Getting In Touch With Your Inner Snake Plissken

November 10, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Entertainment, Lifestyle, Technology 

Washington is like women in the old vaudeville joke: you can’t live with it and you can’t live without it.* But for those who would like to try, and who have about 24 hours to spare, there’s Fallout 3, the new action role-playing video game from Bethesda Game Studios.

The setting is Washington, D.C. in the post-apocalyptic year of 2277 (that’s thirty years after the devastating nuclear war that was unleashed in 1998’s Fallout 2).

In today’s New York Times, Seth Schiesel describes some of his reactions to playing the game:

When I first ventured out of the dank Metro tunnel onto the ravaged National Mall — a snarl of trenches and barbed wire under the shadow of the shattered Washington Monument — I wasn’t thinking about politics. When I sneaked into the ruins of the Capitol and watched a band of mercenaries lob a Mini-Nuke at a raging 30-foot-tall mutant behemoth under the fractured dome of the Rotunda, I wasn’t thinking about filibuster-proof majorities.

Not until I finally battled my way up Pennsylvania Avenue — dispatching mutants with my plasma rifle at every turn to discover only a radioactive crater in the ground behind a twisted, warped yet familiar wrought-iron fence — did I see Fallout 3 in a real-world context. In this vision of the cost of hubris, the White House is not broken or burned. It is not the home of an evil mastermind. It is just gone.

It takes a lot of gumption to blow up the entire Washington area; render the wreckage in detailed yet almost painterly strokes; populate the wasteland with all manner of alternately deranged, endearing and frightening characters; weave a score of intersecting story lines; sprinkle on a thick layer of high-powered weaponry; and simply set the player loose. Yet that is what Bethesda Softworks accomplishes with Fallout 3, one of the most ambitious single-player role-playing games in recent years.

Fallout 3 can be almost intimidating, not in its difficulty (it is almost too easy) but in its scope. At first I basically put blinkers on and studiously ignored everything that was not directly related to the main story. In the game the player begins as a baby, and then picks up as a young adult who has grown up in a locked underground vault with other survivors of the atomic holocaust. You venture into the wasteland in search of your father, who has mysteriously taken off.

*Now you know why vaudeville died.

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