Things I learned from Fallout 3
Posted: June 15, 2012 | Author: Stefan | Filed under: Uncategorized |
Things I learned from Fallout 3:
A bomb made from a child’s lunch box, an explosive fruit, 10 bottle caps and something called a ‘sensor module’ is a lot more deadly than a ‘frag mine’ manufactured according to military grade specs.
I went into a store and tried to buy a Stimpak (The Fallout 3 equivalent of a healing potion). The shopkeeper told me it cost 37 caps (‘caps’ are the local currency). Right in front of her, I changed out of my spiffy Vault 101 coveralls and put on a ‘merchant’s outfit’ that I had taken from the body of a raider. This outfit probably looked like hell because I had killed the previous owner of it with a shotgun, but she was so impressed by my ‘merchants outfit’ that the price of Stimpaks dropped to 36 caps as soon as I put it on. Similarly, if I try to pick a lock with a bobby pin or repair something, I try to remember to change into my ‘Vault 101 utility coveralls’ first since that outfit gives me a bonus to picking locks and repairing things.
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| “Rock-it” Launcher. |
A weapon called a ‘rock-it launcher’ is made from the spare parts of a leaf blower and a vacuum cleaner and fires teddy bears, pool balls, books, boxes of detergent, coffee cups, empty whiskey bottles, etc. It is a lot more effective than most pistols if you goal is to kill your opponent. I shot a raider in the forehead with a 10mm pistol and he cursed at me and stabbed me with his knife. I had to shoot him several more times before he went down. I then used my rock-it launcher to shoot his buddy in the face with a box of detergent and his buddy’s head exploded.
A .32 caliber round fired from a .32 pistol does 3 or 4 points of damage. That same .32 caliber round fired from a “hunting rifle” does around x3 as much damage.
The “Chinese Pistol” is the best looking conventional pistol in the game (it looks like a Mauser c96!) yet does about as much damage as the bb gun that my dad and his buddy Jonas gave me when I was 10 years old. If the Chinese didn’t lose that last war, they deserve to for having manufactured such a shitty pistol.
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| Super Mutant head shot |
If you shoot someone and they explode into fragments, you only need to find one fragment, no matter how tiny, and search THAT fragment in order to retrieve all of their possessions. There was a raider up on a balcony shooting at me, so I shot him with my hunting rifle. His head exploded and I found an eyeball lying on the ground. I ‘searched’ the eyeball and was able to retrieve his weapons, his ammo, his armor, etc. Later I went up on the balcony and found his headless body lying there, dressed only in his boxer shorts and a t-shirt.
In Fallout 3, a man wearing a baseball cap, eyeglasses, a sweater-vest, shirt and khakhi pants is less vulnerable to gunfire than someone who is naked. I’m no ballistics expert, but is an acrylic sweater vest really going to make getting hit in the chest by lead from an Assault rifle less painful? I’m thinking, “Not really.”
Your enemy will stop attacking you if you want to pause to switch weapons, heal yourself, drink some liquor or just munch on some radioactive mole-rat meat. As soon as you are done with your snack or healing break, he will resume his attack.
Fallout 3 is set in a post-nuke wasteland after a savage war between the US and China. There are still a lot of old weapons from the Chinese and US forces in use by raiders, wastelanders, etc. Curiously, in the last war, both sides equipped their troops with different weapons that used the exact same ammo. So a Chinese soldier could loot the body of a dead US soldier and get American made ammunition that would work in his Chinese weapons and vice-versa.
Most of the furniture is bolted to the floor. You can walk around an ordinary desk chair or jump over it, but you cannot move it… even with explosives. The exceptions to this rule include orange traffic cones and dented oil drums.
The ‘Fat Boy’ will allow you to launch miniature nuclear bombs, which is great fun. You can use your Fat boy to kill a whole mess of raiders all at once and scatter their broken bodies all over the landscape, but the Fatboy will not blow a rotted wooden door off of its hinges, shatter an empty whiskey bottle or kill a child.
Some things look like weapons and ARE weapons. Other things look like weapons and are not weapons. You can hit an enemy with a tire iron, pool cue, baseball bat or sledgehammer and hurt or kill them. You cannot injure or hit an enemy with an ordinary hammer, wrench, crutch or frying pan (unless you are firing these things from the aforementioned rock-it launcher).
Reading a comic book will make you better at smashing your enemies with a baseball bat. Reading a book about Nikolai Tesla will make you better at shooting them with laser guns.
When I fire my weapons, I can see the brass cartridges fly out of the gun and land on the ground. Then they quickly evaporate.
Raiders are bad-guys who look like those dudes from the ‘Mad Max’ movies. They have mohawks and wear S&M armor outfits that consist of leather straps, codpieces, spiked shoulder pads, etc., and this raider armor leaves most of their torso bare. If you kill a raider and take his/her armor, you will suddenly see him/her lying on the ground wearing a white t-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts, even though previous to you removing their ‘armor’ all they had covering their chest was a few straps and maybe a metal bra-like thing if they were female. So, somehow, mysteriously, between the time you killed them and the time you took their armor, they somehow managed to put on a white t-shirt, despite being dead at the time.
It is possible to find ‘sleepwear’ in the game. If a female character puts the sleepwear on, it becomes a sexy nightgown. If a male puts it on, it becomes pajamas. Also, no clothes are ever too big or too small. They are always all just the right size.
Tenpenny Tower is a giant hotel in the wasteland that serves as a ‘gated community’ for the people who are wealthy enough and of sufficient social station to live there, sort of like ‘Fiddler’s Green’ in that Romero movie, “Day of the Dead.” From the outside, it looks like there are 20 or 30 stories, but if you go inside, there are only 3 floors plus a basement. Also, all of the women in Tenpenny Tower are wearing the same dress. If this is such a high-class, hoity-toity establishment, how can these women stand to be all wearing the same thing?Three Dog, DJ at Galaxy News Radio, has a serious memory problem since he keeps repreating the same stories as ‘breaking news’… but I have heard that short term memory loss is a side effect of smoking too much pot so maybe there is a logical explanation.
I walked into what I thought was an abandoned house and found a woman living there. She started shooting at me, so I shot back and killed her. I went to her body and took her money and her weapons and ammo. Then I went to the kitchen counter and took a can of beans and I ‘lost kharma’ for ‘stealing.’ Excuse me? I kill a woman and loot her corpse and that’s OK but taking a .69 cent can of beans off the kitchen counter is a morally reprehensible act? Also, I tried to take a nap in her bed, but the game told me, “You cannot sleep in an owned bed,” despite the fact that I was yelling, “She doesn’t own this bed any more…the bitch is DEAD!” at the computer.
I can carry 250 pounds of ‘stuff’ without a problem. If I try to pick up 251 pounds, I suddenly start moving at a snail’s pace because of the weight.
In Fallout 3, a pack of cigarettes and a piece of ‘ant meat’ (which is the abdomen of the giant mutant ant you can eat that appears to be about the size of a German Shepherd) both weigh the same — 1 pound. To me, that seems like a VERY HEAVY pack of cigarettes and a VERY LIGHT giant ant abdomen.
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Hehe, but its still a glorious game. So, did you end up setting off the nuke?
I tried it both ways. Blowing up Megaton is certainly satisfying, but then I have to live in that creepy-ass Tenpenny Tower with all of those assholes.