Fallout 3 is now available for preorder on Steam, standard price of $50, available in 3.5 days (as of the time of posting). This likely means that Bethesda will port their other releases to Steam in due time - Oblivion, Morrowind, and hopefully the older releases that you can’t get anymore (like Battlespire, the only multiplayer Elder Scrolls game).

There is too much to say about Fallout 3, it is a bit overwhelming to write an “Upcoming Titles” post about it. I’ll just leave you with two of the videos showing a good coverage of gameplay.

There are oh so many videos, somewhere in the neighborhood of 12-15 unique ones, on Youtube - so if you’re as excited as I am, search for “Fallout 3″, and “IGN Fallout 3″ to find them all.

Thank you Bethesda, for this great opportunity to buy Fallout 3 on Steam. Let me say that you are making the right move, both to widen your audience, and to reduce piracy. You are one of few companies to not include much copy protection, including a lack of serials on your games. This is smart, as the protection does not stop piracy. Adding your game to Steam will cause many of the would-be pirates to buy your game, as often one of the major reasons they pirate is to avoid having to goto the store, deal with installation times from media, serial activation, disks in the drive, etc. - Steam also removes all of these flaws of traditional media. I for one will buy another copy of all of your games if you release them on Steam.

Now we just need to get Blizzard Entertainment on the bandwagon…

Source: http://lasecwww.epfl.ch/keyboard/

I am doing this using Python and pywin32, so here’s a code example in that language (note that all Windows API languages have similar functions and can share much of their code):

import win32gui
window=win32gui.FindWindow(”EXENAME”,”TITLEOFWINDOW”)
win=window.GetSafeHwnd()
desktop=win32gui.FindWindow(’progman’,'Program Manager’)
win32gui.SetParent(win,desktop)

Note: EXENAME does not include the extension “.exe”

I was searching for this code for months in an effort to create a custom Windows shell. I’m sure it would be useful for a number of other applications as well, such as desktop-level apps, media players, custom widgets, etc.

Enjoy, and I hope I spare someone the headache of finding this that I had to go through.

This video was brought to you by the organization of sheep for McCain.

I can hear the voice-over dude speaking already…

“Elvis impersonator… lions… Watch an elvis impersonator kill lions while being clawed apart. Coming to theatres across Syria this fall.”

Brought to you by the Coalition for Infotaxis Lulz.

Dude, I want a kangaroo mount…

This game is quite the unexpected surprise. Tilted Mill entertainment is a relatively small-name company, but they have really managed to strike a niche genre that I for one adore. This game has Diablo-style gameplay for items and combat, and a unique citybuilder perspective rolled into one game. The basic idea is to grow from a man (or woman, or goblin…) with a hut, to a bustling city - all the while becoming more powerful yourself.

You can check out some screenshots by clicking here.

You have many a character class to choose from, but they all basically boil down to starting resources/items, and special abilities in either combat or townbuilding. I prefer combat-oriented characters myself.

You then go out into the world, taking down level one and two baddies nearer to your hut. Slowly growing your town, you level up and take on increasingly more powerful dens of evil (catch my diablo reference there? no?). You hire various people such as farmers and herders for food, others like craftsman, and guards for you and your town to stay alive. Your town can even be home to wizards and necromancers (I either win or lose before this point [depending on difficulty], so far, so I haven’t tried these yet. The game has quite an assortment of things to see, and, provided you like the basic combat of diablo, provides infinite replayability. With so many items, people, and monsters to get and fight, and randomly generated areas to plod through, you can play this as many times as you want, and it will be different in each.

Let me make clear something that wasn’t clear for me buying this game - your worlds are non-persistant. You create a character, and that character is gone after that game. You can save/load, of course, but you cannot take a decked-out character into a new game.

The difficulty variety is great. On easy, you can solo most places you go, respawn if you die, and the monsters that raid you are almost always noobs. On hardcore, you’re dead if you die once, you can barely kill an enemy den without running back to heal or using potions, and your town is constantly besieged by groups that have your whole village running for the hills to cover.

There is no multiplayer, though the sequel (or perhaps a patch? please?) is rumored to have it. The game is well worth the $20.

If you’re looking for a bottom line as to whether you should buy this or not, and you’re sitting on the fence, do it - you’ll find what you expect in this game. Check out some videos on their main site if you’re still not convinced.

P.S. - There’s no widescreen (as far as I can tell), but it really doesn’t matter. The graphics aren’t great enough so you can tell the difference, tbh, but I personally don’t see why they didn’t support it.

For those of you who don’t know what that means, basically from here on out, whenever you play a PhysX-enabled game, if you have a Geforce GPU of 8 or higher series, your FPS will be much higher!

Update: Note that this, through personal experience, does not apply to Geforce M GPUs. I.E., if you have a Geforce 8 laptop, it will not hardware accelerate your physics.

Part One

Part Two