Journal entry 2: Unexpected item in bagging area

Today I learned that I really suck at this game.  Let's start out with a quick walk in this new world, get a taste of the fresh air, look at all the complete lack of landscape.

Is that a golden shopping cart or was it painted to look like that?  Maybe it's made of copper.  I couldn't take it despite it not being nailed down so I'm not sure what it's for apart from possible alerting angry wildlife (all wildlife so far appears angry) that I'm tripping over my own feet and stumbling into trolleys.

Megaton is nice.  It reminds me of Peacehaven from Borderlands.  Expect a lot of comparisons between this and Borderlands because they both have a kind of scavenged dystopia aesthetic and because I really, really like Borderlands.

I like the look they've got going here.  Megaton could be a nice place to hang around in and they even have a happy greeter robot.  Whiterun didn't have a greeter robot.  Firestone did but I had to kill him in the DLC.

I hope I don't have to kill this one.  I do seem to have to kill a lot of things that I love.  Poor, poor Cicero...

Oh, this guy was lovely!  Welcomed me to his town, complimented me on my attitude, made me feel right at home.  We're getting on famously, me and him.  Him and I?  Eh, there probably aren't many books on grammar in the Capital Wastes so maybe we can let that one slide.

He asked me to defuse a nuclear bomb.  He'd only known me for about 2 minutes at this point so this seemed a bit too trusting to me.  I wouldn't trust a guy I'd known for a day to fix my washing machine unless he identified himself as a plumber but I've in no way even suggested I'm any kind of engineer, let alone a specialist in nuclear weaponry.  I hope you guys think this is strange because it sure scares me.  This guy is responsible for a lot of people!  I don't even look like the normal guys around here, I'm dressed like someone known to come from an isolated bunker who's never seen the light of day, let alone studied nuclear warheads.

I tried to play with the bomb.  It told me that I need an explosives skill of 25 to do it which is a shame because I'm specialising in speech, infiltration, small guns and science.  It's taking up a lot of my skill points.  Still, it's good to know that knowing how to toss a grenade gives me the skills I need to safely disable a leaking nuclear weapon.

Me and this game are going to have a lot of problems.  I was willing to suspend disbelief about dragon shouts, demonic voices and learning to forge glass by training myself to craft leather but Dragonbjorn lived in a world of magic.  This is sort of real worldy.

I realise that radiation causes mutations but I think it'd take hundreds of years and a lot of very weird selective breeding to cause all cows to be double headed.  I don't even know why these cows would succeed over regular cows.  When you live on grass, being able to eat twice as fast isn't a big deal.  I refuse to believe that a few cows had both a radiation resistance gene and a dormant double headed gene.  From what little I know about radiation, it doesn't make you grow extra bits like this, nor does it give you powers or melt you.  I think it just burns you and gives you cancer.  I mean, that's a big "just" but it's not a magic polymorphing wizard energy.

I let Sir Vaulter have a nice sit down.  He immediately sat in a way calculated to make him look as absolutely casual as possible.  I think he might be a bit of a poser but it's okay because with all his charisma, even though he looks a bit pale and thin he's still inhumanly beautiful.  Maybe he has the glamour.

Oh Christ, I made him into an elf.  That's not good!  I pledged genocide against those things and now I am one!

Well, maybe if radiation is a mutating force in this game, I can just get him swimming in the glowy green for long enough that he turns into a troll or something.  An exquisitely beautiful troll.

 Speaking of immersing myself in radiation, this nice lady suggested I get irradiated until I glowed in the dark and my sperm were on fire.  She then gave me some concoction of something that perfectly healed my radiation sickness.  I get the feeling that there will never again in this game be a source of perfect radiation healing medicine.  I could have sold that for the GDP of a small island nation.

I gave in to her demands because she sounded fun and Canadian, because a gentleman of the realm always listens to the needs of a lady and because it was a quest.  Nordic brutes have to do quests.  Gentleman adventurers have to do quests.  Questing is important.

