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_drafts/fallout3.md

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+---
+     tabtitle: "Fallout 3 on Linux"
+     title: "Fallout 3 on Linux: Setup, Summary, and Suggestions"
+     topics: [gaming]
+     pub: ""
+     short_desc: A relatively comprehensive review of my recent playthrough of Fallout 3.
+---
+
+# Fallout 3 on Linux: Setup, Summary, and Suggestions
+- Objective: Play Fallout 3 with a "Vanilla+" setup of mods. Play through all
+    the DLC, play through the main story.
+
+To-Do:
+- Installation
+    - Game files (Steam, GOG, other?)
+    - Mod Organizer 2
+- Modding
+    - Mods I used, and why
+    - How-to Install and/or Configure
+- Game Review
+    - Main Story
+    - DLC (in order played)
+        - The Pitt
+        - Operation Anchorage
+        - Point Lookout
+        - Mothership Zeta
+        - Broken Steel
+
+# Notes
+
+## Installation
+
+### Base Game
+
+### Mods
+
+#### Mod Organizer 2
+
+#### Mod List
+
+#### Mods of Note
+
+## Review
+
+### Main Story
+
+Overall, I think the main story of Fallout 3 is strong until the very last beat.
+The beginning tutorial, which is the first 10 to 40 minutes of play, takes place
+entirely within the starting Vault. It does a good job of the standard tutorial
+phase: teach the player how to interact with the game; walk the player through
+character creation; setup a few characters to care about. Then, the beginning
+ends, and there's the second phase of play: open world. Arguably, this is the
+remaining phase of all game-play. The player is free to explore, pursuing quests
+or ambitions as they whim. There are game mechanics to aid with decisions,
+generally quest markers and points-of-interest. The entire play time of a player
+could be spent on everything _except_ the main story, and it would still be a
+rewarding and enjoyable experience. However, my objective was to play the story
+of Fallout 3, and so I keep that as my main guiding star. This is not to say I
+didn't do any side-quests. I wandered far and wide; I actually discovered every
+location on the map! I enjoyed exploring the abandoned and ruined metro lines,
+finding small settlements or outposts, and coming across other wanderers and
+survivors who had setup their own little slices of the wasteland.
+
+I want to specifically talk about the setting. The Capitol Wasteland, a
+fictionalized, augmented, scaled-down region around modern-day Washington DC,
+northern Virginia, and Maryland. The "sights" are there: all the monuments and
+museums (well, some _aren't_ there, like the White House!). There are two
+"layers" to the map. The first is the surface. There's the big, open-world
+Wasteland, which spans almost the entire map, excluding some smaller,
+independent cells. Then, there's the underground collection of metro tunnels.
+All of these connect, mostly, and it is fascinating that, once underground, it's
+almost possible to stay underground, at least when around the Mall and within
+DC proper.
+
+I want to touch on one of the strengths of Fallout 3, and the open-world 3D
+environment: environmental storytelling.
+
+### DLC: The Pitt
+
+The Pitt was the first of the DLCs that I played. It was advised as a good
+early-game DLC, if only because it gives some great guns. I hadn't made the
+connection between "Pitt" and "Pittsburgh" until I saw the name of the DLC
+spelled out (as opposed to hearing it simply as "the pit"). I love the hook into
+the DLC: a man, looking like Snake Plissken from "Escape from New York", sends
+out an SOS signal that your Pipboy can pick up. Traveling to the
+northern-reaches of the map, there's a hand-powered rail car that you use to
+travel to "The Pitt." There, according to Wernher, the people are oppressed and
+sick, and their tyrannical leaders hold the cure for their disease but refuse to
+hand it over. Wernher escaped from the slave pits, seeking help in their
+revolution. Granted, it's not all that straight-forward. There are a few hours
+worth of story, during which you learn a bit more about the setting, the
+disease, and the characters. You fight through the slave pits to earn your
+freedom and a meeting with the tyrant, a former Brotherhood of Steel member
+named Lord Ashur. The cure is actually a child that was born with immunity to
+the disease. Conveniently, it's Ashur's kid. His wife, (conveniently) a
+scientist, is working on bio-engineering a cure from the kid. Wernher wants to
+take the kid, harvest it, and distribute the cure himself. Thus the main moral
+conflict of the DLC: do you side with Ashur, saving the kid, but continuing the
