Shallow Intellectual

cjmeeks:

Review Of a Video Game That I Am Too Shitty At Video Games to Properly Review: FALLOUT 3

I was torn between this game and Resident Evil 5, but the kid at GameStop said “This is a much better game, one that you’ll be able to spend a lot of time playing.” This is good, because if there’s one thing I have too much of between work, a relationship, my bullshit creative endeavors, and attempting to stay in shape … it is clearly time.

In Fallout 3, you’re some dude (or chick, I guess, since at the beginning you have to spend like 45 minutes designing your own character … my guy has a huge chin and an awesome moustache), who’s been raised in an underground bunker years after the world was destroyed by nuclear war. You escape your bunker and the first thing you have to do is go find your dad by gathering information from different sources, while living off the meat of mutated animals that you must murder yourself (giant mole rats, dogs that you have to shoot multiple times in the face to kill).

The first stop on your journey is a shantytown where various residents are supposed to have information regarding your father’s whereabouts. Here’s where it all went sour for me. There’s this sheriff who basically tells you upon your arrival, “I’m the sheriff here. You’d better not pull any horseshit, or I’ll kill you.” Then later you have to go into this saloon and pay the bartender to tell you where your dad was headed. Then you’re accosted on your way out by this creepy guy in a suit who wants to pay you to blow up the town. At this point you’re given a choice as to whether or not you’ll do this guy’s bidding. I pussied out, on the grounds that even if I wanted to be evil, that sheriff would probably fuck me up real good before I could even find what I needed for the bomb.

As I quickly learned, there is no reward for being a decent person in the world of Fallout 3. The sheriff got all up on my balls asking what I was up to, so I chose to win his good faith by ratting out that guy in the bar. Then the sheriff’s all “Come with me, I’ll show you how we do justice in this town.” You get to the bar and the sheriff proves to be a complete asshole, telling the guy he’s under arrest and then turning his back on him. The bad guy killed the sheriff, so I reacted on instinct and killed the bad guy. This was done slowly, and with a great deal of difficulty, because at this point in the game the only weapon I’d found that I could do any damage with was a baseball bat. The game then allows you to search the bodies of both dead guys. From the bad guy I was able to take a suit, a hat, and something called a “Chinese pistol.” This, distubingly, left a naked corpse on the floor of the bar. From the sheriff, I got a cowboy hat, a rifle, and a key to “the armory.” (I did not take his clothes, as I’d seen enough computer-dick for one gaming session.) “Great,” I thought, “now I can unlock the armory and make sure I have plenty of firepower for when I go back out to look for my dad.” You see, I had almost made it to the abandoned radio station before, when something called a “Super Mutant” proved too much of a challenge for my baseball bat.

I made my way to the armory, unlocked it, and was promptly attacked by this robot who was guarding the place (because even though this is an improvised town built out of plywood and sheet metal, they somehow had the resources and technology to make a talking, hovering robot.) The robot looked like a volleyball with thin metal tentacles. A far less formidable opponent than, say, your average mutated mole rat, so I figured my trusty baseball bat and I could take him. I was quickly proven wrong. He made me his armory bitch. “That’s fine,” I thought, “now I know not to go into the armory until I have better guns.” But thanks to Fallout 3’s impressively thorough auto-save features, I was revived right inside the goddamn armory again.

I’m no dummy, so I quickly fled the armory and ran through the town until I found the comfort of the saloon, which I should point out, still held the corpses of the sheriff and the naked guy. I felt safe for a few seconds, until the guard-robot burst through the door. Not content with simply killing me in front of the other patrons, this robot quickly let everyone in the bar know that I’d tried to break into the armory, so that I could die five times faster at the hands of (realistically animated) drunks. Next life, I ran out of the bar and far from the town, out into mole rat country. The mole rats were clearly the least of my worries, as I’ve had to stop playing Fallout 3 due to the fact that every time I select ‘continue,’ I’ve got about 10 seconds before the drunken townsfolk and that angry goddamn robot catch up with me.

And yes, I tried switching to the shotgun I took off the sheriff’s corpse. That buys me about four more seconds.

IN SUMMATION: Fallout 3 is, at best, a mediocre game with decent graphics and an overzealous auto-save feature. Also, robots are dicks.