Hope you have your hazard suit handy, because this game’s totally rad … -ioactive! Nyuk, nyuk.

Title: Fallout
Developed by: Black Isle Studios
Published by: Interplay
For: Windows
ESRB rating: Mature

Available for free now on GameTap, “Fallout” is a role-playing game set in a future world totally devastated by nuclear war. You take on the role of the Vault Dweller, a player-named and customized character who is sent out from his hardened underground home, Vault 13, to find a replacement chip for the Vault’s water purification system. This initial quest leads to a larger adventure that eventually sees the player facing a monstrous mutant bent on absorbing all the remaining life on the planet.

The graphics look primitive by today’s standards, but they’re effectively gritty, gross and grotesque as the scenario requires. The game is a mix of real-time and turn-based elements. When out of combat you uses the mouse to walk around freely, talking to survivors in their ramshackle villages in the wasteland, taking on quests and doing favors. When fighting a mutant scorpion or a shambling nuclear ghoul or something, you’re given a number of action points per combat round that are used to move, attack and use items and skills. Once they’re gone, you have to wait a bit for them to fill up again.

The game was a bit favorite about a decade ago. The second game is available on GameTap via its pay service, and with the third installment on the way later this month courtesy of Bethesda Softworks, makers of the dense “The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion,” it’s a perfect time to revisit this classic.

(Image from MobyGames.com)

Remember when Star Wars was awesome?

I do. As a teen I used to read all the book; I’ve seen the original movies a dozen times and more. Campy though they are in places, they’re incredibly good popcorn movies. I even like the Ewoks. And though George Lucas tinkered overmuch with the Special Editions in the late ’90s, they were still good fun, and it was worth going just to see them on the big screen.

But after that …

I won’t belabor all the ways the prequel trilogy dragged down the fun times of the original movies. Suffice it to say: If you have a good bad guy, don’t give him a history. And if you have to give him a history, please don’t show him to us as a happy-go-lucky kid and then a petulant teenager. Kinda takes the edge off the 7-foot half-machine monster he turns into later.

Let’s not even talk about this summer’s “Clone Wars” movie.

The best “Star Wars” stories these days are told in the games. Not all of them, of course, but enough. “Republic Commando,” aside from being a bang-up shooter, offered a nifty glimpse into what goes on behind the visor of a Clone Trooper’s helmet. “Knights of the Old Republic” is one of the best “Star Wars” tales, period, taking place thousands of years before the movies during another bitter war between the forces of light and dark.

And now we have “The Force Unleashed,” which is … pretty good. The gameplay borrows liberally from a decade’s worth of action games, but isn’t polished enough to really stand out — there are control hitches, camera problems and opportunities for numerous deaths that can’t be blamed on the player. Still, in giving you control of Vader’s secret Dark Side apprentice it at least tries to make you feel as powerful as the image at the top of this post would suggest.

The most interesting bit is the story — it’s well-plotted and well-told, allowing for the fragmentary nature of game narratives, and Vader’s apprentice is a far more likable character than Anakin Skywalker himself ever was. There’s some speculation that the game’s narrative might be reworked into a movie that would bridge the gap between Anakin’s fall and Luke Skywalker’s coming-of-age.

Who knows if it’ll happen. But I hope it does, or something similar. “Star Wars” has become weighed down by a whiny Anakin Skywalker and a mawkish love story, to say nothing of Jar Jar Binks.

Decent games are fine things, “Star Wars” needs a shot in the arm if it hopes to appeal to anyone past their tweens in the future. Maybe it doesn’t. But I hope it gets one.

(Image from LucasArts)

This week’s freebie will totally “hook” you! Ha ha, get it? “Hook,” as in the title. Ha!

Anyway, the indie Web game “Gravity Hook” is about as simple to play as can be, and like so many simple games that only makes it harder. You’re this little yellow guy. You use the mouse pointer to hook on to and pull yourself toward one of the numerous floating mines in the air. Get too close to the mine you’re attached to and it’ll blow up, but time it right and you can let go and fly past it safely to grab one above it.

The goal is to get as high as you can without getting blown up or falling to the bottom of the screen. It’s tricky — really tricky. But it’s fun.

(Screen capture by Justin Hoeger)

You may have heard of a game called Galactic Civilizations II. If not, you’re about to. Lucky you!

GalCiv II is this monstrously complex and deeply involving strategy game from Stardock that has you shepherding a  race into colonizing the galaxy and hopefully becoming the dominant race in space. It’s a lot like Civilization, but set in the void instead of on terra firma. You build colonies, encounter anomalies, seek out new life and new civilizations, boldy go … well, you get the idea. Plus, you can design your own ships!

What makes the game truly exceptional are the many ways you can win, and the many, many ways you can go about winning in those ways. Instead of elaborating, I’m just going to direct you here and here. These are long blog entries detailing two long games of GalCiv II, the first using its first expansion, Dark Avatar, and the second using its most recent expansion, Twilight of the Arnor.

