Smalltalk with James Robertson

Over the weekend, I let Parallels update itself - and that turned out to be a mistake. Prior to the update, Fallout New Vegas worked just fine in my XP VM; after the update, it crashed as soon as the intro screen started to render. This is what I call a bad thing :)

I figured that I have backups - Time Machine runs regularly, so I'd just do a restre and be done with it. Not so fast, apparently - just overwriting what was in Applications with the old version stopped Parallels from working at all. Things had gone from bad to worse.

So, I dug through my emails (gmail search ftw), and found the original download link. I grabbed that, and let it download overnight (I'm on slow hotel bandwidth here). This morning I fired up the installer, gave it a firm no to all of its requests to update, and voila - my XP VM launched, and the game runs again. I archived the dmg on an external drive, so that after the next update I have an easy place to walk back to.

Why don't I still have the original download, you ask? Well, I do - on a hard drive sitting in my home office, 1200 miles away :)

It's that sort of day, when music and video games blend - who would have expected a StarCraft love song?

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There's more crossover between the fan bases of Fallout and Rock Band than I thought :)

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I spent a fair bit of the evening playing the new DLC for Fallout: New Vegas . It's not bad - but it does have a fair bit of similarity to one of the DLC packs for Fallout 3 - "The Pitt": You get captured and lose all of your equipment It's a one way trip, with your return dependent on finishing the task at hand The whole thing is being run by a whack job escapee from the Brotherhood of Steel (I'm giving nothing away by saying that it's Brother Elijah, the guy who really wanted to stay at Helios)

Mind you, there are huge differences as well. I was able to run through Pitt and find all the guns, ammo, and armore I wanted. Theer seemed to be plenty of stimpacks lying around too, as I recall. In Sierra Madre, that's just not the case. There's virtually no guns or amm to be found - I've been pumping up my melee skills since I started it (the level cap goes up to 35 with this dlc). Still, my health has been running at 50 percent or less most of the time. The only health I manage to find is out of the vending machines, and that requires me to find lots of casino chips. To be fair, those are all over, albeit in small-ish numbers.

You also lose your entire party - again, a lot like "The Pitt". Inside, you end uphaving to take the crew you find and deploy them to various places on the map (and convince each of them to stay there) as you go off to open up the casino proper. That's as far as I've managed to get - I was on my way to the bell tower when I ran out of time for the day.

My advice? Bring in a leveled up (at least 20th) guy with both melee and survival pushed up. Your gun and energy weapon skills just won't help you that much.

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The group page for our Fallout New Vegas podcast requires moderated joining - I've created a more open fan page that you can check out.

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We finally got back to board gaming last night - my friend Mike got me the game "Founding Fathers", and we sat down to a game - my brother in law was visiting, so it's nice that it handles 5 players. The game has you at the (US) Constitutional Convention, voting on the various articles for the document - and you end up working with the four main factions - big states, small states, federalists, anti-federalists. It's all pretty fluid, and your options change as you get your hand replenished with new delegates.

It played pretty well, and, once we got going, it was a simple game. The rules only look long because they include bios of all the convention attendees :) If you like strategy games that take 90-120 minutes to play, this one is pretty cool.

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The latest DLC for Red Dead Redemption confuses me:

Seemingly overnight, a undead plague ravages the once bountiful frontier, decimating the landscape and reawakening the dead. In towns, settlements, and outposts throughout the world, the uninfected citizens are left to fight for survival against waves of the undead. John Marston must ride out into the vast and terrifying world and survive long enough to find a cure.

This sounds like a fusion of the game and the TV show "The Walking Dead". It might be fun to play - but boy, it just doesn't seem to fit in at all with the basic premise of the game. Not to mention this: by the end of Redemption, Marsters is ded anyway. So is this more or less an alternate history that pops up when he was about to be whacked at the end?

Now you know why I'm confused....

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The first DLC for posted about running Fallout: New Vegas is coming (XBox Exclusive, at least at first) - and the description makes me wonder a bit:

As the victim of a raw deal you must work alongside three other captured wastelanders to recover the legendary treasure of the Sierra Madre Casino. In Dead Money, your life hangs in the balance as you face new terrain, foes, and choices.

This sounds more like the style of DLC that Dragon Age had - largely separate from the main game? Maybe I'm wrong about that, but that's how I read it. With the Fallout 3 DLC, which I only saw in the game of the year package, it all extended the base game - so if you came at it fresh, it was all just part of the game.

I hope I'm wrong about this, because I much prefer the integrated approach.

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I posted about running Fallout: New Vegas in an XP VM under Parallels last week, and I wanted to add a brief addendum. When I first started playing, I got fairly frequent crashes. I thought that perhaps things would be more stable if I quit a few apps, and sure enough - the game runs nicely after that.

So it turns out that you can play FNV on a Mac using Parallels, but: if you only have 4 gb of memory (as I do) - go light on the Mac apps when you decide to play.

Technorati Tags: fallout new vegas, fnv, mac, parallels, vm

Update: If you are using Parallels 7, then don't follow the directions below. Just install it normally; it'll run correctly without any tweaking

I spent some time playing Fallout: New Vegas in a Windows XP VM today (Parallels 6) - and the experience was quite good. Here's the setup I have, for those who might be looking to do the same:

• 13" MacBook Pro, Fall 2010 model with 4 GB of memory and 250 GB of disk
• Parallels 6
• A Windows XP, Service Pack 2 VM that's been given access to both cores, priority, and 2 gb of memory
• Additionally, I had to register for the New Vegas Forums, and download the d3d9 dll from there, and drop it into the New Vegas folder (under the Steam directory structure).

Before I added that DLL, the game ran right through the opening movie, and then crashed. Afterwards, it ran perfectly. I did reset the graphics to "Low" from "Medium" - even at that setting, it looks much crisper on my Mac than it does on the Xbox.

The gameplay seems fine, although there is a bit of an odd delay going into VATS at times. Since the whole game slows down, it doesn't result in my character getting killed, so that's ok. As to stability, I've only seen one crash - and given the noise you hear about the game crashing on regular Windows boxes, and some of the instability I've seen on the Xbox, this doesn't worry me much.

The good news? I have access to my current favorite game when I travel now :)

Technorati Tags: fallout, fnv, fallout new vegas, parallels, mac