I’m going back to Fallout 3 again for a few reasons. Firstly: it’s brilliant. Secondly: between Fallout 3 and Mass Effect I can’t decide which is my game of the year 2008. It might seem that I’m a bit late coming to this question in June 2009, but that’s because I’ve been debating it for so long.
I was going to write something laying out what exactly makes a game good, thinking about how this affects reviewing, but that’s a really long post and I’m bashing this out in Notepad in about 15 minutes, so instead I want to tell you all about a little something called Fisto! (exclamation mark mandatory)
Fisto! might actually be the reason I prefer Fallout 3. All told this is a game which has a lot going for it. An absolutely packed world generates a wonderful sense of exploration, and boasts a dark sense of humour and a strangely beautiful post apocalyptic wasteland, but over all this good shit Fisto! prevails.
What is it? A giant iron fist that you use to punch people so hard that they basically vapourise.
There’s lots of stupid and violent weapons in gaming, but this one cracks me up every single time I hit someone with it. Every. Single. Time.
Fallout 3 has VATS, a system that lets you freeze the action at any time and target bodyparts, once you’ve picked your shots you come out of VATS and fire off the attacks you’ve queued up in glorious explodey slow motion. With melee weapons you can’t target specific areas, which is a shame, except with Fisto! when it makes sense, because if one part of you gets hit by Fisto! then your whole body gets hit by Fisto!. I even love typing it. Fisto!
With the infamous ‘bloody mess’ perk your foes’ limbs will fly off when killed. When killed by Fisto! they come violently apart at the seams, and bits of them fly off into space.
Bloody Violence isn’t really a big draw for me in games, one of the most shocking virtual sights for me is seeing ranks of men falling in Empire: Total War where there’s no blood at all, just a horrible kind of reality that hundreds of men are dying. Sometimes though violence hits the right mark and becomes hilarious. This is one of those times.
Fisto!
Ludo out.
In order to show my wife Fallout 3, I had to find a work-around for the gore and stuff; it was an ini tweak that did it for me. (It made some sequences with the slaves very confusing, because you just hear a bang when heads should be popping.) I can take gore or leave it, but when it does something truly hilarious, it becomes a true “part of the experience”.
Fisto!
Fisto!