Living & Arts

War, war never changes: 'Fallout 3' best of 2008

In print | November 13, 2008

Her skin is sagging and flaking in discolored bits—how is she even talking? This woman, a radiation-blessed ghoul who defends the National Museum of American History, is calling me a tourist here in blasted-out Washington, D.C. “I’m not a tourist,” I say, a bit sheepishly. “Come on!” she replies. “Here you are in the Mall of our nation’s fine capital, taking in the sights, visiting the monuments. Face it: you’re a tourist.” With the collapsing remnants of the Washington Monument looming behind me, I guess I really can’t argue with her.

Despite a few minor problems with the (lack of) emotiveness in the character models and some annoying mechanics, “Fallout 3” (Xbox 360, PS3, PC) is a rich and elegantly constructed first-person role-playing game (RPG) and the finest game I have played in 2008.

“War, war never changes,” the voice of Ron Perlman deadpans in the opening of every entry in the series. As its name suggests, the essential point of “Fallout” is its setting: the remnants of the United States in the wake of absolute nuclear holocaust. The incomprehensible cause of the conflict that led to the bombs dropping is faceless in every way except for through its consequences on the vast, well-crafted wasteland you have the opportunity to explore. Many of the people (those that can still be called people, anyway) that currently populate the Washington metropolitan area’s own Wasteland are from high-tech underground complexes called “Vaults,” with seals so powerful that they can take a direct nuclear blast. You were born in one of these Vaults, number 101, located (as best I can tell) near Tyson’s Corner, VA, and there you lived for many years, until the day your father mysteriously escapes from the Vault and you follow his trail out into the Wasteland.

Although the process of character generation is ultimately standard, it is presented through a refreshing framework wherein you play through snapshots of your character’s life to help determine your attributes, skills and appearance (though you can later customize all of these to your heart’s content). Bluntly and with an odd appropriateness rare to the field, the game opens with your birth, where you mold your character’s physical features and first meet your father, whose paternal visage is crafted to strongly resemble your own, an immersive touch. You stumble around as a toddler to learn basic movement, and shoot rad-roaches with your birthday BB gun to hone your skills at the game’s hybrid first-person shooter/turn-based strategy combat system. Though you grow up with the antiquated relics of American culture—jukeboxes and birthday cakes—when you step outside those Vault doors, things, you soon learn, have changed.

The broad theme of the game pits the hopelessness of the wasteland against the sometimes fleeting successes of people struggling to survive at any cost. It’s not the larger events that communicate the devastation—It’s the little details that destroy you emotionally. At one point, I pick up a shortwave radio transmission from a father asking for help for him and his child, and I start to search around the area for the source. Eventually, next to a blinking radio transponder, I find two skeletons, one large and one small, curled up into each other. They had been dead for years. The skeletons and other detritus of human life that you encounter are a stark reminder of the finality of destruction—that no matter how heroic or powerful your character is, you cannot hope to reverse the nuclear holocaust. The static horror that saturates the atmosphere nevertheless highlights your character as a dynamic force, either for the revitalization of humanity or for the furtherance of its ruin. While the designers could have done more to emphasize the agency of the non-player characters in the game universe, the powerful changes you can make to the landscape gives you some (perhaps misguided) hope that life can continue after the end of the world.

More so than the other entries in the series by virtue of its setting in D.C., “Fallout 3” evokes a broad line of questioning strangely thoughtful for a video game, exploring the most resilient elements of culture and history. The only individual who is at all interested in actively preserving the past is an Abraham Lincoln fetishist who collects U.S. governmental documents, only to grossly and perhaps purposefully misunderstand them. You listen to him ramble about the “first and second Judgmental Congresses” that sparked the “Civil War against England,” before he asks you to break into the National Archives to steal the Declaration of Independence, presumably so that he can fake Lincoln’s signature onto it (under what state’s banner, I ask). Afterwards, he has you return to collect Lincoln memorabilia, including a fake recording of his voice and that iconic stovepipe hat. It isn’t history: it’s mental masturbation. A tourist, through and through.

Through the atomic dust and the utter collapse of civilization, it’s interesting that the residents of the Capital Wasteland still turn to the (blindly?) positive, harmless music of the ’50s for the small comfort in their lives. (I will interject to say that at times the designers are coyly ironic in their music selection; Google the songs “Bongo Bongo Bongo (I Don’t Wanna Leave the Congo)” and “I Don’t Want to See the World On Fire.”) It’s up to you to discover what other little bits of Americana survive in the Wastes.

I’ve neglected much in talking about “Fallout 3”: its occasional flaws (why does the nuclear holocaust make everyone look like plastic?), the exact ins and outs of its gameplay (try placing a grenade on an unsuspecting raider), the scope of its world (that, sadly, does not extend to my own home in Northern Virginia), etc. I can write with confidence, though, that if you like gaming at all, the Wasteland will treat you surprisingly well.

Jack is a junior. You can reach him at jkeefe1@swarthmore.edu.