MODERN GAMING
Fallout 3
Developer:  Bethesda Game Studios
Publisher:  Bethesda Softworks/ZeniMax Media
Genre:  Action-Adventure/RPG
Year:  2008
System:  PC/Xbox 360/Playstation 3

First let's get things clear.  I have played the first Fallout in a trilogy set of 1, 2 and Tactics.  But I suck horrendously at it.  Really, I have barely gotten past Vault 15 and I know it's more my own fault of being so unused to its system rather than just bad design.  But I look fondly upon Fallout, I love its concept, I love its system even if I dislike these percentage chances of landing hits, and I loved seeing Fallout 3 come even when I wouldn't be considered a real fan of the series.  So let's see how the nuclear holocaust is faring at this point in time.

Story - The game is set in the year 2277, 200 years after the nuclear apocalypse and 30 years after Fallout 2, and you are the newest addition to the ranks of Vault 101, situated within the Washington D.C area where you live with your father, and your best friend, among many others of the vault ruled by the Overseer.  As you progress through the 19 years of your vaulthood, you wake up to find chaos running amok with your father having escaped in the confusion.  So you decide to follow him out into the wilderness of the D.C area as one of two people to do so from Vault 101, finding your father as well as the quest for a powerful life-reviving equipment that could well change the future of humanity in the wasteland it has made for itself.
Among this wasteland are other stories of course of the varying towns and cities trying to keep alive, such as the town of Megaton built around a single undetonated bomb, the community of Rivet City within an enormous grounded ship, or the ghoul city of Underworld, as well as the many groups of beasts lurking to survive in any way possible from the human raiders, slavers and wastelanders, to the ghouls, mirelurks and mole rats.


Gameplay - Here lies the biggest fansplitter of the game.  Fallout was always appreciated for its interesting turn-based battle system of using Action Points (AP) to determine how many actions you could utilise within a single turn.  Each footstep meant 1 AP, and various attacks depended on their power and how good you are with them.
Thankfully Fallout 3 keeps the same system but with a new twist for anyone new to the series and prefers something simpler.  When in battle you can choose between the normal shoot-em-up mode of either 3rd-or-1st-person-mode and hope for the best.  Or you can use the V.A.T.S (Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System), which is the same system of the past games but with a refinement of even allowing you to aim for specific body parts of an enemy, as well as showing each one's chance of hitting it and how much damage they may cause.  Even I use the V.A.T.S more regularly than the normal mode because the real-time battles without using V.A.T.S are blind like bats with retinal cancer.
There are many huge buildings with full-standing sides among the wasteland but I wouldn't trust shooting them without your V.A.T.S because it's a metaphor all in itself (and yes there are barns out there to test this out so good luck trying to shoot at the homes of two-headed bulls).  However, melee weapons and unarmed combat work just as well without V.A.T.S so no worries there when all else fails.  I definitely recommend using explosives like grenades with V.A.T.S so you know WHERE you're throwing it.

On the matter of old tricks of the game there is the character customisation making a triumphant return with a fantastic twist to it.  At the very start of the game you are literally born into the world into the arms of your father.  You're given the choice of being a boy or a girl, then with a Gene Projection you can see what you choose to look like.  While the character creation is physically nowhere near as good as Mass Effect, the overall presentation sets it blazing forwards.
After that comes being a year old where you learn to walk and with thanks to a SPECIAL book, get to choose your stats of Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck.  Then comes the social interactions at your 10th birthday party on handling other people as well as your attitude towards them (basically being a sweet little lad or an arrogant prick is your choice but I bet your parents didn't tell you that), and lastly the Skills which you obtain in a standardised test at the age of 16.
Lastly there is the levelling up process which not only adds on extra Skill points per level but also gives you a new Perk per level.  Perks are special abilities that help your progression through the Wastelands such as more resistance to radiation or gaining more faster proficiency in Medicine.  Their usefulness all depends on what sort of game you play.  However some of the Perks (which back in the old games were called Traits) are gone and replaced with different ones.  Also there is no longer any Perks/Traits with negative qualities.  The older games had a good and bad side to every Trait which made your levelling up much more tactical.  However these Perks make it less so.  What this tells you I dunno, I was rather hoping to be really sluggish in daytime when I pick Night Person because....well I AM.