In the former game the writer decided to take on the universe with military might, only to desperately pursue a different path as doom closed in. The latter game is still in progress, with our intrepid blogger (a writer for PC Gamer) attempting a cultural victory, with no warships or direct attacks of any kind. It’s going to be fun to see how this game turns out. Fun for me, anyway.

Oh, and the races he plays as are his own custom creations — they look like rabbits.

It isn’t a free game, but I think it’s cool. So check these blog entires out (beware some swears), and the game’s demo if you’re so inclined.

(Image from GalCiv2.com)

When I was a kid we mostly played pretty traditional board games: Chess, Monopoly, Life, Connect 4, Balderdash, Clue, Pente, Scrabble, stuff like that. When I was a teenager my brother started playing Dungeons & Dragons — which I  never really got into (too abstract, I think) — and both of us occasionally played fantasy-themed board games like HeroQuest and Battle Masters.

In high school I played a lot of the popular card game Magic: The Gathering (I still have a box of the cards somewhere — anyone need a Vesuvian Doppelganger? I’ve got, like, four.), but I quit the game after myself and my lunchtime play buddies graduated — no one left to play with, you see. Since then my attention has remained focused on video games; aside from occasional matches of Pente or Boggle or whatever with friends and at family gatherings, I hardly played non-electronic games for years, and I certainly didn’t buy any.

I realized last year that I’ve been missing out. The catalyst was Catan, a board game whose cardboard version I’d heard talked up on message boards but which I’d never tried (its picture is at the top of this entry). Suddenly it was made available in video-game form on the Xbox 360’s Live Arcade — I played it a few times, and liked it. I wasn’t very good, but I had fun. And so I started looking into what modern board games had to offer, and discovered the existence of German-style board games, of which Catan is one of the most prominent examples.

Over the following year or so, more digital versions of notable board and card games were released on XBLA, including Carcassonne, Lost Cities and Ticket to Ride. I also figured out that there are more than a few board games based on video games. And now there’s even one based on Battlestar Galactica, pretty much my favorite show ever.

So I gave in. With a birthday coming up a while back, I put games on my list and received a couple doozies: Twilight Imperium, along with its expansion, Shattered Empire; Arkham Horror, based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft (thankfully minus the overt racism and classism that marked his writing); and a fun little word game called Quiddler. And about a week later my wife and I picked up a copy of Catan from Tom’s Toys in SLO, and liked it so much that we’ve put in an Amazon order for the Seafarers expansion.

With so many new things to play, I think we’ll be set for a while. Not that I don’t have my eye on a few games for the future.

Catan is the one we’ve played the most — the goal  is to gather resources and build settlements and roads on an island, with the first player to reach 10 “victory points” declared the winner (we’ve found the 10-point limit makes for a shorter game than we’d prefer, so we’ve been upping it to 13).

We haven’t yet had time (or enough people) to try out Twilight Imperium, but it looks like a blast — it’s a space-conquering game where three to eight players try to become the emperor of the known galaxy through conquest and political maneuvering.

I played a few practice rounds by myself to get a handle on the rather complex rules — this one isn’t a rookie game,  but figuring out how a beast like this works is half the fun.

And finally, Arkham Horror is a battle with the forces of chaos and madness. You have to maintain your character’s sanity and stamina while fighting monsters and  exploring alternate dimensions, then return to the city of Arkham so you can shut and seal the gates leading to these strange other worlds. Seal enough of them and you win; take too long and one of Lovecraft’s mythical monsters, like Cthulhu, wakes up and probably eats you. There’s a chance that you can send the creature back whence it came if it wakes up, but the odds are against you — the odds are always against you in this game. It makes for an intense, suspenseful game, and is the only board game I’ve played in which the players can all lose.

The point of all this is that board games these days are really neat, and if all you’re familiar with are the classics it would be worth your while to take a look at what newer games have to offer. Locally, it appears that Tom’s Toys and Captain Nemo Games & Comics have the best selections, though Barnes & Noble has its share as well. Let me know in the comments if I’ve missed and notable local sources. And by all means, discuss your own favorites!

(Images from Wikipedia)

You do, if you buy the game they’re developing based on the classic graphic novel. The game will take place before the events of the story (and next year’s film adaptation by Zack Snyder, director of “300″), when a still-fit Nite Owl and a less-crazy Rorschach fought crime together.

I have hopes for this, but not high ones considering the generally poor state of games based on comic-book franchises (those score averages make me very glad there wasn’t a game rushed onto shelves as a tie-in for “The Dark Knight”).

But hey, it’s no fair judging a game before even a screen is released.Maybe this one, like Dr. Manhattan’s thermodynamic miracle, will surprise me.

Yeah, so, oops. In all the Fourth of July commotion I forgot to post a free game yesterday. I make it up to you today by offering two, and a lead on a third.

