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camwynOkay, first things first: I understand that the Fallout franchise has a pretty big fandom and that they're only marginally less terrifying than the kind of people who can read Transformers: Kiss Players and come out the other side thinking they've had a really good comic book experience. Allow me to state here and now that I've never in my life played any of the other Fallout games. Not the original, not Fallout 2, not Tactics, not Brotherhood of Steel- none of them. My entire knowledge of the games comes from Tvtropes, some glances around the Fallout wiki, and the comic series that the Penny Arcade guys did for the official Fallout website. I went straight to Fallout 3 for the Xbox 360 because the wiki indicated that 3 wasn't a narrative sequel. I’m good with that. I'm not really interested in the other games just yet- I mean, I figure I'll play them one day, but right now I'm good with what I've got.
Also, I bought the strategy guide for the game. I've read some of it. I've deliberately avoided the parts that talk about the central plot and anything, anything marked with spoiler warnings, other than an accidental blundering into some of the background info early on in the book. I don't want to be spoiled for this game; I want to blunder through blindly. The character is, after all, sincerely and truly out of her element and it's more immersive this way. At least if I get completely blocked I have the book to turn to- and probably more save files than previously believed to be humanly possible to fall back on. In the meantime, if y'all've played the game or read the info, I'd appreciate it if you refrained from spoilers. Or at least put them in whitetext so people have to check the spoilers on purpose. Thanks.
That being said, on with the show!
Allow me to begin by saying that any game where the 'pass the time while the game loads up' images include a massive newspaper headline announcing U. S. TO ANNEX CANADA is a game that I'm damn well going to pay attention to. I already knew the premise of the setting when I bought the game- a series of wars between the US and China led to a nuclear conflagration in 2077, at which point people ran like bunnies for the Vaults, which sounded like a good idea but were really pretty much what happens when you let a megacorp perform the sociological equivalent of the Tuskeegee Experiment. I also knew that the world depicted was split off from our universe sometime shortly after the Second World War, and tech took off but society just went Perky Shiny Television 1950s and sort of stayed there. (That… might have been in the manual, actually.) Nevertheless I sat and watched a bunch of the load screens purely to see what extra information I could get. I suppose I probably ought to have been disturbed by the combination of Cheerful Perkiness and Seriously Creepy Subject Matter, but enh, whatever. Far as I'm concerned the whole thing was meant to be funny. I'm good with that.
They included the teaser trailer before the game actually started. I'd seen it when it was made into a TV commercial, and to be honest I think the commercial was what pushed me into taking enough of an interest to buy the game. Vacuum-tubed radio in a wrecked, collapsed bus tinnily playing a late-40s early-50s romantic tune as the camera pulls back to reveal a wrecked, burned, trashed city, and in the distance, tall and black and asymmetrical, rises the Combine Citadel OH MY GOD IS THIS HALF LIFE EPISODE THREE oh wait that's the Washington Monument OH HEY GUY IN POWER ARMOR WHAT. Sometimes you can't not pay attention, at least if you're me.
The actual game events, however, start under rather different circumstances. Namely, with your character being born. Apparently you're a very well-behaved baby from day one, because you make a vague 'gwaaabh!' noise or two before going quiet to let the other dialogue happen. You don't see much at this stage because there's a light shining in your face, for the most part, but you do hear your oddly familiar, oddly British-sounding father talking to your exhausted, very clearly American mother as you choose your character's sex and name. (I named the character Camwyn to see if I could force the game to attempt to pronounce it, but they never actually incorporate the name into dialogue, so I'm just going to be thinking of the character as Ellen. Her parents are named James and Catherine, so I doubt they're going to get fancy.) Then your really oddly familiar sounding father says something about a gene scanner to show what you'll look like when you're twenty, which is the game's excuse for letting you pick your character's race, hair style, hair color, facial features, and so on. I went with Asian and steel-grey hair; I liked the look. Apparently the character is supposed to look just like her father when she grows up, even though they only have the one sprite for Daddy… they couldn't have said there was a resemblance to Dead!Mom? Would that be a problem for guy players or something?
