Family Wii

If I did, it would look like this~

I spent a ton of time last winter in a major side quest, and it sucked up a bunch of my time, and contributed to my lack of productivity over the last three or four months. That was caused by Fallout 3, which I played on both PS3 and PC. I’ve written elsewhere that the Wii was what got me back into console gaming after 20 years, but the siren song of Fallout 3, many gaming journalists’ game of the year for 2008, dragged me in. I bought the Game of the Year edition at GameSpot, and spent a good deal of time playing the PS3 version. Since there is fierce competition for our television here in the V household, I bought the PC version from Steam to have a backup thing to do on my computer that didn’t involve porn sites.

Between playing the PS3 and PC versions of the game, and comparing it to my Wii experience, I learned a lot about why I like the Wii and the PC and why I’m not all that impressed with the PS3 (and don’t even mention the XBox to me). So, if I decided to review the game in the same fashion as the other games featured on this site, it might look something like this….

Grade: A 

Vital Stats
Publisher	Bethesda SoftWorks
Developer	Bethesda Game Studios
Price	$49.95
MetaCritic score	91

review by David V

Reviewer’s Note: MotionGaming would like to stress that this game is inappropriate for children and is intended for adult gamers only. Always manage M-rated games in your household responsibly.

Although PCs have traditionally set the bar for excellence in graphics and gameplay, the HD consoles have closed the gap considerably, and now it’s not uncommon for major titles to appear on consoles first and then get ported back (usually because Microsoft bribes them silly to do so). If dazzling graphics, immersive gameplay, and replayability define the cream of the crop in PC gaming, then Fallout 3 is a major accomplishment. In this article, I am reviewing the Game of the Year edition, released in 2009, which includes all of the downloadable add-ons: Operation: Anchorage, Broken Steel, The Pitt, Point Lookout, and Mothership Zeta.

Bethesda spent a non-trivial amount of money to buy the rights to the Fallout franchise from bankrupt, struggling publisher Interplay. That there is little in common with the original games, and a whole lot of debt to existing technology from Oblivion, matters little in the cosmic scheme of things. Bethesda has successfully taken the storyline, which hasn’t seen much sunlight since Fallout 2 ten years previous, and updated it to current gaming technology, with near-spectacular results. I say "near-spectacular" because while Fallout 3 is the very definition of "epic action RPG", it’s not without some minor flaws.

200 years after the Great War, a nuclear conflagration that laid the globe to waste in all of 2 hours, and 36 years after the events of Fallout 2, you are born in Vault 101 in the year 2277 in the Northern Virginia outskirts of the ruins of Washington, DC. Your mother dies during childbirth, and you are raised by your father, James, who serves as Vault 101’s doctor. You experience life at age 1, 10, and 16, each of which serving as game set-up and tutorial where you will construct your character, choose their starting RPG attributes, and learn how to move, interact with non-playable characters (NPC’s), manage inventory, and use weapons. Right off the bat, your choices in these interactions affect how others view you via the game’s concept of karma, which measures how good or evil you are. Choose carefully, because your karma will have a profound impact on events and decision years down the road.

At age 19, you’re woken by your best friend, Amata Almodovar, who is also the daughter of the Vault Overseer. Your father has unsealed the vault and bolted into the surrounding wasteland, and the Overseer is sufficiently outraged that, as a precaution, he has ordered your murder. Your first real mission is to escape Vault 101. Once you accomplish that, the game explodes in all directions to an open world that dares you to explore it. Your mission is to track down your father, find out why he left the Vault, and then follow fate’s course from there.

The Capitol Wasteland is vast and unforgiving. As with previous games, the world is a historical hybrid, as if time went in a different direction from our course of events after the 1950s. The pre-war world of Fallout was one of a retro-future as envisioned by ’40s and ’50s futurism and sci-fi culture: a weird mix of advanced nuclear and chemical engineering, oversized electromechanical computing, and a persistent Cold War. The Great War was the exclamation point on a drawn-out period of wars between America, Europe, and China, motivated by dwindling resources. What’s left 200 years later is the detritus of that culture. Most food consists of centuries-old pop junk food culture like Sugar Bombs, Insta-Mash, and the ubiquitous presence of Nuka-Cola, spread through art deco urban architecture and post-war tract homes. Scavenging in these ruins is a primary means of collecting resources.

The scope of Fallout 3 quickly becomes awe-inspiring. Although you may choose to follow the main quest storyline, you’ll find a myriad of side quests to occupy your time. But your first major stopover point is likely to be the town of Megaton, the second largest organized settlement in the Wasteland, and the place likely to serve as your operational headquarters in the short term. In addition to the unexploded nuclear bomb in the center of town, there are a dozen or more important NPCs to interact with here, and all of them will significantly impact your success in the game. The town is run competitively between Sheriff Lucas Simms, who fashions himself the mayor of Megaton and is generally a good guy, and Colin Moriarty, the operator of the local saloon and generally a sleazebag. In Megaton you’ll find a little bit of everything you need — shelter in the Common House or Moriarty’s, supplies from Craterside Supply, local folklore from the Church of the Children of Atom, the Brass Lantern eatery, and Doc Church’s clinic.

