One of the most significant accomplishments of my life took place today.
 I beat Fallout 3. After over 80 hours of playtime, I finally beat it. I'll go on a limb and say that this game is probably the single most involved game I've ever played. The genre of this game is called a "Role Playing Game". Meaning, you decide every course of action and method of accomplishing tasks. For example, if one of the quests is to rescue someone, you could do the quest as is, go and rescue them. Or, you could go to rescue them, run into the person holding them captive and then decide to take a payoff instead of rescuing them.
It's incredible. You gain and lose karma all throughout the game. Every discussion you have has ramifications on this karma system. Every person you kill or don't kill affects it. If you decide to steal some food, you get negative karma. If you decide to donate money to one of the two churches in the game, you gain karma. You can decide to go through the entire game as a positive karma'd person (as I did) or you could go through the game as a neutral or negative karma'd person. I'm satisfied with how I chose to play, as a nice guy, but I think it would be way more fun to be the jerk, and say things to make kids cry, blow up the huge nuclear bomb in a town populated by innocent people and killing and stealing from whomever I run into.
 This game introduced me to the RPG genre, as I'd never played a game like it before. So now, I want to go get a few other games like it and play those. It's really fun being in control of my own destiny, and choosing how I want to solve problems and quests. One of the reasons it took so long for me to beat it though, was because of these quests. I wanted to make sure I didn't miss anything, so I played the game while simultaneously glued to the Fallout 3 website on my laptop. I feel like doing that really made the game more fun, as I knew how to gain certain things and not miss anything during the game.
So now that I've invested 80+ hours into the game with the goal of beating it, I'm going to go back to one of my old save files and start doing some things I avoided during my first run through. Things like building grenades made out of radioactive coca cola and throwing them at people. I'd also like to sneak up to people and place live grenades and mines in their pants, them watch them walk away and explode. I'd also like to walk into a town where I'm known for being a good guy, and start blowing people away with my shotgun. I'd also like to do a couple of the bad karma quests that I avoided too.
 Now, I know what you're thinking. 80 hours already?! When did you have time to play that while you were taking care of the girls and stuff? The majority of my playing time came between the hours of 10pm and 2am. Since I've been on Christmas Break, I didn't have to get up early and pay attention to a lecture, I only had to get up early to pay attention to my two kids. ;) |
I put 20 hours in the first week... beat it and decided that was enough. I couldn't go through it as a bad guy. I tried but just didn't have the heart to blow up Megaton. I mean the shop girl who gives you all of those missions is such a goober. I couldn't kill her.
If that is your intro to RPG everything else is subpar in comparison... though Elder Scrolls IV was made by the same people and is total quality. Though I did have the heart to be a bad guy in that game!