Yeah, Dead!Mom. Once you set your appearance Mom goes into cardiac arrest. Sorry.
The lights get real bright and there's sort of blurry dialogue for a bit, and then the camera comes up on one year later, with your father trying to get you to walk to him so that you can figure out why the hell his voice sounds so damn familiar. This was about the point where![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
daniidebrabant looked the game up on IMDB. Turns out your father? Is voiced by Liam Neeson. Yeah, you've got Qui-Gon Daddy. Apparently he gave up on that whole immortality through the Force thing and just shaved and scarpered off to Earth to be a scientist- anyway, this is where the game control tutorial begins. Qui-Gon is very very pleased to see you toddle up to him, and promptly puts you behind a fence with a big red ball and tells you to be good and goes to check on something else. Being good isn't really in the cards, though. You're in the playpen so you-the-player can learn to open doors and handle objects. One of the things you pick up is a book that explains the stat system and lets you set your stats. It's a seven-attribute system- Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck. (I'm told they wanted to use GURPS originally, but Steve Jackson said no.) Once you've set your stats Daddy comes back in and exclaims in surprise; guess he left the Force turned off today.
There's some more talking, and then time skips forward again. It's your tenth birthday. This is where I had my first 'ack' moment, because- as the tag says- I stink at videogames. I don't believe I've ever played a console RPG before this that had actual conversation choices or dialogue trees. The closest I get is the original Dune videogame, where you could bork yourself pretty badly if you tried to demand a Fremen's loyalty without adequately rallying him first.
… that sounds really awful.
*ahem* Anyway. This is the character's tenth birthday party, and you get to start meeting the rest of the crew of the Red October! I'm sorry, I mean the rest of the Vault's inhabitants- the place looks like you're living inside a submarine, and everyone wearing the same jumpsuits does very little to curb that impression. (Although now I kind of want to see Sean Connery and the Pretend Russian Sailors wearing little red party hats.) The first person you get into conversation with is supposed to be a friend of yours, a girl named Amata. Yadda yadda party, yadda yadda hard to keep it a secret, guess what I got you. I picked the most amusing choice, which was 'a date with Freddie Gomez?', even though the character is ten years old. Apparently Amata thought this was weird, because she was all "EW GROSS BOYS EW I can't believe you like those," and then she gave me a pre-war comic book called Grognak the Barbarian.
Grognak's gotta be a hell of a read, given that my melee weapons score went up just by reading the book. I like Amata's style already.
At this point I dimly recalled that 'talk to everyone' is supposed to be the way to survive in games where it's possible to talk to people, so I went around and talked to everyone I could find at the party. I tried to choose the politest options I could, because I had no real urge to be snide or grabby, and I figured a kid raised in a heavily 1950's-steeped climate by Qui-Gon freaking Jinn was probably going to be polite enough to make a Canadian's teeth itch. Okay, so the friendly helper robot accidentally completely mutilated my birthday cake, it's okay, these things happen. The old lady gave me a sweetroll as a present, that makes a nice substitute. 'Course, another kid around my age then proceeded to try and extort it from me… I looked over my options there and figured I'd still be polite, but Butchie boy wasn't gonna get my damn sweetroll. Qui-Gon Daddy's daughter doesn't just roll over and show throat, thank you.
NB: Butch is a jerk, and tried to punch me. This did not work for him and he got yelled at by Officer Gomez. This apparently sets something of a pattern for the rest of Butch's life.
