The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn is not actually a straight adaptation of the original story. It seems to be aimed more at kids who have never read Tintin before, which means that things needed to be changed around, as the ever-popular Captain Haddock (played here by Andy Serkis, aka Gollum and King Kong) was already an established character by this point. Spielberg’s solution? Mix in elements from The Crab with the Golden Claws, where he was originally introduced. Elements of the original Secret of the Unicorn have also been changed, which results in the movie being a fresh take on the material, even after I re-read the original story. Suffice to say that while there aren’t that many overall changes in the plot, what changes there are actually improved the material, though I’m sure there are many who are screaming at Spielberg for daring to alter even the slightest thing.

The acting is pretty solid, with Tintin being played by Jamie Bell (aka Billy Elliott), Dupont and Dupond (or Thompson and Thomson to everyone who didn’t read in the original French) by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (those two guys from Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz), and the villain being played by Daniel Craig (James Bond and Mikael Blomqvist from The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo). Popular Moroccan Jewish comedian Gad Elmaleh also has a minor role in the movie, but his appearance is so brief that his role feels wasted. The CGI is quite good in the movie, with almost every character looking as though they stepped out of the Tintin books. The only exception is Tintin himself, who has a realistic face, resulting in an uncanny valley effect (though the hair and clothing style is spot-on). The music in the movie is excellent, which is hardly surprising, considering that it was composed by the legendary John Williams.

The movie is very faithful to the books, even resisting the temptation to use the character Professor Calculus / Tournesol, which I grudgingly admit wouldn’t have worked because he only showed up in the follow-up to The Secret of the Unicorn, Red Rackham’s Treasure. (Though I’m still a little annoyed about this, since he was my favourite character). There are tons of little references to the various Tintin adventures scattered throughout the movie, and trying to find them all would probably warrant watching the movie a second time. If you look carefully, you may even spot a cameo by Hergé, the deceased creator of Tintin, at the beginning of the movie.

Overall, this was a great movie, which I feel most people would enjoy, but Tintin fans will especially love it. I’m hoping for more Tintin movies like this in the future (with more Tournesol, ideally). Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to re-read Tintin in Tibet.

Next Time: I finally get around to talking about Fallout 3′s DLC, followed by Fallout: New Vegas.

This was the first numbered game in the Fallout series to not be developed by Black Isle Studios or be published by Interplay. Black Isle had folded years before, but not before starting work on their own version of Fallout 3, code-named Van Buren, as well as releasing a demo. This was very different from the Fallout 3 that most people have played in virtually every way, but a lot of the story content was repurposed for Fallout: New Vegas later on. The Fallout 3 that came out in 2008 was made by Bethesda, who are also known for producing the Elder Scrolls series, with Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion being one of the most hyped games to come out around the launch of the Xbox 360. This meant that this Fallout would be very different: instead of being a turn-based game where stats were everything and the player had total freedom, Fallout 3 was a real-time game where stats were everything and the player had total freedom.

Wait, that actually sounds pretty similar. A better way to put it would be that the first two Fallout games looked like this:

While Fallout 3 looked like this:

Yes, many complained that Fallout had turned into another FPS. Fortunately, that was absolutely false. If anything, it was more like Oblivion with guns, which is valid because they took many gameplay mechanics from Oblivion and mixed with old Fallout mechanics. It even runs on the same engine as Oblivion, but looks much better.

The story was also fairly different from previous Fallout games. For starters, it didn’t take place on the West Coast anymore: the whole game took place within Washington D.C. and the surrounding area, including Arlington, Virginia. Your character lived in Vault 101 his entire life, but is forced to flee to the Wasteland outside when his father James (who is voiced by Liam Neeson) has left the Vault, with your character taking the blame from the very controlling Vault Overseer. You end up running into all the old Fallout mainstays during your journey to find your father, including the Super Mutants (who have become even more stupid than in the first game, if that’s possible), the Ghouls (with Feral Ghouls being among the most common enemies in the game), and the Brotherhood of Steel. Naturally, the Enclave joins in as the villainous faction again, being led by the mysterious and oddly affable President John Henry Eden, who is voiced by Malcolm McDowell, better known as Alex from A Clockwork Orange. Yes, I know that it’s odd that they hired a British guy to voice the American President, but Heroes was still big back then, and McDowell had a big role on that show, so Bethesda took advantage of it.

So how does Fallout 3 differ from the previous games, besides looking more like a standard console FPS? Well, Bethesda brought in the item repair system from the Elder Scrolls, but changed things around a bit. Instead of having to use repair hammers to fix items, you just needed to find another of that item and use that up to repair the other item. There were also unique versions of certain weapons and armour, which were generally better than their non-unique counterparts and could be repaired with those common items too. You could use a third-person perspective instead of first-person, but it was useless beyond just looking at your character, since aiming became very difficult. Bethesda compensated for the loss of the turn-based combat by creating the VATS system. VATS (short for Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System) used the Action Points of the old Fallout games, but did things a bit differently. By pushing a button, time would stop, and your viewpoint would zoom in on an enemy, with different body parts available for selection. Each body part had a different hit rate and would suffer different effects if crippled. You just picked whatever parts you wanted until you knew the enemy would run out of health or you ran out of Action Points, hit the confirm button, and watched the action. Alternatively, you could just shoot manually, but that was boring.

Above: A player who is either getting ready to shoot a Super Mutant or preparing to get his brains splattered by a sledgehammer from the future wielded by a giant yellow moron. With a tire for a shoulder pad.

A lot of old Fallout elements were kept, too. SPECIAL was still around, as were skills, though skills like Outdoorsman and Gambling were taken out. Perks were reworked to fit in with the gameplay changes, and you would get them every level instead of every third level. This meant that by level 20 (the highest level in the base game), you could be a walking tank, especially if you picked up power armour.

The main question is, however, if Fallout 3 is any good. I would have to say that it’s still a very good game, but doesn’t hold up as much when compared to Fallout: New Vegas, which made a lot of improvements. Fallout 3 was a very buggy game, even after patches, and there isn’t much to make it feel really connected to the older Fallout games. Though, considering that many people who bought Fallout 3 had never played the first two, that probably would have been for the best. The main story isn’t that well-written either, and the ending is just plain terrible unless you have the Broken Steel DLC installed. The Brotherhood of Steel is kind of meh here, too: while they’re more likable in this game because they try to help people in Washington, they also come off as more bland, since part of the appeal from before is that they were incredible jackasses who only cared about preserving technology.

