There’s just never enough bullets

Prologue

We’ve all been there.  Imagine this: You find yourself in a dark, foreboding corridor of some creepy facility with a torch that’s not as powerful as your average mobile phone’s ‘torch’ mode, casting a dim light into the distance.  Your head… hurts.  Must have been that [insert name of relevant: zombie/beast/abomination] you encountered previously who had a killer right-hook and fancied nibbling on your leg like it was a chicken drumstick.  You rustle through your medic pack and apply your last bandage.  That’ll keep you going for a while.  You hope.

The facility’s main alarm goes off, alerting any nearby creature with even a passing interest in human flesh to your presence.  Your heart beats a little bit faster, unsure of what’s to come.  In the distance you make out the silhouette of some 7ft tall creature who’s making good progress towards you probably due to a good-fitting pair of trainers it took off the last victim.  Shotgun out: let’s go for a head shot shall we?  Nice and easy.  *click*.  Oh dear.

Rather than act with any kind of haste within this situation, your character finds it best to slow things down a bit.  You leisurely reload your gun, give it a good spit and polish, before realising the creature’s just a matter of metres away from you now.  You raise up your shotgun once more at the point where the creature’s forehead rests on the end of the barrel just as you pull the trigger and blow it’s head off.  Phew- that was a close one!

Not enough

Chances are, if you’ve played a RTS  at any point, then you may very well have encountered a similar scenario to the one I’ve painted above.  Some games handle this reasonably well: you’re either provided with an ample amount of health packs and ammunition, or at least a good, reasonable stock.  Other games leave you broke, quite literally.   I’ve mainly found this to be the problem with Fallout 3 and BioShock.  What sort of problems you ask?  It can range from lack of ammo, lack of money to buy ammo, or failing that… the weapon breaks.  Unreal!

To make matters worse, I usually find myself in these situations when an enemy I’ve encountered simply refuses to die (like emptying a few rounds of shotgun ammo onto them, the machine gun, the crowbar, and in-between all that, setting the b******* on fire about five or six times).  That particular example was BioShock, if you’re wondering.  And no, it wasn’t a Big Daddy.

I give up

Well, not quite.  If I’m going through a bit of a gaming slump, it doesn’t help matters that I’ve got a couple of perfectly good games just lying there, un-played for the most part.  Every time I fire them up again just to see if I can get a bit further, I’m presented with failure.  But there’s one trick left up my sleeve- the guidebook!  I plumped for the Fallout 3 official guidebook and was shocked at the sheer size of it.  Heck- it was giving some of my law books a run for their money!  Now, reading a big, chunky guidebook for trying to understand/play a game doesn’t really appeal to me, but I won’t be defeated by these games.  I’ll see how my reading goes, and I’ll report back on anything particularly amusing.

Does anyone else share my pain, or at least understand the problems I’m having?  Are you having similar problems?  Or am I just a lost cause?  This situation has been driving me mad for months, so it’s felt good to get this off my chest.  There, I’ve said it! :p

4 thoughts on “There’s just never enough bullets”

  1. Hmm, as you know I like my games to pose a bit of a challenge. It frustrates me with 'realistic' games such as Medal of Honor, when bullets present little damage to your enemy, but with arcadey games like Army of Two, I can tolerate it.

    Fallout 3, however, was fantastic in this respect. I loved being a genuine wastelander in the sense that I had to keep supplies replenished, but that it was never easy, and that I had to constantly maintain my weapons. To me, that's partly what made the game so great.

    I guess what I'm trying to say is, some games get away with it because it's an integral part of survival (aka Fallout 3), but others take the piss and it's a case of bad development (aka Medal of Honor fricking Airborne!). Either way, you don't want to walk through a game without having a challenge, do you?

    1. I've played plenty of other games that have thrown down the gauntlet and offered me a worthy challenge, but none have ever felt so blatantly unfair as Fallout 3. It felt like things would pretty much go the same way if I had to fend for survival myself in a post-apocalyptic future for real.

      For example, I killed a bad-ass mercenary early on in the bar in Megaton, everyone else started shooting at me, I died, and the game auto-saved, putting me back in the bar just as the guys started shooting me. That was game save number one wrecked. Three game saves later and I've gone for the guidebook as I've been getting nowhere.

      That brief story is just the tip of the iceberg for the grief that Fallout 3 has given me!

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