Stalk’s Videogame Corner: Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel

Posted on August 28, 2021 by stalkingvengeance

Game: Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel
Developer: Interplay Entertainment
Genre: Action Role-Playing Game
Releases: 2004 (PlayStation 2, Xbox)
Stalk’s Rating: 4/10

Before I start talking about the “good” games with the “Fallout” moniker, I thought that I could start a little differently for this franchise by picking one game that barely anyone will have played before. But first, some storytime: After games like “Fallout 1”, “Fallout 2” and “Fallout: Tactics”, Interplay was looking for the next game to release in the Fallout franchise. “Fallout 3: Van Buren” was already swarming in the heads of the developers and took shape at a rapid pace, but there was one other idea for a game that would be released before any other “Fallout” game would see the light of day; and it only killed the hope for any further games until Bethesda came around to pick up what was left of the “Fallout” franchise. That game was “Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel”. The idea was to make an Action-Roleplaying title in the likes of “Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance” for the consoles of that generation. Some might wonder why Interplay would decide to go for the console market after producing solely for PCs before, but that has to do with various decisions regarding their financial situation and probably a good portion of mismanagement. However, the decision to aim for the console market was eventually made and the “Fallout” IP had to be the sacrificial goat. Interplay managed to produce “Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel”, but the game was, and still is, pretty terrible for multiple reasons.

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Stalk’s Videogame Corner: 10,000,000

Posted on August 25, 2021 by stalkingvengeance

Game: 10,000,000
Developer: EightyEightGames
Genre: Puzzle Game, Role-Playing game
Releases: 2013 (Windows)
Stalk’s Rating: 6/10

Before we talk about the topic of the article, here is some storytime: Some years back, my old computer was on its last legs performance-wise. It was a good machine for the time it was running, but its age and the extensive usage made themselves noticeable when no game was running anymore without crashing after just a few minutes. Back then I still played quite a bit of “League of Legends”, but disconnecting about seven times per game on average due to my PC shutting itself off because of overheating really worsened the gaming experience. This was not only an issue when I wanted to play “League of Legends” obviously, but for a lot of other games that I had on my PC as well. Therefore, I needed some fun time-waster that was barely noticeable to my PC performance-wise, and after searching for a little while I found a suitable candidate.

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Archetype Analysis: Dragunity

Posted on August 21, 2021 by stalkingvengeance

Last updated: 04.02.2026 (WIP)

“Dragunity Knight – Romulus” serving as an example of how the archetypal monsters work together: By being rider and steed.

Yugioh is not an easy game to play; at least, not anymore. Back in the day, it was perfectly fine to summon one big monster (also known as any of the “Monarchs”) and work with that, but the game has evolved so much in terms of speed and combo-play that this strategy has become almost entirely unviable. Examples for the evolution of the game can also be found among archetype, some of which saw drastic changes in power, speed and consistency with newer cards being printed. One of those archetypes is “Dragunity”, which experienced quite an identity change from a fan-favorite with a unique and Control-focused approach to a “Hyper Combo”-deck with long combos and some incredible pay-offs. Due to that, “Dragunity” is certainly not an easy deck to master, but one that rewards good players with a myriad of choices and consistently stable end boards. In this article, I will try to give a glimpse at what the unity of dragons and birds can do, so buckle up and enjoy the ride.

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Sunburst – The shortest dawn in Magic history

Posted on August 14, 2021 by stalkingvengeance

“Five Suns, no power” is apparently the idea behind the “Sunburst” keyword.

The last time (and first time to do so, to be honest) I talked about Magic the Gathering keywords I chose “Tribute” as the subject of my scrutiny. “Tribute”, at least in my opinion, had a lot of room to be an interesting keyword, but WotC squandered their chance of making something with it; and due to their market research showing that players did not like the keyword, they are probably not going to revisit it any time soon. But this is not the only case for a keyword being done dirty that comes to mind: There are various other keywords with short appearances that left me wondering why there was so little interaction with them from a game design choice. All the while WotC always keeps mentioning that the decision to cut them came down to market research since players simply did not like the theme in question. In all honesty, I do not know how WotC’s market research looks like and they probably get a boatload of solid and sound data from doing it, but the idea of doing a bad job with a new keyword and then ditching it due to less than stellar feedback from the community somewhat puzzles me.

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Archetype Analysis: Monk

Posted on August 11, 2021 by stalkingvengeance

Last updated: 25.03.2026

See where training gets you? 600 additional ATK points, but you require a tribute now.

There are various archetypes in Yugioh, as I have mentioned countless times before, but back in the day, when archetypes were still unknown, certain strategies formed in the game due to card designers making some small series of cards that people could work with. Series are still a thing in modern Yugioh, with often seemingly random cards uniting to form a somewhat coherent strategy, with the only real difference to an archetype being that no cards refers to the name of the group of cards in some way, shape, or form. Now, some of those series aged in a pretty terrible fashion, and the topic of this article is no exception since we are talking about “Monk”, a loose group of cards with the stars of the show being the motley crew of “Chu-Ske the Mouse Fighter“, “Monk Fighter” and “Master Monk“. Let us see what they can do.

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Archetype Analysis: Vendread

Posted on August 7, 2021 by stalkingvengeance

Last updated: 06.02.2026 (WIP)

“Avendread Savior“, the hero this archetype needed.

When I first wrote this article, I asked around what archetype I should cover next and while there were a few suggestions available, I decided to go for one that fell from grace after the support cards left a lot to be desired: “Vendread”. See, Konami sometimes introduces so-called TCG-only archetypes that we in the lands of the TCG receive way before anyone in Asia can lay their hands on them. The most powerful of those archetypes was “Burning Abyss” and it seemingly dominated the meta so much that Konami loosened the powerscrew for everything that came afterwards; such as for the “Resident Evil”/”Spawn” inspired zombie apocalypse scenario we will take a look at in this article.

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