There is fortunately quite a bit of good stuff here, too. Wandering through the DC ruins is a real pleasure, and a lot of the landmarks, including the Metro tunnels, are really accurate to their real-life counterparts. You also have an in-game radio that plays old tunes like “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” and “Maybe.” Killing groups of Super Mutants becomes even more fun when you have “Butcher Pete” playing in the background. While most of the companions are bland, Fawkes the Super Mutant, Sergeant RL-3 (who is a Mister Gutsy robot), and Dogmeat are great to have along with you, mostly by virtue of them being incredibly tough and hard-hitting. All the guns are satisfying to use. The two best elements, however, are Liberty Prime and the Fat Man.

The Fat Man is a very special weapon. It fires explosives, but not any regular explosives. It shoots miniature nuclear warheads.

That’s right, the game gives you a man-portable nuclear catapult. Sure, the warheads are really rare, but what other games can boast about letting the player shoot enemies with nukes?

Liberty Prime, on the other hand, is not a usable weapon. He is, in my opinion, the best NPC in the Fallout series. Why? He’s a giant robot that looks like Gort from The Day The Earth Stood Still that shouts out anti-Communist slogans while praising America. He also has laser eyes and throws Fat Man warheads like footballs. Behold:

The best thing to ever happen in Fallout

The only bad thing I can say about Liberty Prime is that he only moves around to kick Enclave ass in the final quest of the game, and can bug out sometimes, forcing you to load your last save again.

Overall, Fallout 3 is great, but after playing New Vegas, it just feels kind of dated.

Tune in next time, when I’ll talk about the DLC for Fallout 3.

Also, please leave comments for me. Constructive criticism is always appreciated.

The premise of the movie can pretty much be summed up as a disaster movie where the disaster is a global pandemic. What makes the movie work compared to other viral disaster movies like Outbreak (which is still good) is that the way the scenario is presented is entirely realistic, which helps make the entire experience frightening. The fact that the CDC gave scientific advice to the filmmakers is readily apparent, and makes the experience of watching Contagion not only harrowing, but educational as well. I certainly didn’t know what an R-nought was before I went to see the movie.

The disease in the movie (dubbed MEV-1) is definitely chilling: it spreads like the flu, but seems to be so dangerous that virtually everyone shown to be infected in Contagion is guaranteed to die. Steven Soderbergh’s signature style of showing the perspectives of multiple characters at once definitely works here: we have the husband of MEV-1′s first victim, played by Matt Damon, who is forced to deal with the death of his wife (Gwyneth Paltrow) and stepson while trying to make sure that his daughter doesn’t get infected herself. We also have multiple characters working for the CDC, including Laurence Fishburne and Kate Winslet, who are pretty much passing up on sleep in order to try and create a vaccine for MEV-1 while simultaneously trying to keep the general population from panicking and making the situation even worse. Marion Cotillard plays a doctor working for the WHO who is sent to Hong Kong to try and determine how the disease spread. Unfortunately, Cotillard’s character does not play a significant role in the film, and doesn’t get much screentime overall. Jude Law plays a sleazy conspiracy theorist with a blog, and ends up being the closest thing the movie has to a human antagonist. Despite first appearances, he is not the usual intrepid journalist; rather, it’s best to describe him as a greedy egomaniac with an Internet connection. Without spoiling anything, Law’s character manages to become the most unlikable person in the movie, but in a way that is entirely plausible, and should earn him a Best Supporting Actor nomination at the Oscars, if not the award itself.

One of the best parts of the movie is how it shows law and order breaking down due to government attempts to control the spread of MEV-1 by quarantining cities. Most might say that the number of people resorting to looting and mob violence to get vaccine doses is exaggerated, but seeing how people in Montreal are willing to riot over the Canadians winning a hockey game, it seems all too plausible for me. The seriousness of the situation in Contagion is, to me, best summed up by a scene halfway through the movie where the audience is shown a mass grave being filled with the bodies of the infected who have died. One doctor asks another when they ran out of body bags, and the other says that it was two days ago, and they’re waiting for more to come from Canada.

I also enjoyed the short appearance of Elliott Gould as one of the doctors working on figuring out how MEV-1 actually kills its victims. Who knew that Trapper John would go from treating soldiers in the Korean War to working with the CDC?

Overall, this was a great movie, hampered only by some characters having too little screentime. Definitely a must-see, unless you’re a germaphobe, get frightened easily, or happen to be sick.

Fallout 2 was released in 1998, just a year after the original game, and it shows, since they run on the exact same engine. There have been some slight changes in the game mechanics, and the game world is much bigger than before, but it otherwise looks more like an expansion pack than a sequel. But that’s fine. CRPGs aren’t exactly played for their graphics; it’s more about role-playing and experiencing the story, after all. I just think that if Black Isle worked on it for another year or so, the game might have ended up looking better. And would also have been less buggy.

Anyways, the game starts by explaining that you are a tribal from the village of Arroyo, which was founded by the Vault Dweller (the person you played as in the original Fallout). More specifically, you are the Vault Dweller’s grandchild, and the village elder (who is the Vault Dweller’s daughter) charges you with recovering a legendary device known as a GECK (Garden of Eden Creation Kit), which will help save the village from the famine and disease that is currently ravaging it. All the tribals of Arroyo know is that there probably is a GECK in Vault 13. Those of you who played the original game or read my previous post on Fallout know that Vault 13 is where you lived in the original game. Fallout 2 explains that there was a mixup in supply shipments to the Vaults before the war, and Vault 13 ended up with a GECK while another Vault got a ton of spare water chips. The tribals also know that a trader named Vic, who lives in the town of Klamath, recently left a Vault 13 canteen behind in Arroyo, and may know where the vault actually is. Before you can go off searching for him, you have to prove yourself as the Chosen One of your people by going through a temple of trials (which appears to actually be the ruins of a museum).

This set of trials serves as the tutorial of the game, and tells you what the rest of the game will be like: HARD. You’ll already have created your character by this point, and chances are you’ll have tagged skills relating to guns instead of close combat, which will already bite you, since you’re going to have to fight your way through the trials with a spear and your fists. Having few points in their corresponding skills means that you’re going to miss. A lot. Chances are you will die against the radscorpions and giant ants (Of course there are giant ants. Everyone knows that radiation makes insects grow abnormally large and vicious, right?). You’re also going to have to blow up a door (hope you know how explosives work!) and get into a fistfight with another tribal as the final test (though you can talk him out of it with high enough speech or just cheat and pull out your spear). Apparently Black Isle was forced to put in a tutorial at the last minute by Interplay (the publisher), and decided to make it really hard as their revenge. I think that punishing the players might have been a bad idea here, but I’m no game developer, so what do I know?

