My dear readership, it’s time that we talked about something near and dear to the heart of every gamer. That subject? Baseball!

[/President John Henry Eden]

Or maybe we should talk about Fallout 3 instead – a game where there is less hitting of balls with sticks, and more hitting of supermutants with plasma rifles. And gatling lasers. Oh yes, the gatling lasers.

Since I’m late to the party, I’ll build off Samson’s review of the game. Since this is essentially Oblivion with guns, if you for some reason never played it, my review of that is here.

I’ll do some non-spoilerish comments first, then talk about some stuff in more spoileriffic detail later.

The Good

- The graphics are excellent. They build on the foundations that Oblivion laid, and sometimes too well, as the wastes are bleak, man. Often is the time that I emerge from a cross-country trek through the wilds, gazing at the browns and greys of the wastes, wishing there was a giant robotic kitten somewhere to give everybody a hug.

That having been said, there’s a certain epic feel, as an American, to seeing the results of nuclear war on the nation’s capitol. The entire Mall is…yeah.

- The radio stations. They get repetetive, sure, but Enclave Radio is worth price of admission – many is the time I stalked the ruins of DC while listening to the Battle Hymn of the Republic, or shooting raiders in Springvale School while listening to the president of America, the president of my heart, John Henry Eden, talk about romping with his dog and making everything better for the children.

- The environment. Unlike Oblivion, almost all of the places here are fully realized, even if they’re just random buildings out in the middle of nowhere. Even the non-quest related areas have their own stories to tell, if you dig into them enough, or you can easily imagine what might have transpired there. Too, the environments vary enough, both interior and exterior, to remain interesting, although I got very very tired of ruined office buildings by the end. OTOH, whereas Samson hated the DC Metro system, I loved it. Almost all of them were great dungeons, and I loved going through them.

Special mention for the Vaults here, but I’ll come back there in the spoilers.

- Difficulty. For the most part, once I hit about level 3, difficulty was fairly appropriate, although I lucked out by picking up a Chinese assault rifle early on. I had a lot more trouble keeping in ammo than I did not dying, since stimpacks weren’t particularly hard to get ahold of (I had about 90 at the end of the game, used 200+ more, and bought some all of about twice). That having been said, the enemies were still challenging enough, and I have a special hate for giant radscorpions. Unlike Oblivion, it all felt appropriate for the most part.

- The Main Quest. About half of it was awesome. The two tutorial missions? Awesome. The bit right before the end? Awesome. Everything up until about the midway point? Awesome. That escort bit, and those of you who did this know what I’m talking about? Made of win.

- Side Quests. When they existed, almost all of them were top notch, better than Oblivion’s in every way, or at the very least equal to them.

- Minigames. Until you understand how the lockpicking game works, it’s exceptionally lame. After that, it is fun. My favorite, though, was the computer hacking minigame, which involves guessing passwords out of a list of words and gibberish. If you’re into this sort of thing, it’s extremely fun, and the rewards are often well worth it, so I enjoyed finding computers.

- The Workbench. I built a sword out of a lawnmower blade, a motorcycle gas tank, a pilot light, and some baling wire and spit. This sword is on fire. It catches my enemies on fire. If this is wrong, I never want to be right.

The Bad

- The Main Quest. Yeah, so the end. WTF was that? Also, the second half took about 10 minutes and was lame. Which isn’t enough to totally spoil the thing for me, but it was tragic, and another example of Bethesda not quite getting their main quests right.

- Various Factions. By and large, compared to any given Elder Scrolls game, I found the towns and factions uninspiring, with the marked exception of Moira and a couple of others. Megaton was fun for about 5 minutes. Rivet City was the awesomest idea EVAR spoiled by the fact that it’s also boring as all hell. I kept hearing about the Brotherhood of Steel all game, and I was excited to go check them out, but you don’t really join them or do any quests for them, and it’s sort of a letdown. The glimpses I got of the factions, and the story I built around them in my head turned out in most cases to be better than the actual story I got.

All of which is to say that exploring the Chryslus Building was generally more awesome than following the plot.

- Unrealized NPCs. Maybe I just didn’t spend enough time in town, but by comparison to Oblivion, the AI seems underutilized (although the idle animations are MUCH better), and background conversations are limited. Mostly people just seemed to wander around a lot, which was kind of boring.

- The graphics. Some of the textures, generally all the stuff covered in paper scraps, which is a lot, looked lame. Half of Megaton looked like ass, and not in the way they meant. Not enough to detract a lot, but on high settings I expected more.

- Little Lamplight. It was lame. I do not possess words for how lame this place was, but chasing kids around caves for no goddamn reason was pretty annoying. Among other things.

- Timeline. So, the war happened 200 years ago. So why am I wandering around (well-illustrated) only partially decayed wood frame houses in a humid climate? Why hasn’t all this stuff melted away by now, considering how corrosive this environment is? Why are there bodies of people that aren’t decayed from 200 years ago (albeit not many)? What have some of these people been DOING for 200 years, anyway?