There were some other kids at the party, so I tried talking to them, but the only big thing to happen otherwise was that I got my Pip-Boy 3000 from Amata's father, the Vault Overseer. The Pip-Boy is the gauntlet computer thingy that everyone in the Vault gets when they turn ten. In OOC terms it means you have a menu screen now. It's kind of cool-looking. I like big clunky gauntlet things. The Overseer sort of wandered off after that and Daddy Qui-Gon told me he had a present for me too, and that I should go meet Jonas down in the reactor room, and OH GOD THEY'RE GOING TO MAKE ME JUMP FROM MOVING PLATFORM TO MOVING PLATFORM AND SWING FROM RINGS OVER RADIOACTIVE WASTE AND CLIMB LADDERS AND GET ZAPPED, I’m ONLY TEN YEARS OLD, NOOOO.
Fortunately, the Vault-Tec engineers were a little less psychotic than the Black Mesa ones. The reactor room was perfectly safe. Took me a while to get there, though- I followed the Overseer upstairs at first by mistake, which is how I overheard him snippily telling one of the Security guys that he was only at my party because his daughter was friends with 'that brat'. Hmmph. Fine, see if I vote for you if there's ever an election again. Eventually I found my way back to Dad, but before he could send me in the right direction a Perky and Cheerful lady named Beatrice gave me a poem she composed specially for my tenth birthday. I read it. Beatrice has issues. Poems for kids should not involve comparisons to larvae and pupae hatching out and bashing themselves to death on the walls. They should not involve the words 'larvae and pupae' at ALL.
Deep breath, smile, be polite, remember your daddy is a Jedi in disguise, back away slowly…
Why Dad and Jonas set up an impromptu target range in the reactor room I don't know, but my present was a BB gun and fifty beebees. Goal: shoot the three targets. Fine, I could do that. Dad kept telling me that every time I zoomed in on one of the targets to get a better aim, in fact. I half expected him to tell me to close my eyes and feel the target. Or the giant radioactive mutant cockroach that showed up shortly thereafter, and when I say giant I mean something at least the size of an ergonomic computer keyboard.
This is where things get really fun, because if you can remember which freaking button to press you get BULLET TIME. Like, really picky BULLET TIME. Something in your possession, I'm guessing the Pip-Boy 3000, gives you the ability to scan a target's form and assesses your probability of hitting if you aim at any given body part, and shows you how much damage the part in question is still capable of taking. You can take as long as you like in this mode before pulling the trigger as many times as you've got action points for, and then you have to back out of BULLET TIME and do things naturally until your action points grow back. Me being, well, me, I pushed the wrong button and was instead kicked into third-person action mode instead of BULLET TIME, which almost got embarrassing, because who wants to flail around like a dork in front of Qui-Gon Daddy? I got the bug killed eventually, though, and Dad was proud enough of me to have Jonas take our picture with the corpse.
Fast-forward to six years later. Dad wants me to go take the Generalized Occupation Aptitude Test, or whatever the hell GOAT stands for. It's supposed to indicate what job I'm best trained for to serve the Vault population in general. There are no wands and no wizarding committee involved no matter how Rowlingish the name sounds, which is kind of a pity. On the other hand, the character's reluctance to take it opens up all kinds of conversational opportunities with Dad, including 'do we really have to be in the Vault all our lives?' and 'whyyyy?' and 'tell me about Mom?'. I opted not to try to lie to Dad and just went to take the test. Ran into Butch and his 'Tunnel Snakes' being jerks to Amata on the way, though. Butch did not look all that impressive in the leather jacket he wore, possibly because I was very distracted trying to figure out where he got the gel necessary to hold his hair in that pompadour style in underground submarine-style post-apocalyptic 2277. I had a couple of options here, including insulting Amata myself, but I wound up going with trying to convince Butch that, oh, hassling the freaking Overseer's daughter might not be a good idea for his future. It worked. Butch and his leatherboys slunk off, and I got Good Karma. (The game has a good-evil karma axis built in; it influences how people react towards you, apparently. I haven't gotten far enough to see much of that.)
