Fallout: New Vegas is an excellent sci-fi RPG from 2010 that puts you into the boots of a courier in post-nuclear war wasteland Las Vegas.
It's a great open world game that is very similar to Skyrim in many respects (aside from the radioactively mutated ghouls, of course).
Check out this Gamespot video review for further info on the game.
Simple, I want to hear about your best sci-fi experience of 2011. Whether it was the best sci-fi game you played, the best sci-fi movie you saw, your favorite sci-fi book or some other sci-fi related thing.
Just post your personal favorite sci-fi "thingie" of the year below and let us know why it was so great and you'll have a chance to win the game. I will pick a winner based on most persuasive arguments and added points for an interesting story behind your nomination.
The contest will end on the 22nd of December 1PM CET, which means you will be able to spend some quality Christmas holiday time exploring the nuclear wastelands if you win. Fun for the whole family!
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For me, the best sci-fi thing of this year has been the vision of the movie "Inception" starring Di Caprio. I found the multi-layered plot involving dreams a real mind boggling experience.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing, Michaelz! Yeah, I also really enjoyed Inception. Even if the plot is actually kinda dumb when you think about it too long, it has a really great vibe and style to it that I liked a lot
ReplyDeleteHey guys!
ReplyDeleteBest SciFi experience this year? Definitely a book.
I do enjoy movies very much, and games with a good plot even more, but nothing jump-starts the imagination better than a book.
Or in this case, an audio book :)
A show host of a Versus the World podcast I listen mentioned he started "reading" the 'Fate of the Jedi' saga.
(you can find more about it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Wars_books#Fate_of_the_Jedi)
I listen to those guys since August of 2006, a long time I know :) but they are just that great.
And since I learned to trust their taste for games, it didn't take me much to try this as well, especially as I already was a hardcore Star Wars fan :)
And so I got me a copy of a first novel and became instantly hooked. It was perfect!
I spend a lot of time in public transport while going to work and back and that allowed me 2 hours of Jedi Masters' adventures each day :)
And finally, the story. Sorry for the long introduction :)
Story is set in the Legacy Era, a timeline roughly 40 years after the events we saw in The New Hope movie (part 4). All the characters we know are much older now, and have their more-or-less Force-sensitive offspring.
New characters you'll fall in love with the more you hear about them and see them in action. Always recognizable clarity and calmness of Luke, countered by hyper-activity of his son Ben, trademark stubbornness and luck of Han Solo, countered by even more stubborn daughter of him and Leia, Jaina, and many other situations ensure enough of hilarity and drama on their own :)
But if you throw in the corrupt government, paranoid hidden tribes of Force-users, mysterious folks that live among black holes, tribes of long-considered-extinct Sith and many many more enemies in the mix you get a perfect story filled with twists and turns that will have an eye-widening and jaw-dropping effect on you.
Hilarious if you're on a public transport like me :)))
I used to take a 30-minute break from work and instead of having my lunch I'd walk around the park and listen what happened next as I can't wait for the shift to be over so I can continue.
I've never been addicted to anything in my whole life, but these audio books are as close as it gets.
You should try it, I recommend highly, as those novels are a masterpiece that every Star Wars fan should experience.
Even for people not familiar with Force at all, it should be all easy to comprehend. The story explains it all while mercilessly sucking you in more and more until you are fully converted Star Wars universe lover :)
For anyone willing to try and listen to these epic adventures of Luke Skywalker with friends and foes you can get audiobooks from audible.com.
I'm pretty sure you can get them via other means and websites, but this is the first one that comes to mind, and biggest.
I finished all the 8 novels that came out by now, and it's killing me to wait until March for the last one :)
A truly epic saga, superb writing and narration you'll find no flaw in will win you over, so watch out if you have less than an hour of free time a day :))
Now if I could only find Fallout or Mass Effect ones I would take a holiday leave and storm through them all without food or drink breaks :D
Hope you liked the read, it wasn't boring, and something positive came out of it :)
Also, I'm very interested in hearing your SciFi experiences as well (great topic Technomancer!) so let's get it on!
P.S.
English obviously isn't my native language, so I'm sure you'll forgive any grammar errors and/or misspellings :)
Hi Six. Thanks for your great comment! I've actually been wondering if I should get into the Fate of the Jedi series (I've read a lot of the other EU books with the Thrawn trilogy probably being my favorite). Sounds like maybe I need to buy a little Christmas present for myself, then ;)
ReplyDeleteThank you for the great website, allowing me to comment :)
ReplyDeleteThanks for the recommendation of a Thrawn trilogy.
I heard people praising Timothy Zahn before, but his books so far eluded me.
No more, I say, I'm getting all three :-)
As for Fate of the Jedi - if you don't like the books, I will personally reimburse you by gifting a different audio book of your choice! :)
A little tip, if you don't mind me advertising Versus the World people some more :)
They have a deal with audible.com, so if you enter "VTW" as the special code you get a special deal. I'm getting books from a friend's account (he buys them for me :), so I don't know what kind of a deal it is. But if you don't have an account yet with audible, you may as well use it. Perhaps it will get you a nice discount or bonus credits for books. Just thought to let you know :)
Best Sci-Fi of 2011? I don't really watch Sci-Fi because that genre is usually about flashing lights and explosions. I did watch this small movie that wasn't very advertised. It was called "Another Earth". This was a pretty good movie, it's about this girl that does something stupid that causes her to have incredible amount of guilt. And then comes Earth 2... I really can't explain it without spoiling it if you didn't watch it yet.
