomes an almost endless barrel full of stories, a good selection of which has been taken in this fourth installment. This is especially evident in the high-quality DLC Automatron, Far Harbor, and especially Nuka World, which restarts the game over and over again when it threatens to freeze. So it’s only right that Prime release a TV series in this now very detailed universe next year.

What’s new in Fallout 4 is that there are many different variations of the famous Power Armor. Unfortunately, these things now need extensive and ongoing repairs, and that means constantly collecting stale waste. The whole drawback is that it only works thanks to Fusion Cores which are hard to find. Bethesda, of course, has the right to deny access to its vastly more fun weapons, but the fun is completely lost this way. Only at the end of the game did Uberkamper wander around in Power Armor for a while, but by then it was no longer necessary for him.

Equally new and equally underdeveloped in Fallout 4 is developing settlements yourself in pre-determined locations in the world. This is the opposite of what a lone wanderer in the wasteland should have to deal with, and it’s also incredibly boring. After two beds and a mailbox, Uberkamper had enough of this and it can be said that the understated moments when this game principle was forcefully forced down the lone wanderer’s throat were actually the true test of this game. The settlements that Uberkamper was supposed to maintain had all gone their own way after months of complete neglect and those left behind were forced to go without food, sharing a meager bed with three fellow residents under relentless attacks from mutants or invaders. The constant care needs of the dying wild population gave Uberkamper the impression that he was still living in a welfare state and not in the miserable mess he was promised when he bought the game. It remains strange that this incredibly weak part of the game received additional downloadable content (DLC) and later even a standalone online version in the form of Fallout 76. The latter is a game that Uberkamper will never play, unless he unexpectedly turns into a masochist or ends up… Nuclear world. It will make it the only game on earth.

If Uberkamper were a bit philosophical, he would wonder if Bethesda is slowly losing its connection with the average gamer. But Uberkamper is no philosopher and Fallout 4 wasn’t groundbreaking enough to warrant this kind of deep thinking for any length of time. What Remains is a welcome addition to the Fallout family and is highly recommended for playing through it in a few long sessions in anticipation of the true end of the world.

Fallout 4 (2015)

forefront

The world of Fallout is a gift that keeps on giving
-Once again three very powerful DLCs
-More colors than Fallout 3

negative

Building settlements is stupid
– He is no longer a lone wanderer, but a complex conspiracy that ultimately leads nowhere.
-There is no better energy shield than this ordeal with constant repairs and fusion cores
-Less sense of humor than Fallout 3

Who is Oberkamber?

Ubercamper. His inherently slow and contemplative style of playing is so similar to “camping” that it was decided to adopt this usually pejorative label as an honorary title. Unfortunately, the alternative with “K” instead of “C” turned out to refer to the German word for fighting, rather than the English word for camping. “Uber” is also borrowed from the German language and means: to bypass everything and everyone. Let’s be honest, this is of course the only way to play the game. So Uberkamper can refer as much to the superior ability to lie quietly in a corner and wait for the game to end, as to the person who dominates the playing field. Both are true.