Jourrnal entry 3: Everything explodes

Good day to you all.  It's been a while since writing one of these so there's rather a lot of material.  I also made a lot of bad decisions.  I think these are things that we can all enjoy together.

After getting my immaculate ass beaten several times and after having been told repeatedly "BUY BETTER GUNS, BUY BETTER ARMOUR" by my good friend and former longbow, Mr Huntington, I decided to do neither of these things because I need all the caps I can get to spend on stimpacks.

I need to buy stimpacks because my guns are terrible.

I should be learning something here but I don't have any of the learning perks yet.

Looking on the wiki for interesting things to do in Megaton, it told me about a sniper rifle hidden behind the town in a rock so I went to investigate.  It's not a bad gun but since it's pretty good, I'm too afraid to use it in case I can't find any more sniper rifles to repair it with.  I can't afford to hire a repair guy to fix my stuff so I'll have to just save it for a rainy day.

Since all water in Fallout appears to be irradiated, does the rain just outright kill people who aren't used to rads?  I'd better buy a mac and some wellies.

 On the way back from my little Shawshank-esque looting escapade, I shot a rat so hard that its head exploded.  Fucking VATS.  The rats in this world are super weird and I don't like them much.  They're more like toothy naked badgers.

Also, thanks to my friend Mr Pickup for pointing out that the reason that we have two headed cows is because of Forced Evolutionary Virus.  Okay, it's good to know where I stand on that, so thanks!  Everything in Skyrim is explained by "dragons or daedra did it" and everything in Fallout is explained by "bombs or magic science juice did it".

I then shot a rat so hard that it burst into flames.  I did this a lot.  What bothers me, and it's a problem that Borderlands has too, is that if I shoot an enemy with a hot weapon, it won't be immolated unless the last hit reduced the last of its health.  I'm not looking for realism, really I'm not, but I find this all very peculiar.  It's like the only thing keeping people from setting on fire at all is force of will.

Set entirely on fire until there's no physical remains to speak of, but I can still pilfer things from the corpse.

Alright.  Alright, Fallout.  We'll just play it your way.

This wasteland is actually kind of pretty.  Good thing too because there sure is a WHOOOLE lot of walking to do.

Fallout 3, like Skyrim, has absolutely hilarious doofy dog faces.  Look at this guy!  Look at his smooshy face!  Brave little guy!

I shot him.  We had a good time.

Sir Vaulter gets all pissy at me for drinking out of a toilet but it quite happy to loot and eat dog meat.  Hey, I'm not one to judge,  I mean, I eat pepperami sticks, pot noodles and Ginsters' pasties, there's almost no limit to what I'll willingly ingest but this was a mutated, irradiated dog.

Just think about what you're doing here.

I'm realising that since food gives you rads, I'll never eat.  I don't want to accumulate rads because I don't want to take anti-rad medication.  I know that a lot of things in the game that count as "medication" are actually addictive and I really hate debuffs, so I'm sort of apprehensive about taking radaway.  Besides, look at this place.  Are there really pharmaceutical companies mass producing little foil blister packs of pills to help with radiation sickness?  I could be eating little chunks of asbestos.  I wouldn't even know.  You think there's a Glaxosmithkline out in this irradiated hellhole?  I bet that stuff's made by hobos under bridges.  Probably been peed on and pee gives you rads.

I found a weird bog with brown fog coming off of it.  I don't think you get brown smoke coming from things unless it's something drawn by someone of age 10 and below who wants to convey that the item in question is a bit stinky.  Since it gave me rads, I'm thinking it was a septic tank leak.

I went into VATS when a few raiders approached me and VATS immediately allowed me to home in on a grenade which had just been thrown.  However, I was made to feel a little silly as I was given a 0% chance of hitting it.  After exiting VATS, the grenade immediately went off right next to the raider, doing no damage to me.

VATS: killing fools without even hitting them.  I think VATS is shorthand for some kind of Carrie-esque mental powers.  That's why it makes people's heads explode.

Is that why dad wanted me to leave the vault?  Is it because I'm not like the other kids and can't be trusted to live with people who aren't thinking nice thoughts all the time like that one kid in the really awesome episode of the Twilight Zone which got recreated into a fucking terrifying segment in the Twilight Zone movie?

Yeah, I want to be that kid!  I'll send all the super mutants to the cornfield!

MOTHER OF CHRIST IT'S JEFF GOLDBLUM

Noodles give me the same rads (there's another pot noodle joke in there somewhere) as eating irradiated dog meat.  That's my first problem.  My second is that the raider here was carrying a bowl of loose noodles but didn't have any pockets.

