The Nuclear Holocaust Made Boring, Or How To Fallout With Gaming Completely

Originally posted on 1/11/09

Fallout 3 - Playstation 3 Game Review

There are several things I hate in games. One of them being when you are made to do things which have no outcome on the experience of the game, and thus is the case non-stop with Fallout 3. After spending the first hour or so of gameplay going through the "important" steps in a 16 year olds life (his tenth birthday party, and when he was 12 and Qui-Gon Jinn gave him a BB gun) and having the life bored out, you find out Oskar Schindler has ran away from the underground tin-can you call home and you decide to kill everyone in the Vault (with my bare hands, I hadn't figured out how to use the Pip-Boy yet) and right when you're about to leave you get asked if you'd like to change anything of your monotonous upbringing (ironically this is your looks, skills, name and gender, which was all decided when you started the game having dropped fresh from your dead mothers vagina) before you leave your home.

Brilliant, that's the first hour wasted and that was certainly the first of many, many hours. You're left rather clueless when you leave, thrown out into post-apocalyptic Washington DC (Capital Wasteland) with your only goal being to find your father. The first thing you stumble upon is a place called Megaton, a town put up around an un-detoated nuclear bomb. Shows that the fallout (wayhey!) from the end of the world really did send people mad. Here you get introduced to the games lovely varied style, as you can do whatever you like. You can talk to everyone, who stands directly still, not blinking and not moving, to find out about the place you're in, and get quests off them. Now, being the kind of soft-arse who tries to be the good guy all the time I steered clear of the more dubious offers and tried to please everyone by doing what everyone wanted but not harming anyone. This is where the joys of the sheer vastness of the Capital Wasteland came into play.

Note - to anyone designing games, if you're going to have an expansive, open-world game map, then please have some method of exploring it quickly. Being a 16 year old with no armour in a place where everyone wants to shoot you or eat you or parts of the ground try to make you grow an extra 8 arms and no method of moving around quickly is something that makes the act of testing out Blu-Ray discs as frisbee's all the more satisfying.

Not really knowing what I was doing probably lowered by enjoyment of the game initially, because rather than fulfilling any of the side quests I simply plowed ahead with all the story ones which were so bloody tedious I was half wishing I could go back to my tenth birthday in tincan 101. That and the fact that all my character seemed to want to do was find Rob Roy which bemused me, as in the tincan he seemed to be the human equivalent of beige wallpaper, so bland and pointless and poorly acted I felt no sympathy when he'd run away. Then... some stuff happened, i'll be honest I forget what, I do remember going to Galaxy News Radio which was a rather unfair monopolisation on distribution media in the area I felt as it was the only radio/telly/anything station in the area. Well, one that wasn't run by a robot anyway. The nuclear holocaust damaged the place mind, because the songs it played were all shite (I say all, the 3 of them) and when The Ink Spots are on a games' soundtracj and you still hate it, you know something's went wrong somewhere. Here I got to experience the Super Mutant Behemoth's (or Super Super Mutants, if you will) which was a big angry yellow fellow with a fire hydrant for an arm and car doors for armour.

After this was a rather amusing part of the game (the only amusing part it has to be said,) as on my travels I came across an emergency signal beckoning me back to Room 101 (I mean Room 101, not Vault) because the place had went to pot. You see, when you and your dear father left people got a bit angry, as no-one else had left the place.... ever (see! it is Room 101) and people rebelled. I went in to find the place in mob rule, and run by a new complete whackjob who had the audacity to pull a gun on me! Simple, I press R2, go into the targeting system that stops time and lets you choose in what order you want someone's limbs to come off and shoot the guy in the face with a shotgun. THAT, I can get on board with. Shooting people out of your way was by far the best part of the game. Similar incident happened when I tried to get some kids out of a slave pen, shot the guard at the door in the face and nuked the rest. Stupendous fun, watching limbs fly off in all directions.

After killing him along with the other uppity twats i'd tagged along with I.... done some more stuff. Found out where Schindler'd buggared off to, another Vault which was being run by some whackjob who had everyone hooked up to a machine that put them into a place called Tranqulity Lane, which was essentially a Charlie Chaplin film with talking. And Oskar as a dog. I had no idea what to do, so I looked up how to get past it, and apparently the good karma method (way to be a good guy) was initiate the failsafe and unleash an army of Chinese Soldiers who shot everyone. Killed them too. mmkay then, yet another side-note in how shit this game is.

I forget the rest really, lots of unimportant guff about Qui-Gon wanting to built a water purifier in the Jefferson Memorial, then the Enclave (what was the US Government) trying to steal it and take it for themselves (well the game got them right, at least.) Your Dad rather takes issue with this mind you and seals the place. Killing himself. And I cared so little for anything or anyone that this was perfectly fine with me. But no! You must continue your fathers work!.... so off I trot to another underground tincan, which is infested with Super Mutants (it's at this point I put the difficulty down, getting killed at the same place 5 times in a row rather irritates you) in order to get.... something to make the purifier work. I meet a stand-up Super Mutant chap here who doesn't want to kill me! And who braves the radiation levels of about +145/sec (which is bad) to get the thing I need. Brilliant! I then leave (the fact the President is a robot is unimportant), and go back to the Brotherhood of Steel who follow some weird anti communist robot (you see, Yanks just can't let the Cold War go) back to the purifier, so we can turn it on and be a world hero! Snag. The purifier has been irradiated, and you can't go in otherwise you die! Bear in mind the radiation levels are about +30/sec. It's at this point your Super Mutant friend decides he doesn't want to save the world, because THOSE radiation levels are too much. So, you die in that poxy fucking chamber, after you'd busted your arse all over the god-forsaken wasteland, being everyones bitch and right at the end they can't grant you a slight favour at the end. Ingrates. I don't even care if i've ruined this story for you, because it was at this point I was actually caring about what happened and then I got killed. Super.

Shit story aside, the gun play was a bit annoying, having to bring up a menu to choose an appropriate weapon then bringing up another menu to decide how to kill whatever it was you had a disagreement with gets old before it begins, and completely disrupts the flow of combat. Not using the targeting system yields poorer results than throwing balls of paper at them, so you can't get round it that way. All in, there are good points to Fallout 3, but they're so badly outweighed by it's deficiencies that you barely notice them.


Also, a chance to moan about DLC. Fallout 3 has 5 different DLC's, which offer new quests. At �7.99 each, the total price if you bought the game when it came out plus the 5 DLC's is �80. You can now by the 'Game of the Year' edition for �30. Just to let you know.