initial review for fallout 3 (pc)

I recently got my hands on Fallout 3(pc)!!

The first 2 fallout titles were some of my favorite games, but I have never been a huge fan of interplay, the company that developed them, their visual style and game play mechanics have never been better than average in my opinion.

Happily, interplay is now as dead as Greedo.
Finally someone good at this kind of game took a swing at it. When I heard that the new Fallout title was going to be made by the same people that make the Elder Scrolls titles (Bethesda Softworks/zenimax media) I was very excited. (I was hardcore addicted to ES3 Morrowind, I didn’t do every quest but I’m still playing)

The first 2 Fallout titles were some of my favorite games, and making them in the same freeform non-goal driven style of the Elder Scrolls titles could only make the series better.
You begin Fallout 3 in a bomb shelter where everyone seems to hate you and want you dead, and things just get more fun from there. Once you leave the bomb shelter, which acts as a training zone before you hit the big wide world, you can either follow the main story arc (finding your lost father) or just explore the nuke blasted landscape.

NPC characters provide quests and storylines of an impressive variety. You can recover a Stradivarius for an old woman (and be able to tune a radio to hear her music) or track down an android (that might just infringe a copyright or 2 in Blade Runner.) Combat can be played in loose first-person style or using a targeting system that displays hits in a gory slow motion, whether you're delving into abandoned vaults or invading the gorgeously crumbling Washington Monument.

Bethesda carried over the steal everything option from their Elder Scrolls games but happily left out the silly adaptive AI (every enemy was exactly as tough as you in oblivion) and upped the difficulty. Anyone who thought the Elder Scrolls combat system was too challenging should go back to Super Mario Bros. Overall the deep sense of design that seems to be Bethesda's calling card adds a dirty, gritty appeal to the apocalypse.

I do have one major complaint so far though.

IT IS NOT FUNNY!

Anyone who played the first 2 Fallout titles will remember a dark and often whimsical humor sprinkled all throughout the games. Sadly the humor is mostly missing from Fallout 3.

The hardware requirements are restively low for a game in this day and age
• Windows XP/Vista
• 1GB System RAM (XP)/ 2GB System RAM (Vista)
• 2.4 GHz Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent processor
• Direct X 9.0c compliant video card with 256MB RAM (NVIDIA 6800 or better/ATI X850 or better)

All told the game runs seamlessly on my thoroughly middle-of-the-road computer I will have a follow up for this later as I only have about 15 hours in so far, but I suspect that I’ll have a 100 or so more by the end of the month, which is the most ringing endorsement I can give any game :)