The iPad was supposed to be the saving grace of comics, and a lot of people think it’s doing that, but the Fallout: New Vegas comic, and subsequent reader, has left quite a bit to be desired. While the story if fun and everything you’d come to expect in a modern day comic, the reader and implementation leaves a lot to be desired.
Fallout: New Vegas is a graphic novel based on the popular Fallout gaming series. The iPad version is a preview of the Fallout New Vegas All Roads graphic novel. Thank God they released a preview, I would have been pretty pissed if I paid for this experience, even at a dollar.
Sometimes I wonder if the comic industry is just like the news print industry, stuck in the past, too big to change, and unable to cope with the new landscape. For once I’d like to see someone take the ball and run with it, instead of spiking it in last generation’s expectations. There’s a page scrubber, and cell by cell approach in this comic reader, and even an entire page at once view, but other than that, there’s nothing. It’s not innovative, and it’s certainly something we seen imagined previously in other comic readers.
kid
It wouldn’t even be that big of a deal, but the cell by cell mode is terrible. It works like you’d expect it to, tap to zoom in, swipe to jump to the next cell, rinse and repeat. That’s not the problem though, Fallout: New Vegas’ zoomed in view is pixellated and blurry. That, as far as I’m concerned is absolutely unacceptable, no matter how to frame it. Why do these companies insist on cutting corners and putting together half-assed digital comics, when instead, they could be focusing on redefining the industry entirely. I’ll never understand it.
If you want to read an interesting comic, and you don’t mind jumping between landscape and portrait mode to get an optimized viewing experience then go download it for free, but if you’re tired of pixellated and blurry text, then don’t waste your time.