She sent me to do her shopping for her after this so I went ahead and took care of that and got eaten by a dog on the way there.  I then realised that I had two pistol rounds (rounds, not clips) and a BB gun.  This was not okay.  After reloading and taking note of how guns need bullets to function, I encountered no further dogs but did learn a valuable lesson.

Okay, shopping mall in the distance.  Considering that this is America, the mall is really close to a lot of things!  I've been to America.  You can't even get to ASDA without a car on account of how much space there is between everything.  I think that's why American petrol is cheap.

If anybody in America is reading this, please feel free to get angry in the comments section below!

I hope this place was named Super Duper Mart before the war.

So far so good.  Nothing looks out of the ordinary.  Considering that this is a large solidly built building, you'd think that Megaton's residents would leave, clear out the old superstore and move into it.  This thing even has aircon!

These days, I see a body in an unusual place, I think "someone's trying to intimidate me".  Note that I don't think "I feel intimidated" because if I've learned anything from Doom, corpses are bad guy decorations and can probably be found in Villain IKEA.  When the hero's not around, you could keep pencils or clothes inside this guy.  It's a unique and contemporary storage solution, it's biodegradable, easy to install...

Did I mention I'm going for overall good karma?  Just wanted to make that clear.

Yep, looks like a nice place to live.  A bit dark, but easier to defend than the scrap heap.

Put up some walls, you could get some houses in this shelving or just run a store.

I then had to deal with the raiders and died maaaybe 11 times. I was probably still high on the hubris of having killed some cockroaches recently and thought that my pistol would easily kill someone who wasn't wearing a helmet when I shot them in the face.  Turns out that pistols don't work that way.

Much like Skyrim, you can fit lots of household items in the head of an opponent.  This guy had a gun, all of his body armour and a lead pipe in his head.  Bodies really are a good storage solution.  If I can fit all that stuff in someone's head, imagine the possibilities of a torso or even a leg!

Picture taken in a women's bathroom.  I'd just looted the room which was full of addictive drugs.  Gentlemen do not take drugs but they do sell them to vendors who can dispose of them in an environmentally friendly way.  I'm sure that's what Moira did with the future-meth I sold her.  Definitely.  I'm absolved of all responsibility and guilt.

So anyway, I run into this room, see a bed and Vaulter wants to take a nap.  This really doesn't seem like an appropriate time or place (also it was the ladies' room, I shouldn't even have been there!  I only went in to check for raiders) so I decided to leave it.  I healed myself by drinking from the dirtiest sink in the world.  It was actually about as healthy as a stimpack but mildly irradiated.  Still, it was a net gain.

It gave me the option of drinking from a urinal too but that was far more irradiated.  Odd, you'd think they'd feed from the same water source.  Maybe Sir Vaulter is interpreting his gag reflex as a sign of radiation.  Or maybe he's lying about the rads to keep me from drinking from a urinal.

Duke Nukem would have done it.

You're not better than the Duke, Vaulter.

Already proving himself to be far, far more intelligent that any video game character I've ever played as (probably), Vaulter knows how to hack computers.  And by "hack", I mean "guess a password".  Considering that in common parlance, that seems to be what hacking means in this day and age, I suppose that's close enough.

I mean seriously, hackers didn't take over your facebook account.  If somebody could compromise Facebook's security, the first thing they'd do wouldn't be to post ads to your feed or post a status update that you like it up the bum long time.

I love this guy!  I had to hack him to wake him up, he moved slower than molasses uphill on a cold day and he shouted a lot about somebody not having clearance but he stepped out of this room and proceeded to shoot everybody in the face with lasers!

Protectron, I think you're going to be my best friend.

I did get a bit worried when he started asking to be provided with a valid employee ID but I think he was talking to someone else 'cause he was cool with me.  I do question exactly how good an idea it is to have a robot that immediately laser blasts intruders, it seems like the kind of attitude which would lead to a lot of teenagers getting set on fire, but he saved my sweet charismatic behind so I'm okay with that thinking.

