Rant 236 / Fallout 3 > Red Alert 3

So I managed to save my money in the Trade Up game in Facebook. From $4.7M last week I'm now back in the healthy zone of $5.1M. It's not even my doing - everything is rising! Didn't matter what I bought because of that. Any Tom, Dick and Harry can make a hundred grands easy, as long as they don't touch currencies because

1) they're bugged - prices displayed =/= prices you actually pay
2) all of them don't move much except for the Yen, which is now dropping slowly.







Tested Red Alert 3 v1.04, which is the latest version. Seems pretty nice, except they were too easy. Should have played at Hard mode or something. It's so ghey, I captured the enemy bases with engineers instead of destroying them. It counts as "Destroy" as far as the objectives go. Oh wow...

Anyway the gameplay is still quite the same except they threw in special abilities for all units, greatly diversifying the possible strategies. Does require quite a bit of micromanagement to make them all work effectively. I think it's almost on par with Starcraft in the need for 1337 microing, though for different reasons. No longer is it just a spamfest the way all the other C&C games were. Now, you need to use the different abilities/modes to make your units more effective in different situations.

Natasha, the new Soviet Superwoman, is freaking powerful. Not only is she the usual 1-shot-1-kill sniper, her bullets fly through people and kills those behind them, as if she shoots lazors from her guns that do not dissipate... And that isn't all - she can snipe drivers just like the GLA Superman from C&C Generals. I think his name was Jamal or something.

Oh wait, I didn't say that's the end of the list! She can't shoot tanks, but she can call in airstrikes that kills most tanks and buildings plus AOE damage in a small radius. She's practically a 4-in-1 combo 1-woman-army! The catch? Her HP isn't as godlike as all her counterparts in other C&C games.









Fallout 3 is basically a post-apocalyptic version of Oblivion. Either I suck or the sign's design was bad, but when I saw the word Megaton on the giant sign after escaping from the vault, I did not see the tiny arrow pointing to the right. I went left and got all the way to the supermarket across the river, but not before finding a scrapyard, escaping from raiders with big guns and finding my dog, which somehow disappeard on my way back to Megaton.

It was only when I got the quest from Will to help him find his father that I realized I must have strayed pretty far from the path I was supposed to go. Coincidentally, I just learnt less than a minute ago that I can travel anywhere by clicking the place in Pip-boy's map. So I clicked on Springvale (can't remember the town's name exactly) and walked randomly. That's when I saw the damned arrow...