The Temple of Trials. You will learn to despise this place very quickly.

After the excruciating tutorial, you get to leave the village (though there’s some sidequests in the area that you should do first) and then you can do whatever you want. Seriously, there’s no specific place you have to go to first. I’ve even heard stories of people just going to one of the main villain bases, stealing as much stuff as they can carry (including the second-best armour in the game) and then going to the final area. I imagine that would be ludicrously hard, even by Fallout 2 standards, but I don’t doubt it’s possible.

One big improvement Fallout 2 makes in comparison to the original is the use of companions. In the original Fallout, companions ultimately proved detrimental by the end of the game, since they didn’t level up with you (or if they did, it wasn’t very noticeable). You also couldn’t give them orders, so they would do as they pleased, which tended to be bad news for you, as the AI governing companions was slightly dumber than a brain-damaged turkey. Well, the companion AI is still stupid in Fallout 2, but now you can actually mess around with their settings to regulate how they behave in battle (so now there’s less chance they’ll shred you with automatic shotgun fire because they were shooting through you at an enemy). You can also freely change their equipment by simply going through a conversation tree, whereas the original Fallout literally forced you to pickpocket companions to do this. Companions will level up, but less frequently than you do; this means that they will end up being useful at the end of the game, but not to the point that they make you feel like your character isn’t needed. Most significantly, you can actually have a small army of companions with you, depending on how high your Charisma stat is. That’s right, Charisma now has purpose beyond giving bonuses to Speech and Barter. Basically, every two points of Charisma translates to another companion slot, though I don’t remember this actually being mentioned in-game. Anyways, the possible companions are:

Sulik: a tribal you meet with in Klamath. Since Klamath is probably the first town you’ll visit in the game, chances are Sulik will be your first companion. To get him to join, you either have to pay off his debt to the local motel ($350, which is a lot at this point in the game) or rescue a guy from the Toxic Caves, which is quite difficult due to the radioactive sludge that’s all over the floor there (worth doing later for the Bozar, which is probably the best Big Gun in the game). Sulik specializes in close-combat, whether with his fists or trusty sledgehammer, though he can use any gun that uses the SMG animation. Give him a Mega Power Fist or Super Sledge later on with some power armour, and he’ll be smashing enemies across a room with a single hit, then running up to them and doing it a second time. Talks with a Jamaican accent and really hates slavers and bad guys overall.

Vic: the trader that you have to find who may know where Vault 13 is. While it turns out that he just bought the canteen off some guy who found it in the middle of nowhere, it’s still worth it to rescue him from the slavers in the Den, either by paying for his release or just killing them all (the latter is really only recommended when you’re very strong, since there’s quite a few slavers and they’re all well-armed). While fragile and not especially quick, Vic is deft with repairs and can end up being one of your best snipers. Give him a Gauss rifle or sniper rifle and watch him take down enemies with almost no effort. Just don’t let anyone get near him; a small breeze can prove dangerous for him. Quickly develops a tendency to call you “boss;” won’t stop even if you ask him to.

John Cassidy: A grizzled old man running a bar outside Vault City with a heart condition. When you meet up with him, he’ll offer to join you (provided you aren’t a child killer or slaver) for free, saying that he’s sick of putting up with all the crap Vault City security forces put him through. Think of him as Clint Eastwood in a post-apocalyptic future, and that about sums him up. Is a good shot with rifles and shotguns, and can slug it out with his fists as well. Probably the best companion in the game. If you can only take one companion with you, go with Cassidy. Just don’t give him any drugs besides regular stimpaks, or he’ll drop dead of a heart attack.

Myron: Teen genius who works for the Mordino family in New Reno. Developed a highly addictive drug known as Jet after killing hundreds of enslaved test subjects through testing that could only be described as a crime against humanity. Probably one of the most evil characters in the game, if not in the entire Fallout series, which is really saying something considering his competition. Is also near-useless as a companion, since he can only use pistols. His one redeeming feature is that he can make stimpaks for free if you give him the ingredients, but you’ll be so rich by the end of the game that even that is useless. Even killing him is more trouble than it’s worth, since the game will consider you a childkiller if you do it. Don’t even bother recruiting him.

Lenny: A Ghoul doctor who works in the town of Gecko. Once an inhabitant of Necropolis, he regrets not having gone with the Vault Dweller on his journey, and will ask to join you if you have a good reputation with the citizens of the town. Is notable for being the only character proficient with medical skills who can join up with you, and can take a beating to boot. Not the best companion, but you could do worse. Fairly flat as a character, though.

Marcus: The Super Mutant mayor of the mining town of Broken Hills. He’s basically a member of a race of proud warriors who once opposed humanity, but is now on such friendly terms with humans that he’s willing to work with them. Is also voiced by Michael Dorn, and can be described as the big guy of your team. Wait, am I describing Marcus, or Worf of Star Trek: The Next Generation? Anyways, Marcus is a pretty good companion, and is notably the only one who can use Big Guns and the really big energy weapons, like the Turbo Plasma Rifle. He’s one of the most interesting companions you get, but suffers from some downsides. He can’t equip armour, though his skin eventually becomes as tough as Mark II Combat Armour, and he has a tendency to kill your own guys with the bullets from most of the Big Guns. Give him something like the Turbo Plasma Rifle, though, and he’s pretty good in a fight.

Goris: A member of a modified group of Deathclaws who have increased intelligence and currently live in Vault 13. After they’re massacred by the villains (who created them), Goris will be the sole survivor, and will ask to join you in order to gain revenge. Is the smartest of the Deathclaws, as he proves himself to be quite literate and capable of human speech. Despite this, he is just as tough as any other Deathclaw, but you can’t give him new weapons or armour. Because of this, he’s OK as a companion. Has an awesome animation at the beginning of battle where he throws off his cloak.

K-9: An intelligent cyberdog who can be recruited at Navarro. He is just as erudite as Goris, but needs your help to get his legs working again. Is limited in use due to only having his teeth to fight with. K-9 is also an obvious reference to Doctor Who, and will not be the last one in Fallout 2.

Pariah Dog: The single worst companion in any game, ever. You encounter him randomly (depends on your Luck stat), and he will automatically join up with you and never leave. He also has 750 HP, which makes him one of the toughest characters in the entire game. What’s the downside? He comes with the Jinxed trait, which will cause everyone in your party to suffer incredibly bad luck, resulting in guns jamming, missing more often, taking critical hits more often, having their guns explode… You get the idea. His high health makes him tough to kill, he won’t help in a fight, and as soon as someone attacks him, he will flee the area, only to return on the next screen. If you encounter him, just reload your game.

Skynet: An AI you encounter in the depths of the Sierra Military Base. If you have a Science skill of 121%, you can install a cybernetic brain into a Robobrain, which Skynet will download itself into. Skynet can attack with it’s arms and whatever rifles you give it, but cannot recover health with stimpaks. It can repair itself somewhat in battle, but you’ll mostly have to let it heal after each fight. Not very good as a companion, but interesting in concept.

Fallout 2 greatly differs from the original in tone; namely, it is way darker. This is probably one of the darkest games I’ve ever played, including the Mass Effect games, where you have to deal with Mecha-Cthulu and all his friends coming to kill everything in the galaxy, make another one of them, and come back to do it all again in another 50 000 years. As mentioned before, there are slavers (who you can join up with), prostitution, mobsters, and villains who plan on committing genocide. Speaking of which…

Meet the Enclave. These mysterious soldiers have been going around the Wasteland and killing or abducting people with their advanced technology, including power armour beyond what the Brotherhood of Steel has and helicopters (“vertibirds” here), which are the only form of flight left in the world. While mysterious, they clearly demonstrate that they hate everyone they perceive as mutants, which includes everyone who isn’t one of them or a Vault dweller. Sound like the Nazis so far, don’t they? Well, you find out who they really are at the end of the game:

The United States government.

That’s right, the US government turns out to be the villains. They’v survived the war on an oil rig off the California coast, and were the ones who planned the Vault project in the first place. As it turns out, the Vaults weren’t meant to save anyone: they’re actually meant as experiments for the Enclave’s goal of going into space and colonizing another planet. Their plan is to use FEV (Forced Evolutionary Virus), which is what created the Super Mutants, and modify it into a supervirus that is lethal to any organism with even a trace of radiation. They’ve been abducting people from around the Wasteland in order to use them as test subjects, and when you finally get to their oil rig base with an oil tanker in San Francisco, they’re just about ready to deploy. You fight your way through the base, and eventually confront the president, Dick Richardson.

God, this guy is even scummier than he looks.

You can choose to just leave him alone or kill him, which you could easily do by just injecting him with a super stimpak and letting the damage side-effect kill him. You then can set the base to self-destruct or convince a scientist to change the FEV enough so that it’ll affect the Enclave instead, then unleash it on the base. Either way, you have to make a run back to the tanker, and then you meet the final boss right at the exit: Frank Horrigan, Secret Service Agent.

You don't want to mess with this guy.

Voiced by Michael Dorn (I guess Black Isle really like him on Star Trek), he is the only final boss in the series who cannot be talked down: you HAVE to fight him. You can convince some fleeing Enclave troops to lend you a hand, or you could hack some turrets, but otherwise, you’re going to have to take him out before the place self-destructs. He has the best power armour in the entire series and uses the unique Endboss Plasma Gun and Endboss Knife (the latter of which is the size of a sword). Once you take him out, you get to go home to Arroyo with the GECK (you did pick it up, right?), and the village ended up becoming a prosperous city. You also get a slideshow detailing how your actions affected the Wasteland; you might, for example, have slept with the wife or teenage daughter of a mob boss in New Reno, which would have gotten the one you slept with pregnant with your son, who ends up taking out all the competition and ruling the city himself (this is confirmed in Fallout: New Vegas).

I mentioned earlier that this game got really dark, but it also has a lot of humour at the same time. It proves quite jarring to run into Monty Python’s Knights of the Round Table (who also have Holy Hand Grenades that you can get from them) or the Doctor’s TARDIS. They’re funny, sure, but they don’t really fit in. Still, this is a good game, though there was a lot of content cut out (for which there are mods). Overall, I’d recommend Fallout 2, but Fallout is still the better of the two, if you ask me.

Join me next time, as we head to the Washington D.C. area for Fallout 3, and all the RAGE that accompanied it.

Credit goes to The Vault (http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout_Wiki)

Fallout (or Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game), which was produced by Black Isle Studios and published by Interplay, has a fairly straightforward plot: Your character is an inhabitant of Vault 13, one of several vaults built to protect people from nuclear war. The game takes place in the year 2161, but the war itself took place all the way back in 2077, and the game never really says whom the USA fought against (though Fallout 3 later showed that it was against the People’s Republic of China). Anyways, your character has never been outside the vault in his or her life, until the computer chip that regulates the water supply of Vault 13 breaks down. There also happens to be no spares in the vault, which means that someone has to venture out into the California wasteland to try and find a new water chip before everyone dies. Naturally, since you’re the player, you get chosen. You get to create your character, and then you’re booted out of the vault with little more than a pistol, some ammo, a knife, and some basic medical supplies. From there, you have 150 days to find a new water chip and get it home. Beyond that, however, you’re free to do as you please. Naturally, things don’t stay that simple, but more on that later.

It may not look like much now, but this was cutting edge back in the '90s

The tone of the game becomes fairly clear during the video that plays when you start it up. It shows a black and white TV commercial praising the army that looks like it came straight out of the 1950s, except for the fact that the soldiers are wearing power armour (big metal suits that make soldiers incredibly strong and tough as a tank). It’s so cheesy that you can’t help but laugh, right until the part where it announces that the USA has invaded Canada. It then cuts to two soldiers marching two prisoners, with the prisoners (who I assume are Canadian soldiers) trying to make a break for it before being ruthlessly gunned down. One of the soldiers then turns to the camera and waves, and it goes back to the commercial. At this point, the camera begins zooming out to show the player that the commercial was playing on a TV in a building that is little more than rubble. It’s a great opening, and manages to convey to the player that this game is going to use a lot of black comedy to accompany the horrors of nuclear war.