Amata and I went and sat down for the test, which turned out to be how our initial skill points were allotted- you got multiple choice questions about how you would handle various situations. Things like 'a small child has stolen supplies and gotten lost and frightened deep in the Vault, what do you do?' I said 'hug him and tell him things are going to be all right', but other options included 'lead him back and turn him in to the Overseer immediately', 'knock him down, take all his supplies, and run', or 'leave him to fend for himself'. There was also… oh, 'you go to visit your beloved grandmother and she hands you a gun and tells you to kill another Vault Dweller. Do you: a, do it without hesitation, b, shoot your grandmother instead, c, offer your most prized possession for the other person's life, d, demand Granny make it more worth your while'. Things like that. The last question was 'who guides our every moment and makes sure we're safe and who do we owe our very lives and existence to'. All answers were 'the Overseer'. @whee. At least the test proctor didn't seem enthusiastic about it either… I hung back to hear how the other students did on their tests. Butch? Got told that he was going to be a hairdresser for the rest of his life.
No, there is no button for snickering. I just wished there was.
My test results wound up giving me high scores in Barter, Speech, and Medicine (I think). Apparently choosing the 'be nice to people' options is relatively rare, since, well, you're supposed to be setting your skills for survival in the HUGE AND DEADLY RADIOACTIVE WASTELAND YET TO COME, but let's be honest- I wanted to play this the way Qui-Gon Daddy's daughter would be thinking. Turns out my scores lined me up to become the Vault's next chaplain.
Well, Jedi are sorta chaplainny…
There's one more fast forward while you're still living in the Vault, but that takes you out of tutorial time and into the actual OH GOD PEOPLE ARE SHOOTING GUNS part of the game, so I'm gonna stop here and cover that next time.
Also, I bought the strategy guide for the game. I've read some of it. I've deliberately avoided the parts that talk about the central plot and anything, anything marked with spoiler warnings, other than an accidental blundering into some of the background info early on in the book. I don't want to be spoiled for this game; I want to blunder through blindly. The character is, after all, sincerely and truly out of her element and it's more immersive this way. At least if I get completely blocked I have the book to turn to- and probably more save files than previously believed to be humanly possible to fall back on. In the meantime, if y'all've played the game or read the info, I'd appreciate it if you refrained from spoilers. Or at least put them in whitetext so people have to check the spoilers on purpose. Thanks.
That being said, on with the show!
Allow me to begin by saying that any game where the 'pass the time while the game loads up' images include a massive newspaper headline announcing U. S. TO ANNEX CANADA is a game that I'm damn well going to pay attention to. I already knew the premise of the setting when I bought the game- a series of wars between the US and China led to a nuclear conflagration in 2077, at which point people ran like bunnies for the Vaults, which sounded like a good idea but were really pretty much what happens when you let a megacorp perform the sociological equivalent of the Tuskeegee Experiment. I also knew that the world depicted was split off from our universe sometime shortly after the Second World War, and tech took off but society just went Perky Shiny Television 1950s and sort of stayed there. (That… might have been in the manual, actually.) Nevertheless I sat and watched a bunch of the load screens purely to see what extra information I could get. I suppose I probably ought to have been disturbed by the combination of Cheerful Perkiness and Seriously Creepy Subject Matter, but enh, whatever. Far as I'm concerned the whole thing was meant to be funny. I'm good with that.
They included the teaser trailer before the game actually started. I'd seen it when it was made into a TV commercial, and to be honest I think the commercial was what pushed me into taking enough of an interest to buy the game. Vacuum-tubed radio in a wrecked, collapsed bus tinnily playing a late-40s early-50s romantic tune as the camera pulls back to reveal a wrecked, burned, trashed city, and in the distance, tall and black and asymmetrical, rises the Combine Citadel OH MY GOD IS THIS HALF LIFE EPISODE THREE oh wait that's the Washington Monument OH HEY GUY IN POWER ARMOR WHAT. Sometimes you can't not pay attention, at least if you're me.
