So I finally resolved my decision paralysis crisis in Fallout 3 -- to which, incidentally, I hear it's preferable to refer as FO3, and not "F3," to avoid associations with this.
Truly, the first moment of emergence from Vault 101 gave me the chills. We travel through a lot of ruined wastelands in games -- abandoned labs, haunted tunnels, destitute villages, the headquarters of various nefarious parties. But when the game environment manages to retain such a grim and telling imprint of what life in the place must have once been like, and when it just begs you to ask, "what happened?" I just go all jelly in the knees, I do. I've got a real post-apocalypse fetish.
I felt this way about BioShock's underwater once-paradise; I felt this way about Fatal Frame's cursed mansions, and I felt this way about Alex's house in Silent Hill: Homecoming, to name just a few, and I feel this way about Springvale and Megaton. It's strangely satisfying to be able to see, either traced in the dust of wreckage or subtly, in the lines of social structures, the long and lonely road back from a tragedy.
Which is why what I'm enjoying most about Fallout 3 is the permanent after-image of innocence. My colleague Chris Dahlen's review at Variety says the game's vision of Washington D.C "didn't just wreck the buildings, it twisted the American Dream itself." And maybe I'm a closet patriot -- or, at least, patriotic in the fashion of the American subconscious -- but this touches me, deeply.
I was struck by something as simple as the idealistic, propaganda-style pop art pastel of a family apparently playing football in a park. It sometimes appears during interim screens, but poignantly, it's one of the last things you see as you flee your room in Vault 101 for the last time.
I stepped out into the sun and to the irradiated dust, and I really, really did get chills.
Then I wanted to shoot some things. A lot of things.
My first thought, on seeing my first live humans for several stretches, was not, "hey! How are you holding up? What's your story?" No, it was actually, "I wonder what will happen if I kill them?"
MTV Multiplayer's Tracey John and I have joked that we Twitter to one another so often that we feel that we know each other better than we actually do -- I wrote that I wondered why I felt so tempted to shoot the salesman's two-headed pack-cow. Aren't I supposed to be feeling... exploratory? Moved? Anything but gleefully murderous?
"Dude," Tracey wrote back. "I totally killed that two-headed cow. Had to put it out of its misery."
But I didn't just want to cap the cow, I wanted to try and take down the chick standing guard over the cow, execute the guy with the cowboy hat, start a bar brawl. I haven't done any of these things -- because mostly I'm a little bit guilty, and largely I don't want to go all trigger-happy without an answer to my question: Why is it that such a stirringly nostalgic playground, framed in the cultural touchstones of one of my own nation's most painful-charming eras, just makes me want to kill?
Then again, how would you feel if you saw such absolute destruction of the American Dream?
Anyway, I think what I'm loving most about Fallout 3 is how aptly it blends the idealistic with the sinister -- which probably makes it even more of a thought process when you're deciding which of these your character responds to more.
