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FALLOUT 3

I

i could sit here and recite old classics like "but where's the food!!" until fallout3 fans go butcher pete, but whatever, i get it: this is a theme park and doesn't need to adhere to reality. there are more fresh corpses than living people and those who still have a pulse are 75% likely to be some kind of roving maniac responsible for said corpses. none of it really makes any sense, and wondering why, 100 years after the bombs fell, no one bothered to clean any of their shit up is just a waste of time. it doesn't matter! who cares! they just didn't feel like it!!! they're fucking idiots!!!

folks can go on about how bethesda "didn't get it" but i'm pretty sure they did; after all, one of the guiding lights here's a very familiar brand of shit-eating irreverence. i hate to bring up real-life-supermutant pete hines' dismissal of the desire for plausibility again, but it bears repeating that these people have made it crystal clear they view the fallout series as nothing more than an epic fucked up playground, and i'm still not sure it's entirely their fault

either way, this is a game that forces you into a backstory (person who used to be a baby), has you butchering supermutants an hour in, and hands you gatling guns and mini nukes not long after. it looks like total goose shit, is characterized by an overwhelming spiritual emptiness, and has a tutorial that takes longer to finish than fallout (1). i don't like it, but i am going to live with it

i will engage with this material in exactly the way the developers want me to

II

i find myself in another abandoned building full of torture victims and inexplicable bags of gore; paper bills, nuka cola, molerat meat, and burnt books as far as the eye can see. i'm getting the faint impression that something might be amiss, but so far everything looks normal enough

i'd like to stay a while and keep reading about undercover scientists making experimental miracle meats, but i understand my mission's urgent. as someone who has three dads and doesn't care to know the whereabouts of any of them, i find this all very hard to immerse myself in, but i decide to roleplay as someone who is immersed and head over to megaton

i meet the sheriff, lucas simms, and he offers me a whopping 100 bottlecaps to disarm the currently-active nuclear bomb in the center of town. lacking the required 25 explosives skill, much like everyone else who must've visited in the last hundred years, i have to presently decline. i consider asking lucas if he's seen my dad, but knowing what i know about liam neeson i don't think they would've spent much time together

everyone here's psychic on account of the radiation messing with the ESP receptors in the brain or whatever, so i lose a bunch of karma snooping around moriarty's personal computer. thankfully i get my first lead: three dog and galaxy news radio. i also hear about a "weirdo" named burke who moriarty doesn't seem too keen on, but is happy to let hang around "until the bomb detonates" so long as he keeps paying his tabs. 30 seconds later i meet burke, and you would not believe what he asks me to do

one thing leads to another and now lucas and burke are drinking dirty water in the big wasteland in the sky. troubled by the recent developments, and in no mood for three dog's impeccable wit, i decide to take a break and explore fort independence where i help a fellow patriot gun down a couple crust punks. afterwards, there's a minor misunderstanding, and now i'm addicted to psycho. once the smoke clears i dump 100lbs of crafting garbage onto the floor of the fort, grab everything i can get my hands on, level up, and go back to megaton to defuse the bomb

it's a major success, and the new sheriff (who is eight) rewards me with my very own tetanus hut. i try to carry burke's head with me outside a building, but (despite baldur's gate (1) letting me equip a live infant in my ranged weapon slot for hours) the game does not allow it. i sleep 14 hours cos depression and then get ready to go to meet the big dog himself

despite picking every option i could to avoid working with three dog, i'm now enthusiastically working with three dog. the conversation bends to the desired outcome, and i'm forced to admit i love my dad and gee whiz mister it sure would be swell if i could see him. i'm also forced into tunnels. and more tunnels., and more tunnels. mutant tunnels lead to raider tunnels lead to ghoul tunnels. the tilesets repeat over and over, the enemies keep pouring out from the woodwork, and i start remembering my time served in the prison known as "daggerfall". it's endless. i'm never escaping. i'm gonna live off radroach meat and go ascetic. i guess i'm an honorary ghoul now

after circumnavigating the entire public transit system, barreling thru the trenches, and personally executing another hundred supermutants, i finally fix three dog's radio shit and return to him to find out about my dad. sometime after mentioning doctor li and rivet city he tells me to "smoke a peace pipe" and i lose it

dirty water in big wasteland in the sky. the brotherhood of steel couldn't give less of a shit