As you find other settlements in the wastes, you’ll find other vendors of similar supplies, the biggest concentration of which is found in Rivet City, the Wasteland’s largest town, fashioned out of a beached aircraft carrier. The main quest will inevitably bring you here. But there are other little corners of civilization scattered all over a gigantic map. Some are purely fictional, like Canterbury Commons and Tenpenny Tower, while others are based on real locations, such as the Fairfax and Bethesda ruins and The Mall. Your main tool for keeping track of it all is your PipBoy 3000, a wrist-mounted computer given to you in the Vault on your 10th birthday. From it you can keep tallies on all of your supplies, keep track of quests, and tune into radio stations for information and entertainment. In all, there are about 50 different quests, over 100 map locations, and myriad collectables in the stock game. Add to that the five DLC packages, which are included in the Game of the Year Edition, and you’re faced with over 75 quests and 200 map locations. We’re looking at well over 200 hours of gameplay. While I will try to cover all of the important gameplay features, I’m sure I’ll miss something because the game is just that freakin’ huge.

Just like any good RPG, your character has their strengths and weaknesses, and you can use your experience to build on your strengths or mitigate your weaknesses. At age 1, you navigate the SPECIAL RPG system — strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility, and luck — and distribute a finite number of points to influence your abilities. At age 16, you’ll take the GOAT (General Occupational Aptitude Test), which may (or may not, your choice) specify your particular skill areas, of which there are thirteen. Upon achieving each level, you’ll gain a certain number of points to allocate to your skill areas. There are 30 levels with the inclusion of the Broken Steel expansion, enough to grow considerably, maybe even max out one or two of them, but you won’t become a god. It’s just not that simple. You’ll also get to choose a perk at each level, of which there are nearly 40, that will impart additional skills or abilities. Some are only available once you reach certain levels, and others are influenced by your karma.

And you may as well come to grips with this now: You’ll have to kill things. Lots of things, including people. Whether you like to do this, or hate it, it’s not relevant in the Wasteland. Some folks, frankly, will deserve it. Raiders will kill you if you don’t kill them. So will the mercenaries from Talon Company. But there are good people, too. Befriend them and you may gain powerful allies. Kill them and you may make powerful enemies. What’s not in doubt is that you’ll need to kill just about every other creature you encounter. Just as the ’50s monster movie posited, radiation doesn’t seem to make new species so much as make old ones bigger and meaner, so you’ll face giant mole rats, ants, mutated crabs called mirelurks and mutated bears called yao guai and things called deathclaws that you really won’t like running into. Oh yeah, and the irradiated humans. Ghouls come in three flavors: sane, insane, and radioactive. The first is okay, and you’ll befriend quite a few. Kill the second kind. Run away from the third if you can, because they, the Glowing Ones, will give you a nice dose of rads when they explode. And there are several flavors of super mutants, ranging in size from 7 feet for the standard foot soldiers to well over 20 feet for the Behemoths. Fortunately, if things get to be too much, you can adjust the game difficulty on the fly simply by hopping out to the pause menu and adjusting it, though you’ll get fewer experience points for easier levels.

When you’re not being hunted, you’re trying to survive. You can regain health points by sleeping in unowned beds, scavenging food and medicine, or drinking water, but since nearly everything is irradiated, it’s always a trade-off. You’ll have to manage your radiation levels through several levels of sickness, from minor to deadly. You can buy or scavenge weapons, which will need both ammunition and periodic repairs. All of these things are influenced by the skill categories, which in turn are influenced by the SPECIAL system. And while you can carry quite a bit, your capacity is still limited by your strength, although it can be temporarily augmented with drugs. A lot of barter happens with both fixed vendors and traveling caravan operators, but you can also bank "scav", as it’s referred to in the game, by trading for bottle caps, which somehow has become the de facto currency of the future. You may be assisted from time to time by companions, NPCs which mostly control themselves and tag along to help with your endeavors. Some will join you for free, while others require particular karma levels.

To many people, Fallout 3 will look like a shooter, but the true FPS elements in the game are limited. It excels as an action RPG, and the combat system reflects this. While you can shoot freehand if you wish, most folks are likely to use the quasi-turn-based combat called VATS (VaultTec Assisted Targeting System). You’re assigned a number of Action Points, which can be used within VATS to queue up shots. Once you press the VATS button, the action freezes, and you can target particular body parts and even multiple enemies. Once used, you must wait for Action Points to build back up. Generally speaking, more powerful weapons require more Action Points to use in VATS. And speaking of weapons, there are plenty to choose from, including melee weapons for cutting and bludgeoning, ballistic weapons requiring bullet ammunition, energy weapons, and big guns like the missile launcher, flamer, and fat man, used to launch mini-nukes.

