I remember the first time I loaded up The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It stuttered like a bitch and had serious framerate issues, right until I downloaded and forced in so many modifications it barely had any resemblance to the original. Spectacular as it became I played for quite some time. However, it was not long ’til my computer refused to boot it, and as such I left it to rot on the hard drive.
Bethesda, the developer of The Elder Scrolls, recently released the game Fallout 3. A sequel to the turn-based semi-top-down view third-person shooter that is Fallout 2 (and one) set in a post-apocalyptic America. After a nuclear war, which by the way lasted 2 hours, everything was fucked diagonally and thouroughly. Amazingly enough, the company called Vault-Tec and their nightmare provoking mascot had built atomic-bomb resistant vaults in many places (including Washington), from where our voice-deprived protagonists emerge from. All the time.
Apparently, all the radioactive isotopes released into the atmosphere following a nuclear holocaust are completely nulled out after 30 years. This is interesting, along with the fact that pre-2-hour-long-nuclear-war clothes are simply ‘dirty’ after 200 years. Irish and British accents are also perfectly well-preserved, even though there is no international travel following the complete collapse of civilization.
And so you are born from your father’s mother’s vagina, and you must’ve been as hideous as Shrek because she goes int Cardiac Arrest the moment you are pulled out by your not-so-enthusiastic ‘daddy’. You also understand English speech at the age of fifteen seconds, can walk, run and read at the age of 1, but you are unable to open metal doors with handles at the age of 10. Why this is, I don’t know, maybe your character was dropped shortly after you got blinded by that immense light that seem to strike you when you follow dad shortly after learning how to read, walk and run. At the age of one.
Suddenly your father runs away, and the pompous prick that is the Omnipotent, Omnibenevolent, Omniscient Overseer suddenly wants you omnimurder you. Just because he can. The vault-whore Amata gives you head a gun and you run off into the wasteland. Many conflicting emotions overwhelm you, but ultimately you are apathetic and think everything sucks. So you run off into the horizon, but is stopped by a magic boundary which forces you to fast-travel (read teleport) to the town called Megatron (or Megaton, I beg to differ) where everyone thinks that cocka nuka-cola caps are pure awesomeness and worth more than a billion trillion dollars. Hell, everybody carries around huge bags filled with caps and trade with them for radiated water and eggs. Welcome to the Real World, boy.
You are told by the local house nigga (the sheriff) that he wants you to disarm the nuclear bomb (omai) in the middle of the town. You are stopped by some cult fanatic named Cromwall or something, and after preaching to you about The Power Of Atom; he wants money from you. You just ignore him and continue up into the saloon from where your father apparently was. The irish bastard named Colin Murderoveryarty wants caps for information, but before you can finish your sentence a strange pedophile named Mr. Burke calls you over and wants you to blow him up the town. You can then choose to blow up the town or disarm the bomb.
The rest of the game is pretty much just freeroam survival. There are scary moments and funny moments, ugly bitches and uglier bitches. This game was obviously not made by horny 22-year old nerds, but by serious 25-year old ’serios biznizz’ nerds who aren’t into making correctly-looking tits. Everybody seems to have breast and face cancer, but I guess it adds to the atmosphere.
)
