An Idiot in the Wasteland

Warty Goblin plays Fallout, with no earthly notion what he's doing.
Day 1.

I wanted to get Fallout 3, I really did. First I went to Wal-mart, which I never do, and they didn’t have it. Neither did Gamestop or Best Buy, so I settled for a boxed set of Fallout, Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics. It was one of those very, very budget releases, one disc, no manual, but hey, three games for twenty bucks? Sign me up.

So I installed them all, and fired up Fallout. My immediate impression was ‘this game has the coolest opening video of all time.’ Then I went, made myself a custom character focusing on Intelligence, Agility, Perception with a side of Charisma, and specializing in Energy Weapons, First Aid, and something else. These choices where based on knowing that talking to people is good, Intelligence has something to do with skills, and lasers are cool. There was another, somewhat less awesome video telling me I needed to go get some sort of water purifier, a first person cutscene that really, really made me wish I was playing Fallout 3, and then boom, I’m in the game.

And I’m in a little underground cave. Populated by rats. My first thought was ‘this color palate makes Gears of War look like a rainbow.’ Second thought, ‘rats? Really? A game often hailed as the pinnacle of western RPGs starts in a dungeon with rats? Usually you at least get to wander around the starting town for a few minutes before the rat cave.’ Needless to say, this did not blow me out of the water.

Nevertheless, only mildly daunted, I wander out of the dungeon, past the rats, and on to some grayer rock that transports me to a very large world map. I click around on it for a while, and watch a little green arrow trail a red line around. Eventually it got where I clicked. Nothing happened. I clicked the arrow, there was a very brief loading screen as my computer laughed at the puny amount of data the game was throwing at it, and then I was standing in the middle of a mountainous region. I click to walk around for a while, but there’s nothing. Absolutely nothing.

I suppose this is a realistic representation of a post nuclear world, but it hella boring. A gutsy statement from a design point of view, but rather short. Like this sentence.

After some reflection, I decide there has to more to the game that some brown mountains. Pressing the ‘map’ button doesn’t do anything useful, like take me back to that overland map that allows me to travel. Using my keen gaming senses, I decide that clearly I need to find an exit point, but there’s really not anything obvious around. There are two of those shaded regions on the sides of the screen, but the curser turns to a red X whenever I click on one, which I take to mean I can’t walk there. At this point I’m rather tired of completely lifeless brown, and so do the only logical thing, I hit escape, and quit the game.

Tomorrow, I play Fallout having perused the manual.