III

a great malaise starts to come over me, perhaps prompted by the tunnels or the other tunnels or the other tunnels. the capital wasteland's blasted concrete and cragged roads seem to go on forever in all directions and every vacuum sealed interior starts to feel the same as any other. i enter one building and kill raiders. i enter another and kill ants. i enter another and kill mutants. doesn't seem to matter where i am; little changes from place to place except the name on the map marker

i'm reminded of a nightmare i'd frequently have as a child where i was trapped in a large room that was empty save for what felt like millions of small, evenly sized papers strewn about. each had a number, and though i was never told directly, it was implicitly understood that i would be unable to leave until i organized them from front to back

i diverge from the critical path, tired of rolling with the punches and well aware it doesn't get much better. i'm told the some of the sidequests offer more substantial, potentially-human interactions that seem to be lacking everywhere else, but no matter where i turn or what i do, i find no evidence that this is true. so again i wander, going thru areas and encounters like pull tab lottery tickets, hoping to eventually get my big break

eventually you start to wonder what they were trying to curate. i think of 911 transcripts on police station computers about home invasions that end in screams and an assailant reassuring the operator "my wife's just off her meds". i think of jericho assaulting jenny stahl. i think of how the only way to avoid capitulating to the game's pre-established vision for your character is by embracing sneering nihilism. many works are called soulless for a variety of non-literal reasons, but here we see it most plainly and vividly as the total absence of a governing soul. bart simpson gaming; the doors don't open

within three seconds of entering Yet Another Tunnel a mine explodes and breaks my right arm and leg. shortly after ants start pouring out with crowd crush liquidity and i get a fucking headache. i tab out to make a note on the ongoing pulverization of all my lobes when the game seizes up and has to be closed via task manager. in response i try to enable windowed mode via FOSS + OneTweak, but they require me to downgrade to a previous patch and my headache gets worse

returning topside, i fruitlessly search once more for signs of life. i'm dozing off wandering thru the stony hills north of the minefield as the combat shotgun blares thru infinite nothing and my exp bar fills up +5 +10 +30 at a time. i start to entertain diseased thoughts i've never had before, like maybe borderlands isn't so bad and was i too harsh on tim willits. my patience is quickly reaching its limit, and i need to find a way to get this back on track. i will do what needs to be done; i'm leaving the capital wasteland

but first a detour

IV

[curse's tip #76: tabbing out while in the save menu will allow you to tab back in some of the time]

while heading to my destination i'm stopped by a scraggly man who says grayditch is being burned to the ground, so i decide to give it a look. when i arrive it's worse than i ever could've imagined: boarded up buildings, aluminium bolted to every surface, and rubble everywhere you look. then i realize i followed the wrong marker

when i arrive it's worse than i ever could've imagined: a child runs up to me and asks me to find his dad. i reluctantly accept, and he gives me a key to a dumpster and hides out in a personal shelter reminiscent of one of those amazon crying boxes

i head to their apartment and find three dead fire ants, two live fires, and one dead father. it'd be easy to assume the fire ants were responsible for all this, but there's no sign of forced entry. for the ants to have entered the building they'd have to either have opened the door, or been let in, and i don't think ants can open doors (tho this is bethesda so we can't rule it out). since the kid was the last person to see his father alive and had access to a pistol stashed in the dumpster, i decide to pay him another visit

unsurprisingly, i'm unable to accuse him of murder, so i do the next best thing and break the news by telling him his "old man" is "ant food". he calls me an asshole repeatedly, but is instantly placated when i promise to destroy the source of the ants. once he calms down i close the door to his AmaZen shelter and walk away

V

upon following a weird signal, i meet up with some brotherhood outcasts who mercifully lack the psychic capabilities of everyone else in the wasteland and don't know about the wall-to-wall murder i enacted on their compound hours prior. we go thru a near identical rehash of the GNR brotherhood setpiece, fending off supermutants by the shitload, and eventually make our way to their other compound. we all get to talking, and it turns out my pipboy's real special and can grant access to an amazingly racist anti-chinese simulation they've been struggling to access. since i'm the protagonist they don't try taking it from me or shooting me in the head, and instead send me inside. if i succeed a big old vault will open and i'll get a bunch of epic rare loot