Where did I get these noodles from?

I'm certainly not eating them.  I bet they're inexplicably warm.

Yep, just going to butcher a giant monstrous fly.  Nothing wrong with that.  I wonder if it's like blowfish, get the wrong bit of the fly and you're dead within 24 hours.

Probably not.

I'm not sure how one can be able to walk with a crippled entire torso but Vaulter, a true gentleman's gentleman (not in the Jeeves sense), merely stiffened his upper lip and carried on regardless.

A warrior of the realm has nothing to fear from internal bleeding, lung punctures and intense physical pain.

All this crippling was probably brought on by my attempts to visit a minefield for a quest.  "Visit the minefield, walk to the middle of it and try to pick up some live samples" is the most bullshit, irrational quest I've ever seen.  It's absolute suicide.  However, what am I supposed to do, not complete a quest?  That's not how it's done.

The minefield quest was very, very frustrating because my framerate on this game is sort of lousy.  I'd step up to a mine, press disarm and immediately walk half a pace forward missing my target and sitting on the mine.  Then some prick with a sniper rifle popped out and started using his infinite ammo to blow up cars.

I hate Minefield.

The pier area was pretty.  Almost nothing tried to kill me, either.  The people were nice, there's lighting... I think I'll retire here.

With a name like Grandma Sparkle, I knew we were going to be friends.  She didn't have much to say, sell or do but I didn't kill her because that's not the gentleman's way.

You know all those times that I kind of made fun of mudcrabs?  When I called them noble, dignified warriors?  I met a mirelurk.  This thing is a bipedal mudcrab.  I hate, hate, HATE it.  So violent!  It's just an armoured carapace and a series of limbs designed to deliver horrible scary pinchy death!

I think the Fallout continuity is pretty much The Elder Scrolls' continuity except that it's in the far future of Tamriel and magic has died out.

I wasn't sure if these things look more like mudcrabs or like the aliens from the original movie adaptation of War of the Worlds (the old one where they actually NUKE the martians).  Mudcrabs, I think.  I killed one and went for a bit of a look around, at which point 4 more of them appeared, backed by 2 radroaches, and decided to let me know what they thought of me killing and looting from all those mudcrabs way back when.  Suddenly, a burst of patriotic music from the distance and laser fire from a source I couldn't identify...

Thank you flying robot friend!  God bless you and your kind!  Robots in this game are amazing!  They help me whenever I write cheques that my arse absolutely cannot cash!

I started doing some rat repellent thing and the magic stick I was given hit rats so hard that they burst.  I didn't even need VATS.  I think if I had used VATS, you'd have been able to see the explosions from the moon.

 "And be sure not to kill any mirelurks..."
Um... shit.  I already bagged 5.  Well, the robot killed 4 but he doesn't care about his kill count so I'm having those.

I entered the horrible lair of the mirelurks.  Don't kill them, she says, so I equip my rat botherer and move into their lair which will now be known as "the mausoleum of endless suffering".  I did not have a good time in there.  Despite dying like 10 times and then panicking and getting lost, I had two big problems:

• The bastards could open doors when I shut them behind me thinking I could hide and plot my escape.  They don't have hands, how are they working the handles?
• They appear to have had some form of psychic bipedal mudcrab wizard down in the bowels of this place because something was throwing blue plasma balls at me! 

I'm never coming back here.  Well, unless there's a quest.  You know how it is.

A little hard to see, but this government-looking building was surrounded by benches facing it.  If there's one thing I like to do when I'm eating lunch, resting after a long stroll or just stopping to smell the roses, it's staring at a large building from a distance of 30 feet.

I saw this place and thought it might have been Rivet City.  It looked like a large open area surrounded by spiky railings.  Nicely fortified, seemed like a good candidate for a human settlement.  I started looking for an entrance.  Someone began shooting me.

Now I don't know much about this game but I gathered that I may be in a spot of bother here.  I decided to flee when my guns didn't achieve much.

I ran into a shopping cart again.  The mall is like 5 miles away.  Was it flung by the blast or do super mutants need something to help move their corpses around?

And now, make yourselves comfortable for I have a tale to tell.

