Fallout Three

Fallout 3 for the X-Box 360 is an interesting and immersive game which you can beat in a few hours, or play for weeks on end. The game takes place in a post-apocalyptic Washington DC. You start the game being born in a very graphic fashion complete with unsettling sound effect and can choose you gender and appearance. Wish I’d had that option in real life. You then go through a kind of tutorial mode in which you learn to move around while your character grows up, selecting your attributes and skills while scampering about the vault.

The vault itself is a self contained city/fallout shelter that is meant to support human life for years after a nuclear war. There are a handful of people within, most of them uninteresting except for the greasers who you get to beat the snot out of. You are guided through all this by your father who is voiced by Qui-Gon Jinn until he decides to just up and leave the place causing an uproar within the vault that results in several deaths and your banishment out into the wastelands where the rest of the game takes place, but just before you leave, the game gives you the option of adjusting your stats more to your liking.

The world outside of the vault is even more bleak than the world inside of it. Destroyed streets, crumbling buildings, and mutated monsters abound in an otherwise desolate world sparely populated by eccentric humans living in makeshift cities. There’s a village of tree worshiping hippies, a city built around a megaton bomb, a city of zombies, a little hotel full of snooty blue bloods, and a city of only children who hate grownups that seem to come right out of the road warrior. One of my favorite characters you meet is Moira Brown who reminds me oddly of Sarah Palin.

Aside from wasteland raiders who will attack you on sight, the games enemies also include super mutants which are basically big ugly brutes with large guns and psychotic personalities, rogue war bots that shoot lasers at you, and feral monsters that roam the wastelands. You can identify most of these creatures: a giant scorpion, mutant bear, giant mole rats, and even crab people, but the one creature that I honestly have no clue about are the death claws. These things look like demons from hell, and I can’t figure out what they were mutated from.