Fallout 3 (PS3)
2008 Bethesda Softworks
The Short Version: It’s really amazing what a new paintjob and some guns does for… just about anything!
The Long Version: Even though I like to call myself a ‘retro’ gamer, what it basically boils down to is I’m excrutiatingly slow to warm up to new games or hardware until I’m sure most of the kinks have been beaten out of it. And even then, I’m honestly a lot more happy playing 2-D sprite-based Nintendo DS titles than anything where the camera is something actively impeding me. This gets even worse when a game is popular, for some reason- probably because it’s really awkward when a hot new game comes out and ends up sucking ass but is either awesome in multiplayer or has tons of one liners that people will be repeating ad nauseum.
(Yeah, that does mean I haven’t played Portal yet.)
If there’s anybody out there yet who hasn’t already played through the game eight fucktillion times and would find some explanation helpful, Fallout is a post-apocolyptic RPG series that takes place in some kind of bizarro alternate future where technology advanced up until nuclear war obliterated about everything, but culturally, everything froze somewhere in the 1940’s. Hence all of the cheery retro advertising posters, cheesy equipment names, and anti-Communist Gigantor.
Well, that’s skipping ahead a bit.
Fallout 3 takes place in the Capital Wasteland, formerly Washington D.C.. You play a nameless character who seems to be dubbed “The Lone Wanderer” for ease of reference among fans who need to call the character something, and “Vault Dweller” was taken by an earlier main character. You’ve lived a sterile little life in an underground Vault (number 101), until your old man escapes and the Vault’s Overseer throws a little cover-up cum shitfit and orders everyone that knows him dead. And since this is a Western RPG, you’re not an orphan with amnesia and blue hair (probably?), you have the misfortune of knowing who your dad is, and must escape to save your own ass, not to mention eventually meet up with your father again on the outside. Once you leave the Vault, the world is pretty much your oyster, in the same sense that a discarded styrofoam burger box in a roadside ditch is yours for the taking.
As many people recommended the game to me, once I got it, I found I had a pretty hard time getting others to give it a chance the same way for some bizarre reason. My RPG liking friends always say “But I hate FPS games!” while my friends who are into FPS cry, “But RPG’s are so slow and boring!” But Fallout exists as a sort of wonderful hybrid monster mix of the two. You can fight in realtime, taking carefully aimed shots, or close in for melee kills, or you can bring up V.A.T.S., a targeting system that freezes the action and lets you target specific parts of the enemy, then plays out the attacks in gruesomely detailed slow motion. So whether you like to snipe directly, or prefer overly theatrical Final Fantasy-ish demises for your enemies, the battle system sort of covers you either way. Though you do have to wait for your Action Points to regenerate between V.A.T.S. attacks, just think of it as a spin on waiting for the ATB gauge to refill.
You’re basically given free reign to do as you please, amassing or losing Karma for good and bad actions, ultimately leading to a good, bad, or meh ending. The central story focuses on following in your father’s footsteps of trying to purify the wasteland’s water supply, which is actually a pretty good tragic tale if you sit and think about it afterwards, not counting the selfless sacrifice you have the option of making at the end being undone by the added download chapters. Being a mostly open game, of course, there are so many sidequests you can stumble on that you can nearly forget the main plot, ranging from slave trading to alien abduction, and about everything in between.
Anybody who’s been reading a while is probably familiar with that statement I roll out about RPG’s and me: Straight up Tolkienesque high fantasy bores the snot out of me, but as long as there’s an anachronism or two along the way, I can usually focus on it. Fallout basically is an Oblivion clone, with guns and ammo rather than swords being the big thing, and the vast, rubble strewn hills and blasted out cities of D.C. make for a lot more memorable a locale than “Forest, Forest Village, One Big City, The Castle, etc.” which is weird, since Fallout’s locations are really kind of repetitive in itself. Going into office buildings for quests is almost always reminding me of those City of Heroes office building missions where you’d basically fight the same mission on the same map with a different species of enemy waiting around to die. Luckily there are a number of nice setpieces to break it up and keep it from feeling too much like MMO filler questing.
But really, the whole thing that makes a game like this fun? The amount of room you have to fuck around in it. Everyone seems to run through the game a little differently. Do you rob every house blind? Do you give purified water to the beggars? Do you pick all nice dialogue options then punch people in the face afterward just to see how they react? Ok, maybe that one was just me.
I know I said I’d review more crappy games, but I just had to get this one out of my system even though I’m pretty damned late to the party.