FAILout 3

I'd like to talk about the latest game in the Fallout series, seeing as I've not played the first two games in the series - though I have been told that I really should get my hands on them at some point. Despite the hideously lacklustre video trailer I saw before the game's release, I still wanted to try the game. While it might make a passable introduction to the game itself, I feel it was a terrible advert for the game. But that's another matter entirely. What I'd really like to talk about is Fallout 3 itself, and discuss its good and bad points. Except that I can't.

This is the first game I can recall for a long time, that I have genuinely begun to desire to talk back to the store I bought it from and demand my money back. It reminds me of the bugridden debacle that was STALKER, which made me think that all those cockroaches that will supposedly survive a nuclear holocaust had infested the game code rather than the virtual environment of the game itself. But even that did not cause me as much chagrin as Fallout 3 has done.

Which is so much worse because it started off so promisingly. I installed the game, patched it right away, and set off on my journey into the world of Fallout. Everything was going peachy, I grew up in the vault, made a few friends and enemies, escaped from Vault 101 with only a small amount of hassle, and began exploring the devastated wasteland. I made a journey to Megaton and had a look around, before finishing up after a few hours of gameplay. While I had some issues at first with the somewhat confusing ramshackle arrangement of Megaton, the game itself seemed vaguely interesting.

So I returned to the game the next day. Or rather, I tried to. An impassable wall of a black screen thwarted my every attempt to start the game, for clicking "Play" on the Fallout 3 launcher would first pop up a little window on my screen, before Windows disappeared to be replaced by complete black. The game even refused to crash, simply hanging the computer irrevocably, forcing me to hit the reset button on my computer. Even after a bit of wrangling, I managed to get the game to run, but I felt very much like a resident of Megaton, sitting on top of a nuclear bomb about to explode, except my nuclear bomb was the game itself.

So I trawled through forums, uninstalled and reinstalled the game, fiddled around with codecs and generally have jumped through a whole bunch of technical hoops that have ranged from the relatively simple to the outright ridiculous. It was when I was a suggestion to "make sure that Windows Media Player has all its defaults associations" that I lost my patience. If something within the game is checking the associations that Windows has with filetypes, then I suggest that someone be given the task of rewriting that section of code within the game. Any file associations should not matter a whit to how the game runs, because the game should be specify how to interpret its own data files, and not rely on files being associated with Windows Media Player in order to function correctly.

I know the QA department has their work cut out for them in releasing a game for PC, when there are so many variations in hardware and software setups. And I know programmers don't have an easy task in creating a game to release on PCs and consoles. Yet the issues that I (and many others just like me) are experiencing with Fallout 3 seem to indicate some sort of catastrophic failure during the development. And to think that I bought Fallout 3 instead of GTA IV because of the myriad of technical issues that I'd read had plagued its PC version. It is little wonder that PC gaming is diminishing in favour of current generation of consoles...

I'm hoping I find a way to get the game to run reliably, because I'd like to see how good this heavily praised game really is. And call me harsh, but I really don't see it possibly garnering the same degree of praise from me as it has from many other reviewers.