Dear Fallout,
We’ve been together a long, long time now. We’ve been through a lot together. I remember when we first found each other. You were so young back then. I was a young kid in the Desert Rangers at the time, and you taught me how to repair Toasters, and occasionally find guns in them. God that seems like a lifetime ago, almost like it happened to someone else in a different universe.

Hey you remember that one time we found that Tardis out in the middle of the desert? That was pretty awesome; Too bad we couldn’t get in there. Or the time we spent too long wandering the desert, and Vault 13 ran out of water? That was pretty shitty, but we reloaded and persevered. And then after we saved their Blue-Jumpsuited asses TWICE, they refused to let us back in. The vault was home, and they sent us into exile… Assholes. So many Memories, huh?

Hey! I know what I wanted to talk to you about! When I was trying to Help Arroyo, and find the G.E.C.K., remember that loincloth I used to wear? I’m still “em-bare-assed” about that… get it? “Em-BARE-Assed“… Get It? Huh? Huh? Heh. Left nothing to the imagination. Oh man, we always end up regretting the fashion choices of yesterday, don’t we? Except for that leather armor, with the one arm torn off, and the one shoulder pad. That still rocks, and hell, between you and me, I’m wearing it right now.

And all the people we’ve known. Most of ‘em are gone now. I don’t want to get morbid here, but everyone we’ve known ends up dying, and its usually just us in the end. You… me… and Dogmeat. Hey, wait a minute. I just realized something; How long are dogs supposed to live? Because by my reckoning, Dogmeat is like… um… let me see here… 120 YEARS OLD?!? Wait wait wait! That CAN’T be right. Lemme see here… um… (scribble-scribble) carry the five… minus 22… no wait… (erase!) Uh… Fuck. Yeah thats right. 120 Years. How the hell does he have the strength to even walk? You know what? A dog that old is mighty suspicious. I think one day, he’ll open his little doggy mouth, and start talking. He’s gotta be a mutant-dog, right? A hyper-intelligent, mutant dog. I think in the end, in a bizzarre twist, he’ll end up being the one who’s orchestrated everything thats ever happened to me, and he will let me know that right before he stabs me in the back.

God I hope that doesn’t happen, that would suck. He’s been our only constant friend all these years. Well… Him and, you know… Harold. But Harold doesn’t really count. He’s just a mopey, depressed half-tard that we occasionally run into. I mean it’s always nice to see him, but he’s More of an acquaintance. By the way, between you and me, when you weren’t looking, he tried to get me to eat his head-fruit. He was oddly insistent about it. Kinda creeped me out really.

We had our good times. And we had our bad times, right? We saw a lot of combat with the Brotherhood Of Steel, and we learned their… “Tactics” for lack of a better word, but it felt somehow empty. We didn’t talk too much then, and I had a feeling that even though things were okay, that that was the beginning of the end for us.

And then it happened… We broke up. You and I were through. I thought, and hoped it was going to be a clean-break, but things are never that easy. You kept coming around, showing up unexpectedly, sometimes we thought we were going to get together again, but at least a couple of times we were smart enough to stop before we even got started again. We planned that trip to Van Buren, out west, but that fell through. I felt like a such a F.O.O.L. for believing in you when you suggested we try an Online only relationship. You were just messing around with my heart, and dropped me faster than a defective mini-nuke.

We spent years apart, our paths never crossing. I can honestly say that I never thought I would see you again, the only thing left to me; nostalgic memories of all our time together. I had moved on.

And then you came back. You were living way out in D.C. now. I didn’t think I ever wanted to see you again… boy was I wrong. When you came to me and asked me to go with you to the east coast, I went. Damn right, I went. And Oh, the times we had again. Walking under the full Moon; The Ink Spots playing on the radio; It was magic. It felt like the old days all over again, and you seemed fresh and new. I just wanted to get you all to myself, and explore every inch of you, mapping your every curve and detail in my head. I could spend hours, hell DAYS with you and not bat an eye. And I loved every minute of it. Shit… How many heads have we blown up with a single bullet? A Hundred? A Thousand? Too many to count. It’s been great, don’t let anyone say that it hasn’t.

But we need to talk.