This is what power armour looks like, in case you were wondering

Fallout managed to stand out from its peers beyond the uniqueness of the setting through how it approached gameplay. When you created your character, you had to put points into your character stats of Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck (or SPECIAL). You then had to put points into your skills and then “tag” 3 of them, which would then double and would go up by 2 points instead of just one whenever you put more points into them. The skills themselves are quite diverse, ranging from combat skills like Small Guns and Energy Weapons to survival skills like Outdoorsman and First Aid, and even included skills like Gambling and Speech. For the record, I usually went with Small Guns, Lockpicking, and Speech, if only to stay well rounded. You didn’t get much in the way of appearance customization: you got to choose if your character was a man or woman, and that was it. The weapons and armour you would pick up later in the game would show up, but that was about it. Having an intelligence stat lower than 5 made you speak like the Hulk, though. You also got to take up to two traits at character creation that gave you bonuses and penalties (Gifted basically broke the game by giving you an extra point in all your stats at the cost of some skill points, which you would be swimming in by the end of the game). Every third level, you could also take a perk, which would give you a special bonus: Sniper, for example, would give a significant increase in critical hits with ranged weapons, to the point that having 10 Luck meant getting a critical hit on every shot.

Like most RPGs, you get experience points for fighting enemies and accomplishing tasks for people, but there was usually more than one way to go about doing things: after all, you had all those skills for a reason. Fallout was unique at the time in that fighting wasn’t the only way to solve problems (though most of the mutants and bandits you would run into wouldn’t exactly respond to negotiations). Instead of just shooting someone in the face, you could just as easily talk someone down or sneak around and plant a stick of dynamite in their pocket before running for your life. Fighting was entirely turn-based, and revolved around spending Action Points (AP) to perform actions like movement, shooting, and opening your inventory. While it was usually faster to just shoot normally, you could also spend an extra AP to aim at specific body parts on a target to achieve different effects. Shooting someone in the leg, for example, would make it more difficult for them to move around. You could aim at pretty much any body part your opponents had, and yes, that does include the groin. There’s many stories of people doing something completely ridiculous, like shooting a rat in the groin… with a rocket launcher. This would typically result in one of Fallout’s more gruesome death animations, which also helped to set it apart from the pack, though they could easily be switched off.

Yes, you could shoot at a two-headed cow

You didn’t have to venture into the wasteland on your own, though. You could also recruit certain NPCs (non-player characters) as companions, who would help you carry all that precious loot of yours and would lend you a hand in combat. The most prominent of these companions was Dogmeat, mostly due to the fact that he was a dog. These companions weren’t necessarily helpful, since they proved to be incredibly stupid, and could prove to be just as much of a danger to you as they were to your enemies. All that needs to be said here is that you never want to give a companion a fully automatic weapon, unless you enjoy seeing your character get shredded to pieces. Like all the characters in the game (except for you, of course), if these companions were killed in battle, they were dead for good. This also meant that you could potentially kill everyone you met, including children, though killing innocents lowered your karma meter and gave you a bad reputation in the wasteland, and killing children would make many people outright hostile towards you.

The cast of characters you could meet was quite diverse as well: there were normal humans living in settlements, as well as the typical bandits, but there were also ghouls: people who had been changed by the radiation of the war into immortal, sentient zombies, and were often discriminated against as a result. While most characters were silent, you would occasionally run into some who were at least partially voiced, and those characters (such as Killian Darkwater and Gizmo) were some of the most interesting characters in the game.

Set may not be the prettiest face in gaming history, but that doesn't mean he isn't a nice guy! (He's actually even nastier than his appearence)

The enemies you went up against were also fairly unique. While you would still run into bandits and large rodents, you also had to contend with malfunctioning robots, cultists worshipping a nuclear bomb, and the dreaded deathclaws. Deathclaws were especially terrifying: while they could only attack you up close, their claws were among the most dangerous attacks in the game, and could outright ignore your armour. Later on, you would run into bloblike monsters (floaters) and super mutants.

All this deathclaw wants is a hug. And maybe to eat you.

Super mutants were particularly important, since the latter half of the game’s plot revolved around them. You first encountered them slaughtering the inhabitants of the ghoul city of Necropolis, where you also had to go to find the water chip. The leader of the mutant attacking the city, who happens to be the dumbest character in not only Fallout, but possibly any other game out there, reveals that they’re looking for Vault humans, and that there are many more super mutants out there. When you got back to Vault 13 and reported this to the Overseer, you would get new orders to find out more about the mutants and stop them before they reached the Vault.

Harry here is so dumb, he refers to his superior as Lou Tenant and will believe become confused if you tell him that you're not a ghoul, human, or super mutant. I am not making this up.

Originally, the game only gave you 500 days to accomplish this, but this was changed in a patch to be unlimited. In order to learn more about the super mutants, you had to go to the Brotherhood of Steel, a militant organization that had dedicated itself to preserving pre-War technology, which included energy weapons (lasers and plasma rifles) and power armour. In order to join though, you’re told that you have to recover some old military records from a nuked military base known as the Glow. You had to be incredibly careful here, since lack of preparation in this area could lead to you dropping dead of radiation poisoning. Once you found the records (and looted everything useful from the base), you returned to the Brotherhood, who would accept you as a member, give you a suit of power armour, and point you towards two locations of mutant activity. Mariposa Military Base was where the mutants were taking captured humans and turning them into more super mutants, and was run by the Lieutenant, who was voiced by Tony Jay, who most people would probably remember as the villain from Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and every other deep-voiced villain in a cartoon or video game from before 2004.

Unlike Harry, the Lieutenant is definitely a credible threat, being big, strong, and incredibly smart.

The other location was the Cathedral, where the leader of the super mutant army was located. You had to fight off hordes of cultists and their leader Morpheus, only to discover that the Cathedral was itself built on top of an abandoned vault. When you ventured down to the bottom, you finally got to face off with the Master, who is one of the creepiest video game villains ever. I mean, just look at him!

To make things worse, one of the people voicing this guy is also the voice of Tigger from Winnie the Pooh. Your childhood memories are now ruined.

This part of the game is where Fallout really demonstrates freedom of choice: While you could choose to just shoot the Master until he dies and then set off a nuke, you could beat the game without even pulling out a gun here. You could hack his turrets so that they shot him instead of you, or just talk him into suicide by showing him an autopsy report that proves super mutants are completely sterile. You then returned to the Vault, where you lived happily ever after… If this was another game. What really happened is that the Overseer banishes you from Vault 13 because he’s worried that you’ll endanger the inhabitants of the Vault by making them want to explore the outside world (the reason for this worry is only revealed in Fallout 2). Your character (known in the sequel as the Vault Dweller) went on to found a tribal village… But that’s something to talk about when I get to Fallout 2.

Fallout still stands up today as one of the best CRPGs ever released. Admittedly, the graphics haven’t aged too well, and it’s significantly different from the more recent Fallout games. But it still has a strong story and setting, the gameplay is fairly easy to get into and holds up today. It is a fairly buggy game, and the graphics don’t work quite right on modern computers, so it’s worth looking around on the Internet for mods and bug fixes to get around these issues. It’s easy to find these days, too: Digital distribution services like Steam, Direct2Drive, and Good Old Games sell Fallout 1,2, and Tactics for $5 or $6, and you could probably find it on DVD-ROM in a store for $15-20. The best would probably be the Good Old Games version, since the downloads are automatically patched, and they throw in a bunch of extras.

I’ll be back on Thursday or Friday with a post on Fallout 2, which will ideally be shorter.

I profess that I have never been that big a fan of Apple products. Even I would have to admit, however, that Apple has had a major influence on the computer industry. It was Apple, after all, that released the first mass-produced PC (the Apple II) way back in 1977. Back then, people felt that computers were meant to be used for business, not at home. The wild success of the Apple II, which was mostly designed by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, proved this way of thinking wrong, and by 1983, Apple had made it onto the Fortune 500 at a speed that nobody had achieved before, and has yet to be replicated.

Note that I wrote the Apple II came out in 1977. Windows may be the more popular brand of OS these days, but what everyone (including myself at one point, regrettably) forgets is that it was Apple that made PCs big first.

Apple didn’t only revolutionize the PC, either: almost everyone these days seems to own some variation of iPod, iPad, or iPhone. Even my grandmother, who barely uses computers, has become a real expert when it comes to her iPad 2, and it barely took her any time to get used to it.

I still remember when I was first given an iPod Mini as a Bar Mitzvah gift from my uncle back in 2004. These days, the mini looks absolutely primitive: pretty much all you could do with it was listen to music or play the few games that came on it. The screen was black and white, the battery life wasn’t so great, and it only had 4 GB of space, which is less than what you would get on a $15 USB key these days. But in 2004, this was a huge deal for me, since the last portable music player I had tried using was a bulky Discman, and I had learned very quickly that trying to listen to music with it and walking around at the same time was a bad idea. All of a sudden, here I was with this tiny little device that I could just plug into my computer, choose the songs I wanted to upload, and I was pretty much good to go. I managed to get about 3 years of use out of that iPod before the battery finally started to go on the fritz, but in those 3 years, I had started to listen to music a lot more than I used to.

After that, my parents and I made the long trek to Carrefour Laval (re: 20-25 minute drive) to trade in the iPod mini at the Apple Store there, which was the only one in the Montreal are at the time. By this point, my brother had gotten an iPod Video (what they call an iPod Classic now, to all you younger readers), so I decided that I had to have one as well. Thus, I walked out of the Apple Store that day clutching the iPod Video box, which seemed absolutely miniscule compared to that of the Mini, which probably had to do with the fact that this didn’t come with an AC adapter. I didn’t care, though: the memory had expanded considerably, and was now a whopping 32 GB. The screen was finally in colour, and most importantly, I could watch videos on the iPod, which I proceeded to with gusto. Now everyone in my family was hopping on the iPod bandwagon: my dad had one, my mom had a Shuffle, and even my little sister was clamoring for one.

This iPod didn’t last as long as the Mini, though, but not because of dwindling battery life. After the McGill Open House in Fall 2008, I went to the McGill metro station and looked in my jacket pocket, only to find that my iPod and case were gone, but not my headphones. It must have either fallen out of the pocket or, more likely, been stolen. I called McGill security later to ask them to let me know if they found it, but I never heard back. I was crushed: I had worked hard to earn the money I spent on that iPod, and now it was gone. As a temporary solution, I borrowed my brother’s old iPod Video, which developed some kind of faulty connection in the headphone jack and was replaced by the iPod Nano (which my sister also had by this time). Ultimately, the two of us came to the agreement that the best thing to do would be to trade in the old iPod at the Apple Store for a new one, since trading in gave a decent discount. My dad suggested that I get an iPod Touch instead of the iPod Classic, but at the time, I thought that a massive internal drive (160 GB, which was more space than my computer at the time had) trumped the myriad features of the Touch. Considering that I bought an iPhone 4 last winter and gave the iPod Classic to my brother, I suspect my dad ultimately got the last laugh on this one.

During the 8 years that have passed since I first got that iPod Mini, the rest of my immediate family have gone for Apple way more than I have. My brother and sister both use iPods (Touch for my sister, Classic for my brother) and Macbooks; my mom has been using her iPad as a substitute laptop and bought an iPhone 4 a week after I did. My dad is probably the biggest Apple fan now, though: he bought an iPhone 4 early on. Not only that, but when I got my current computer (a Samsung R522), he told me that when he replaced his HP laptop, he would probably get a Mac. He clearly remembered those words 2 years later, since he not only bought an iMac, but also a Macbook Air. His one complaint is that he has trouble getting his accounting software running on the Mac OS. As for me, I have to admit that I’ve contemplated eventually getting a Macbook of some sort, but only if it ends up having a good video card and some form of Windows on it. Really, the fact that I need those for most of the computer games that I own is one of the few things that keeps me from getting a MacBook; that, and the fact that my laptop is only 2 years old and doesn’t need replacing for quite a while yet.

It’s hard for me to imagine how things would be different if it wasn’t for all these wonderful gadgets that Apple came up with; it’s even harder to imagine how things would be different if the Apple II didn’t bring computers into the home. I haven’t even gone into the influence the iTunes store, the App Store, and iBooks have had on the market and on the development of computer technology today. What I do know is that it’s mostly thanks to Steve Jobs and the various people working behind the scenes at Apple that these devices have had such an influence on my life and that of so many others.

Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me. – Steve Jobs

The problem was that the directions were wrong. I didn’t know it at the time, but Google Maps had actually failed me for the first time and gave me wrong directions. When I say wrong directions, I don’t mean that I got directions for the long way. I mean that I got directions for somewhere else entirely. Unfortunately, I didn’t know this at the time, so I simply assumed that I knew where to go and got my suit ready for the next day.

