@Brit: The world reacts very strongly to your alignment, which is my reward. I find it satisfying when raiders run away from you, slavers get out of your way, and the occasional bad ass offers to join up with you. It’s also nice getting showered by gifts from grateful citizens, and attracting evil mercs. I just don’t like that the good-evil meter. Life is complicated and there are many ways people judge eachother. I certainly don’t add up all the good things you’ve done and subtract all the bad things; just one rape negates an awful lot of donations to Oxfam.

I liked the Sims 3 feature where you just pick traits. That was almost the idea behind perks in the original fallout, although they didn’t replace stats. I tried designing a tabletop game that ran from traits, but the temptation to give them “ranks” was too strong. Was still fun though.

This doesn’t happen in F3 to me. My ‘dad’ isn’t really all that likable, as the game works of one basic premise: you have to like him. You have to find him because you need to see him, because he’s nice… but you don’t get to actually make that relationship! You only see him like three times while skipping through your childhood. And then, there are like what… zero major characters? Everyone dies quickly, the DJ at Washington is just annoying, companions are boring and don’t tie up to the story. If Butch, or A… A… that girl went out with you and something happened, like a love triangle or whatever that could affect the story, I’d personally find the game more interesting.

MAJOR SPOILER?:
Right now I’m on that ship-city finding my father and apparently he’s just trying to build something that’s going to revamp the wasteland or whatever. Not. Amused.

If you have five choices in Deus Ex, you pick the one that suits you. If you have five choices in F3, you wonder which one the dev has attributed the greatest number of points; maybe you save and load until you get the best choice. It’s a different process, one that has systematically flattened every situation I enter.

As my evil character, I killed a bunch of Super Mutants and then killed their slave. I didn’t lose any Karma. I reloaded, killed them all again, then chose not to set her free. Lost Karma. Mission Comprete.

Examples:

Man: Paradise Falls: Killed everyone, freed slaves.

Woman: Paradise Falls: Works for slavers, sells slaves.

Man: Megaton: Did all sidequests, except for blowing it up.

Woman: Megaton: Massacred, blew it up

Ect. ect.

Dont even get me started on non-sensical shoehorned in puns.

you know, that pun doesn’t even make sense and feels like I just shoehorned it in.

I’ve noticed that, post-Fallout 3, the choices in the game are very black and white most of the time. Yes, everyone’s game is different, but if two different people completed every quest playing evilly, the quest outcomes (and most likely, their method of completion) would still be the same. I seem to remember the other Fallout games having more variety in quest completion techniques. Still a great game though.

And I recommend trying that “non-violent solution” to the Tenpenny tower quest on another playthrough…interesting results. I hated the results either way.

But seriously, the preterite and perfect tenses and the passive voice are always ‘led’.

Please dont hate me for thst.

After trying to blog like this I have to say well done to Tom, as it’s harder than it looks to play revelantly, take good screenshots as well as make it funny and easy to read. Hoorah for Fallout Girl!

You killed Tenpenny and stole his sniper. You eventually find better weapons, yes. But, without Tenpenny’s sniper, you’d have a slave thats alittle angry his friends are killed, holding a hand held nuclear bomb launcher. Thank god for snipers, and thank god for Fallout3’s VATS system.

Pentadact, can I ask what kind of stats you’ve gone for? You seem to use any weapon to hand, so either you don’t care about your stats or you put everything into killing efficiently.

I find it very hard to not be a goody-two-shoes (which I’m kinda glad about). I can only be evil if it’s in a completely anarchic way, which I find odd considering it’s just a game. After blowing up Megaton and hanging out with Ten Penny and Mr. “Overacting” Burke, killing them all felt rather pointless. There’s a certain satisfaction in killing those two though.

Joe: yeah, I discovered that after I’d killed everyone. I think I ended up making two trips, rather than any hard decisions.

Cheers and happy crippling

But I’ve got a vanilla game on my the better computer, I love this game so much. Although on that save I’m a really nice person, I just cant quite get round to being mean/slaughtering people.

Oh, by the way, did anyone else find *minor spoilerz ahead* The Vault 77 jumpsuit in Paradise Falls Barracks? *end o’ spoilerz* If you’ve read the fallout comic done by the penny arcade guys, then it’s really quite a funny lil’ thing to find.
Linky linky! (sorry, couldn’t be bothered geting a hyperlink =P)
http://fallout.bethsoft.com/eng/vault/pennyarcade.html

Half Loaf 2

Edit: Sorry forgot to add the website

Half Loaf 2

I swear F3 has exposed some dark traits in my character that a shrink would be deeply concerned by. Like that time when I saw a slave being chased by a slaver (he had obviously escaped), so I murdered the slaver, took all his stuff, and then beat the slave to death just after he had thanked me for saving him.

What did you do at the end of the vault when Amata is being beaten up by that guard? I ran in and blew the guard’s head off, and then blew her dad’s head off too. She seemed really annoyed about that – god know’s why the guy was a dick who was threatening to have her beaten.

Maybe it was having her dad’s head splattered all over her Vault 101 jumpsuit that rubbed her up the wrong way