I thought it was kind of weird that you wanted to move to Vegas. Its a big decision, but we always have had a problem settling down in one place, so I said okay. You assured me that it would be just as good as D.C., and it is. We’re doing all the same stuff, and hell it even looks the same. I thought it was supposed to look different out here, but I guess I was wrong. They also have WAY less music out here than I’d hoped for. I keep hearing the same 6 songs over and over… but that’s all besides the point!

I want my life back. What I’m saying is that I’ve spent a whole hell of a lot of time with you in D.C., and now I’ve been here for over 38 Hours, and I haven’t even been to Vegas yet. Now I know it sounds on the surface like I have a gambling problem, but that’s not what I’m implying. After opening like the 7-Millionth container last night looking for Ammo or Stimpacks that we can use, I came to a realization.

I want to leave. I desperately want to go home to my wife and children, if they’ll have me back. Maybe they miss me. I want to stop what we’ve been doing, but every time I think I’m going to, you suck me right back in, and I end up with another night gone and sleep-dep the next day. I’m saying that I am just a man… A Man who is too weak to stop.

So I’m asking you… no, I’m begging you, please just end this, and LET. ME. GO. I promise that if you can just do that, then you will have saved my sanity, and that of my loved ones. Will you please set me free?

What?

What’s that?

There’s a building 5 miles away we can see from here?

And it’s probably got a lot of containers that are full of stuff?

Okay. This’ll be just one last quick jaunt… right?

Right.

Being the rabid gamer that I am, and with all the hype going on for the new Spider-Man reboot, I decided to add two Spider-Man games to my Gamefly Que. Spider-Man: Web of Shadows from Developer Shaba Games and Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions from developer Beenox.

Title: Spider-Man: Web of Shadows
Publisher: Activision
Developer: Shaba Games
ESRB Rating: Teen

Rating: 3.75 out of 5
Achievements: 45 out of 45

Title: Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions
Publisher: Activision
Developer: Beenox
ESRB Rating: Teen

Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Achievements: 40 out of 42

Let’s start with Web of Shadows. Again like all the Xbox console release games since the Spider-Man: The Movie game (other than Spider-Man: Friend or Foe) we find the game-play in the open world environment of a very large and beautiful New York City. The backdrop for a somewhat better than average story and a kind of “been there done that” game-play scheme. If you’ve played any of Treyarch’s Spider-Man games you’ll find hardly new ground broken here as far as controls go. Though don’t get me wrong I found myself easily web swinging through Times Square, picking off a bad guy and saving the day in no time flat. The familiar game-play did make it nice and the new abilities that the black suit gives the player makes the use of switching costumes on the fly a must when overwhelmed by baddies in the last Act of the game. The polished beauty of the game, the decent combat and the witty personality of our Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man helps to save this game from the disaster that was Spider-Man 3.

The basic plot starts with Spider-Man searching for Mary Jane in a symbiote infested New York City, getting you used to the new black suit powers and providing some nice symbiote battles to wet the appetite. Then flashes back four days earlier to a big battle with Venom, which starts the whole mess the game’s story is built around, when a piece of Venom’s symbiote attaches itself back to Spider-Man. From then on it’s the classic bad or good choices change the ending of the story kind of game with either Spider-Man saving the day or… well I don’t want to ruin the other endings. With cameos from Spider-Man’s comic past such as Luke Cage, Black Widow, Wolverine, the Rhino, Tinkerer, Electro, Black Cat, Moon Knight and others the story and how the “heroes” and “villains” interact make the story of the game entertaining.

What isn’t entertaining is all the filler in the game. One bad thing about me is that I am an Achievement Whore as my friends call it; I must get them all in a game (as I did in this one). This game has some ridiculous side-quests that make the game take forever to finish and in this case I almost stopped trying to get the achievements just so I could keep the story moving. One of the worst collection aspects of the game is that there are 2,000 Spider-Man Emblems to collect in the game which end up being spread out over three different Achievements. This collection had two saving graces, the first being that the each one gave you a small speed and health increase and the second being that after 1,000 each emblem left will show up as a red dot on the mini-map. The other frustrating and kind of funny achievement paths were for all the optional “bonus” missions: Save civilians, airstrike symbiotes, separate symbiotes from their hosts, kill # symbiotes, get symbiote samples, etc. These missions take forever to finish and lead me to spend two whole days just trying to finish these missions. At least the names for the achievements, Excessive Spider-Man and Obsessive Spider-Man, laid out the nature of those achievements. My one major complaint about this game is that as entertaining as the story is, when you skip all the mindless side-quests it only took me about an hour to get to Act 3 and another 2 hours to beat the game.