He's still in the shop.  I might try to find a way to take the wall out and release him so he can wander the wasteland and murder all the bad people forever.

God bless you you homicidal metal bastard.

I found blood packs.  Vaulter was willing to drink them to regain health.  Why does every character I play turn out to be insane?  I realise that I'm the common theme but I refuse to believe that I'm causing all of this.  At worst, I'm the one making all my characters into kleptomaniacs but I haven't suggested anything to this degree.

Isn't drinking blood cannibalism?

Is Moira a daedric prince?

This guy wanted me to murder everybody in Megaton so I politely declined and told him to leave.  He agreed to.  He won't get out of his chair.  I think he might just be finishing his drink but since he's taken over 48 hours to do it, I'm wondering if he ordered a Coke and has infinite free refills.  Got to get your money's worth after the end of the world, right?

Thought for the day:
I took the Intensive Training perk.

How does one train luck?  Even charisma is a bit tricky to teach yourself.

Journal entry 1: Pip pip, cheerio!

We began with baby's first quest.  We also begin by learning that dad actually has a name and that name is James.  I mean honestly, you try to build up a narrative, get a little involved in your character development and you find out you've been getting it all wrong.

My relationship with my virtual dad is already off to a bad start and I've not even learned to speak.

Learning to walk is a quest.  This is fabulous.  I'm glad it wasn't the kind of quest you can fail 'cause that'd be embarrassing.  It didn't give me any experience but tutorial quests don't have to.  No big deal.  I was hoping for a gun but then I remembered that this isn't Borderlands and so it wouldn't be okay for a baby to have a gun.

Everything in here is very gray.  I'm not really one for bright colours or anything but all I'm saying is a bit of something wouldn't go amiss.  Blue is nice.  It's a nice colour for babies.

I'm glad I'm too young to really be able to read complex things because this is a pretty heavy thing to have as the only decoration in the room.  Still, Catherine liked it so I guess it's a sentimental thing.  That's okay.  It's still a lot to deal with.

Yeah, you're damn right I am!  This looks like an appropriate level of reading material for me (and for Dragonbjorn, oddly) so let's get stuck in.

Well, I'm smart enough to read a book unaided.  Even though it has cardboard pages, that's still no small feat for a 1 year old.  A bit of intelligence seems fine.

Watch out, ladies!

At 8 charisma, I figure that I'm the Fonz.  Except not 30 years old and hanging around with teenagers.  Or maybe I will be, you never know how these things will turn out and apparently I'm locked in here for life so I guess it'll happen if any of us have kids of our own.

Everybody threw me a lovely party.  I tried to be polite.  It didn't result in me getting more presents but that's okay because I felt good about making other people feel good.  You'll notice that the birthday banner has some colours.  Apparently primary colours are only liberally used during special occasions and maybe times of national celebration.  The 4th of July is going to be a real challenge to celebrate underground, though.  I'm no expert but I think that explosions and enclosed spaces aren't often friends.

I disliked this guy immensely even though I wasn't sure why.  I think I had some bad memories of him.  He handed over my PIP boy and told me I'd be on work assignment tomorrow.  That makes the device seem less like a privilege and more like a shackle.

Notably, Vaulter won't change his clothes unless he looks at what he wants to wear through the PIP boy, so I can only assume that until now, James dressed him every day.  8 charisma can really make people eager to please, I suppose.

And here's a young Vaulter now.  He... looks really ill.  I'm not sure I'm okay with this.  He did just see a robot cut his birthday cake with a buzzsaw but as a 10 year old boy (or a boy of any age up until death), that should be pretty awesome.

"For some reason"?  Wow.  I realise I should respect my elders but as a leader, you should be setting a better example.  You're seriously going to start smack talking a 10 year old?  Sir, you're a conversational gladiator.  I can see why you're so well regarded.

VATS.  I don't understand VATS.

So it seems to be a thing you turn on when you want people to die.  If you turn it on, you enter Sherlock Holmes Analysis-Vision and see your odds of hitting people's body parts.  Without VATS, hitting things is very tricky.  VATS therefore feels like a "win combat" button and if I don't have enough AP, I'm supposed to take cover.