And while talking about stats, there's the return of your PIP-Boy, now known as the PIP-Boy 3000 showing your status, items and data.  Status is your health and radiation.  Items is your inventory of weapons, clothes, healing items, ammo and random shit.  And Data is your map, radio and various important notes and objective reminders.
Of course out of your various statistics to keep an eye on, health and radiation is vital.  Your heath is self-explanatory except due to the not-always-turn-based nature of the game, you and your enemies no longer measure out health in numerical points like Final Fantasy, but more judge them with a single bar.  Your own bar has points but they're only shown in your PIP-Boy 3000.  You can also get crippled when severely wounded in one area of your body which should be attended to with either healing with a Stimpak directly into it (which does not restore as much health as it normally would), paying a doctor or sleeping.  You can sleep anywhere on a free unowned bed for any amount of hours you want.  I wish I had that ability, I never can seem to sleep less than 8 hours and it's pissing me off.  Also, I never seem to get killed in my sleep despite using the bedding of various monster-infested places.  Not happened to me yet but it'd be very odd if you never do.


Actually there is an actual time scale in the game which works like the time in Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask.  The time is shown in the Data screen of your PIP-Boy 3000.  Every minute in-game is a second for you, and every hour in-game is a minute, so there is the rather irritating and unfortunately maybe too-familiar of slugging across 3 miles, going into some ruins, killing some raiders, scraping your remains out of there and back to the town to get a reward and finding they're asleep and you can't finish the objective, so you have to fucking WAIT in the middle of the wilderness sticking near the town or actually in the town itself if you prefer for the day to wake up because there's no fucking way you're wasting 120 caps just to use a bed in order to skip into daytime* and get the damn mission done, goddamnit Moira I irradiated myself to near-death for you and you don't even fucking tell me when you close your shop you BITCH!
*(Bear in mind I am Scottish so therefore I have a natural urge to hoard money and not use anything unless I absolutely must)

This is really the only irritation I had with the game, in that you have to wait for people until they're free, unless you can lockpick into their houses and for some reason people really don't like it when you do that.  I mean what are you gonna do while waiting for the sun to come up?  There is no masturbating option in this game and even then that's gonna like waste half an hour, of course nothing stops YOU doing it though god knows what would ever turn you on in Fallout 3.  There's not even anything for the furries in this game.  But you could be one of those people turned on by mutants, so there is that.
Radiation is another matter.  While radiation does not actually poison you as in decreasing your health, it does start lowering your stats depending on how severe you are irradiated.  Now you think you can just avoid that by not stepping near anything intensely irradiated right?  Wrong.  There's rivers to cross and items to use, almost all water in the land is irradiated as well as food so eating any takes a certain risk to it.  At first it'll do NOTHING to you, but past about 200 Rads it'll start turning bad on you and that's when you gotta get rid of it through a doctor or some Rad-Away.


Lastly there is your equipment.  The currency in the world is bottlecaps which you obtain pretty much anywhere since th Franklin Mint and such got irradiated.  Weapons and clothing you can are either scavenge off bodies, buy in places, or find them in ruins.  But of course it's not all just about keeping the best stuff and drop the rest.  Because firstly the clothes have different skill bonuses attached to them.  A mechanics outfit gives you extra skills with Repair, and likewise a businessman's suit offers you more skills in Barter and Speech.  Just because you're in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, there's no excuse to not dress smart.  Not only that but weapons and clothing all have a limit of usage before they break, weapons especially.
And when weapons get closer to breaking point, they turn more weaker.  So you have to go find someone to repair it from pretty much any town, or you could just dump your well-used weapon for a lesser-used replacement you find lying around.  So either keep repairing a weapon you know and love with an almost sentimental feel about it, or fuck it and find another one like it, you heartless bastard.  I bet if you do that, you're the kind of person who'd do that to a woman.  A gun is like a woman.  It can be very dangerous if misused, can turn rusty if not used enough, and every man should own one.