Yes, it’s a small nitpick. You’ll enjoy yourself anyway. But.

The Ugly

- Little Lamplight. Also, there happens to be a bug, even in the latest patch, wherein if you don’t do your dialogue options right, the game will glitch and won’t allow you to advance the main quest without using the console command tcl to walk through a door. This was intensely frustrating after spending 30 minutes hunting down the right kids to talk to.

- Controls, and where do I start. How are these a step backwards from Oblivion? Why can’t I map my middle mouse to activate like I used to? Why does my middle goddamn scrollwheel change my camera zoom at the slightest touch, even in the middle of combat, which invariably makes me die?

That aside, the default map is pretty good, but lacks a few useful features that every FPS in the modern age has, like lean, and prone. I got through without them, but they would have been nice.

- Guns, Lots of Guns. This isn’t so much a gripe against the guns, which were mostly neat, as it is the ridiculously useless zoom and the complete waste of a repair and upgrade system. I mean, let’s see. We have scopes, silencers, bigger mags, stuff like that combined with a workbench system and a repair system. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could upgrade your guns? Yeah, I hear there’s a mod for that.

Also, did I mention zoom? The ridiculous jerking on the sniper rifle scope is the worst, here, but some iron sights for all the other guns would’ve been nice. Against, every FPS in recent history did this.

I’ll ignore the ridiculous spreads on some of the weapons.

- Crashes. I am unsure as to how much of this is the game, and how much of it is what is probably my audio drivers conflicting with something, but the instability was rampant, ranging from freezes to BSODs. I think this is probably me, but…

- Glitches. That aside, there are definitely some things that broke, like my VATS perks not working. I’m told this used to not be the case.

- Level Cap/Endgame Stop. The official Bethesda story is that they didn’t realize anybody would want to continue after the endgame, nor did they think anybody wanted to go beyond level 20. Our choices here seem to include either beliving them, which would mean they weren’t paying attention to the last 8 years of Morrowind and Oblivion players, or thinking it was all a ruse to sell people the Broken Steel DLC or similar. Either way I am unimpressed, although I was pretty much done with my first guy anyway.

The Fun

- The Future of the 1950s. I grew up on Tom Swift novels, ok? Yeah, I loved the styling. Hell, I even loved the music.

- VATS. You shoot them, and their heads fly off. In slow motion. I can see how some people would get tired of this, but for me it’s endless fun.

- Perks. The various speech ones are worth picking up. And Samson’s right. Mysterious Stranger is great. Take it if you can.

- Shooting Cars. Hee. BOOM!

The Meh

In which I react to some things Samson said.

- Repair. I didn’t hate it but I didn’t love it. Mostly I spent caps at the store. Later I got better, but carting around 5 spare assault rifles got a little old. Rarely a game-breaker though, except early on when it kept getting down to me baseball batting guys.

- Companions. Mine worked ok for the most part, except when Dogmeat glitched out on me. Lots of line of fire issues, but I worked around it and it wasn’t a big deal. Certainly less of an issue than Oblivion’s were, which I suspect is because of the guns. The real sin here is the fact that most of them are one step above cardboard cutouts personality-wise.

That having been said, I spent 90% of my game without a companion, so.

- Floating Stuff. I didn’t notice this as much as Samson appears to have, but I noticed some. Worse were the large number of misaligned building pieces and other graphical glitches, including one point in Mama Dulce’s where a whole corridor flat out disappeared. For the most part this was minor and ignorable, however.

Final Verdict

Flawed in many ways, but Bethesda continues to put out quality stuff. 7.5/10 aliens.

HERE BE SPOILERS. YEARG.

In which I mainly want to talk about Vaults as a first-time Fallout player. While parts of the main plot were well done and hard hitting, What really got me was the Vaults, and by extension Vault-Tec HQ, which is in the DC ruins and tells you where to find Vaults 87, 92, 101 (if you couldn’t find it… ;), 106, and 108.

It, and the Vaults, also reveal certain truths which are fundamentally much more disturbing to me than the paper cutout Enclave we got presented with. The main plot doesn’t make it particularly clear that yes, by the way, the Vaults were essentially a complete lie, giant experiments with people as lab rats, run by the government who never meant to see any of these people survive in the first place.

On that same note, if, having played through all the Vaults with the exception of 87, knowing everything there is to know in the game about how monstrously flat out evil the US government became, let me just say that playing through Vault 87 at 1am with the lights low is probably a bad idea. Just saying.

But yeah, ok. So I came to this realization, somewhere after Vault 106 (essentially a giant version of MKULTRA), Vault 108 (cloning experiments), and Vault 92 (hypnotism experiments), that the people in Vault 112 were pretty lucky (stuck in VR forever, in one of the best sequences in the game), and the people of Vault 101 had it totally easy with nothing but a control freak on their hands.

Because, on that scale with megalomaniacal petty dictator on one hand and government-sponsored mass murder and mutilation in ways that make the Nazis look like chumps? Yeah, I know which I’d pick.