ReplyDeleteIt's a very good movie that makes you think about what if you're in that situation.
Thanks for the competition.
Hi DC, thanks for your comment!
ReplyDeleteWell, flashing lights and explosions can be fun too, sometimes ;)
Interesting looking movie "Another Earth". Just looked it up on IMDB, A really fascinating concept with parallel universe Earth and "another you". Definitely a movie that I need to check out.
My best sci-fi experience of 2011 was watching the 1997 movie "Contact," starring Jodie Foster. I won't spoil the plot for anybody that hasn't seen it, but the movie portrays how I think the public and the government would react to the discovery of and ability to travel to another star where other life could exist. Toward the end of the movie, one of my favorite moments is when Jodie Foster is in front of a panel that determines who gets to travel to Vega. She holds to the truth that she is an atheist when asked if she believes in God, since God's existence has not been proven, and this response bothers many members of the panel that want a candidate that believes in God. Matthew McConaughy's character, who is on the panel, asks her if she loves her deceased father. She answers yes, and he says, "Prove it." Anyway, it's a really good movie, I highly recommend you see it.
ReplyDeleteHi Josiah. Thanks for sharing! I actually never watched "Contact" back in the day. I was 15 at the time and I guess it didn't have enough explosions and scantly clad women in it for my movie tastes back then ;)
ReplyDeleteYour description really makes me want to go watch it though. I didn't know that it was such a philosophical movie. Thanks for the recommendation!
There's so much great SF this year that it's quite hard to pick one, but I really enjoyed a conference called the Singularity Summit, where speakers discussed recent and potential future advances in technology, which bordered on science fiction, and anyone who is an SF fan should desperately want to know about. One of the best talks was by Stephen Wolfram (i.e. Wolfram Alpha, Mathematica) about computation and the future of mankind, the development of artificial intelligence, the nature of human intelligence. It's some pretty heavy stuff, but it's not too difficult to grasp (as technical as a TED talk might be), and I learned a lot. The videos are on youtube, check them out.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment, Oasis789. That sounds really cool. I'm just checking out the Stephen Wolfram talk now (here's the link btw, in case any else is interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pgw_nVqSTLw&list=UU1zny_jKmgnEbQitfPgAlxg&index=3&feature=plcp). Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the link Technomancer82! I'm downloading the video and will be watching it shortly.
ReplyDeleteLooks very interesting :)
The window is now closed for entries in the giveaway. Please feel free to keep sharing your great sci-fi moments, of course :)
ReplyDeleteI will announce the winner later today.
I want to thank everyone sincerely for taking time to contribute. I have gotten some very interesting tips for some great sci-fi material that I can't wait to check out!
Thank you too, for interesting topic to stir up conversation :)
ReplyDeleteI would like to share another piece of SciFi experience I had last year.
It was Mass Effect 2, a space opera FPS RPG game. A perfect one.
While it came out in 2010, I didn't play it until 2011, so I guess it
fits our current topic :-)
For the people who played ME1, but not ME2, this may contain some
spoilers, so read on at your own responsibility xD
Mass Effect 2 picks up with the story several years after the events
from the first part. Commander Shepard saved the galaxy, but nothing is
over yet. Colonists from the human planets in the outer rings are
disappearing, a colony at a time. And only human ones.
Other races don't really like humans very much as the only human Spectre
at a time, Shepard, was seen as seizing the power from incapacitated
Council at one time - although she (I played female Shepard :) actually
saved the Citadel, the Council and all the people on the planet from the
Reaper attack.
Now nobody wants to help, and the threat becomes so present, yet
invisible. Shepard needs to assemble the team and run in the fight
blindly as there is no time left to waste.
You will have the opportunity to recruit your old friends from the first
part and by helping them with their current problems on various planets
with different people earn their trust and loyalty again.
Also, if you kept your save file from ME1, you will see those little
things in the game that make it all so much better. People talk to you
about stuff you did "in the past" and either congratulate you, or hate
you. You see newspaper headlines referring to your past heroics, even
your friends talk mention things you did together before.
It's so easy to get immersed with this universe as it seems so complete,
and your sense of purpose in it is so real and clear. But although you
know what you need to do, you still don't know how... and as the story
unfolds, surprises and treacheries reveal, friends help you realize that
the real threat is actually coming from... well, I think you should
really play the game and see ;-)
Story is very deep and engaging, gameplay mechanics easy to use and
like, and since it's an old game now - it's not expensive at all :-)
Also, be sure to keep your save game file. Mass Effect 3 is coming :-)
Nice little mini-review, Six :) Yeah, Mass Effect 1-2 are on my all time top games list and I already made a post about what I'm looking forward to in ME3: http://www.lightspeed-gaming.com/2011/10/5-things-i-cant-wait-to-see-in-mass.html
ReplyDeleteI agree that the feature with your decisions carrying over from the previous game is a stroke of genius and I can't wait to see how the choices I made in ME1 and ME2 will affect the events in ME3.