to bethesda's credit, they dodged a giant head exploding bullet by opting not to tackle rural alaska. instead, operation anchorage offers an ostensibly parodic take on its military shooter contemporaries, because this game can't feign earnestness for more than five seconds. you might think there's something being said here about red scare bullshit, but no. why would you ever think that. aside from terminal logs contextualizing it as being insanely racist due to the kooky general who oversaw the project, there's no commentary present whatsoever on any of the subject matter at hand

in a daring swerve, the million corridors of the capital wasteland are replaced with one large meta-corridor, and the game reneges on even the faintest allusions to roleplaying. instead, you traipse thru said corridor, clicking on the heads of endless, identical Chinese Soldiers, and occasionally (every 30 seconds) stocking up on health and ammo at infinite-use dispensers. notably, these Chinese Soldiers are never more than fodder, are obscured from head to toe, and are depicted as shelling so indiscriminately that they're killing more of their own soldiers than the enemy. i'm somewhat uncertain as to exactly how much of the dehumanization is a deliberate in-world propagandic effort vs. how much is incidental, or whether it makes a difference, but given the rest of the game i'm not about to carry water i don't have to

later, chinese ninjas with swords show up and my companion tells them to get out of his country. at this point i realize we're about two anime girls taking loud shits away from this being tonally on par with shadow warrior (1997)

eventually it opens up a bit, i pick my strike force, and go take care of two forking objectives. not much to say here other than that one of the ambient events involves an american soldier executing several chinese hostages point blank. during the listening post segment i accidentally shoot a non-hostile technician in the head, which i guess means the conditioning's working beautifully

with everything else out of the way i assault the chinese stronghold, disable the pulse field, and successfully convince the chinese leader to commit japanese ritual suicide with a single line of dialogue. this ends the simulation and allows us access to the vault. i stuff my pockets and get the fuck out

maybe the wasteland's not so bad after all

VI

due to the grace period afforded by Not Being Operation Anchorage i won't get into exhaustive detail about how much of a pain it was to get to rivet city, but it wasn't pleasant. many parts of the open world are deceptively closed off from one another, and many routes you'd expect to be thrulines end up in dead ends with a nothing but raider, a fridge, and a plunger to shove up your ass in the event that the raider and fridge don't excite you enough

doctor li doesn't know shit, but recommends i check out project purity in the jefferson memorial in case my dad left something behind that alludes to his whereabouts. sure enough, one of the holotapes mentions vault 112 being hidden beneath a garage near evergreen mills, so i head on over there and make my way underground. my dad got trapped inside dr. braun's wacky simulation looking for the GECK, so i strap on a vault 112 jumpsuit and hop into one of the loungers to go rescue him from tranquility lane

forgetting there's a less psychotic resolution, i become the pint-sized slasher, kill everyone, and save the day. afterward, my dad mentions how excited he is to give fresh water to the good people of the wasteland, then chastises me for being too young (19) to know whether leaving the vault is what i really, truly want out of life. five minutes later he refuses to enter the jefferson memorial until i murder the dozen 10ft tall carly beth mutants hanging out in the basement

i'm then told i gotta deal with the flood pumps because everyone else has important shit to deal with, which is visibly not true. i turn them on and my dad tells me to come back to get fuses he could've given me from the start. i swap the fuses, activate the mainframe, and am about to clear out the pipes when the enclave show up on a vertibird to claim the purifier at behest of the president

at this point i can't help but think that if kojima had the american president sending tesla nazis to murder scientists in 2008 you'd all be completely insufferable, yet poor emil pagliarulo has ZERO dickriders. explain this

colonel autumn comes to claim the machine that doesn't work, so dad sabotages the machine that doesn't work, killing himself and colonel autumn to prevent the enclave from accessing the machine that doesn't work, which they do anyway. it also becomes irradiated(?) which seems like a liability for a water purifier, but honestly what the fuck do i know. so dad dies for nothing, the nazis have occupied the jefferson memorial, and i need to escape in (take a guess) a tunnel with doctor li. once again, these pencil pushers have no combat experience and travel the world without armaments, so i'm tasked with taking out the enclave on my own while they stand around getting munched on by ghouls. eventually we surface at the brotherhood of steel citadel, where li demands to be let in because she has "people who need medical attention", which is also visibly not true