The actual game events, however, start under rather different circumstances. Namely, with your character being born. Apparently you're a very well-behaved baby from day one, because you make a vague 'gwaaabh!' noise or two before going quiet to let the other dialogue happen. You don't see much at this stage because there's a light shining in your face, for the most part, but you do hear your oddly familiar, oddly British-sounding father talking to your exhausted, very clearly American mother as you choose your character's sex and name. (I named the character Camwyn to see if I could force the game to attempt to pronounce it, but they never actually incorporate the name into dialogue, so I'm just going to be thinking of the character as Ellen. Her parents are named James and Catherine, so I doubt they're going to get fancy.) Then your really oddly familiar sounding father says something about a gene scanner to show what you'll look like when you're twenty, which is the game's excuse for letting you pick your character's race, hair style, hair color, facial features, and so on. I went with Asian and steel-grey hair; I liked the look. Apparently the character is supposed to look just like her father when she grows up, even though they only have the one sprite for Daddy… they couldn't have said there was a resemblance to Dead!Mom? Would that be a problem for guy players or something?
Yeah, Dead!Mom. Once you set your appearance Mom goes into cardiac arrest. Sorry.
The lights get real bright and there's sort of blurry dialogue for a bit, and then the camera comes up on one year later, with your father trying to get you to walk to him so that you can figure out why the hell his voice sounds so damn familiar. This was about the point where
daniidebrabant looked the game up on IMDB. Turns out your father? Is voiced by Liam Neeson. Yeah, you've got Qui-Gon Daddy. Apparently he gave up on that whole immortality through the Force thing and just shaved and scarpered off to Earth to be a scientist- anyway, this is where the game control tutorial begins. Qui-Gon is very very pleased to see you toddle up to him, and promptly puts you behind a fence with a big red ball and tells you to be good and goes to check on something else. Being good isn't really in the cards, though. You're in the playpen so you-the-player can learn to open doors and handle objects. One of the things you pick up is a book that explains the stat system and lets you set your stats. It's a seven-attribute system- Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck. (I'm told they wanted to use GURPS originally, but Steve Jackson said no.) Once you've set your stats Daddy comes back in and exclaims in surprise; guess he left the Force turned off today. There's some more talking, and then time skips forward again. It's your tenth birthday. This is where I had my first 'ack' moment, because- as the tag says- I stink at videogames. I don't believe I've ever played a console RPG before this that had actual conversation choices or dialogue trees. The closest I get is the original Dune videogame, where you could bork yourself pretty badly if you tried to demand a Fremen's loyalty without adequately rallying him first.
… that sounds really awful.
*ahem* Anyway. This is the character's tenth birthday party, and you get to start meeting the rest of the crew of the Red October! I'm sorry, I mean the rest of the Vault's inhabitants- the place looks like you're living inside a submarine, and everyone wearing the same jumpsuits does very little to curb that impression. (Although now I kind of want to see Sean Connery and the Pretend Russian Sailors wearing little red party hats.) The first person you get into conversation with is supposed to be a friend of yours, a girl named Amata. Yadda yadda party, yadda yadda hard to keep it a secret, guess what I got you. I picked the most amusing choice, which was 'a date with Freddie Gomez?', even though the character is ten years old. Apparently Amata thought this was weird, because she was all "EW GROSS BOYS EW I can't believe you like those," and then she gave me a pre-war comic book called Grognak the Barbarian.
Grognak's gotta be a hell of a read, given that my melee weapons score went up just by reading the book. I like Amata's style already.
At this point I dimly recalled that 'talk to everyone' is supposed to be the way to survive in games where it's possible to talk to people, so I went around and talked to everyone I could find at the party. I tried to choose the politest options I could, because I had no real urge to be snide or grabby, and I figured a kid raised in a heavily 1950's-steeped climate by Qui-Gon freaking Jinn was probably going to be polite enough to make a Canadian's teeth itch. Okay, so the friendly helper robot accidentally completely mutilated my birthday cake, it's okay, these things happen. The old lady gave me a sweetroll as a present, that makes a nice substitute. 'Course, another kid around my age then proceeded to try and extort it from me… I looked over my options there and figured I'd still be polite, but Butchie boy wasn't gonna get my damn sweetroll. Qui-Gon Daddy's daughter doesn't just roll over and show throat, thank you.
