Falling Out

I have just spent a weekend in the company of Fallout 3. I had intended to finish the body of either Oblivion, or Fallout on the PC, before I attacked it, but my will was weak and my wallet was padded with £50 I unexpectedly received in uncollected loans.

What a game.

I was enjoying Oblivion very much - it has a wide open world, and it was easy to get distracted by the many, many side-quests on your way around Cyrodil. If you've played it, then you will have a pretty good understanding of the basic mechanics of the game. What you won't appreciate is the sheer atmosphere that drips from Fallout 3.

It is as rich in realisation as Bioshock, with the added bonuses of being able to wander freely around the whole game world, having loads of locations to visit, being imbibed with genuinely smile-inducing post-apocalyptic humour delivered through the mediums of NPCs and the nuked-desolate remnants of the retro-1950s flying car future society.

The world you encounter once you are launched from the character-creating safety of The Vault is a scary place, the early weakness of your character and the kind-of scarcity of ammunition forcing you to rely on sneak attacks, running away and the occasional application of a variety of rusted, jury-rigged weapons and armour that need to be maintained as you navigate from one colony of desperate survivors to the next, the bleak wasteland offering a subdued and often grim backdrop to your adventures.

The one advantage you have in combat is the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System (VATS), which freezes time and allows you to spend a finite pool of Action Points targeting a particular enemy body part or protruberence. Once these Action Points are used up, they need time or the injection of a drug to replenish, meaning that you'll be seeking cover or engaging in the frantically innacurate realtime combat while the stock of APs creeps back up.

If you have a rental outlet near you that stocks this, and you aren't engaged in Fable II, you'd do yourself no harm in spending some time with what has likely overtaken Burnout Paradise, CoD4, GTA4 and everything else I have played this year to rank as my personal Game Of The Year.

And that is on an SDTV, in a game where I am only scratching around the first dozen locations, occasionally pondering whether to be an out-and-out paragon of virtue, or take the mercenary route of demanding recompense for my services, or just blasting through the place at will, looting, killing and adding to the misery already seeping out of every blasted bridge section, each boarded-up house and the vaguely hopeful faces of the defeated populace of a blasted world.

Some Genius has gone into this, and a lot of proper game-making Love in the creation of something that already feels like a masterpiece.