Well okay, I can deal with that.

However, what really bothers me is that I'm quite apparently looking intently at my wristband while trying to pick my targets, then firing a gun unnaturally fast.  I know I could be squeezing the trigger really quickly but the BB gun I have doesn't fire nearly as quickly as when I'm in VATS.  Being just a BB gun, I refuse to believe that VATS is actually interfacing with the gun because nobody in their right mind would create a children's toy gun which could connect to a sophisticated portable targeting computer.  Disregarding how VATS makes my gun fire faster, if I'm not looking at my wrist during each use of VATS, that means my PIP boy is connecting straight into my brain and providing me with a augmented reality experience created for the express purpose of highlighting my opponents' most easily struck locations.

Someone sat down and thought "Yes, all citizens need a targeting computer from age 10.  It's a hostile world after all".

Except it wasn't a hostile world.  The PIP boys aren't made down here, there's no factory, which means that they have to have come from before the big one hit.  That means they were supplied as part of the pack provided to each overseer and therefore, someone at VaultTec really thought that during the apocalypse, the world would be a terrible enough place that 10 year olds would be taking up arms and having to shoot things to death.  Not only that, these things are advanced enough to be able to identify the head analogues of species which didn't even exist until after the world was irradiated!

SO MANY QUESTIONS!

Wow, happy... birthday.  Is 10 old enough to drink in the vault?  I could do with one.

I've got a goat to take?  Well, it's an unorthodox birthday present but... well, if I can have some privacy then sure, I guess.  Being 16 is a socially awkward time, after all. 

Being married to a scientist and being (technically) a scientist myself, I'm come to regard a series of interestingly shaped glassware in a working environment as one of two things:

1. We're trying to convey "science"
2. Someone has just broken bad

So maybe dad's cooking meth.  Hey, why not?  What else is there to do here?

Ah, it's Butch.  He's trying to forcefully take the honour of this fair maiden and so it is up to I, Sir Vaulter Raleigh, to deal with the vagabond.  Fisticuffs dear boy, Queensbury rules, put up your dukes and let us have at it like gentlemen!

Butch told me his gang rule the vault.  The gang he created when he was 10.  If I were still doing the things I did when I was 10, I'd still secretly want to be a Mighty Morphin Power Ranger but maybe some of us are better at moving on than others.

Maybe some of us grew up, Butch.

NOW HOLD ON SIR.  I thought this was exactly the kind of thing that the overseer was trying to warn us about?  That we can never leave the vault!  So he tells us we can't leave while simultaneously saying "but there's nothing to worry about out there".  The guy's just being a control freak for the sake of it!

You know what this place needs?  A monopoly board.  Give these guys something to do.

Sir Vaulter naturally specialises in speech but he's also interested in science.  I picked small guns too.  I didn't want him to really be much good with a gun but since this is an RTRPGFPS (or something like that), it seemed suicidal to send him out there being unsure of how to disengage the safety.  Nobody wants to diplomacise with someone who can't identify the operational end of a firearm 9 times out of 10.

Some time later, a strapping 19 year old is awoken by the only similarly aged woman in the vault.  Now, I feel sorry for Amata.  Being the only woman in a vault full of hormone ravaged teens can not have been a fun time.  I've read "I have no mouth and I must scream".  That kind of thing was used as psychological torture.  Fun story, that.

So yeah, I'm woken up, apparently there's been a roach infestation and now everybody wants me dead.  I still, after completing the quest, don't completely understand the reasoning for this but sure, I'll run with it.

You can strip corpses?

10/10 GAME OF THE YEAR

I used VATS to kill this guy with a BB gun.  I shot him so hard he flew backwards, spun a somersault in the air and landed on his back.

I'll just repeat the key point in the above.  I shot him with a BB gun so hard he was propelled several feet backwards and spun in the air.

A BB gun.

What even is VATS!