Having safely escaped from the mutants which were shambling after me with very big guns, I saw a large statue of a muscular man by the river.  It was naked.  I immediately started to wonder if it had a dick and so approached it looking squarely at its crotch because about half of the screenshots I take are "a funny thing happened to me" and the other half are "this is a funny situation and I bet I could get a decent picture of something to comment on".  Statue dongs fall into the second category.  As I approached, before I got too close I fell in the river, having been fixated on this thing's crotch.  Filling with radiation, I scrabbled for the shore as the game repeatedly offered me the helpful action of "drink".  I made it to shore and realised that I was right outside the super mutant barricade again and they were all stood outside waiting for me.  Awkward.  I tried to take one out and his 4 friends came and utterly ruined me.

I then went back to the statue and realised it had no balls.

This kind of thing happens to me more often than I'm comfortable with.

I saw this thing being signposted as Rivet City and figured it was an ironic name for somebody's weird treehouse.  Oh well,  Quests are quests, let's take a look.

Oh.  Right, that's a city, sure enough.  Bloody hellfire.

Upon entering I realised that my caps situation was getting quite bad and so resorted to stealing everything that didn't have karma loss and which had a cost which outweighed its weight.  I spent 10 minutes looting pool balls from a bar to sell to be able to afford a better gun.  This post apocalyptic setting sure does have a very real sense of desperation.

I then stole from a church donation box.  I got an awful lot of lockpicking experience from it.  This is some very negative reinforcement and I'm not comfortable with the implications.  I've frontloaded a lot of good karma though so on average, I'm still kind of a good guy.  I followed it up with breaking into the priest's bedroom because hey, in for a penny, right?

Don't you know who I am?!  I'M SANDER FUCKING COHEN!

"That's not all a robot can be"?

Sir, when you invent a robot with a name like "Mr. Handshaker", I'm quite sure that robots can be many, many things.  I'm sure Mr. Handshaker has been forced to do some terrible things by curious bachelors.  I mean sure, I might be kind of deviant but... well, it's got to cross your mind, right?  It'd sure be a popular labour saving device.

As the game moves on, I'm starting to look more and more like the offspring of Flashheart from Blackadder goes Forth and Peter Perfect from Wacky Races.

Mister Buckingham sir!  Good friggin' GOD I love all of the robots.  This robot is what I wanted my character to be!  A post apocalyptic future butler!  Most of my dialogue choices for Mister Buckingham were very disrespectful.  I think Vaulter needs to get that stick out of his delicate bottom and remember who he owes his life to.  Twice, in fact.

Oh boy.

So on the top of the ship I met a man who wanted to commit suicide because his life had no worth and nobody remembered him.  Except people did remember him, they just thought he was a bit odd and quiet.  I talked him down and he thanked me and left.  I then walked over the his jumping spot to see how far down it was, got a little close to the edge, slipped and fell to my death.

This scene needed a laugh track.

Oh, this prick.  Not only did I have to go swimming to get to him, not only did he live in a mirelurk infested boat, not only did he booby trap every inch of the upper deck he was on, he's the key to two quests.  TWO.  And he totally acted as if it wasn't a problem at all for me to have gone through his Home Alone gauntlet.

He claimed to be an expert with computers.  I'm not sure why he needs a server exactly because unless he's doing some kind of really fiendish gene sequencing, I'm going to assume that future computer terminals are a lot better than the tech we've got now.  So why he needs a server is sort of beyond me.  I'm not sure it's even a server, it looks a little too much like somebody tried to make a thing which looks like a server so they could claim to be good at computers.

I used to work in tech support.  There's little more dangerous than somebody who thinks they're good with computers because they know the difference between a dot matrix and an inkjet printer.

"... you could have access to all the robots you'd ever want!"

You want to be careful making a statement like that, miss.  You have no idea how many robots that is.  Seriously, you don't give the monkey the key to the banana plantation.  We're talking Skynet here.

I'd like to point out precisely how bad an idea it probably is to put a scope on a magnum.  Especially in a world where all the mechanical stuff is falling apart.  This thing probably kicks like a Buckaroo set.

I found a tiny plastic man at the end of this day.  It made me smarter.  I've no idea where I'm keeping it.

Thought for the day
I got good karma for paying a lady 25 caps to buy a pistol to help her deal with her former slaver.  25 caps will not buy you a potato gun.  Furthermore, being a slaver, I can only assume that the gentleman in question was packing some considerable heat.

Since Rivet City has a pretty stern approach to crime, I'm either condemned a woman to death by slaver or by city militia.  Either that or she'll be kicked out of the city and die of radiation, exposure, wild animals, bandits, malnutrition, dehydration...

I could have informed the authorities but instead I encouraged vigilante justice.

I don't really understand this karma thing.