Fallout Diaries
Day 1
My name is Victoria. I'm ginger, I have dark brown eyes, and I have no visible chest. I look a bit like Winona Ryder, if you took each of her facial features and distorted them in a mildly unsettling way.
All this takes a bit of time to settle on, since there are approximately nineteen hundred character creation options, and I'm a bit distracted by the fact that I have just that moment shot out of my mother's vagoo. It's a hell of a time to have to decide what kind of cheekbones I want when I hit twenty.
The next thing I know I'm being asked to decide my future personality based on a cute children's book that looks terrifyingly like something I'm trying to illustrate at the moment. I haven't been playing it for five minutes and already this game is trying to rip me off.
Growing up in a sealed underground fallout shelter 200 years after the apocalypse, I go through childhood and puberty in less time than it takes to say 'handy narrative device'. I take a test. I shoot a giant cockroach. And then, before I know what's happening, a girl called Amata is kicking me awake and telling me I have about five seconds to GTFO because my father, Liam Neeson, who up to this point has seemed like a perfectly amiable scientisty chap, is apparently Hitler.
I like Amata. Two minutes ago, when I was sixteen, I attacked five boys who were standing around her looking mildly intimidating, mainly because she told me to. That and the fact that their ringleader, this universe's answer to the Fonz, was really getting on my tits. I still hadn't forgiven him for making rude remarks at my tenth birthday party.
I forgot to mention that this game gets really immersive, really quickly.
Another cool thing about Amata is her name. I spend a few minutes trying to parse a good joke. It's harder than I expected.
Me: Hey, Amata!
She: What?
Me: Nothing! What's Amata with you?
She: *stares, blinking eerily*
Me: D:
It's at this point when I start wishing I'd put all those points I stuck in Luck and Strength into Speech. Besides, when I say it out loud it sounds more like 'Armada', as in 'The Spanish'. I'd like to explore this subject in more depth, but it's a little difficult to concentrate because suddenly I'm Public Enemy No. 1, there are guys charging around with helmets on, a robot I vaguely remember from my birthday ten years ago is attacking people with flamethrowers, and there's giant cockroaches everywhere.
By the time I get out of the Vault I've been shot approximately twelve times and am basically holding myself together with tape and coffee cups, which I've collected a lot of. I also have a baseball bat, a gun, and a sweet jacket. Collecting stuff in this game is very easy- you can't take a step without tripping over a dinner set, three buckets, and a clipboard, all of which can be picked up. I don't know what all this stuff is useful for, but if later on there's a chance to construct a flamethrower out of nothing but kitchenware and cockroach meat, I am there.
It's very bright, outside the Vault, and apparently endless. I see something in the distance which looks a bit like that building that you see on American TV a lot, and set out in that direction. I've got to find my dad.
Before I go three steps, I find a rusty tin can. Again, don't know what this could possibly be useful for, but it's even better than coffee cups. There's something poetic about it- the first thing I can pick up in the radioactive wasteland of the free world is a rusty tin can, symbol of consumerism and... things.
I find another one. I like this game.
Day 2
I walk across the wasteland for a while, and am attacked by a giant pink thing that, according to VATS (a thing that lets you shoot things in slow motion) is a mole-rat. I beat it to death with my baseball bat, which I've named Geoff, after the furious insurance salesman portrayed by Reece Shearsmith in the League of Gentlemen (the comedy series, not the Alan Moore comic book) I'm out looking for answers and I'm letting Geoff do the talking and he only knows one very loud word! (It's THWACK. Or maybe BOSH, I can't decide)
I have tried out the gun but I can't seem to hit anything with it. This makes me sad.
After the mole-rat I find Megaton, a town built around an unexploded nuclear bomb. I'm not sure who thought that was a good idea, but it's quite a nice place, and, more importantly, it has a shop. This is good because after I looted the mole-rat's corpse (mole-rats, apparently, carry Mole-Rat Meat) a little sign flashed up telling me I was over-encumbered, which isn't surprising since I am now carrying Geoff, a gun, sixteen tin cans, most of the cutlery department of Asda and fifteen rounds of cockroach sandwiches.
'Over-encumbered' means 'cannot move faster than an arthritic snail that's just accidentally crawled over a roofing tack.' It takes me three in-game hours to get up to the shop and fall in through the door in an exhausted heap of haberdashery.
The shop is run by a woman called Moira. Moira is, as is immediately apparent, batshit insane. She's writing a book called the Wasteland Survival Guide, and has absolutely no moral qualms about sending hapless ginger vault-dwellers off to 'do research' which is Moirish for 'get killed in interesting ways'.
However, she buys all my coffee mugs and rusty tin cans, and sells me bullets for the gun I can't kill anything with, so I do what she says. She wants me to get radiation poisoning so she can study the effects, so I trot off to the middle of town and drink irradiated water from the bomb crater until I'm pretty much glowing in the dark.
Moira's pleased. She seems to have a limitless supply of shit she wants done, and absolutely no desire to do any of it herself. This is a characteristic shared by 90% of the population of Megaton.