The game does have a glitchy camera at times, though what can you expect with a huge open world, and sometimes the targeting would mess up the bugs never really bothered me too bad in this game. The boss fights were never too challenging. Though it was fun to fight symbiote versions of Electro, Wolverine and Black Cat and the first fight with Wolverine with the quiz question grounding the game to the comic cannon made it interestingly different.

Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions is truly a different game in both style and game-play. Gone is the slick realism that Web of Shadows strove for in it’s world design, as Shattered Dimensions brings in a beautiful cel shaded look that makes the game feel as if the comics were living there on the screen. The best of the Spider-Man universe is here as you swing through levels quickly dispatching your foes. Shattered Dimensions let’s you deftly evade attacks, pummel enemy’s with brutal web combos and use your amazing spider powers as you play four different Spider-Men: Amazing, Ultimate, 2099, and Noir. Though the game is not open world like most of the last decade’s worth of Spider-Man games for the Xbox consoles, the level design, animations, and story prove this to be an engaging and entertaining experience.

The plot starts with the indomitable Stan Lee narrating Mysterio’s attempt to steal an artifact known as the “Tablet of Order and Chaos.” The Amazing Spider-Man shows up and in the ensuing battle shatters the tablet fracturing it across the four universes in the game. Now each Spider-Man must recover the pieces from their dimensions and return them to Madam Web before all the known universes are erased from existence.

The best aspect of the game by far is the shear amount of bosses that you get to fight in this game, Juggernaut, Hammerhead and Electro to name a few. Fans of the different comics that the universes are based on have many things in this game to enjoy. Even the finding of the hidden Spider-Man emblems in this game are more fun than in Web of Shadows as they are spread in fun and interesting areas of the maps that make it a necessity to play with the way Spider-Man swings and jumps through levels.

The changes in game-play between universes, keeps the game fresh and inviting as you go through the story. Each level designed to fit the world it was attached to with even some of the bosses being design uniquely for the game such as the Noir version of Vulture in all his disgusting detail. One of my favorites in the game was the Ultimate universe’s Deadpool level, where Spider-Man had to fight for his life on Deadpool’s reality TV show “Pain Factor”, all the while Deadpool makes fun of my collecting of Spidey Emblems and my shaky controller.

For most levels the controls are similar to the Amazing universe, though in Ultimate you do have the added rage mode that the symbiote suit gives you and in 2099 the aerial falling sections are a fun addition. The Noir levels are the most different in the game as they remind me a lot of Batman: Arkham Asylum. The sneaking in the shadows and taking down of armed gun men really was my favorite part of that Batman game and here again it’s come be one of my favorite parts of this game. I found myself coming back to these levels and playing them again and again just for the fun of it. The biggest down side to Arkham existed here as well, I found that for me to make it through the Noir levels I had to leave my Spider Sense on just like the X-Ray vision in Arkham Asylum, and that took away a bit from the beauty that the level designers put into the sets that you had to find your way though.

In all this game had me hooked from the first lines of the opening to final “Excelsior!” that Stan Lee exclaims at the end as I beat this game on Easy, than I decided to play through each level on Hard. This is where I experienced the bugs in the game-play that I heard of before the game came out. Fighting throngs of bad guys and defeating them was great fun until I knocked a guy behind an “immovable” fence and could no longer touch him, though could see him with my Spidey sense, caused me to restart my last check point over and over again. Bugs and all, this game has my seal of approval it’s just a great and fun game to enjoy.

So which is better? Not really sure how to answer that question. Each of these two games has a different feel to it, Web of Shadows a little dark and depressing with everyone blaming Spider-Man for the problems in the game and Shattered Dimensions being more upbeat and funny. The witty banter that Spider-Man is known for is in both games but as you beat your 100th street thug you’ve heard all that spider man has to say in Web of Shadows and with Shattered Dimensions being a level based approach you have more banter geared to the types of characters and the things going on in the level to keep it fresh. All in all, I’ve grown tired of meandering through the open world environments that permeate the landscape of video games being up the same nameless bad guys over and over again and loved just exploring the detailed levels of Shattered Dimensions and of these two it’s my favorite. Though if you love to swing through the entirety of New York City and rescuing or hurting the innocent civilians of said city then Web of Shadows is for you.