So i was walking along trying to figure out the expected path to the Museum of Technology for Three Dog's quest in an effort to catch up on the main quest and not shut myself off to anything due to going to Rivet City too early and having to quick load after mistakenly talking to a certain lady who had news I wasn't ready for, and I find myself at the entrance to a hospital. "WTH," I think, Fallout's all about exploration right? I've already found a few bobbleheads and rescued a few captives so far; sounds like a hopsital is a fun little jaunt to end my night of play.

Innumerable Super Mutant Brutes' heads later, I've gone over a precarious debris bridge into some hotel and all I want to do is get back to the street but for some reason the only stairways I run into go up and now I'm on some top-floor restaurant lobbing grenades into a minigun-toting Super Mutant Master apparently looking for a fight. At last: the rooftop; maybe a rope ladder or garbage chute or some other convenient way down. Nope, a long walk while some heavy duty battle goes on above me. I rush in with my assault rifle, dead muties littering the stairs, and some green guy in a helmet is looking at me weird. Then he starts shooting so I take off his head. Then I turn around and see another dude crouched with a minigun roughly the size of the world and those VATS-infused reflexes take over. Just after her head finishes rolling through the air and landing on a coffee machine, I'm notified that Reillys Rangers hate me and I failed some mission. Who is Reilly and what's his problem with me?

A moment of sadness for failing a mission I didn't know I was on.

Followed by the comfort that a good-condition minigun named Eugene and some new armor affords.

Unfortunately, i spent so long trying to get the elevator to work that I forgot about quick loading and now have to live with my battle-hardened homicidal past. These are not the actions of a very good Paladin, yet Fallout presents a harsh world where bad things happen. Sometimes you eat the mirelurk cake and sometimes, well... he eats you.

So long, Reillys rangers. Hardly knew ye.

Whats to say, the game world is huge, taking over 100+ hours (if you take side missions.) the game looks sweet on a high end PC and the story is killer.

Combat could be a little better, most FPS fans with feel its to slow with most RPG fans with think it a bit to shooter based. The PC version also crashes alot but a patch will fix that soon I am sure.

By far a great game in a sea of crap that has been coming out lately.

One of the best games in years, I really enjoyed it. Now we need to wait for the modding community to grow :D

My PS3 broke just bafore fallout 3 was releaed, it's been too long, i want to plzy this now =(

I went back and played Fallout 3 again, this time as a male character and played straight through the linear storyline with no side quests. I tried not to kill any humans if I could and ultimately ended up killing mostly super mutants, feral ghouls and mutated rats and things. It was not as repugnant for some reason to play as a male character when it came to all the killing.

The story was a bit too much to take however in that it really didn't make much sense.

SPOILERS AHEAD --------------------


When Liam Neeson is no longer a part of things, it goes straight downhill. It just isn't much of a story without the lead actor. I didn't like how this was handled in the game by any stretch of the imagination and it leaves a good portion of the game without the soulful voice acting of Liam. I was kind of like - what? Oh great - the only reason I was even paying attention to this crappy story and they just killed him off!

The endgame is BORING and comes down to a sacrifice - are you willing to sacrifice yourself to safe everyone even though in truth - war never changes.

The payoff is the cinematic at the end and if you are really hoping for a payoff that somehow ties it all together and is worth the 20 or so hours you just invested you will not find it here.

Thus my advice is to do all the side quests instead. See the world since they put more into that than they did the characters, animations and storyline.

How much do I think Diablo 3 will bite? Oh much. Very much.

You would think that considering that I normally enjoy exploring game worlds, that Fallout 3 would be a treat, for me. And, generally, it is. Overall, I am loving the game. I'm just so darned frustrated by this one location!

I have been trying to find the GNR building for two days now with no luck. Oh, it's right there on my screen. I can see the little icon, teasing me...mocking me with it's nearness. And yet I can't reach it. I keep finding myself having to backtrack around huge piles of debris or exploring subways in the vague hope that they will pop me out somewhere near my destination. Alas, such has not been the case. I have formed a Ring of Discovery all around the GNR building but no way to actually reach it.

GAH! *pulls out hair*

I think part of my frustration comes from the fact that I don't like the way FO3 rendered the local maps. I have a very hard time making heads or tales of anything I see. It just looks like a big, ol' blob of green and black, making little sense. So, I find myself trying to rely entirely on my memory for where I have been and where I need to go, which is hard when all the streets look basically the same. Oh, sure, there are plenty of landmarks, overall. But when deciding if I should take Street A or the street just a block down from it...well...sometimes it's just hard to remember which one you've already been down.

I know that I am probably missing something very simple and obvious. Maybe there is an old, half-destroyed building that I can get through to reach it. I don't know. I may go back to doing Moira's quests for a bit and come back to this later. (Though, I don't expect trying to find the National Archives to be any easier.)

I was struck by the sheer beauty of this game but I couldn't play it any longer. It was depressing and ultra-violent and didn't give any options on how to play the game without blasting the hell out of everyone. The carnage was beyond gruesome and didn't seem right for a female character who had been raised with high ideals by her father underground for 19 years.

While the world was fully realized, many of the searches take place in tunnels and basements and common looking subterranean depths. These are just dungeons redressed and boring boring boring. I would have much preferred the linear story take place more above ground than below or in the bowels of Rivet City.

It was 10 years since I played Fallout 2 and I loved the game, loved the old-style RPG feel of it and that it was largely dependent upon talking to characters in the game. Also that there was more than one way to get information and figure out how to handle situations without having to kill everyone.

This game doesn't offer that option plus when a game is going for so much realism - the fact that this country has not been able to pull itself back together in 200 YEARS - is a somewhat ridiculous time-line. It would have been much better to set the game, 40-50 years following the holocaust because at least then there would actually be people around who remembered what the USA was really like.

Furthermore in 200 years the place would have been a massively overgrown JUNGLE and although I read that the conceptual artists realized this, they made a style decision to keep it bleak (plus let's face it rendering all that plant life!) which I would have been much better able to accept if the game had not been so far after the holocaust.

I knew the game would be somewhat uncomfortable (I mean, you can actually "eat" the corpses of those you kill - though I don't know why you would when you can buy food (and find it) all over the place) and dystopian but I wasn't prepared for it to be so MILITARISTIC and gruesomely violent.

I wanted there to be a little more intelligence to the game and a little less blowing things and people up. At first that can be fun but 30 hours into the game - snore.