NB: Butch is a jerk, and tried to punch me. This did not work for him and he got yelled at by Officer Gomez. This apparently sets something of a pattern for the rest of Butch's life.
There were some other kids at the party, so I tried talking to them, but the only big thing to happen otherwise was that I got my Pip-Boy 3000 from Amata's father, the Vault Overseer. The Pip-Boy is the gauntlet computer thingy that everyone in the Vault gets when they turn ten. In OOC terms it means you have a menu screen now. It's kind of cool-looking. I like big clunky gauntlet things. The Overseer sort of wandered off after that and Daddy Qui-Gon told me he had a present for me too, and that I should go meet Jonas down in the reactor room, and OH GOD THEY'RE GOING TO MAKE ME JUMP FROM MOVING PLATFORM TO MOVING PLATFORM AND SWING FROM RINGS OVER RADIOACTIVE WASTE AND CLIMB LADDERS AND GET ZAPPED, I’m ONLY TEN YEARS OLD, NOOOO.
Fortunately, the Vault-Tec engineers were a little less psychotic than the Black Mesa ones. The reactor room was perfectly safe. Took me a while to get there, though- I followed the Overseer upstairs at first by mistake, which is how I overheard him snippily telling one of the Security guys that he was only at my party because his daughter was friends with 'that brat'. Hmmph. Fine, see if I vote for you if there's ever an election again. Eventually I found my way back to Dad, but before he could send me in the right direction a Perky and Cheerful lady named Beatrice gave me a poem she composed specially for my tenth birthday. I read it. Beatrice has issues. Poems for kids should not involve comparisons to larvae and pupae hatching out and bashing themselves to death on the walls. They should not involve the words 'larvae and pupae' at ALL.
Deep breath, smile, be polite, remember your daddy is a Jedi in disguise, back away slowly…
Why Dad and Jonas set up an impromptu target range in the reactor room I don't know, but my present was a BB gun and fifty beebees. Goal: shoot the three targets. Fine, I could do that. Dad kept telling me that every time I zoomed in on one of the targets to get a better aim, in fact. I half expected him to tell me to close my eyes and feel the target. Or the giant radioactive mutant cockroach that showed up shortly thereafter, and when I say giant I mean something at least the size of an ergonomic computer keyboard.
This is where things get really fun, because if you can remember which freaking button to press you get BULLET TIME. Like, really picky BULLET TIME. Something in your possession, I'm guessing the Pip-Boy 3000, gives you the ability to scan a target's form and assesses your probability of hitting if you aim at any given body part, and shows you how much damage the part in question is still capable of taking. You can take as long as you like in this mode before pulling the trigger as many times as you've got action points for, and then you have to back out of BULLET TIME and do things naturally until your action points grow back. Me being, well, me, I pushed the wrong button and was instead kicked into third-person action mode instead of BULLET TIME, which almost got embarrassing, because who wants to flail around like a dork in front of Qui-Gon Daddy? I got the bug killed eventually, though, and Dad was proud enough of me to have Jonas take our picture with the corpse.