VII

so my next quest is to acquire a slave outfit

VIII

so my next quest is to defeat the alien guards

the most noteworthy thing here is that it definitively outs much of operation anchorage's pretense as total bullshit. i already figured this was the case, but nothing puts it in harsher relief than seeing the functionally identical combat slog employed without the safety net provided by the declaration of irony. anchorage posits that what it is is what it isn't; zeta ensures you understand otherwise. 95% of this game is mindless, pointless killing in nondescript corridors, but zeta might be the only time it embraces this (or any) truth openly. the most telling moment comes when it doubles down on the ironic racism by referring to the samurai as chinaman and oriental for laughs; (again) the pretense is gone, but the content remains the same. this game believes in nothing

IX

i pay 100 caps to enter tenpenny tower and mingle with the crowd for a while to get a feel for the place. everyone's got a name like bradley moneysworth, and they're all highly concerned with recent ghoul activity in the nearby metro. being something of a ghoul myself, i figure it's high time i start acting like one, so i head down there to see what i can do

turns out the ghouls don't enjoy spending all their time in tunnels, which is relatable. their leader, roy phillips, wants to solve this by opening a backdoor into tenpenny tower and letting the feral ghouls mutilate everyone inside, which is also relatable

but i've caused enough of a ruckus lately, and i'm trying to turn over a beautiful new leaf. one of the last things my dad said to me before he perished, valiantly and necessarily, was how proud he was that i defused the megaton bomb; and if he's up there, drinking dirty water in the big wasteland in the sky, i want to make sure he remains proud

so instead i talk to tenpenny and suggest he lets the ghouls move in. he doesn't seem entirely opposed to the idea, as long as he's able to shoot the ones who misbehave, but he says first i'll need to convince the other residents to go along with the idea

this won't be easy. i'll need every last bit of my charms, my wiles, and my brains to solve th-

i pass five telegraphed speech checks and the quest ends

i love roleplaying

X

after saying goodbye to my friends, i decide it's probably a good time to meet up with li at the brotherhood citadel. no amount of compliments could make me wanna hang with a bunch of bureaucrat technofreaks for longer than i have to, so i hurry along and do my best to get the ball rolling. scribe rothchild gives his condolences for my father's unavoidable demise, then he points me to a computer that oughta have information on the GECK's whereabouts

i root thru the equipment issuance for various vaults and eventually notice that vault 87 has one. rothchild knows where the vault is, but there's a problem: the surrounding area's too irradiated; it'll be impossible to enter.. unless i go through the lamplight caverns

when i arrive i follow the strands of christmas lights down to the cavern and am greeted by a child who says he'll "blow my fucking head off" if i take another step. he calls me a big and a mungo and has no interest in letting me in at first, but i win him over with what might be the only good dialogue exchange in the game

sister none: [child at heart] your face looks like my butt

mayor maccready: you must like having such a good looking butt

sister none: i bet you like looking at butts, don't you

once i'm in he makes sure to let me know that he doesn't just let "any bitch" into his town, and thirty seconds later i'm on my way out the backdoor, wondering why anyone ever lost their mind over this place. has no one seen sir steven spielberg's timeless opus, hook; do you not think self-governing children in a hellish carnage desert would be thoroughly obnoxious shitheads. this is one of the least incredulous things bethesda cooked up

another thirty seconds later and i'm teaching supermutants how the "murder pass" got its name. they keep showing up, and i keep giving history lessons. not even the overlord can deny himself the opportunity for a world class education, and i'm happy to oblige

the vault has the subtle notes of supermutant interior decoration: sickly red lighting, mounds of burnt skeletons, and a bunch of foots and hands everywhere. people often underestimate supermutant sophistication, but judging by the sheer volume of "super mutant masters" present, it's clear that they too understand the art of bullshit job titles

i access a computer by picking three words at random, shutting it off, and repeating until i've successfully hacked the mainframe. the medical database shows almost every resident of the vault having died under unexplained circumstances, which turns out to mean "fucked up experimentation with the forced evolutionary virus"

in the test labs i'm beckoned by an unusually intelligent supermutant who's trapped in one of the chambers. his name is fawkes. and he claims to know not only where the GECK is, but that it's too irradiated for me to access. but, if i free him, he'll gladly go pick it up for me

i oblige, and after he goes gallagher on his kith and kin with the super sledge for a while we make it to the irradiated corridor and he fulfills his end of the bargain. he thanks me and says its time to part ways, but that maybe we'll meet again one day in the wasteland

who knows if i'll ever see him again, but it sure would be nice to have a reliable supermutant at my side to ensure i never have to needlessly and pointlessly subject myself to lethal doses of radiation