I left my house around 1 PM and walked over to the nearest Metro station in my suit, which took about 15 minutes. I followed the directions from Google (which I kept on my phone so that I could always consult them again if I forgot where to go) and ended up at a park in Saint-Laurent instead of an office building. At this point, I was shocked. As I said before, Google Maps had never given me wrong directions before. Sure, I’ve managed to get lost using it anyways, but that’s more because I’m utterly lacking in a sense of direction. I did the only thing I could think of at the moment: I called the insurance company (I’m glad I wrote the number down, at least) to ask for directions. To my great misfortune, the secretary wasn’t a local, so she had no idea how to get there using public transportation. I couldn’t even talk to the person who had called me yesterday, because it turns out that she’s in Seattle right now trying to recruit more people for the company (which is actually an American company; the office was just a local branch).

I decided that I would go back to the nearest Metro station (which meant waiting for a bus again, although I luckily only had to stand around for a few minutes at the bus stop across the street from me) and ask for directions there. I was told to head to the next stop over and take a bus from there. I did so, and after asking around a bit, I managed to get the right bus. I ended up making it to the highway, only to find out one important detail: The office was on the other side of the highway. It’s not like I could just stroll across, either. Even if there weren’t thousands of cars zooming by, there were fences that kept me from simply dashing across, which would have been a suicidal idea. The only thing I could do was walk to the overpass (which was about half a kilometer from where I was standing), cross it, and try and find the right service road to follow to the office. I eventually managed to make it without getting run over somehow.

By the time I actually got there, it was already 3:30. Remember that my interview was supposed to be at 2:20. This means that I was already over an hour late. It didn’t help that I didn’t even look presentable anymore; I was quite literally drenched in sweat because of all the walking and the heat, which was even dripping into my eyes. When I walked into the office, the secretary told me that the interviewer had left, but that I could come back for another interview on Tuesday and that I just needed to fill out some forms. At this point, all I could think was that there was no way I could come back here. Even without the mix-up with the directions, this place is too far to get to by public transportation. Also, I have to admit that I can’t stand even the thought of having to go to work in a suit every day during the summer. If I didn’t die, my bank account almost certainly would, because I would need to have my suit dry-cleaned constantly, and that would cost a fortune. I decided to fill out the forms anyways and go along with it, because I figured that it wouldn’t kill me. At least the secretary was nice enough to offer me some bottled water; I certainly needed it, considering it was around 25 degrees and I hadn’t had anything to drink for the past few hours.

I finished filling out the forms and left around 4. Now I had to deal with getting home. This turned out to be the easy part, albeit long and tedious. Google Maps didn’t fail me again: I managed to make my way to a bus stop where I could get back to the Metro in less than 10 minutes. The problem was that I had to walk even further back than where I had originally been, and I still had to cross the highway again. Even when I got to the bus stop, I had to wait for a while, since the bus was running late. I eventually got to the Metro, and got off at a station where I could take the bus straight to my house. Once again, I ran into a problem: I had missed the bus. It’s not like this was one of those buses that comes by every 10 minutes, either: I would have to wait half an hour before it would actually arrive. I ended up taking the Metro back to the station closest to my house and walked up a steep hill for another 15 minutes before finally getting home.

Now my suit needs dry-cleaning, I’m too worn out to stand up without having some trouble keeping my balance, and the shirt I was wearing probably needs to be washed in holy water and dried with a flamethrower. Still, I at least I managed to get some exercise today!

… I know that’s not really a bright side, but that’s the only positive thing I could come up with about today, so deal with it.

We stuck around for a quick breakfast in the morning before getting driven back to the hotel, where we grabbed the rest of our things and drove through the very dangerous looking mountains to Ouarzazate. We wandered around town for a bit before stumbling upon some shops, where my mom out bargained some shopkeepers for some plates, which is more entertaining than it sounds. On Wednesday, we drove to the nearby Atlas studios, where several movies had scenes filmed, including Jewel of the Nile, Gladiator, The Mummy Returns, Kingdom of Heaven, and Asterix et Obelix: Mission Cleopatre (which is still one of my favorite French movies). We then drove to one of the nearby kasbahs, and by nearby, I mean that it was 25 km away from the studios. Despite the fact that we got to ride donkeys across a river, the kasbah proved to be a big disappointment for me, since it was pretty much a smelly ruin that looked like it was still in a severe state of decay, despite being a UNESCO site. We then spent the rest of the day driving to Marrakech, where we discovered that the duplex room we had reserved at the Golden Tulip Farah was quite small.

We spent most of the last day of 2009 going through the city’s medina, which I didn’t enjoy as much as the one in Fes, since it felt much more crowded and smellier, and all we were doing was shopping, which made me feel incredibly bored. All I bought were two hats (a fez and a leather hat, all for the the equivalent of $15 CAD). We also looked at the Saadian tombs, which seemed less impressive than what I expected, seeing as how it looked like a churchyard. We then went over to the Bahia palace, which turned out to be an art museum, and while it was more interesting than anything else we had seen that day, it still didn’t measure up to the Fes medina. We went to a nice French restaurant called Metro 80 for dinner, and celebrated the new year in our hotel room (although we didn’t get to see any North American New Year celebrations on TV, since it was only 7:00 PM back here at that moment.

We spent Thursday morning in the medina again, and it proved to be of approximately the same level of interest to me as the day before. We then drove over to the Majorelle Gardens, which had been previously been owned by fashion designer Yves Saint-Laurent. I expected it to be filled with flowers, which would set off my hay fever and make me feel miserable for the rest of the day. Luckily, I ended up being wrong, as it consisted mostly of bamboo shoots and various types of cactii, which proved to be very interesting. On a funnier note, we ran into the Americans from Erfoud on the way into the gardens, and they seemed to be dressed in the same clothes as they had been on Monday, and still couldn’t pronounce the city names properly. We then drove over to the city of Essaouria, and arrived just in time to see the sun set over the Atlantic Ocean, which was beautiful. We stayed in a Riad near the edge of the very small medina, which was probably the best hotel of the trip. We walked around the medina before getting some supper in a restaurant that proved to have very good food, but very slow service. I went back to the hotel before dessert, and ended up seeing our waiter having a smoke outside the restaurant.

