First of all, internet friends are not the same as actual friends. Yes, you can chat with them, but everyone needs a life and friendship away from the keyboard. I'm sorry, but those 980 people are not friends, they are at best, acquaintances that you may play a game with, possibly chat with. But friends are people you can count on, that you can vent to, that you can go out to the movies with or share a meal with.

Second, what else do you do besides play video games? Certainly if the thought that you couldn't play violent video games had inspired even a passing thought of suicide indicates that maybe you should be doing things away from your computer.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not saying that everything your dad said is correct. But if you are 11 and so much of your world revolves around video games, maybe you need to listen to your dad. Video games are not inherently bad for you. But if you are playing so much that you are actually missing out on creating REAL friendships, then you really are playing too much.

Wrong assumptions were being made and that irks me when people jump to conclusions without any evidence. It's not correct that only people who never played Fallout 1 and 2 did not like New Vegas. I've found that people who make sweeping generalizations without evidence are always wrong (see what I did there?). It just rubs me the wrong way that anyone would think they can read me without knowing anything about me. It's insulting to be reduced to a stereotype, even when talking about things like taste in games.

Yes, I started with Fallout 1 -- great game for its time, and 2 was even better (in some ways). But people forget just how buggy Fallout 2 was, and that it never was completely fixed -- good game, but also not without its frustrations. While I won't claim that Fallout 3 was a perfect game, New Vegas had the worst release of all of them, with the same problems as 2, only worse. And the even when the game worked perfectly, I stopped caring about the story and the choices the game forced me to make, not too long after I got to the title city -- part of that was simply the game-killing bugs and crashes, for sure. But part of it was the fact that I did not find any of the choices laid out in front of me to be at all compelling. At one point, I was given a choice in the game, and I simply thought "why am I torturing myself with this stupid game?" turned it off without saving, and never reloaded it again.

I know I'm in the minority here, but 99% of games cannot compete with the storytelling in a good book or movie. What I find compelling instead, is good gameplay, and being able to lose myself, not in a story, but in a world. And Fallout 3 did that better than most games that came before it (certainly more than 1 or 2). I would never ever argue that the writing is complex or better than it is in 1 or 2. But I was thoroughly sucked into that world. And that's why I spent so much time there.

Of all the various ways of telling a story, video games, to me, are the weakest. If you want good writing, I can recommend quite a few good books and movies. If you want good gameplay, you can't go wrong with Fallout 3.

It isn't 'the most loved' game in the series. There's actually a big divide between people who loved it and people who didn't (it's the only Fallout game that I never bothered to finish because I didn't care for the story and the parts of the game that were broken made the entire experience extremely unpleasant.

1 and 2 are old-style rpgs. Many people consider them the best of the series, but if you don't want an old-style game, start with 3. 3 and 4 are both modern rpgs. I also recommend starting with 3. You MIGHT like Fallout: New Vegas, (a lot of people do). But just so you know, I didn't. 4 is not a HUGE technical advance over 3, so the fact that it is old should not stop you. If you haven't played it, there's no good reason to skip it. 3 is my favorite of the modern Fallout games.

Hi. I have a question about a computer/board game hybrid. It was either out in the 80s or 90s, PROBABLY ran on MS-Dos. I think this was in the late 1980s.

It was a multiplayer adventure game/rpg that included a game board with a map of the universe that you could move plastic spaceships on. Each player took one of the available roles in the game, each with special abilities, back story, etc. There were a bunch of paragraph books also that came in the box. The computer interface was kinda sparse, text-only, and you'd enter where you are moving to, and the computer would direct you to a specific paragraph in a specific book. Each character also had their own book which was an introduction to your character. So the way the game would work is that you planned a move for your spaceship, took your turn at the computer entering your moves, received some kind of paragraph indication, you'd leave the PC and sit down and start reading your paragraph while the next player took his turn. You could also trade with other players if you were on the same place on the map.

I remember that the writing for it was hilarious, but because most of the stuff was secret, you'd have to wait until after the game (which stretched over multiple play sessions) to share your funny experiences. But it was possible that someone else would get the same paragraph at a different time if they went to the same places, and made the same choices.

I know that it was probably the cost (because of all of those paragraph books) and the fact that it was not geared for multiple play-throughs, that it wasn't more popular than it was. Also, it was at a time when Infocom style text-adventure games were fading in popularity. I think the title had either "Star" or "Space" in the name, but I couldn't find it in a games database I checked, so I could be wrong.

I remember it fondly because my friends and I played over the course of weeks and had a great time doing it. There's not a whole lot of computer games that have or had necessary physical components to it (other than those *<censored>* copy protection keys that used to be so popular and so damned annoying, and occasionally nearly unreadable).

/edit Lol, I finally remembered the name of the game. I'm 99% sure now that it was "Star Saga", and I think it even had a sequel, if I remember correctly.

Yes, here it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Saga

Enemies are not scaled to your level in FO4, so far as I can tell, at least most of the time, since I routinely was encountering enemies with the skull icon, meaning that they were FAR above my level. Granted, they MIGHT be (mostly) scaled to your level in the main quest-line. But overall, they aren't. If you want to see just how they don't scale, simply travel southwards early in the game, and you'll easily find encounters that will turn you into a smoking pile of ash in a matter of seconds.

The general rule is that the further south you travel, the more dangerous the enemies. And btw, I did one BOS quest early in the game, where I discovered I was SO outclassed, that it was ridiculous. If I didn't have an old save to go back to, I would have smashed my computer in frustration.

