06 July, 2009

Game Journal: Fallout 3

written by Blain Newport on Friday, July 3, 2009

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

I started my life in Fallout 3 as a baby. It's a clever way to combine character creation and a tutorial. I made a character who looks vaguely like me and gave him my name.


I suppose that's willfully ignoring the RP in RPG (role-playing game). But my choices don't carry as much weight if I can fob them off as "being in character". The successes are my successes. The failures are my failures. And I'd say I've already got some heavy failures.



The @($& hit the fan when my father booked it out of the Vault without me. I woke up with the administrator's daughter (who kind of liked me, I guess) warning me to run. So I tried to run. Stealth didn't work. The first guard I saw chased me. While I was running, a bully who'd been a pain all my life asks me to save his mother from radioactive bugs.

"Don't you see this guy trying to beat my head in? Fine! Where is she?"

So I've got a pistol the admin's daughter gave me, and I'm trying to kill giant cockroaches swarming over some poor woman while Vault security is trying to club me on the back of the head. It's humorously absurd, but also just plain stupid.

"Look, officer, I have a gun and you don't, and I'm trying to save a woman's life. Can we table the beating, for the moment? *whack* No? Fine!"

So I blow the guard's head off. I didn't want to do that, but I failed to find another way (possibly because the game failed to provide one).



The next major failure occurs when I see more guards and try to sneak past. I see some other people my age hiding nearby. The guy makes a run for it and gets gunned down. The girl makes a run for it and is also killed. Could I have saved him? Maybe. Could I have saved her? Almost certainly. But I just watched because fighting two guards with pistols was not on the agenda. There is a grab button in the game. Maybe I could have stopped her? I don't know.



Finally, I killed the admin. I didn't have to do it. But he gave no cause and expressed no remorse for beating my father's lab assistant to death. He also didn't seem to care that he'd ordered the security chief to beat my location out of his daughter. All I did was call him a thug, which he was, and he tried to kill me with a police baton. I guess he forgot that I'd blown the security chief's head off in front of him ten seconds ago.

"Dude, I've still got a gun. I'm wearing full riot gear I stripped off a security guard. Seriously? *whack* You want to die? *whack* Fine!"

I actually stopped using my gun and used my own baton to try and beat him into submission, but ended up killing him anyway. I'm not sure it's possible to subdue anyone in this game.



And those are the failures I managed before even making it out of the Vault. Now I'm in a radioactive wasteland. I have no idea where my father went. The admin's daughter hates me and may seek revenge. Because I failed to save the other young people, I'm completely on my own. And I've already got over half a dozen deaths on my conscience.

The future sucks.










































But I have a gun.

No comments: