Andyman Messiah
Mr. Ed-ucated
Fallout 3D - A Post-Nuclear First Person Shooter
No Peace For The Wicked
I know what you're thinking, baby. You're thinking "Oh my stars and thigh-highs, I really want to know if Fallout 3 is worth a purchase but there are so many Fallout 3-reviews and not even two of them is written by that incredible Andyman Messiah guy..." Well, it's time for the hottest mess in all of Codexia to speak his mind on Bethesda's recent failures.
Let's do a fucking Fallout 3-review!
[Perception] I have posted this in General RPG Discussion instead of sending it off to some Codex staff member. I don't want this posted as official content and if the Codex is intelligent they won't want it as official content either. I'm ashamed.
Someone Who Cares
You all know the post apocalyptic tango: mankind fucked up the planet and now everything is grey, brown and radiated. Orcs with gatling laser plasma rocket shotgun grenade sledgehammer launchers roam the countryside and the only way to get clean water is to ask your highly improbable magical robot octopus butler – imported directly from Hampshire I imagine, if he can give you some, while at the same time he cuts your hair the same way his colleague cut your birthday cake. All of this takes place inside the highly improbable house you received for disarming a nuclear bomb. A house that you then furniced with highly improbable tip-top high class furniture bought from the annoying scrap vendor across the street.
And by street I mean crater.
Exactly why your Hampshire robot butler knows how to do away with harmful radiation when the most scientific scientists in the world for some reason doesn't, or exactly how interior decorating could have survived the nuke-u-king-lear war, are just two of many questions that will go unanswered in Fallout 3. My advice however is that you shouldn't worry your little head about... well, anything, really! Because, see, there's not going to be much thinking involved. After all, you're not playing your great grandfather's Fallout! You're not even playing your grandfather's Fallout 2! You're not even steven playing your father's Fallout Tactics! Shit, son, you're not even steven believe-n' motherfucking-eel'n'reeling playing your father's bastard cousin's grandfather's dentist's mom's mom's ex-girlfriend's mom's 4chan-quoting hockey-goalie brother's mom's lesbian stepmother's sexy, sexy teenage daughter's teenage daughter's teenage son's ”best friend” Tyler's pirated copy of Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel!!
Hahahaha, fuck no, son! This is Fallout motherfucking 3!
And may God have mercy on us all.
I guess we better talk about the story now, right? It's what reviews usually do first. Hahaha, like this is a review! Hahaha! Oh well, it's the usual bullshit! You play as either a boy or a sheboy who has lived all his life in Vault 101 together with your dad, Liam Neeson, the only doctor in the Vault. Suddenly, after your eighteenth birthday, daddy disappears! What the shit, you think as you're woken up by your seriously unattractive girlfriend Amata. She hands you a gun, tells you to murder your way out of the Vault and find your father. Once located, you will help him save the world. So to recap, grow up, fuck off out into the wilderness and save the world. That's as complicated as the plot will ever get.
Now let's talk tutorial! Tutorial! God fucking damn it... You know what I hate more than fucking tutorials? A goddamn assrapingly cumsouring monster truck rally dumbfuck tutorial. Fucking yippie yay may the holy god of thunder smite your ass, tutorial! Yes, verily, before you wake up and the great goddamn escape can begin you have to go through a tiresome tutorial where you leave your mom's vagina and get to handpick exactly what you're gonna look like when grow older than one minute. Yes, a special machine whose sole purpose is to travel forward in time and find out what kids are gonna look like when they grow up has indeed been invented.
The next bit is all about putting points into your SPECIAL; learning how to move around and interact with the environment. Your father, played by someone who might just be famous actor Liam Neeson, teaches you how to crawl up to him with the ”w”-button and listen as he quotes a bible passage your mother liked or something. People with half a brain will understand that this might be something that will become important later on in the game. And obviously I mean the whole ”moving around thing”. The bible quote will be added to your pipboy as soon as you need it, so don't worry about writing it down. Hahaha! I mean, what a funny idea! Writing important shit down for later! Jesus Christ, what are you, your great uncle's grandfather or something? Hahaha!!
(Kill me!)
After doing all that nonsense, it's time for a birthday party! Not just any birthday party! Your birthday party! This is awesome, because here you meet all the vault residents you know, including old sweetroll-baking lady; the three future star members of the Grease musical; the Overseer, who's a douché, and his daughter Amata, who – if we're a boy with substandard standards, should somehow be attracted to. You also meet Andy who happen to be THE best character in the game, and I'm not just saying that because we happen to share the same incredibly awesome name, give or take a couple of letters. He really is the most developed character you'll find in Fallout 3. Should I mention that he's a Mr. Handy robot? Yeah. Should I mention that the SECOND most developed character in Fallout 3 is also a goddamn robot? Yeah, the greatest characters in Fallout 3 are robots. Other characters include hispanic guard (indifferent, might be douche), alcoholic, poetry-writing MILF, and other freaks of nature you will NOT give a fuck about if you're intelligent! They are all there on your party for a reason: to hand you a present, be it a tutorial in item management or fisticuffs. That's it, that's all! Granted, it's the tutorial and it's supposed to be brief (thank god) but this really is the MOST fleshed out you will ever see these characters and, quite frankly, it makes me sad because it makes me wonder why the fuck Bethesda even bother putting characters in their games. Either hire a couple of real writers or send your existing stupid motherfuckers to school, Bethesda. I couldn't wait to get the fuck outta the vault and leave all this boring crap behind me. Try all you want, Amata, I ain't ever coming back to save your ass later on in the game.
'Course, the tutorial's ain't done yet! The next part is all about a chance to see what kind of skills you're especially suited for. Read: what kind of job in the Vault you'll end up doing. (Try all you want, you'll always end up as the vault's expert excrement expiditor.) You find out in a test wherein you have to answer what you would do in certain situations. Say you locked your car in your keys, do you pick the lock, kick the lock or ask someone to smear cum over your face? The situations doesn't make sense in the generally realistic context of the game but I'll allow it since I'm never going to get this review done if I'm gonna stop and be picky about every single stupid fucking thing I come across.
The test is unfortunately highly reminiscent of the custom merc test in Jagged Alliance 2. I say unfortunately as it doesn't even have nearly the same amount of charm or class as everyone's favorite mercenary management sim do. Instead, it simply acts as a quick nod to a game that some of the developers *possibly maybe* played *once* (and some of them *might* even have completed it, or even gone past the custom merc test, but that's me at my most optimistic) and thought ”hey, this would be cool to reference!” ”Yeah, and it's from one of those turnbased games too!!” ”...” ”What? Did I say something wrong?” ”Turnbased?! What are you, some kinda nerd?!” The problem though, is that unlike JA2's test, F3's test is poorly written and badly executed. And as previously mentioned, it doesn't make sense and that means that whatever jokes the writer intended falls flat to the ground. And then of course add the fact that it's entirely meaningless since, as is normal Bethesda-design, you can change it as you see fit once you hand it over to your teacher (and then a second time once you leave the vault).
If there's one thing I've come to learn when it comes to Bethesda's games, it that nothing actually matters. And character development obviously matters least of all.
Fuck it. At least we're outta the tutorial...
Trouble In The World
And boy howdy, are we outta the goddamn tutorial now or what?! Jumping Jimmy Jack-off Johnson Junior sitting in Georgia drinking tea, your father has escaped from the vault and now, after they discovered his escape, the whole vault has gone goddamn apeshit! See, your father is the only goddamn doctor in the vault and heck, we can't very well allow someone that important to leave, can we?! That's why the Overseer have the guards shoot ANYONE who tries anything! Run up to a guard and he'll shoot your goddamn face off! Fuck yeah, that'll make Doctor Neeson return for sure! Look at all the bodies! He can't just leave without... without... patching them up......c-c-can he? ...Well shit, looks like he did. Oh well. Anyway, you wake up, get a pistol and a baseball bat handed to you and make your way out, killing anything and anyone hindering your progress – including a dozen guards. You also learn the horrible secret of Vault 101, a secret too stupid to even bother with.
Anyway, once you finally get the fuck out, you get a brief nod to Fallout 1 as your eyes quickly adjust to the sunlight and I have to admit that it is a very nice nod. It's quickly done, but anyone who has played Fallout 1 without a reading disorder will know it the moment they see it.
Alright, pistol in hand, pipboy on arm, good out of place custom 70's-80's punk rock soundtrack playing, you head out to find your goddamn father and tell him how much you hate him no matter how good his Liam Neeson-impression gets. How could he just fucking leave you there all alone with those crazy motherfuckers? Didn't he realize the Overseer would go nuts and start executing half the population once the doctor left? Goddammit, dad! This is all your fault! I'm gonna shoot you in the kneecaps once I find you! Shit, I was so mad at my fictional father that I just stormed into the nearby town of Megaton and demanded that they hand over my father, ”a middleaged guy.” The sheriff hadn't seen my father or any middleaged guys that might have been my daddy. Instead he directed me to some other asshole who apparently keep tabs on middleaged guys roaming the wasteland. This is pretty much how the first part of the main quest goes; moving from place to place and ask people if they've seen your father around, and the only description you give them is that he's a middleaged guy. I think it's very fitting that we're playing a hero that is even less intelligent than the most mentally handicapped person ever.
Jesus Christ sitting on a trampoline I need a goddamn drink...
Yeah, so the main quest is entirely summed up with 1, find father; 2, help father; 3, save world. While there are many, many games that would boast a similar plot, Fallout 3 has one of the most boring and, frankly, depraving main quests I have ever played through. There are no highlights. None. I saw some potential but it was sadly ruined by the fact that Bethesda is a bunch of lazy and incompetent fucks, unable to provide intelligent entertainment that makes sense. Take the main gist of the plot for example; building a huge, very complex machine for something as simple as water purifying. Treating it as some kind of difficult high level science magic bullshit that nobody ever even thought about is only the tip of the huge Mount Everestian diarrhea iceberg. It just screams ”shit shit shit we need some epic-sounding plot and we need it fast!” Perhaps Bethesda didn't know how water purifying works (hint: in Resident Evil 4 it would be a puzzle solved like ”use water with earth”) or maybe they didn't think their beloved audience would know how it worked. Either way; you fucking suck, Bethesda. And your fans suck too.
And not in a good way.
Why Don't You Kill Yourself
Alright, shit, deep breaths, deep breaths... Give me a second to calm down. Where's my paper bag?! Calm down, Andy. Calm down... Alright, now let's talk about the fucking dialog! Oh god, where's the paper bag? Alright, fuck it. Let's just do this.
Dialog is entirely in the shitter! Yes, Bethesda actually went into the danger zone and wrote actual sentences this time, but fucking hell, it's an entirely new level of shitter now because of it. I've already mentioned the whole ”have you seen my middleaged father around”-thing but there's more, believe me. But I honestly don't have the alcohol necessary to write them down.
Jesus Christ, the only way this can be passed off as ”better than Oblivion” is because of the fucking skillchecks, because the skillchecks make the stupid fucking dialog hilarious and thus *beyond* stupid. Basically, all these checks do is provide you with an extra, ”more skilled” response and some of them are so fucking bad I think they're some kind of fucking joke because they can't be fucking real, they just can't! Bethesda's writers cannot be so goddamn fucking dumb.
Every multiheaded cock's favorite hero and patriot, Vincent Dylan Weller III, conjured up exactly what most of us thought when we laid eyes on these skillchecks, and so I'm going to quote him:
I should also add that Three Dog is perhaps the most hurtful representation of a black man in a video game ever.
From Here To Eternity
Let's talk gameplay for a second. Or rather, let's talk combat for a second, because most of the time spent in Fallout 3 will be shooting or hitting different things. If you've played a first person shooter at least once, on very easy, you know almost exactly how to play Fallout 3 – the first FPS ever for people who die on very easy difficulty.
Combat A.I. is ridiculously stupid. It was stupid in Morrowind, it was stupid in Oblivion and it's goddamn stupid in Fallout 3 too. It's unbelievable! If you have trouble with Fallout 3 you don't deserve living in my world. Give me your adress and I'll drop by with a huge knife. I'm serious. It's for your own good.
Part of the ridiculously unbelieveably stupid combat is all because of VATS – Bethesda's answer to everyone who craved turnbased combat. VATS is a poorly implemented cinematic bullet time-style cheat mode where you character always gets a free hit and your enemies heads always explode regardless if you picked the ”Bloody Mess”-perk or not. It works like this; whenever you want, you can enter VATS-mode. The game gets paused and and you get a zoomed in view of an enemy and can choose in detail where you want to shoot him. This costs you one action point and... fuck it. Why the fuck am I writing that shit? VATS is retarded and was only ever put into the fucking game because Todd, Emil and Tyler (that fat hairy cunt) thought it would be cool to make something even less interesting than bullet time. It has absolutely no meaning whatsoever and is a disgrace to the noble artform of groin shots. There aren't even any groin shots in Fallout 3! Probably because Todd, Emil and Tyler (that slim, bald penis) had no idea what a groin was. Probably because they had no idea what is located in the groin area. Probably because they're fucking eunuchs! Eunuchs dualwielding nunchuks! Todd, Emil and Tyler (the toddler touching trackmania terrorist) should go die, because they are dualwielding nunchuk ninjas without penises. Beware!
VATS is probably also a stupid abbreviation for something but I couldn't be arsed to check it out. It's probably ”Vampire Agent Terrorizing System” since there's a odd minimum of vampire people running around in Fallout 3, as opposed to Beth's previous games. I'm convinced it's all because of VATS. But yes, there are vampires in Fallout 3. Or at least, there are ”humans with a strange urge to drink human blood.” It is not important if they are vampires or wannabe-vampires. They need to die. Equip a baseball bat, enter VATS-mode and hit yourself a couple of homeruns. Everyone gets a free pass at using VATS if it's to kill vampires and vampire wannabes.
Anyway, long story short; Bethesda fucked up FPS combat.
Oh Lucinda (Loves Becomes A Habit)
I just want everyone to know that the railwayrifle is totally overpowered.
I use it all the time.
Fuck yeah.
No Solution
Aka ”Why can't I kill children?! This is the worst game ever!” Let me tell you how I spent the last days in Fallout 3...
It is a sweet fairytale about a drunk, good-looking dude with a big fucking beard, his many guns and a ton of children standing in his way. Children... that cannot be... killed. Unkillable children. Yeah. Just.... think.... about that for a moment, shit, take TWO moments if you have to. It takes time to grasp, to really sink the whole fucking thing in. Even the greatest of minds are not ready to handle such an absurd idea as unkillable children. It's not their fault. Nobody fucking prepared them for it, so why on earth or anywhere else should they be able to understand it? Children are fucking immortal? I'm sorry, folks, there's just something wrong about the whole ordeal. They can be sliced, diced, stabbed, shot, rocketlaunched and gatlingfucklasered without breaking so much as a drop of sweat.
My quest to kill children in Fallout 3 eventually went so far that I went into the console (really Bethesda's built-in cheat system), clicked on one of the bastards and typed in ”kill”. He dropped down... fucking unconscious. So I fucking dragged him all the way to a nuclear powered car and, yes, every now and then I had to ”kill” him again when he woke up and tried to run the fuck away. Damn kid. Anyway, I eventually managed to drop him right on top of the engine. I backed away and proceeded with phase onehundredandmotherfuckingeleven; to shoot the car until it exploded and the little manchild burned alive as I watched ten feet away. I was disappointed to see, that after a mere minute or so, flat on his back like a rape victim, he got back up without even a glowing rash and started to run the fuck away again from someone that never ever would pose a threat to him. Disgruntled, I ”killed” him again and dragged him to a dumpster, hoping at least to simulate his death ”CSI”-style. I'm still working on trying to put him in it and I will not be satisfied until I succeed in my endeavours. I have a specific savegame devoted entirely for it and everything.
Unkillable kids, I think, symbolizes some of the many things I think is wrong with Fallout 3. Some people do not think that the option to kill children is important in an roleplaying game. I beg to differ. If a game is rated ”T” for ”Teeny Tiny Twerp” I can understand that whoever my player character is supposed to be, the most evil he ever going to be is that one optional quest where he run into the geriatric care, snatches a senile old grandma in a wheelchair and blames a horrible murder (that happened off-screen, naturally) on her. But Fallout 3 is supposedly rated ”M” for ”Murder Many M...kids”. If a game is meant for a mature audience, I want it to give me a mature experience. Don't give me blood and gore and swearing. That's not mature. That's just fucking bullshit. Maturity to me is not about running around in a desert with my dog and blowing up mutants in six hundred and two pieces and scatter the remains all over the world; it's about making difficult choices that fuck with your head and forces you to fucking act! I want to be able to kill children if my player character is wired like that. And if I want to play a character who is all holy and goody and wear two shoes, I want him to be able to *accidently* shoot a kid and have that accident fuck him up until, perhaps, he manage to atone for this horrible mistake. It's the mature thing. Consequences!
Yes, if you give players complete freedom to do whatever they want, sixhundred of sixhundred and one of them will run over a box of cute, furry, meowing kittens, hook twelve year olds up with drugs and commit utter grandmothercide the first chance they get. But simply cutting out an element just because it's ”controversial” is not the ideal way to handle it and it makes me wonder why they even bothered putting kids in the game. They wanted realism of kids running around in the wasteland, but they couldn't cope with the realism that these kids wouldn't stand a chance against all the heavily armed people running around.
This game is rated ”T” but thinks it's rated ”M” just because it's dark, brown, poorly lit and filled with poorly animated blood splatter effects.
The Whole Of The Law
One of the problems with Bethesda is that they never seem to think. In a fairly recent 1UP-interview, lead designer Emil P...araguay-something talks about how they pretty much wrote the main quest way before they actually finished with the design of the game, and once they were finished they had come up with a number of things that, oh no, now contradicted one very important thing in the main quest. Something they actually threw in as a ”meaningful and emotionally powerful” (bear with me, alright?) element in an otherwise sterile and boring story. But they chose to leave this fuck up be. And they chose to be ”ok” about leaving this fuck up be, because it was, and I quote, ”cool” to provide the player with all this cool stuff that fucked up what they previously put into the game as, I repeat, a ”meaningful and emotionally powerful” element. Now, I don't actually give a fuck. I didn't think the end was meaningful or emotional, but the fact that Bethesda willingly fucked up their own creation says a lot about how they think, or rather how much they spend not thinking, and what developing a product means to them: nothing.
They sacrifice meaning for what they believe is cool.
I want you to imagine for a second that I'm hosting a talk show and that Emil is my guest. Emil comes out, the applause sign is lit (as a courtesy), everyone is booing. I begin: Emil, this is... uh, sit down, Emil, we need to talk. Have a glass of water. (more booing) This is... uh, this thing that you said in this interview, well... uh, using the most kind words I can think of at the moment, uh, it's, ah, it's... (I pause, take a deep breath) It's fucking stupid, that's what it is. (uncontrollable cheering from the audience) and, and, and an insult... I... I feel insulted that you just, that you just... Emil, look at me. I feel insulted that you admitted that you and your co-workers were just, y'know, lazy and, and, hey, look at me, Emil. What? No, no, no, those lithuanians aren't there to hurt you, don't be silly. But Emil, to, uh, to have the guts to try and pass it off as a cool thing... Uh, yeah, don't do that, man. The next time you guys fuck up... shit, just ask Pete to cover for you. Say, say, uh, say Craaaaazy Pete came over with a big crate of crack or something. But, uh, don't say you were head of a development team responsible for a main quest that chose to leave illogical shit in the game just because it's so FUCKING COOL TO HAVE A SUPER MUTANT FUCK BUDDY!! (Emil flees the studio, the lithuanian hitmen chasing him with laser chainsaws and plasma kick me-signs. I continue the show.) My next guest is the President of The World, Joe Pesci. (President Joe Pesci comes in and talks about his plan for world peace.)
It is obvious now that whatever Emil did for the Thief-games he worked on, it wasn't anything that made them good. It was easy to impress us with the Dark Brotherhood-questline since everything else in Oblivion was so retarded.
It's The Truth
Fallout 3 sucks.
Review ends.
No Peace For The Wicked
I know what you're thinking, baby. You're thinking "Oh my stars and thigh-highs, I really want to know if Fallout 3 is worth a purchase but there are so many Fallout 3-reviews and not even two of them is written by that incredible Andyman Messiah guy..." Well, it's time for the hottest mess in all of Codexia to speak his mind on Bethesda's recent failures.
Let's do a fucking Fallout 3-review!
[Perception] I have posted this in General RPG Discussion instead of sending it off to some Codex staff member. I don't want this posted as official content and if the Codex is intelligent they won't want it as official content either. I'm ashamed.
Someone Who Cares
You all know the post apocalyptic tango: mankind fucked up the planet and now everything is grey, brown and radiated. Orcs with gatling laser plasma rocket shotgun grenade sledgehammer launchers roam the countryside and the only way to get clean water is to ask your highly improbable magical robot octopus butler – imported directly from Hampshire I imagine, if he can give you some, while at the same time he cuts your hair the same way his colleague cut your birthday cake. All of this takes place inside the highly improbable house you received for disarming a nuclear bomb. A house that you then furniced with highly improbable tip-top high class furniture bought from the annoying scrap vendor across the street.
And by street I mean crater.
Exactly why your Hampshire robot butler knows how to do away with harmful radiation when the most scientific scientists in the world for some reason doesn't, or exactly how interior decorating could have survived the nuke-u-king-lear war, are just two of many questions that will go unanswered in Fallout 3. My advice however is that you shouldn't worry your little head about... well, anything, really! Because, see, there's not going to be much thinking involved. After all, you're not playing your great grandfather's Fallout! You're not even playing your grandfather's Fallout 2! You're not even steven playing your father's Fallout Tactics! Shit, son, you're not even steven believe-n' motherfucking-eel'n'reeling playing your father's bastard cousin's grandfather's dentist's mom's mom's ex-girlfriend's mom's 4chan-quoting hockey-goalie brother's mom's lesbian stepmother's sexy, sexy teenage daughter's teenage daughter's teenage son's ”best friend” Tyler's pirated copy of Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel!!
Hahahaha, fuck no, son! This is Fallout motherfucking 3!
And may God have mercy on us all.
I guess we better talk about the story now, right? It's what reviews usually do first. Hahaha, like this is a review! Hahaha! Oh well, it's the usual bullshit! You play as either a boy or a sheboy who has lived all his life in Vault 101 together with your dad, Liam Neeson, the only doctor in the Vault. Suddenly, after your eighteenth birthday, daddy disappears! What the shit, you think as you're woken up by your seriously unattractive girlfriend Amata. She hands you a gun, tells you to murder your way out of the Vault and find your father. Once located, you will help him save the world. So to recap, grow up, fuck off out into the wilderness and save the world. That's as complicated as the plot will ever get.
Now let's talk tutorial! Tutorial! God fucking damn it... You know what I hate more than fucking tutorials? A goddamn assrapingly cumsouring monster truck rally dumbfuck tutorial. Fucking yippie yay may the holy god of thunder smite your ass, tutorial! Yes, verily, before you wake up and the great goddamn escape can begin you have to go through a tiresome tutorial where you leave your mom's vagina and get to handpick exactly what you're gonna look like when grow older than one minute. Yes, a special machine whose sole purpose is to travel forward in time and find out what kids are gonna look like when they grow up has indeed been invented.
The next bit is all about putting points into your SPECIAL; learning how to move around and interact with the environment. Your father, played by someone who might just be famous actor Liam Neeson, teaches you how to crawl up to him with the ”w”-button and listen as he quotes a bible passage your mother liked or something. People with half a brain will understand that this might be something that will become important later on in the game. And obviously I mean the whole ”moving around thing”. The bible quote will be added to your pipboy as soon as you need it, so don't worry about writing it down. Hahaha! I mean, what a funny idea! Writing important shit down for later! Jesus Christ, what are you, your great uncle's grandfather or something? Hahaha!!
(Kill me!)
After doing all that nonsense, it's time for a birthday party! Not just any birthday party! Your birthday party! This is awesome, because here you meet all the vault residents you know, including old sweetroll-baking lady; the three future star members of the Grease musical; the Overseer, who's a douché, and his daughter Amata, who – if we're a boy with substandard standards, should somehow be attracted to. You also meet Andy who happen to be THE best character in the game, and I'm not just saying that because we happen to share the same incredibly awesome name, give or take a couple of letters. He really is the most developed character you'll find in Fallout 3. Should I mention that he's a Mr. Handy robot? Yeah. Should I mention that the SECOND most developed character in Fallout 3 is also a goddamn robot? Yeah, the greatest characters in Fallout 3 are robots. Other characters include hispanic guard (indifferent, might be douche), alcoholic, poetry-writing MILF, and other freaks of nature you will NOT give a fuck about if you're intelligent! They are all there on your party for a reason: to hand you a present, be it a tutorial in item management or fisticuffs. That's it, that's all! Granted, it's the tutorial and it's supposed to be brief (thank god) but this really is the MOST fleshed out you will ever see these characters and, quite frankly, it makes me sad because it makes me wonder why the fuck Bethesda even bother putting characters in their games. Either hire a couple of real writers or send your existing stupid motherfuckers to school, Bethesda. I couldn't wait to get the fuck outta the vault and leave all this boring crap behind me. Try all you want, Amata, I ain't ever coming back to save your ass later on in the game.
'Course, the tutorial's ain't done yet! The next part is all about a chance to see what kind of skills you're especially suited for. Read: what kind of job in the Vault you'll end up doing. (Try all you want, you'll always end up as the vault's expert excrement expiditor.) You find out in a test wherein you have to answer what you would do in certain situations. Say you locked your car in your keys, do you pick the lock, kick the lock or ask someone to smear cum over your face? The situations doesn't make sense in the generally realistic context of the game but I'll allow it since I'm never going to get this review done if I'm gonna stop and be picky about every single stupid fucking thing I come across.
The test is unfortunately highly reminiscent of the custom merc test in Jagged Alliance 2. I say unfortunately as it doesn't even have nearly the same amount of charm or class as everyone's favorite mercenary management sim do. Instead, it simply acts as a quick nod to a game that some of the developers *possibly maybe* played *once* (and some of them *might* even have completed it, or even gone past the custom merc test, but that's me at my most optimistic) and thought ”hey, this would be cool to reference!” ”Yeah, and it's from one of those turnbased games too!!” ”...” ”What? Did I say something wrong?” ”Turnbased?! What are you, some kinda nerd?!” The problem though, is that unlike JA2's test, F3's test is poorly written and badly executed. And as previously mentioned, it doesn't make sense and that means that whatever jokes the writer intended falls flat to the ground. And then of course add the fact that it's entirely meaningless since, as is normal Bethesda-design, you can change it as you see fit once you hand it over to your teacher (and then a second time once you leave the vault).
If there's one thing I've come to learn when it comes to Bethesda's games, it that nothing actually matters. And character development obviously matters least of all.
Fuck it. At least we're outta the tutorial...
Trouble In The World
And boy howdy, are we outta the goddamn tutorial now or what?! Jumping Jimmy Jack-off Johnson Junior sitting in Georgia drinking tea, your father has escaped from the vault and now, after they discovered his escape, the whole vault has gone goddamn apeshit! See, your father is the only goddamn doctor in the vault and heck, we can't very well allow someone that important to leave, can we?! That's why the Overseer have the guards shoot ANYONE who tries anything! Run up to a guard and he'll shoot your goddamn face off! Fuck yeah, that'll make Doctor Neeson return for sure! Look at all the bodies! He can't just leave without... without... patching them up......c-c-can he? ...Well shit, looks like he did. Oh well. Anyway, you wake up, get a pistol and a baseball bat handed to you and make your way out, killing anything and anyone hindering your progress – including a dozen guards. You also learn the horrible secret of Vault 101, a secret too stupid to even bother with.
Who was the Doctor of Vault 101 before Doctor Neeson decided to show up at the vault door with your diaperwrapped ass, if Vault 101's gimmick was to never open once closed? Shit, why the fuck did it open in the first place? ”Please let me in!” ”You a doctor?” ”No.” ”Get fuck out of here!” ”Let me in!” ”You a doctor?” ”Yes!” ”Alright, come on in.”
Anyway, once you finally get the fuck out, you get a brief nod to Fallout 1 as your eyes quickly adjust to the sunlight and I have to admit that it is a very nice nod. It's quickly done, but anyone who has played Fallout 1 without a reading disorder will know it the moment they see it.
Alright, pistol in hand, pipboy on arm, good out of place custom 70's-80's punk rock soundtrack playing, you head out to find your goddamn father and tell him how much you hate him no matter how good his Liam Neeson-impression gets. How could he just fucking leave you there all alone with those crazy motherfuckers? Didn't he realize the Overseer would go nuts and start executing half the population once the doctor left? Goddammit, dad! This is all your fault! I'm gonna shoot you in the kneecaps once I find you! Shit, I was so mad at my fictional father that I just stormed into the nearby town of Megaton and demanded that they hand over my father, ”a middleaged guy.” The sheriff hadn't seen my father or any middleaged guys that might have been my daddy. Instead he directed me to some other asshole who apparently keep tabs on middleaged guys roaming the wasteland. This is pretty much how the first part of the main quest goes; moving from place to place and ask people if they've seen your father around, and the only description you give them is that he's a middleaged guy. I think it's very fitting that we're playing a hero that is even less intelligent than the most mentally handicapped person ever.
Jesus Christ sitting on a trampoline I need a goddamn drink...
Yeah, so the main quest is entirely summed up with 1, find father; 2, help father; 3, save world. While there are many, many games that would boast a similar plot, Fallout 3 has one of the most boring and, frankly, depraving main quests I have ever played through. There are no highlights. None. I saw some potential but it was sadly ruined by the fact that Bethesda is a bunch of lazy and incompetent fucks, unable to provide intelligent entertainment that makes sense. Take the main gist of the plot for example; building a huge, very complex machine for something as simple as water purifying. Treating it as some kind of difficult high level science magic bullshit that nobody ever even thought about is only the tip of the huge Mount Everestian diarrhea iceberg. It just screams ”shit shit shit we need some epic-sounding plot and we need it fast!” Perhaps Bethesda didn't know how water purifying works (hint: in Resident Evil 4 it would be a puzzle solved like ”use water with earth”) or maybe they didn't think their beloved audience would know how it worked. Either way; you fucking suck, Bethesda. And your fans suck too.
And not in a good way.
Why Don't You Kill Yourself
Alright, shit, deep breaths, deep breaths... Give me a second to calm down. Where's my paper bag?! Calm down, Andy. Calm down... Alright, now let's talk about the fucking dialog! Oh god, where's the paper bag? Alright, fuck it. Let's just do this.
Dialog is entirely in the shitter! Yes, Bethesda actually went into the danger zone and wrote actual sentences this time, but fucking hell, it's an entirely new level of shitter now because of it. I've already mentioned the whole ”have you seen my middleaged father around”-thing but there's more, believe me. But I honestly don't have the alcohol necessary to write them down.
Jesus Christ, the only way this can be passed off as ”better than Oblivion” is because of the fucking skillchecks, because the skillchecks make the stupid fucking dialog hilarious and thus *beyond* stupid. Basically, all these checks do is provide you with an extra, ”more skilled” response and some of them are so fucking bad I think they're some kind of fucking joke because they can't be fucking real, they just can't! Bethesda's writers cannot be so goddamn fucking dumb.
Every multiheaded cock's favorite hero and patriot, Vincent Dylan Weller III, conjured up exactly what most of us thought when we laid eyes on these skillchecks, and so I'm going to quote him:
I have nothing to add. Even the most retarded person should be perfectly capable of looking at the dialog and the skillchecks and go ”Ooooh, there's a lot of stupid there!! I'm not THAT retarded!!”Vaulty Dwellman said:
I should also add that Three Dog is perhaps the most hurtful representation of a black man in a video game ever.
From Here To Eternity
Let's talk gameplay for a second. Or rather, let's talk combat for a second, because most of the time spent in Fallout 3 will be shooting or hitting different things. If you've played a first person shooter at least once, on very easy, you know almost exactly how to play Fallout 3 – the first FPS ever for people who die on very easy difficulty.
Combat A.I. is ridiculously stupid. It was stupid in Morrowind, it was stupid in Oblivion and it's goddamn stupid in Fallout 3 too. It's unbelievable! If you have trouble with Fallout 3 you don't deserve living in my world. Give me your adress and I'll drop by with a huge knife. I'm serious. It's for your own good.
Part of the ridiculously unbelieveably stupid combat is all because of VATS – Bethesda's answer to everyone who craved turnbased combat. VATS is a poorly implemented cinematic bullet time-style cheat mode where you character always gets a free hit and your enemies heads always explode regardless if you picked the ”Bloody Mess”-perk or not. It works like this; whenever you want, you can enter VATS-mode. The game gets paused and and you get a zoomed in view of an enemy and can choose in detail where you want to shoot him. This costs you one action point and... fuck it. Why the fuck am I writing that shit? VATS is retarded and was only ever put into the fucking game because Todd, Emil and Tyler (that fat hairy cunt) thought it would be cool to make something even less interesting than bullet time. It has absolutely no meaning whatsoever and is a disgrace to the noble artform of groin shots. There aren't even any groin shots in Fallout 3! Probably because Todd, Emil and Tyler (that slim, bald penis) had no idea what a groin was. Probably because they had no idea what is located in the groin area. Probably because they're fucking eunuchs! Eunuchs dualwielding nunchuks! Todd, Emil and Tyler (the toddler touching trackmania terrorist) should go die, because they are dualwielding nunchuk ninjas without penises. Beware!
VATS is probably also a stupid abbreviation for something but I couldn't be arsed to check it out. It's probably ”Vampire Agent Terrorizing System” since there's a odd minimum of vampire people running around in Fallout 3, as opposed to Beth's previous games. I'm convinced it's all because of VATS. But yes, there are vampires in Fallout 3. Or at least, there are ”humans with a strange urge to drink human blood.” It is not important if they are vampires or wannabe-vampires. They need to die. Equip a baseball bat, enter VATS-mode and hit yourself a couple of homeruns. Everyone gets a free pass at using VATS if it's to kill vampires and vampire wannabes.
Anyway, long story short; Bethesda fucked up FPS combat.
Oh Lucinda (Loves Becomes A Habit)
I just want everyone to know that the railwayrifle is totally overpowered.
I use it all the time.
Fuck yeah.
No Solution
Aka ”Why can't I kill children?! This is the worst game ever!” Let me tell you how I spent the last days in Fallout 3...
It is a sweet fairytale about a drunk, good-looking dude with a big fucking beard, his many guns and a ton of children standing in his way. Children... that cannot be... killed. Unkillable children. Yeah. Just.... think.... about that for a moment, shit, take TWO moments if you have to. It takes time to grasp, to really sink the whole fucking thing in. Even the greatest of minds are not ready to handle such an absurd idea as unkillable children. It's not their fault. Nobody fucking prepared them for it, so why on earth or anywhere else should they be able to understand it? Children are fucking immortal? I'm sorry, folks, there's just something wrong about the whole ordeal. They can be sliced, diced, stabbed, shot, rocketlaunched and gatlingfucklasered without breaking so much as a drop of sweat.
My quest to kill children in Fallout 3 eventually went so far that I went into the console (really Bethesda's built-in cheat system), clicked on one of the bastards and typed in ”kill”. He dropped down... fucking unconscious. So I fucking dragged him all the way to a nuclear powered car and, yes, every now and then I had to ”kill” him again when he woke up and tried to run the fuck away. Damn kid. Anyway, I eventually managed to drop him right on top of the engine. I backed away and proceeded with phase onehundredandmotherfuckingeleven; to shoot the car until it exploded and the little manchild burned alive as I watched ten feet away. I was disappointed to see, that after a mere minute or so, flat on his back like a rape victim, he got back up without even a glowing rash and started to run the fuck away again from someone that never ever would pose a threat to him. Disgruntled, I ”killed” him again and dragged him to a dumpster, hoping at least to simulate his death ”CSI”-style. I'm still working on trying to put him in it and I will not be satisfied until I succeed in my endeavours. I have a specific savegame devoted entirely for it and everything.
Unkillable kids, I think, symbolizes some of the many things I think is wrong with Fallout 3. Some people do not think that the option to kill children is important in an roleplaying game. I beg to differ. If a game is rated ”T” for ”Teeny Tiny Twerp” I can understand that whoever my player character is supposed to be, the most evil he ever going to be is that one optional quest where he run into the geriatric care, snatches a senile old grandma in a wheelchair and blames a horrible murder (that happened off-screen, naturally) on her. But Fallout 3 is supposedly rated ”M” for ”Murder Many M...kids”. If a game is meant for a mature audience, I want it to give me a mature experience. Don't give me blood and gore and swearing. That's not mature. That's just fucking bullshit. Maturity to me is not about running around in a desert with my dog and blowing up mutants in six hundred and two pieces and scatter the remains all over the world; it's about making difficult choices that fuck with your head and forces you to fucking act! I want to be able to kill children if my player character is wired like that. And if I want to play a character who is all holy and goody and wear two shoes, I want him to be able to *accidently* shoot a kid and have that accident fuck him up until, perhaps, he manage to atone for this horrible mistake. It's the mature thing. Consequences!
Yes, if you give players complete freedom to do whatever they want, sixhundred of sixhundred and one of them will run over a box of cute, furry, meowing kittens, hook twelve year olds up with drugs and commit utter grandmothercide the first chance they get. But simply cutting out an element just because it's ”controversial” is not the ideal way to handle it and it makes me wonder why they even bothered putting kids in the game. They wanted realism of kids running around in the wasteland, but they couldn't cope with the realism that these kids wouldn't stand a chance against all the heavily armed people running around.
This game is rated ”T” but thinks it's rated ”M” just because it's dark, brown, poorly lit and filled with poorly animated blood splatter effects.
The Whole Of The Law
One of the problems with Bethesda is that they never seem to think. In a fairly recent 1UP-interview, lead designer Emil P...araguay-something talks about how they pretty much wrote the main quest way before they actually finished with the design of the game, and once they were finished they had come up with a number of things that, oh no, now contradicted one very important thing in the main quest. Something they actually threw in as a ”meaningful and emotionally powerful” (bear with me, alright?) element in an otherwise sterile and boring story. But they chose to leave this fuck up be. And they chose to be ”ok” about leaving this fuck up be, because it was, and I quote, ”cool” to provide the player with all this cool stuff that fucked up what they previously put into the game as, I repeat, a ”meaningful and emotionally powerful” element. Now, I don't actually give a fuck. I didn't think the end was meaningful or emotional, but the fact that Bethesda willingly fucked up their own creation says a lot about how they think, or rather how much they spend not thinking, and what developing a product means to them: nothing.
They sacrifice meaning for what they believe is cool.
I want you to imagine for a second that I'm hosting a talk show and that Emil is my guest. Emil comes out, the applause sign is lit (as a courtesy), everyone is booing. I begin: Emil, this is... uh, sit down, Emil, we need to talk. Have a glass of water. (more booing) This is... uh, this thing that you said in this interview, well... uh, using the most kind words I can think of at the moment, uh, it's, ah, it's... (I pause, take a deep breath) It's fucking stupid, that's what it is. (uncontrollable cheering from the audience) and, and, and an insult... I... I feel insulted that you just, that you just... Emil, look at me. I feel insulted that you admitted that you and your co-workers were just, y'know, lazy and, and, hey, look at me, Emil. What? No, no, no, those lithuanians aren't there to hurt you, don't be silly. But Emil, to, uh, to have the guts to try and pass it off as a cool thing... Uh, yeah, don't do that, man. The next time you guys fuck up... shit, just ask Pete to cover for you. Say, say, uh, say Craaaaazy Pete came over with a big crate of crack or something. But, uh, don't say you were head of a development team responsible for a main quest that chose to leave illogical shit in the game just because it's so FUCKING COOL TO HAVE A SUPER MUTANT FUCK BUDDY!! (Emil flees the studio, the lithuanian hitmen chasing him with laser chainsaws and plasma kick me-signs. I continue the show.) My next guest is the President of The World, Joe Pesci. (President Joe Pesci comes in and talks about his plan for world peace.)
It is obvious now that whatever Emil did for the Thief-games he worked on, it wasn't anything that made them good. It was easy to impress us with the Dark Brotherhood-questline since everything else in Oblivion was so retarded.
It's The Truth
Fallout 3 sucks.
Review ends.