You also have a choice between first- and third-person perspectives, between crouching and standing, and between scoped aiming. On PC, the controls follow a pretty standard mouse and keyboard layout, although buttons can be mapped to Logitech-style gamepads if you wish. On PS3, all of the controls are mapped to buttons on the Sixaxis controller. I used a combination of a Logitech RumblePad and a Razer gaming mouse for PC play. I had no real complaints except for aiming on the PS3. It’s moments like that where I really, really miss the Wii Remote and Nunchuk, which would be a far superior control scheme. Too bad the game is probably too old to get Move support this far along.

If there’s one general area where Fallout 3 tends to fall down, it’s in quality control. On both the PC and PS3, the graphics are beautiful. Beautifully ugly, and I mean that in a good way. The cityscapes are gleefully ruined and seeing Washington in such a state is a joyful thing to behold. The art direction is splendid. But there are graphical glitches scattered liberally through the game, and crashes and hangs in both the PC and PS3 versions are not uncommon events. Sometimes characters move in peculiars ways, some of the animations aren’t very clean, and then there is the singularly weird glitch that makes NPCs hold their weapons upside down on occasion. The rest of the game is so good, that when problems do occur, they’re that much more disappointing.

Another strong suit of the game is the audio. The Fallout series has always featured great music, and Fallout 3 is no exception. Your PipBoy can pick up radio stations, some of which are just interesting to listen to, such as Enclave Radio and Agatha’s Radio, while others are important to the gameplay and story, like Galaxy News Radio. GNR will be your most common audio companion, as the DJ, Three Dog, serenades you with selected pop hits of the 1940s, plays episodes of the radio serial "Daring Dashwood", drops hints of future gameplay and quests, and gives commentary on your exploits. The theme song of the game, "I Don’t Want To Set the World on Fire" by the Ink Spots (a #4 hit from 1941), is typical of the game’s soundtrack. You’ll also meet Three Dog himself during the main story quests and have the option to do him a couple of favors along the way. When not listening to a radio, the score by Inon Zur is a fitting and satisfying atmospheric backdrop.

The voice acting is stellar, and features some recognizable AAA Hollywood talent. The game is narrated by Ron Perlman, Liam Neeson voices your father James, and Malcolm McDowell provides the voice of Enclave President John Henry Eden. They’re joined by lesser known but top notch voice acting talent such as Erik Dellums, Odette Yustman, and Heather Marsden. Karen Carbone voices no fewer than 16 different female characters. And in classic Samus Aran style, your character doesn’t get to say much other than grunt and holler, but there’s still quite a bit of it.

Just with what I’ve described so far, Fallout 3 would be a great value. But with the release of the Game of the Year edition, all of the downloadable extra content is provided free. That includes Broken Steel, the extension of the main storyline, which also modifies quite a bit of the core gameplay, and four mega-side quests. Operation: Anchorage lets you assist the Brotherhood Outcasts in busting into a weapons cache by completing a holographic simulation of liberation of Anchorage, Alaska from the Chinese. Point Lookout adds a new area of swampland off the tip of the outer banks of Virginia, with its own wildlife and mutant natives. The Pitt lets you travel to ruined Pittsburgh to take on the slavers and raiders. Finally, Mothership Zeta has you investigating a downed UFO and you get abducted by aliens. That wraps up the game, because frankly, I can’t think of anything that could top an alien abduction.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention the active and rich modding community that has evolved to service the game. Bethesda’s previous games, The Elder Scrolls and Oblivion, were both hotbeds of amateur modification communities. Because of the technical similarities between those games and Fallout 3, many of the mods and extensions have been ported, and many more new mods have been created. There are literally hundreds of ways to modify and extend the game, ranging from add-on textures to new NPCs and companions to new side quests to entire gameplay overhauls. Everything from new weapons to new enemies to a whole weather system has been produced, and while adding mods does have an overall tendency to undermine the stability of the game, most of them are perfectly safe, and only require an intermediate level of knowledge to install and implement. The main clearinghouse for mods is The Nexus, which also has mods for Fallout: New Vegas and Dragon Age. You can find all you need to modify your copy of Fallout 3 at http://www.fallout3nexus.com.

It’s rare to find such an expansive experience of this quality in gaming, and the awards that have been showered on Fallout 3 is well deserved. If only there was a way to marry the Wii’s motion controls to it, we could have the most perfect gaming experience ever created.