Collegiate Times

Read – Kick Ass 2 (Comic)

Kick Ass returns to print with volume one of “Kick Ass 2,” written by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.

Volume One, released on Oct. 20, 2010, picks up after Kick Ass left off. Hit Girl has taken up the challenge of training Kick Ass in hand-to-hand combat, often at the expense of Kick Ass’ ego.

The issue peeks into what has transpired since Kick Ass helped defeat Frank D’Amico. Hit Girl is struggling to adapt to a normal life while being cared for by Marcus and her mother who has made a return to her life. Kick Ass has inspired scores of other normal people with perhaps a slight hint of abnormal brain behavior to take to the streets and fight crime like he does.

Volume One doesn’t jump straight into story, but it is important that it sets the story up for the subsequent volumes to follow.

It appears Millar and Romita held onto the same art crew as the first Kick Ass, and the pictures look amazing. Hit Girl’s head seems to be way out of proportion in a few panels, but hey, it’s a comic book — not Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece.

Kick Ass 2: Volume One gets four kicks out of five.

Play – Fallout: New Vegas (PC – 360 – PS3)

The Fallout series made a return to consoles and PCs this past week with its latest installment: New Vegas.

New Vegas will appeal to both diehard Fallout fans and new players alike because it attempts to blend the nostalgic feel of the original games into the beauty of Bethesda’s Gamebryo engine, and it succeeds.

For those unfamiliar with the Fallout series, it is a long line of games in a retro-futuristic (that is, the future as envisioned by the 40s and 50s) wasteland setting after World War III essentially ended civilization as we know it. Originally, Fallout was a third person role-playing game, but Bethesda Softworks has adapted it into a first/third person shooter/RPG.

New Vegas returns to the western wasteland surrounding — you guessed it — Las Vegas. The Las Vegas area did not receive the direct nuclear bombardment that Washington, D.C., and Canada received and the infrastructure remained relatively undamaged, by the bombs at least.

The player takes the role of “The Courier,” a delivery boy ferrying a platinum poker chip who has been ambushed and left for dead. Part of the game is your effort to track down your would-be assassin and find out why that poker chip was so important.

The beauty of this game is you don’t have to follow the story. Feel free to strike out on your own and blaze your own trail through the Nevada wasteland. There are a multitude of factions with which you can ally yourself. Some of these return from Fallout past (the Brotherhood of Steel, the New California Republic), while some are entirely new (all of the casino-operating gangs vying for power on the Strip).

There are a few technical downsides to the game, however. One new annoyance is the change of combat mechanics. Unlike Fallout 3, in New Vegas you must wait for your gun’s firing animation to complete before doing anything. This means you can’t pause to heal yourself or switch out weapons quickly in the middle of reloading. It is a small change to the game but one that affects players greatly.

The game is also riddled with bugs: serious, game-breaking bugs. Several times the game has crashed without warning, and quests and non-player characters display wrong dialogues or behave erratically, meaning you cannot progress in your quests.

Bethesda has acknowledged this and is working on a patch for most of the bugs, but releasing a game in this broken state speaks volumes about Bethesda’s quality control.

Either that or it is an elaborate prank on zero-day game pirates.

Fallout is returning to its roots, but is plagued by problems. New Vegas gets three bottle caps out of five, but if the fixes end up working, I’ll fold to its royal flush.

Fallout: New Vegas gets three bottle caps out of five. 

A version of this article appeared in the Oct 26 issue of the Collegiate Times.