The Overseer got a little shirty.  I tried to resolve this in a gentlemanly fashion by essentially telling him that I didn't want to fight and that we could resolve this all peacefully if he'd just let me go.  Then he pulled a baton on me and so I brained him.

Seemed my only option.

Amata pops out at this point yelling about how I killed him, how could I etc, etc.  Having no option to defend my actions, I reloaded my save and tried to ignore him.  He then, unprovoked, tried to smash my dome with the baton again.  I sought out his daughter, hoping to show her that I wasn't actually fighting her dad but that he was chasing me with a night stick and trying to expose my precious head meats but she was nowhere to be found until I killed him again.  So this time I let him stay dead and she yelled a me a lot as I left.  That really hurt my feelings.  You try to do the right thing and what do you get?  Nothing.

I looked it up on a wiki.  Apparently the diplomatic non-aggressive way to handle this is to threaten his daughter with physical violence.  He was just in the middle of having an enforcer interrogate her and it was looking like a torture scenario might have started.  I didn't think that her welfare was more important to him than apprehending me and I also didn't think that threatening a vulnerable and emotionally fragile friend was the kind of thing that a good person would do.

I guess I was wrong!

After Amata told me to leave, I opened the magic door and popped out for a stroll.

Wow.  It's really, really brown.

Thought for the day
My baseball bat seems to be much more effective in combat than my pistol, despite my small arms proficiency and despite how a gun fills people with pieces of metal with a bat kind of just breaks bones and causes concussions.  Even when applied directly to the head or torso.

Odd.

Also, enemies in this game are very good at fighting me when their head is crippled.  If I shoot you in the face so many times that your head is crippled, I don't expect you to be in any condition to fight.  This also raises some questions.  I suspect this is going to be a strange blog.

Journal entry 0.5: A rocky start

Before we begin this thing proper, let's start with a tale of woe.

Fallout 3 isn't optimised for Windows 7, it's better with Windows XP.  This means a few things but mostly that things will be a little weird if you play on a more modern OS.  To combat this, I did some research into patches, config settings, running through the command line with various settings enabled or disabled, installing software, suppressing software and clean installing over 5 times.

Eventually the solution was that my rig is kind of wrecked and that I should have just used my wife's computer to play this thing.  Lesson learned!  It took me 6 hours to learn it but I certainly took it to heart!

Jesus H...

Because this thing is running but still crashing, I just about got through character creation before the thing crashed again but I think I know what the solution is now.  Either way, I'm going to post something 'cause I'm getting pretty anxious to get this thing started.

So.

To begin, this isn't a 100% blind playthrough.  I HAVE played this for maybe 2 hours, just enough to make the one big decision about Megaton, do a couple of quests and wander into a sidequest that was way to hard for me to handle.

Probably the biggest difference between this game and Skyrim is going to be the morality system.  Since Skyrim's quests are usually assigned by a peasant with a grudge, someone with a political agenda or a voice in your head screaming at you to torture, eat or sacrifice people, "morality" is a bit of a... difficult concept for the people of the northlands.  But Washington has civilisation, soda pop and other modern things so I think we're going to be okay here.

Also, there aren't any elves.  Maybe Skyrim didn't have a morality system because nobody could possibly compare themselves to anything other than pigs rooting through the mud when compared to the paragons of culture and understanding that are the elves.  They're just too beautiful.  They're too pure.  They set an unrealistic moral standard, meaning that everything a non-elf does is basically evil by comparison.  That's part of why I had to kill all the elves, you see.  It wasn't really down to racism like I made it out to be.  It was to prevent the rest of Tamriel from committing suicide because they weren't good enough.  But I can be the bigger man if I really need to be and therefore my feelings on elves and their kin have been made perfectly clear many, many times before and don't bear stating again.

I mean, an elf might read them and cry delicate tears, much like the dew collecting in the misty morning on the end of the petal of a rose.

Since we have morality, I shall be conducting myself in a manner appropriate to one who believes we should go back to old fashioned British values.  Chivalry, good manners, impeccable dress sense.  Except that I'm okay with women having jobs and rights and stuff.