Me: Hi, I'm new here. Name's Victori-
Random Megaton Citizen: My two-headed cow, Bossie Squared, leg is hanging off and this is causing me severe emotional distress. Please fetch me four pieces of scrap metal, some string and some crazy glue so I may save her sweet, sweet bovine life.
Me: Um... I guess I could, but why ask me? Why can't you go yourself?
Random Megaton Citizen: Meh, don't feel like it.
Me: ...How long have you been standing here waiting for some random stranger idiotic enough to do this for you for little or no reason?
Random Megaton Citizen: *stares, blinking eerily*
Me: D:
Still, idiocy is lucrative. I sell a bunch of things and get some information about my dad from the owner of the local bar, who's name is Colin Moriarty. Half the town pronounces this 'MoriORty', the other half goes with 'MoriARty'. Moriarty himself sticks with ARty and the kind of Irish accent you'd expect to find Geoffrey Rush attacking in a Pirates of the Caribbean movie.
It's all going splendidly until Moira tells me to go and get badly injured in the name of science. Since the only way I have yet found of getting hurt besides being attacked is falling off high things, and I don't fancy duking it out with another mole-rat, I walk out of Moira's shop, throw myself happily off her high balcony, and die for the first time in the game.
Day 3
A guy called Mr. Burke asks me to set him up the bomb in the middle of town. He says he represents a bunch of rich people who don't like the way it looks, all sitting there being... settlementy, and he wants me to blow it up. I play along, take the thing he gives me to tack onto the bomb, then shoot him in the head.
To my astonishment, I score something called a 'critical hit' and his head explodes. This may have had something to do with the fact that I was standing so close that he was pretty much giving my gun a blow job, but I feel awesome anyway. In celebration, I name my gun Pauline. She's a tough lady and she doesn't care who knows it.
I'm slightly perturbed by nobody else in the bar taking the slightest bit of notice of this stone-cold execution in blind daylight, apart from one guy who says something like 'rather him than me.' I have a suspicion that everyone in this town is a sociopath. Everyone except the sheriff, a pleasant man who gets very excited when I defuse the bomb in the middle of town (my stupid initial distribution of skill points means I can't repair things for shit, but luckily I can boost my ability by resorting to hardcore drugs called Mentats.) He gives me a house and a robot butler called Wandsworth. I desperately want Wandsworth to come with me and Dog on our travels, but he refuses to follow me through the door.
Stupid robot.
Day 4
I have a dog.
To cut a long story short, Moira, whose sanity I still have multiple and serious questions regarding, told me to go and fetch some mines from a town called Minefield, so called because it is full of mines. I set off, but decided to take a little detour (there was a scorpion about the size of a 4x4 chilling on some rocks directly in the way and I'm allergic to getting stung in the face and dying with a head the size of a beach-ball) and found a scrapyard.
I came round a corner and there was a dog. I nearly hit it between the ears with Geoff before I realised that I was being given the option to talk to it. It seemed remarkably friendly despite the fact that it was surrounded by the corpses of at least four Raiders, people who dress up like extras from Beyond Thunderdome and run around attacking hapless gingers who haven't yet quite learned how to shoot straight. Either it was a Raider dog whose owners had all suddenly succumbed to extreme deadness, or it was an innocent stray who just happened to have killed the fuck out of everything in the scrapyard.
Checkered past or not, my new dog is clearly awesome. He has one blue eye and one brown eye, and he's like a great big black and white Alsatian. I want to call him Bowie for obvious reasons, but the game disagrees with me and names him Dogmeat. This strikes me as a bit unkind, so I settle for Dog.
I set off for Minefield and discover almost immediately that Moria was not fucking around. The place is up to its ears with mines and although Dog is clearly the most excellent dog in the world he does seem to have a knack of bounding all over the place and I certainly don't want to end up wearing bits of him like a hat. I tell him to stay behind a bush near a rock on the edge of town and head in to Minefield.
Almost immediately, I tread on a mine. The first time hurts, the second time blows my leg off and the third time kills me. I reload and start again. This time, my health is low enough that the first mine kills me, tossing my body several feet like a broken doll and landing, to add insult to injury, on another mine. You're supposed to press 'E' to disarm the stupid things but in the time it takes for me to register the little prompt, read it, panic, and press the right button, it's already exploded and taken my legs with it. By the time I manage to disarm one and pick it up, I've had to reload five times and no longer have any idea where the fuck I am.
Flushed with success, I get the hell out of Dodge and head back to pick up my dog. I walk a little, stop, look around.
Hum.
What follows is forty minutes of pure frustration. Dog is here somewhere, behind a bush by a rock on the edge of town, but as the entire landscape is made up of bushes by rocks, this doesn't help much. There's also no way of calling him, no 'whistle for idiot Dog' button. Eventually, I hit on the idea of continually spamming the VATS button, bringing up everything in the area that I happen to be looking at that is alive. Giant scorpions, roaches, mole-rats, a weird robot probe thing... but no Dog. I'm scared of leaving in case he gets attacked by something or the game deletes him.
Finally, I find him, exactly where I left him, behind a bush, sitting there grinning like an idiot.
Stupid Dog.