Graphics - From the moment the placental blood splatters across your face at birth to the moment you first see the open 16 square-mile wasteland before you in all of its apocalyptic glory of a scorched gasping desert filled with ruins of mankind's zenith of civilisation, this game delivers on graphics like the plumber to your mom.  Because if I said pizza boy that'd mean the graphics were awkward, jerky and came too soon.  But the noble plumber, like this game's graphics, work magnificently, get the job done and continue to satisfy you....at least that's what the movies always say.  But whatever, there is nothing about the game that disappoints visually.  The sun shining over the land is beautiful yet sorrowful at the same time, with the light intensity even changing depending on whether you look at the sky or the ground or through even glasses.  It's THAT good.
There's no rain but the water effects of the rivers are not particularly important to give note when you really have no reason to look at the ground at all, which is impressive in itself.  The character faces while not on the level of Mass Effect are impressive enough to get sucked in and not think they're slices of ham like you'd get on the Wii.

Music/Sound - Most of the music is very soothing, bringing out a rather melancholy feel to the entire world of 2277 perfectly.  A sombre wistful soundtrack accompanies you everywhere to reflect on wherever you go from the overall emptiness of the wasteland itself to the somewhat tribal feel of Megaton or the more industrious slower tunes of Rivet City.  Of course the music will change anytime a battle commences or if you're spotted by enemies, which does exactly what it's meant to do, make you alert.  There is nothing extraordinary about the music other than its wonderful use of actual 40s & 50s songs such as the trailer's Kind Hearts And Gentle People by Bob Crosby and the Bobcats, keeping with the excellent retro-futuristic vibe of the series.
Of course there is the voice acting.  The series from its beginning has prided itself on a fine level of proper voice actors keeping the atmosphere, and this game is no exception when you have Liam Neeson and Ron Fuckmothering Perlman being the first voices in the damn game, with Neeson playing as your dad, the most important character besides you in the game.  It's also good to see Perlman get back into being a good voice actor since he murmured his way through the shitty new Turok game like a depressed bull.  No spot of voice acting in this game is really ever out of place and the entire cast have done a solid job here.


Now there are the old Fallout fans out there who don't like the new look of the game, it's 1st-person/3rd-person perspective (your choice either way) just goes away too much from the oblique-projection view the games always had (that's the fancy-ass term for that sort of perspective games have like Fallout and Earthbound instead of the side-scrolling Mario view or the top-down Zelda view), but fear not, because even though the game was actually called by the makers as "Oblivion with Guns" (and let's not lie, it is), it is still goddamn fun, it keeps within the mythology of Fallout extremely well to recognise all the familiar faces such as the Brotherhood of Steel and the ghouls, and it has gone beyond its predecessors as it should do with its more immersive qualities of beautiful graphics (especially weather-wise), quality voice casting and its battle system which tries well to make both camps happy with either real-time combat or the V.A.T.S.
You can't really get a better continuation of the series than this, and if you can, my head might explode with too much radness.  That's like radness as in coolness, not radiation-ness.  That doesn't even work does it?  Well fuck you, this game is the best game I played this year and I can't count Smash Bros Brawl so you have to be happy about this.

Fun and Innovation - 4
Replayability - 3
Gameplay - 4
Presentation - 5

I"ve never played these games but this sounds fucking awesome.

but you didn't mentiin anything about being able to whore out your spouse for money and becoming an adult film star! Oh wait that was Fallout 2... The Story is 3 is pretty amazing though