XI

fifteen seconds after fawkes leaves, the enclave come out of nowhere and knock me out. colonel autumn somehow survived the events at the purifier, embarrassing my dad even further, and when i regain consciousness he starts interrogating me for access codes. i tell him Fuck You a few times, and then the president calls over the intercom, tells him to beat it, and he sulks off like a total loser

the president unlocks my restraints, says all my shit's in the locker nearby, and asks me to meet with him face to face. i'd never have dinner with the president, but i suppose putting on my dirty pre-war spring outfit wouldn't hurt

in a delightful turn of events, the enclave officer who accosts me outside my cell is played by stephen russell, who i love with all my heart. bethesda deserve a lot of shit, but i'm glad someone understands that this man's an absolute treasure. he starts off being a total dipshit, but one phone call to the president clears things up real fast, and he apologizes and sends me on my way

the president goes on the intercom again and tells all the nazis to leave me alone, but two seconds later colonel autumn goes on the intercom and tells all the nazis not to leave me alone, so we're back to shootouts in fuck ugly corridors. thankfully, mothership zeta prepared me for this, and the alien disintegrator does exactly what it says on the tin

eventually, i get to the president, who is a computer. he's got a big plan to heal the wasteland by doing a nifty genocide of mutants and ghouls, and he wants me to modify project purity to "distribute agents to destroy mutated creatures upon ingestion". i don't quite understand how any of this would work, but whatever. i tell him his plan's ass, that i'm not doing it, and that he should destroy himself and his base -- and he does

with the enclave and its big eugenicist dream in shambles, i leave and find fawkes waiting for me outside. we chat for a sec, but my karma's too low (neutral) to have him join me, which is a shame since it sure would be nice to have a reliable supermutant at my side to ensure i never have to needlessly and pointlessly subject myself to lethal doses of radiation

the moment i exit dialogue a vertibird overhead explodes, lands on top of me, and kills me

XII

when i arrive at the citadel, elder lyons is presenting the classic brotherhood argument that intervention is too risky, and we should just sit around jacking off in our techbase while the nazis regroup instead. when he sees me he asks what's up and i tell him the enclave has the GECK, at which point he does a complete 180 and rushes to ensure the enclave don't access the purifier using codes they don't have to distribute FEV they also don't have or intend to distribute. they invite me to join the brotherhood, which i firmly decline, then we gear up to launch an assault with the help of the irony giant

i follow the team america robot while it says stuff like "engaging chinese invaders" and "death is a preferable alternative to communism" until it reaches the jefferson memorial. once i get inside the purifier i run into colonel autumn, whose evil plan is to distribute clean water. i shoot him once and his shit ragdolls like you wouldn't believe

unfortunately, the purifier's all fucked up and at risk of exploding if it's not activated soon because my dad's an idiot, but the radiation levels inside will likely kill anyone who attempts to activate it, also because my dad's an idiot

hearing this i jump at the opportunity, type in the code (2:16), and start to pass out. as i'm losing consciousness i see thomas jefferson's ghostly visage staring back at me -- the game's attempts at earnestness now completely indistinguishable from its attempts at humour

under a more merciful god, i would be dead. instead, thanks to broken steel, i awaken two weeks later after a monologue about how sacrifice is the greatest virtue next to listening-to-your-dadliness

EPILOGUE

with my resolution yanked out from under me by Downloadable Content, i try to search for something that feels like suitable closure. i hear of a city for ghouls called "underworld" somewhere in the south eastern corner of the map and figure that's as good a place as any to wind things down

i stop off at tenpenny tower to visit my friends first and find that they've mutilated everyone despite our agreement that they probably shouldn't do that. i think about what the game's trying to say about ghouls and quickly arrive at the only possible conclusion: nothing

i pass by the capitol building where the enclave, talon mercs, supermutants, and deathclaws are fighting amongst themselves. after it all settles down i stand and stare out at the washington monument, on the cusp of something that resembles a feeling, but it passes before i can identify what it is

i meet a woman named sydney at the national archives who asks me for help stealing the declaration of independence. we set off for adventure, but only make it 30ft before she's shot dead by a supermutant

i speak to a ghoul named carol in the underworld and ask if she knows gob from megaton. she says he's like a son to her, and that if i see him again, tell him she loves him

i return to megaton to tell him, but am unable to do so

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