Just a little Xbox love to throw Bethesda's way. Fallout 3 is fantastic.
Last night I finished the “It’s Just Business” mission, requiring me to uh, “kidnap” 3 people by placing exploding collars around their neck. In my defense, when I first starting tracking these people, I was getting my butt handed to me. I needed credits and the salvage wasn’t doing me well. That’s one thing I love about this game – you try to play nice, but when you are constantly forced with picking up every scrap of metal for money and picking through an old corpse for food just to survive, the lines between right and wrong blur quickly. Your equipment wears out, forcing you to continually harvest money for repairs…it’s inevitable; to survive out there in the Wasteland, you have to do some bad things sometimes.
So I was feeling pretty guilty – here my character is racking up all these accomplishments, getting his praises sung by the survivors, all the while secretly kidnapping people for money on the side (no one is perfect).
Still, I felt pretty bad about the whole thing and decided to redeem myself…which in my case involved me using my ill gotten wealth to turn into a one-man Delta Force and liberate all the folks who had been captured. Here’s what I love about the game #2 – it was hard. While attacking Paradise City isn’t a quest, the layout of the city is built for one thing – heavy resistance. There are very few cover points and a manned gun tower with a view of everything, not to mention tons of baddies walking around the joint. The whole thing is built to convey the idea that it would be a bad idea to attack this place.
After 20 minutes of heavy, door to door fighting, I approached the captives victorious, ready to bask in their thanks. With a simple click of my screw driver, their exploding collars were deactivated, redeeming my crimes and sending them to freedom. Or so I thought.
A minute later, I stared down at the now-exploded head of my rescue (who again, I kidnapped in the first place) and realized that this was a fantastic game.
And that is how I spent my Monday night.
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