Jay’s Internet Log

                To be honest, I wasn’t going to buy Fallout 3.  Every time someone mentioned the game, I just wasn’t turned on by it.  Even the 30 minute X-Play about the game did really nothing for me.  I am also (still) heavily addicted to Call of Duty 4 and have been planning on playing Fable II for a few months.  So Fallout 3 was going to be skipped.

                This all changed after learning of sheer amount of bugs and glitches in Fable II.  I don’t feel like putting 10′s of hours into a game just for it to glitch out and become unrecoverable because the designers decided to include just a single save file for the game.  I emailed Lionhead and asked if the game will be patched, and got an affirmative answer, but it may take weeks still, so I decided to go over to Best Buy at lunch and pick up Fallout 3.  I chose the regular edition and Collector’s Strategy Guide.

                The Strategy Guide is made by Prima, enormous, hard-covered, with non-glossy paper that will be easy to write on, if need-be.  I read through the first chapter to get my hands wet with what I was getting myself into.

                The game starts as any other game does, with you being born of course.  You get to see your father standing over you and your mother lying next to you.  Your dad asks what sex you are, and I chose female (for the same reason that I did in Fable II, which is that it made me sick to stare at Captain Sheppard’s junk for 50 hours in Mass Effect).  He then asks what they should name her, and I chose my wife’s name of Heather.  After that, he ponders what she might look like when she grows up, and a very intricate face editor comes up.  I tried my hardest to recreate my wife’s face, and I think it came out pretty good.  So after spending about ten minutes or so here, my mom goes into cardiac arrest and my dad tries to save her while I’m being brushed out of the room.  1 year later and you’re a baby….you look at a child’s book and choose some attributes like Strength, Endurance, Intelligence, Agility, etc, then it shoots you 9 years into the future….Now it’s my birthday and as a present I get a Pip-Boy 3000 which is basically a really nice inventory and stats page.  You go about talking to people and kids and whatnot…you learn that 200 years ago, there was a nuclear war where you are but your ancestors were locked into this vault and you will probably never leave it…you learn to shoot a BB gun at some roaches….then it whisks you ahead another 3 years…This is where you take an “exam” to learn what skills you want.  The exam is pretty dumb but afterwards you get to choose some skillsets, like proficiency with small or large weapons, lockpicking, medicine, speech, etc.  It is really starting to feel more and more complex already!  After this it sends you another 3 years into the future, when you’re 19 years old, and something crazy is happening.  I won’t get into it too much, but you basically need to leave the vault.  I come across some guys that I think I need to kill so I use a baseball bat on them.  By just hitting them, you do a little damage here or there, and it’s kind of tedious….but, if you use the VATS system, you pause the fight, can target certain body parts (like the head), then hit A and it will go on and do a combo of sorts to really do some damage.  This feature is SICK and I haven’t used it enough!  So I leave the vault and am greeted by a really sweet and disturbing look at Washington DC that’s been obliterated by nuclear weaponry.  I use my compass to head towards a makeshift town and on the way there, kill a dog.  I’m now in this town called Megaton, which has a huge live nuclear bomb in the middle of it.  I need to do something about this bomb, and will find out when I play more.

               I’ll add this in for PC users – I know of two people playing on the PC that are able to log into their Live accounts and gain achievements.  I can see them online and send messages to them just as if they were on the 360.  It seems like a very cool feature.

So what do I think about Fallout 3 so far?  I am completely and utterly blown away by it.  The game feels and handles like a mix between Halflife 2 and Bioshock.  When walking around, I kind of wish I had a crowbar in my hands!  The graphics are some of the best I’ve seen on the 360 and the music is all 1940′s-era jazz which makes it feel more like Bioshock and is incredibly well-done.  I’ve leveled up just once and when you level up, you add more points to your skills.  It also doesn’t stress the 360 out like Fable II does.  That game makes the 360 sound like it’s on its last breaths from all the spinning.  Anyways, I can highly recommend this game for you and will update with more posts in the future.