The first is “Minishoter RS,” a Japanese freeware game by Peposoft. And yes, the title is spelled like that. Anyway, it’s a very simple space shooter — there are several ships to choose from, each with two weapons, an energy shield and a limited dash ability. And it is very, very small — at its default setting the game display looks like this:

Not very big at all. But it’s fun, and it’s free (oh, and the display window can be boosted to about three times that size).

Also this week, I direct your attention to Game Giveaway of the Day, which puts up games each Saturday and Sunday that are free for that day only — you have to download and install them in that time, or lose the chance forever (though demos for many of the games are freely available, and you can always, well, pay). Today’s is called “Troll” — check the site tomorrow for another one.

(Screen capture taken by Justin Hoeger)

I said I’d offer something lighter this week, and here it is: “The Ur-Quan Masters,” a free multi-platform port of the classic sci-fi game “Star Control II” (the name was changed for copyright reasons). This is a classic game of the 1990s.

Title: The Ur-Quan Masters
For: Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD
ESRB rating: Everyone

Of course, the bare-bones description of the game doesn’t make it sound anything but bleak: You’re the captain of a starship crewed by a science team that was marooned for years on an alien planet, only able to escape because your group found an ancient factory that automatically built the ship you’re in — actually, half-built, as the vessel is just the skeleton of a larger craft.

You’ve returned home to find Earth shielded under a glowing red barrier, and an automated drone informs you that humanity and its allies have been defeated by the Ur-Quan Heirarchy; Earth chose permanent isolation rather than become battle slaves for the Ur-Quan.

Who are these Ur-Quan? Well, they’re extremely mean and warlike three-eyed grub monsters that pilot huge ships on a galaxy-spanning mission to subdue or enslave all races they encounter. And they’re not even the worst of their kind — an offshoot of the species is traveling the galaxy in the other direction on a parallel mission of genocide; the game takes place as the two factions near a predetermined meeting to determine the superiority of one of these doctrines — through war, of course.

Still sounds prettty bleak, right? Well, the situation is dire, but the game has a cheeky sense of humor to the proceedings, mixing goofy races and running gags with space exploration and ship-to-ship battles. There are the hyper-cowardly Spathi, a race of mullosks who’d like nothing better than to be shield-protected slaves but are condemened to eternal battle servitude; the spaced-out hippie bird aliens called Pkunk; the disgusting Umgah, galactic pranksters who tricked the Spathi; and numerous other races.

The gameplay is relatively simplistic — in battle each ship can accelerate, turn, and employ a standard and a special weapon — but there’s a diverse arsenal spread among the many ships. When not fighting, you can explore planets for resources and other points of interest, and the story is engaging.

(Image courtesy of sc2.sourceforge.net)

What is one thing that “Aliens,” “Iron Man,” “The Terminator” and “Jurassic Park” have in common? No, not James Cameron. No, not scary monsters. No, not metallic men.

The correct answer is special effects wizard Stan Winston, who died yesterday. Winston worked on these movies and many more in his decades-long career. He was an effects pioneer — his creations were the stuff of dreams and nightmares, and though his studios will likely carry on, he will be missed.

(Image courtesy of MovieWeb)

This week’s free game came out exactly four years ago tomorrow, which I didn’t realize until after I started writing this post! That’s an odd coincidence — maybe I’m psychic.

Title: Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy
Developed and published by: Midway Games
For: Windows
ESRB rating: Mature

Well, probably not. But Nick Scryer (get it?) the protagonist of “Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy” is. He’s also and amnesiac, which presents a convenient excuse for him to need to relearn an strengthen his fancy-schmancy mind powers over the course of the game’s levels.

Gameplay-wise this is a pretty standard third-person shooter from the mid-2000s — lots of guns and explosions, lots of reasonably stupid enemy forces to battle and a handful of bosses scattered about — but the mind powers give it a neat twist. Scryer’s usual enemies are the meat puppets, a legion of lobotomized and mind-controlled troops commanded by a group of terrorists. These terrorists are the bosses of the game, and each of them specializes in a paranormal power — one is gifted in telekinesis, another in mind control, and so on.

Scryer isn’t extremely strong in any one area; instead he’s a jack of all trades. He can employ telekinesis to throw objects around, send a projection of himself to scout ahead, and suck out the mental energy of enemies to replenish his own (their heads go *pop* — this is an M-rated game, after all). He can also mind-control his foes, produce and control pyrokinetic flames, and perceive things normal people can’t.

The free download requires a free or subcription FilePlanet account — nonsubscription users will have to wait in “line” behind others for a download, which took about 20 minutes in my case. And, as is the case with many free games, this isn’t largesse on the part of FilePlanet and Midway; this version of “Psi-Ops” is ad-supported. But that’s the cost of a zero-dollar price tag.

The last week of posts has been kind of grim and shooter-heavy, hasn’t it? I’ll find some lighter fare for next week’s game.

(Image courtesy of PsiOpsGame.com)