And so we prepare to cover the span of around 18 years in about an hour.  Put a pot of coffee on we're about to do the timewarp.  For the first time, mind you and not, as is often suggested, again.  I mean, were you doing the timewarp at the start of this blog?

No?

Then you're not doing it again.  And don't try to argue that by the very nature of the timewarp, you may have gone back in time and already done it before you've done it for the first time because I realise the implication in the lyrics.  I also realise that anything involving time travel can very easily devolve into a pseudo-intellectual mess because the logistics of time travel and of the grammar involved in it are horrible, horrible, horrible.  What I'm trying to say is that I think that song's catchy but I don't think it's maybe as clever as it's meant to be.

So, what were we doing again?  Gentlemanly conduct, casual racism against non-existant peoples, Rocky Horror...

Oh yeah, birth.

It's the pelvic thruuust that really drives you insa-a-a-a-ane!

Okay, so I decide my gender after my dad asks me what my gender is.  I don't like how this is starting.  I would have thought that kind of thing was kind of decided quite a while ago.  Like, pre-foetus.  Unless in the year 2077 you can pick your gender at birth.  That's kind of progressive I suppose but it seems an unfair level of responsibility to give a baby.  I haven't even learned to poo yet.  At this stage, even if I have the cognitive ability to make decisions, I'm entirely likely to declare my gender as "FIRE ENGINE".  I really wish that was an option.

It also lets me choose my race which suggests that my mother is rapidly switching between various races as I try my different character creation options out.  Dad is certainly caucasian and that doesn't seem to change.  Maybe I'm not his actual son.

What a twist!

As a gentleman, I need a gentlemanly name.

PERFECT

Sir Vaulter Raleigh, son of Geoff Raleigh and Barbara Lilywhite.  Lovely.  And from what I saw of the unnamed (until now) father in my last playthrough, he seemed like a nice, friendly and trustworthy guy.  I'm sure he'll bring me up right.

Okay, that looks like the kind of face that I'd confidently buy a product from or share a pot of tea with.  Yes, a truly distinguished gentleman.

At this point I learned that my mum's name is Catherine.  However, she died pretty much as soon as she saw my face (which happened to Dragonbjorn all the time.  I'm largely okay with that now).  What I'm trying to say is that she can't correct me any more so her surname is still Raleigh.  Or Lilywhite.  Like I know if they're married.  Probably not, I don't think vault 101 has a registrar in it so... I'm a bastard?  Not that it matters but it's good to have these things straight before I get to the playground.

I don't know if dad has a name now so we're sticking with Geoff.

After Catherine died, the game crashed.  That was poetic.  I'll try to fix a few things and report back next session.

Thought for the day
How does the genetic projection machine know what facial hair I'm going to grow in the future?  Technology is amazing.

Journal Entry 0: A whole new world

The trailer for Fallout 4 was released recently.  I'm interested in that.  I mean, for once the community have decided that reality does not have to be brown and it looks quite exciting!  Although I'm not sure if they're implying that they had those robot helpers in the 60s.  I don't know if Fallout is supposed to be what happened after the big one hit during an otherwise historically accurate timeline.

Truth be told, I don't know anything about Fallout at all other than it seems to have all the trappings of a game that I'd really, REALLY enjoy.

I've owned Fallout 3 for years but haven't played it much for two reasons:

• I get a bit upset when the mother dies in the character creation sequence
• The last time I played it, I wandered off the beaten path, entered a subway, ran out of ammo, died, threw a tantrum and gave up

Considering how really shockingly well the Skyrim blog went down, I thought maybe I'd try the same for Fallout 3.  I'm going in fairly blind and going in with a character concept in mind.  A happy go lucky outgoing do gooder who ultimately just wants the best for people.

Knowing the way these things turn out, it could quite easily become Dragonbjorn with guns.  Actually, that's sort of guaranteed.  If you enjoyed the last blog for its slow decline into madness and sociopathy, you're probably in for a treat.