+status-quo, and having only Ashur's word that he'll do the right thing when the
+cure is ready? Or do you side with Wernher, kidnapping and probably dooming the
+child, to let him play his power-trip and essentially take over The Pitt for
+himself? I sided with Ashur, killed Wernher, saved the kid, and got some sweet
+guns.
+
+Overall, I enjoyed The Pitt. The setting is phenomenal, the story is engaging
+enough. The characters are good. It has that 80s action-film vibe. The moral
+choice at the end is a good twist, though by no means unforeseen. I do like that
+the game has no karma tied to the final decision; neither one is obviously good.
+I tend to enjoy that in moral decisions, as rarely are any decisions obviously
+"right" or "wrong."
+
+### DLC: Operation Anchorage
+
+Apparently this one is polarizing. (Oh snap, no pun intended). I really liked
+it. It hooked me in, it didn't overstay it's welcome, and it gave me some cool
+loot.
+
+The gist: your Pipboy lets you operate a virtual reality training simulation of
+the invasion of Anchorage, Alaska by the Chinese forces. You start off on a
+cliff, having been one of a few surviving special forces members, to infiltrate
+and destroy the artillery shelling the United States forces. Right away, it set
+a really fun tone with me. I loved the little infiltration angle. After you save
+the day, you return to base camp, where you are given several more missions to
+destroy key resources, before repelling the Chinese forces and retaking
+Anchorage proper.
+
+The stealth mission at the beginning really swings this content in a favorable
+direction, as does the cool rewards. The Gauss Rifle is just fun to use, and the
+player gets the Power Armor Training trait and access to a suit of Power Armor.
+One of the mods I had included several additional sets of armor in the reward
+vault, and I enjoyed them as well.
+
+### DLC: Point Lookout
+
+This one grew on me. When it started, due to the nature of the DLC being more
+open-world and less driven, I felt thrown into another region that I had to make
+my own fun in. However, I was able to relatively quickly find some engaging
+storylines, intriguing storytelling, and the main quest was fun.
+
+Arriving in the Land of the Punga, you have two objectives: one, you were asked
+to find a girl by her mother; two, you are advised to investigate why a manor on
+a hill is smoking. The swamp wasteland is inhabited by inbred swamp-people,
+mirelurks, and the expected cretins. There's plenty of history scattered both
+told and unsaid throughout abandoned tents, terminals, hotel rooms, and ruins.
+This location does a lot to invoke an eldritch horror vibe, and it does so quite
+well at several points. There's a specific side-quest dealing with a tome, The
+Krivbeknih, which is obviously a reference to tomes like The Necronomicon. The
+characters throughout the location are well-written and fun to interact with.
+The main quest covers a lot of ground, sends you on a psychedelic dream-vision,
+and gets you lobotomized! Plus _an entire building explodes_, and that's pretty
+rad. Oh, and the secret Chinese spy submarine!
+
+By the end of this DLC, I was happily impressed, and it took the new top spot on
+my list. There's some cool loot, plenty of neat lore, and more Punga than you
+can shake a shotgun at. And you can make moonshine.
+
+### DLC: Mothership Zeta
+
+Another DLC generally looked at unfavorably.
+
+### DLC: Broken Steel

_drafts/oblivion-part3.md

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+---
+     tabtitle: "Oblivion on Linux Part 3, A Full Install"
+     title: "Oblivion on Linux, with Mods! Part 3 - Full Install"
+     topics: [gaming]
+     pub: "2021-12-20"
+     short_desc: "The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is one of my favorite games of
+     all time. The vanilla game holds up, but mods take the game to an entirely
+     new level. Getting it working on Linux requires a bit of configuration, bit
+     is surprisingly accessible! This is the final part of my journey."
+---
+
+# Install Walk-Thru
+
+- Install from source. Run for first time.
+- Symlink `obse_loader.exe` to `OblivionLauncher.exe`, make back-up of original
+`OblivionLauncher.exe`
+- "Install" all relevant tools
+- Source `Aliases` file
+- LOOT masterlist not working. Change to reference local
+- Disable LOOT update on start
+- TES4Edit click the box to not show stuff on startup, ignore the error
+- Make updates in BethINI
+- Install Unofficial patches. Run to verify things are working.
+- Begin installing mods!
+
+## Universal Silent Voice
+Had to install manually. Move relevant files to `Data/OBSE/Plugins`.