Fast-forward to six years later. Dad wants me to go take the Generalized Occupation Aptitude Test, or whatever the hell GOAT stands for. It's supposed to indicate what job I'm best trained for to serve the Vault population in general. There are no wands and no wizarding committee involved no matter how Rowlingish the name sounds, which is kind of a pity. On the other hand, the character's reluctance to take it opens up all kinds of conversational opportunities with Dad, including 'do we really have to be in the Vault all our lives?' and 'whyyyy?' and 'tell me about Mom?'. I opted not to try to lie to Dad and just went to take the test. Ran into Butch and his 'Tunnel Snakes' being jerks to Amata on the way, though. Butch did not look all that impressive in the leather jacket he wore, possibly because I was very distracted trying to figure out where he got the gel necessary to hold his hair in that pompadour style in underground submarine-style post-apocalyptic 2277. I had a couple of options here, including insulting Amata myself, but I wound up going with trying to convince Butch that, oh, hassling the freaking Overseer's daughter might not be a good idea for his future. It worked. Butch and his leatherboys slunk off, and I got Good Karma. (The game has a good-evil karma axis built in; it influences how people react towards you, apparently. I haven't gotten far enough to see much of that.)
Amata and I went and sat down for the test, which turned out to be how our initial skill points were allotted- you got multiple choice questions about how you would handle various situations. Things like 'a small child has stolen supplies and gotten lost and frightened deep in the Vault, what do you do?' I said 'hug him and tell him things are going to be all right', but other options included 'lead him back and turn him in to the Overseer immediately', 'knock him down, take all his supplies, and run', or 'leave him to fend for himself'. There was also… oh, 'you go to visit your beloved grandmother and she hands you a gun and tells you to kill another Vault Dweller. Do you: a, do it without hesitation, b, shoot your grandmother instead, c, offer your most prized possession for the other person's life, d, demand Granny make it more worth your while'. Things like that. The last question was 'who guides our every moment and makes sure we're safe and who do we owe our very lives and existence to'. All answers were 'the Overseer'. @whee. At least the test proctor didn't seem enthusiastic about it either… I hung back to hear how the other students did on their tests. Butch? Got told that he was going to be a hairdresser for the rest of his life.
No, there is no button for snickering. I just wished there was.
My test results wound up giving me high scores in Barter, Speech, and Medicine (I think). Apparently choosing the 'be nice to people' options is relatively rare, since, well, you're supposed to be setting your skills for survival in the HUGE AND DEADLY RADIOACTIVE WASTELAND YET TO COME, but let's be honest- I wanted to play this the way Qui-Gon Daddy's daughter would be thinking. Turns out my scores lined me up to become the Vault's next chaplain.
Well, Jedi are sorta chaplainny…
There's one more fast forward while you're still living in the Vault, but that takes you out of tutorial time and into the actual OH GOD PEOPLE ARE SHOOTING GUNS part of the game, so I'm gonna stop here and cover that next time.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-11-20 10:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-20 11:03 pm (UTC)I do know that the author of the strategy guide worries me. He dedicated the book to several humans and then to Great Cthulhu.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-20 11:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-21 04:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-21 05:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-21 04:06 am (UTC)...yeah, I'm thinking those people belong somewhere far away from where children could find them and put them in their mouth.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-21 08:18 am (UTC)And don't worry too much about survival skills. There are nearly always paths to fight, sneak, or talk your way through any given situation in these games. :)
no subject
Date: 2008-11-21 02:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-21 04:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-21 04:27 pm (UTC)Thus explaining how he got the pompadour!
no subject
Date: 2008-11-21 04:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-21 11:40 pm (UTC)But don't worry, playing 2 apparently holds no spoilers for 3, since I haven't spotted anything yet in your description of 3 that seems to refer overtly back to 2. 2 did sort of faintly build on 1, in a 'several generations later' kind of way, but only faintly.
I do expect the lizard-onna-stick joke to recur. And I was v. amused to find out that (old, scavenged-from-the-former-world) bottlecaps were currency. My husband started saving his in a jar for a while when he was really into playing 2. :->
no subject
Date: 2008-11-22 12:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-24 03:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-24 03:27 pm (UTC)My husband assures me spoilers aren't really possible game-to-game, because 1 and 2 took place west-coastish, whereas 3 takes place eastern-seaboardish. So likely almost no overlap at all, at least in postapocalyptic events.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-24 04:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-25 08:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-10 06:02 am (UTC)