Armello, but also giving the new Civilization: Beyond Earth dlc a try (haven't had a chance to do much with it yet, but so far it does seem like an improvement). Also, every so often, I've been booting up the original Master of Orion for a touch of nostalgia. Hopefully, the upcoming reboot will be able to replace that in my gaming queue.

Honestly, I am not a star wars fan. Don't get me wrong -- I enjoyed the original trilogy just fine, but I'm not a 'fan'. I read a lot of SF, but when it comes to movies I'm more of a 2001 guy (that was MY Star Wars). Or "Blade Runner". Or most recently, "The Martian" (imho, one of the best SF novels AND movies in recent years). Star Wars wouldn't even make my top 10 list. I just don't find the Star Wars universe to be either believable or compelling, and its themes are too.... fantasy-like. Luke is special because he's part of an elite family -- that's conservative/reactionary to the point of monarchy. That's a typical fantasy trope. And don't even get me started on "The Force", or Darth Vader's 'redemption'.

I haven't decided, but I'm leaning towards no. The reason is that I tried the game briefly during the beta, and while I enjoyed the concept, and am a real science fiction geek (with a great disappointment with the relative dearth of good science fiction mmos vs. non-SF mmos), I was really turned off by parts of it. For example, I got thoroughly frustrated and mad in the beta because of a section of the game where, in order to progress to another area in the world, you had to do some platforming, and I completely lacked the hand-eye coordination to progress beyond that section. Granted, the game controls probably have improved, but I play MMOs mostly because I don't need to have the best eyesight or coordination or reflexes to enjoy them.

Furthermore, I have found that I get bored too easily with modern MMOs. I hate the end-game in almost all of them, because they tend to be too focused on raiding, with scripted encounters (which, to me, is boring, and turns what used to be a 'game' into an exercise in synchronization and rhythm and military coordination and acting like nothing more than a cog in a machine. I had enough of that way back when I was a senior Everquest cleric in a top-tiered raiding guild (in retrospect, it was more like torture than fun, but I was an addict).

So I almost certainly will skip it.

I'm 55, and started with board games (I still have a love for board games, although those have changed a bit too). I've also been a computer gamer before there was such a thing as a 'personal computer'. And let me also say that I tend to stay away from shooters, and platformers, and rts games and so on. I'll try one here and there, and every so often I'll find one that I like. But even if I kind of like them, I get bored with them far too quickly. So no way am I going to spend the money for a triple-A mainstream game that I'd only likely play for a few hours and then never look at again.

Part of the problem now, is that there's so many new games coming out (as compared with when I was 20-something and PCs were brand new), that it's harder and harder to separate the gems from the drek. I think that back when I was first getting into PC gaming, there were so few games available, that you could play almost everything worth playing, and you could actually be aware of every new game as it came out. And people were experimenting because no one knew what would and would not work. And almost everything was new and exciting (at least in the PC world -- don't ask me about consoles). Nowadays, there certainly are some new ideas still hatching, but you can't always easily find them among the clones and mediocrity.

Also, what I've found is that there are certain popular features of games that modern audiences seem to like, but, at least for me, are negatives. For example, I hate hate hate cut-scenes in a game, because they seem to interrupt the 'game' part of the game (which is why I'm actually playing). If I want a story (which I often do), I am nearly always disappointed by what passes for a story in a video game. Even when the story is decent, the pacing gets ruined by the 'gaming' parts. To me, if you have a good story, the gaming parts (especially death and dead-ends and difficult puzzles, and so on) can absolutely totally ruin its pacing. If you have a good game, the story parts too often distract from the game. I accept that others like games like that. I just don't.

There are exceptions. Some open-world games, where there isn't a fixed story, or there is enough to do outside of the story, it's your choices that drive everything, and pacing is not an issue. Elder Scrolls and Fallout games, in particular, seem to have a balance of stories and gameplay that I like, without too many cut-scenes to ruin the gameplay, and pacing that just seems to fit better than most games. That's because the 'stories' are more like vignettes, and so they don't feel like actual stories. Getting stuck, while possible, doesn't slow things down much. It's like if you are trying to watch a movie, and every 15 minutes, you get interrupted, you are going to get annoyed very quickly. But the mini-stories are more like short, shallow, unimportant you-tube videos, and so you aren't as invested in finding out what happens next, that stop and start pacing is going to interfere with your enjoyment.

What I HAVE liked, though, about (some) modern games, is a tendency to streamline, to replace some of the tedium or repetition of old-style games, by reducing them to their most essential elements. The best example of this that I've seen recently is the most recent XCom. Don't get me wrong, I loved the original, and there are some aspects of the original that I certainly miss. BUT with the new game, I feel like there is less to interfere with getting to the really important parts of the strategy and tactics. It's not perfect, but it's probably better than what I would have done. And I also appreciate the thought behind what was done (and how XCom 2 looks to be shaping up).

I also love the fact that there's been a resurgence in board gaming, which has infiltrated computer games. So we get gems like "Armello" -- definitely a video game that plays just like a board game. Or "Ticket to Ride", which simply put, is one of the best board game translations I've seen to date. Similarly, roguelikes (and roguelites) have been having their own rennaissance, with gems like "Dungeons of Dredmor" and "FTL" and "Sword of the Stars: The Pit". Certainly there's a lot of drek to go through to find those gems. But the gems exist, nonetheless.