Fallout 3 is possibly the most vast games I have seen.  With 100 hour gameplay, I am scratching the surface, and the enormity of the environment only sinks in many hours into the game.  The game is flawed, in many ways, but at the same time the good bits make the entire game worth experiencing.

This enormity has changed my behaviour.  What I have found in Fallout 3 is that I play it for just a few minutes, and walk away at any point.  The game is just so big, that persisting is pointless, and whilst the game has milestones, progression feels analog.  Living with your consequences makes the game very interesting.  For example, my uber hacking-lockpicking-sneaking-melee strategy isn’t going so good.  Why?  Let me point out there are few buildings, let alone doors, and even less computers, and in the vast expanse of the wasteland visibility is 100 miles, and nearly everyone has at least one gun.

Fig 1. Guns > Sneaky

But I’m sick of such large budget games not getting the characterisation solid.  Every second character in the game still feel like cardboard cutouts.  Some major characters are excellent, others feel like someone has wheeled them in.

The other aspect is radiation poisoning.  Radioactive poisoning in Fallout 3 is cool.   From rivers of toxic waste, to inactive bombs, and old war sites.  You start to feel like the entire world is a post apocolyptic Chernobyl.  Every time you eat a piece food, you get radiation poisoning.  Get too much and you start to get sick.  This in turn can be reduced by taking radiation reduction formula.  That is pretty simple.  Regardless, I dub this the ‘did we forget to balance this’ game mechanic.  It constantly feels like a ball and chain slowing you down through the game progression.  I like the fact swimming in radioactive water can make me sick, it is immersive, but I am at a loss as to how eating a kebab somehow makes me more radioactive than swimming across an ocean of radioactive sludge.

But enough of Fallout 3.  It’s good, either buy it if you can’t wait, or borrow it when your mate has completed the billion hours of gameplay or died of radiation sickness.

Second up on the agenda today is Cooking in the Dangerzone .  You can watch it on TV (in Australia) Wednesday November 5th on SBS .  Stefan Gates sets out on his way to Chenobyl, and against his producer’s advice, he eats the local food, with some interesting results.   A short clip from the show below…

A really interesting show, and well worth the watch. And with an 80 year old women eating radioactive food every day of her life, you start to realise how unbalanced that game mechanic really was.