We ate breakfast on the rooftop terrace Saturday morning and walked around town some more. It was then that I stumbled upon something that I hadn’t even hoped to see during the trip: a bookstore with recognizable books. For whatever reason, there were even books by Stephen King in there, which I would never have expected to see in a Muslim country, considering how explicit they can sometimes get, but then again, it is considerably more moderate than, say, Iran. After a quick lunch, we got into the car and drove off to our final stop, the resort city of Agadir. After checking into the hotel, we walked around trying to find a highly recommended pizza restaurant. We couldn’t find it at first, but it turned out that we had walked about 7 blocks in the wrong direction, so we turned back and eventually found it. My siblings and I lounged around the room watching Arnold Schwarzenegger spew out hilarious one-liners on TV, while my parents decided to drive around town for a while.

On Sunday morning, we packed up our bags, checked out, and drove to the Agadir airport to go home. We gave Putt-Putt back to the guy from the rental company on the way into the airport, which gave a sense of finality to the entire trip. However, when we went inside, we found out that we had to go through security and customs, despite the fact that we were flying to Casablanca before getting on the plane to Montreal. The flight itself went smoothly, although things at the Casablanca airport got considerably more annoying. First, we had to go through security again before being allowed access to the terminal for international flights. When we got their, the gate that we were supposed to go to wasn’t listed yet, so we killed some time in the duty-free shops. When the flight was finally listed, it was listed as boarding, so we rushed to the gate, which took a while to find due to the strange layout of the terminal. We then had to board a bus to another terminal, where we had to go through security a third time. We then were told that the flight had been delayed for about an hour, so we had to sit around in a terminal where the only place that served food didn’t have any food to serve. The flight back home was comfortable, although I didn’t manage to get much sleep. We had to show our passports as soon as we got off the plane, which was odd, but the line at customs was fairly short, and our luggage came out very quickly, so everything seemed to be going smoothly. This illusion was shattered when we saw the line for taxis, which seemed to go on forever. We ended up waiting for an hour and a half in line before we could finally get a taxi, but we eventually made it home. Not the best way to end a good trip, but at least I’m home again.

We stayed at the Pietri, which was a very nice hotel, and I didn’t even have to share a room with my parents or sister, which meant that it was much quieter in the room, since only my brother was in there with me. We ate dinner in the hotel restaurant that night, which proved to be very good, and went to sleep early.

We ended up waking up fairly late because of jetlag, so we missed most of the food at breakfast. We walked around the neighborhood, and found my mom’s old apartment building and school. She seemed extremely happy to see these places again, and considering that she left the country when she was twelve, I can’t really blame her. We then walked over to the tomb of King Hassan II, the previous king, which was located in the ruins of an incomplete mosque. Not only was the sheer size of the ruins breathtaking (it was supposed to be the biggest mosque in the Middle East at the time, after all), but it also had a great view of the city. When we got back to the hotel, we found out that the tire we had just inflated the day before was now completely flat, so my dad had to call the rental company, and when he also mentioned that he couldn’t lock the trunk, they sent a guy with a replacement car from Casablanca. As it turned out, my dad hadn’t realized that the trunk and doors were locked by remote, making for a hilarious moment when I reminded him how he had said earlier that “Either the trunk is broken, or I’m an idiot,” although he took this jab pretty well. The guy who had picked up the car then told us that not only was a second tire deflating, but they both appeared to have been slashed with a knife, which was definitely worrying. In any case, the replacement works fine, although it’s still a clunky car overall.

For some reason, we managed to outdo ourselves and sleep until 9:30 the next morning, so we had to rush through breakfast in order to scramble into the car to travel to the Kasbah, an old fort which is a sizable neighborhood. One of the local guys followed us and took it upon himself to be our guide, despite the fact that we didn’t ask him to. At the end of our wandering, he even asked to be paid, and complained how we underpaid him afterwards. It started raining right around then, so we ran to the car and drove around for a while. We then went to the local medina, which was a) filled with people selling cheap knockoffs of clothes and DVDs and b) very dirty. Still, it was an interesting experience, although it mercifully didn’t smell as bad as the market on the Rue des Consuls, which smelled of dead animals (I thought this was because of tanneries, but apparently they were nowhere nearby). We then went back to the hotel to get our things ready for the long journey to Fes.

We ended up spending most of the day driving to Fes, but mostly because we spent a few hours in Meknes, the town where my mother was born. Everyone agreed that the city looked like a dump: we ended up having to eat a shwarma pizza at the local Pizza Hut because everything else looked terrible, and most of the city seems to be turning into a shining example of urban decay. We did have a bit of a laugh when we found the grocer where my mom would go with her cousins to steal chocolate in her childhood (right across the street from her grandmother’s house, no less) and she went to ask the guy running the store what happened to the previous owner (he didn’t know, thus averting a potentially humorous moment). By the time we actually got to Fes, it was dark, so we had some trouble finding our hotel. The hotel turned out to be a riad (Riad Damia, to be exact), a massive house that was converted into a hotel with 7 or 8 rooms that was located at the edge of the gargantuan medina. We have a massive apartment that takes up the entire top floor, which is so beautiful that I think that I’ll be constantly thinking my room at home is a major downgrade. Anyways, getting food was a bit of a pain, since the medina is a massive maze that becomes very creepy in the dark, leading to my constantly expecting a mugger to pop out of the shadows. A local guy named Said was kind enough to lead us to a good restaurant and then lead us back to the riad after dinner for free.

We spent most of Friday getting the grand tour of the medina… which proved to be only a small taste of the area (which is made up of 9000 or so streets, most of which don’t even have names). It’s a good thing that we had a guide, otherwise we would have gotten lost and never found our way back. Our guide, Rachid, showed us various landmarks in the medina, including the first university in the world (which is now a mosque, but still very impressive). We also got to see the inside of a large house, which was perfectly indistinguishable from every other house in the area from the outside, but could easily fit my house inside twice over, which was very impressive. Rachid then guided us over to the part of town where various ceramic products, such as pots and fountains, are hand-crafted. We got to see how everything was made, and I was strongly reminded of the process used to manufacture glass at Murano in Venice.

We visited my mom’s uncle Albert for what proved to be a very long lunch on Saturday at his apartment in downtown Fes, right near the train station. We also got to meet some of his friends from France, and we ended up staying from around 12:30 until 3:30, when we excused ourselves to go visit the Roman ruins of Volubilis. Unfortunately, we didn’t actually get to go near the ruins, since we only got there around dark, so the best we managed to do was take some pictures from a distance. Guess we’ll have to go visit the ruins the next time we visit Morocco (whenever that may be). Tomorrow, we’ll be driving down to Erfoud, which is going to take the entire day (especially if the all of the rain from the past week makes the driving more difficult).