Review: My Week with Fallout 4

I had intended in the weeks leading up to the release, to play the game for a few hours, get some experience and share my initial thoughts. Well, it's been almost a week since the game was released and I've managed to play at least an hour each day which should tell you something about this game.

So far, it's everything I wished that it would be.

At this point, spoilers are everywhere, but I'd like to keep this review spoiler free. If you want spoilers, all you need to do is google.

To make playing this long awaited game possible, I arranged to take release day off from work and made plans that while I'd be home for the day, that I'd be playing the game rather than resorting to typical mommy duties as I do. Also a large factor in gaining enough game-time during release was a last minute decision to attend the midnight release.

Copy of game in hand, I loaded it up at 12:15 and was carefully crafting my character at 12:40. I spent a little more time than I should have on character creation, not because it's unimportant to get the likeness correct but because I was under the assumption that I had to craft both the male and female characters on the startup screen.

The brief tutorial ended (without me even really noticing it- nice job Bethesda) and I was off into the full Commonwealth wasteland.

I managed to get 11 hours of play in during that first day. An achievement in itself. I actually had to stop playing at one point because my eyes hurt too much, not having properly marathoned a game in over a year, my eyes were not used to staring at a screen for so long!

By now, I've read a few other reviews (because when I'm not playing Fallout 4, I'm thinking of it) and I wanted to address one major point here. Settlements:

I'm not sure why the gaming community as a whole seems to be so frustrated by the lack of instruction on how to operate the settlements (which are completely optional and only seem to enrich gameplay) but I find myself laughing each time someone writes about how they didn't know how to set one up. I applaud Bethesda for the execution of settlements and the lack of intruction. It really has helped with the immersion factor for me. Also, it's not like I had everything about settlements figured out, there were a few things that I was stumped on but someone else had figured it out!

This game to me is all the good of Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, Skyrim, all rolled up into one wonderful package with improved graphics. Yes, there are some of the "usual" release day issues (I only had one though, and it was because I behaved in a way the game didn't expect) and there's the characters speaking/weird mouth matching up thing.

One minor spoiler- I haven't heard "Sweet Caroline" yet. This game is set in Boston. If I don't hear the song, I'm going to be a little disappointed given where the major city of the game is!!

Ok, time to go play more!

Extra Life: Today's the Day!

Friendly reminder that I'm participating in the Extra Life Charity in support of Boston Children's Hospital. If you're feeling so inclined, please donate if not to my page then to one of the other's.

I'd love support in reaching my goal! Follow my twitter, I'll be live tweeting quite a bit today and I hope to do my first ever stream of the game Big Pharma as well!

Also, Happy N7 Day!

Geeky Music

Something I haven't discussed so much yet is the fact that I enjoy playing piano. I had a piano growing up and played some recitals. Until recently I had a half-keyboard but it really wasn't doing it for me. So I purchased a nice MIDI full keyboard.

I hope to be able to share some covers of game music, the sheet music for which can be found on great sites like NinSheetMusic, they have some really fantastic compositions on the site, some of which are pretty challenging.

Recently I've been working on a cover of Jonathan Coulton's memorable "Still Alive," from Portal. It's been interesting starting to use Garage Band, software that I've had on my imac for ages (and the imac before that) but never really used. 

Hopefully I'll get to share some of my covers soon!

Mass Effect Special Edition Loot Crate- Sold Out!

I had planned on writing this post telling those of you who had interest to hop over and grab the Mass Effect Limited Edition Loot Crate before it sold out, but too late! I managed to purchase mine yesterday afternoon during my son's nap and I tweeted about it then. So I guess the lesson there is that my twitter is often more up to date!

Regardless, I know for a fact that I'm getting a sweet N7 hoodie that I've wanted for a while and the rest is a surprise! I'll definitely have an unboxing when it arrives!

Also in special edition crate news, waiting on my Fallout 4 crate to arrive and I couldn't be more excited! I've generally avoided spoilers so far, so I'll do the same for all of you. I'll post an unboxing but will try to hide the unknown contents farther down the post and provide plenty of warnings!

Product Review: Juice Bluetooth Speaker

Recently I was over at my parent's house when my dad excitedly pulls me aside and showed me this little speaker; Juice. He was very excited because our local hardware store had a customer appreciation day and these were on sale for 6 dollars. He showed how it was a wireless (through bluetooth) connection to his phone and the audio quality was pretty nice for a 6 dollar (normally 50) speaker.

Intrigued, I ended up purchasing 2 of them for 9.99 (with Amazon Prime), they arrived this weekend, I charged them both up quickly and I'm pretty pleased.

One of the speakers is for my car, I purchased my car in 2002 brand new and had a CD player put in, but nowadays obviously vehicles come with USB plugs for smartphones and bluetooth feeds to the vehicles speakers. My vehicle has none of that, but it can play CDs!

I want to listen to audiobooks on my commute and I've recently just been blasting the sound through my iPhone speaker. Enter Juice.

I used it this morning and it was perfect. Good sound quality, easy and quick to connect and best of all, it's small and I can simply toss it in my glovebox during the day.

The other speaker is devoted to my laptop at home and again, my iMac has reasonable sound but it's not great when I'm trying to play my MIDI keyboard through GarageBand. Enter Juice.

I'm a little less thrilled with this application. Although the speaker still works great for normal sound applications (streaming youtube, netflix, amazon prime, etc). There is a big delay from my MIDI keyboard through the speaker. Now, I can plug in the audio with a normal jack, but then there is a lot of static. I'm still working on resolving all that. I suspect that issue isn't the speaker's fault though, just the application of bluetooth.

Review: Mostly positive!

PROS:

• Easy to use
• Compact (I have small hands)
• Quick charging time through USB port (an hour or so)
• Supposedly long use per charge (I'll update if that is not the case)
• Good sound quality

CONS:

• Large delay in MIDI application (may not be fault of speaker)
• Static from audio jack (again, checking to see if this is the speaker or my iMac)
• A little challenging if there is interference, audio quality sinks significantly.

Gaming with a Baby, Now with More Posts!

In honor of NaNoWriMo this year, I'm giving myself a goal of blogging more! I've wanted to for a while now but was having difficulty committing. With my little about to turn 1, things should hopefully start to run a little more smoothly but at the same time, there is no way for me to write 50,000 words.

So, I'm writing more blog posts! Some will be gaming relevant since Fallout 4 is coming soon!! And some will be related to Christmas shopping (since that's on my mind) and then some random scattering of content.

My goal is to keep this page gaming related as much as possible but I'd also like to post more, so there will be some elements that shift a little bit.

Please bear with me as I find myself and I promise to generate some worthy content.