Fallout 3: Waiting For The End Of The World
The trouble with wanting to talk about videogames on the internet is you have actually stop playing them long enough to do so. Take for instance Fable 2, a truly great game that I managed to happily play for fourteen hours straight one weekend (not something I normally do) and could not shut up about in person for a good long while, and yet I still haven’t breathed a word about it here. And while I fully intend to fix that eventually, I figure it’s best to strike while the iron’s hot (or some other not entirely fitting saying) and jump in to talking up the new shiny thing that my fickle, raccoon-esque attention span is mooning over: Fallout 3.
It’s hard to know where to start, as I’ve already spent so many hours wandering the blasted wastelands of post-nuclear Washington, D.C. in search of new things to see, people to meet, and trouble to get in to. What started as an often frustrating experience - this latest installment is every bit as brutal as the classic first two, with little mercy for new players and an almost giddy willingness to let you get in over your head from the word go - has become a completely engrossing one, sucking away hours at a time whenever I pick up the controller. It’s safe to say there’s never quite been a game world like the one Bethesda has created here - Not even Oblivion’s picturesque vistas and forest quite match up to the sixteen square miles of devastation they’ve pieced together here. For a dead world, it bristles with life and a creeping sense of menace. It’s a place that doesn’t particularly want or accept your presence, challenging you at every turn to prove you’re smart enough and hard enough to earn the right to to reach the top of the next hill or uncover a new secret. Even now, after playing for fifty-six hours and change over the last two weeks and hitting the level cap of 20 last night, it’s still surprising how easy it is to get in to serious trouble if not careful. Above all else, Fallout 3 excels at reminds you that it’s not a world to be conquered, but one to be survived.
So how to talk about it? I’m thinking it’s best to lift a page (that is, steal unapologetically) from the likes of Tom Chick and his game diaries over at Fidgit in the form of posting experiences from from my time in the game. It’s a big enough game to more than make sure I don’t cover any of the same ground he did, and by talking about these things here I can maybe - just maybe - offer my hard-suffering girlfriend and any others who happen within earshot a brief reprieve from the constant stream of stories starting with “Okay, so there’s this one bit…” It’s not likely, but we live in hope.
Tomorrow: Getting around.
Originally published at Expertologist. You can comment here or there.