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E3 officially ended today, but it started with an event I have literally waited months for: a morning appointment at the Bethesda booth to play Fallout 3 for 30 minutes. There are not many RPGs that are going to deliver any significant entertainment value in 30 minutes, which can make RPG demos of otherwise good titles at shows like this a real drag. Fallout 3 is quite the exception, owing both to its unusually open setting and the high level of freedom offered the player. Thirty minutes with this game was so entertaining that I believe the full copy will give me a heart attack from sheer joy.

Read on for hands-on impressions of the demo event, full press kit assets, and plenty of limb-crippling. After I've had a little time to think over the show's many (many, many) games, there'll be more wrap-up coming later, too. For now, though: Fallout 3, the premiere RPG of this year's E3.

I've seen it argued that it's impossible that Bethesda could really understand or love the Fallout franchise, rightfully viewed by PC gamers as a special piece of history. Why abandon the isometric view for (choke, gag) a first-person perspective? Why use something similar to the (choke, gag) Oblivion engine? Why isn't Troika or Black Isle involved??

Well, judging from the reaction of my pal KouAidou, of many a comment section, these people are idiots. Kou went with me to the show to help out, eat good Korean food near our hotel, and also to serve as my Fallout Expert (by which I mean "person who has played Fallout before"). While I never got to play the originals, owing to my cheap parents, Kou cut her teeth as a PC gamer and has talked fondly about Fallout 2 for about as long as I've known her. If Bethesda got any part of the setting wrong, if anything wasn't note-perfect, I was pretty sure I'd hear about it. Meanwhile, I could judge how fun and accessible Fallout 3 was to the rank n00b.

It was obvious from the moment we entered the booth that nothing was amiss, though. A massive standee of the game's supreme power armor (identical to Fallout 2's, according to Expert Testimony) adorned the PR booth. "Instructional" videos about the glories of Vault living, complete with fantastic 50's-mocking humor and gloriously animated Pipboys, played in the background. When we entered the massive demo room, with half-a-dozen 360 stations set up for Fallout play, a huge stand of authentic bottled Nuka Cola rested by the door. Kou was able to navigate the entire inventory and combat screens almost instantly, based purely on prior knowledge of the games. The V.A.T.S. System is apparently little-changed from the original (groin shots are gone, but you can target all the other major parts of the body-- and enemies will target you intelligently now).

Even without knowing the references, though, Fallout 3 amazed me by being one of the very few RPGs at the show that year that was genuinely funny. Even knowing nothing of the game's original setting, it was very easy to warm up to the mockery of Cold War hysteria-- so easily understood as mockery of more modern but equally irrational hysteria-- and the tons of jokes worked into the game itself. Your intrinsic stats spell out the word S.P.E.C.I.A.L., hilarious Pipboy art lets you track which skills and perks you have (and which limbs are crippled), and the game constantly provides information about the world's history in the form of various radio broadcasts. The writing is sharp, the dialog trees are extensive, and the clothing frequently hilarious. Just speaking as a general fan of RPGs, there's nothing to dislike here-- the writing is always intelligent, witty, or just plain silly and amusing. The very realistic 3D, almost shooter-style graphics at times only serve to enhance the humor.

All the demos on the floor started at the same savegame point, when the protagonist first leaves his underground Vault and emergences into a post-apocalyptic desert wasteland at a measly level one with nothing more than the jumpsuit on his back and a crappy gun. Despite this, no two sets of players did the same things or ended up at the same locations in bombed-out D.C. The world was so open and it was so possible to explore everywhere to find weird things that, well, everyone actually did this. A friend, for instance, managed to immediately find a full suit of "Ward Cleaver"-style 50's clothes and strode about the desert slaughtering dogs with dapper impunity. Some guys on our left somehow ended up at the Washington Monument. Our major accomplishment was ending up at the corpse-festooned, Raider-infested Super-Duper Mart and proceeding to raid it for hilariously silly-looking Mad Max-style spiked armor and rusted-out tin cans. We spent most of the rest of the demo shooting Raiders in the head (which created a satisfying gore explosion) while listening to the radio broadcast info. You can and should listen to the radio pretty much constantly in Fallout 3, as it's a constant source of both hilarity and interesting story flavor.

What's interesting about Fallout 3 is that it's really following in the tradition of Mass Effect, a sophisticated RPG that has a disarmingly simple FPS-like interface. You could toggle between first and third-person play with the LB button, and we generally preferred third-person perspective because it let you see your character's outfit change. Right trigger shot and left trigger blocked, as you would expect. Likewise, right analog was camera control while left analog was movement. Pushing the left analog stick in as a button let your character crouch, and onscreen information let you know whether or not you were hidden from enemy view. At one point we discovered you could crouch behind sufficiently large animal corpses to get cover, and so survived a Raider attack by hiding behind a dead Mole Rat. To the best of my knowledge as I write this, RB opened V.A.T.S. during combat if you wanted to use it-- you didn't have to, and it played like a perfectly viable if challenging FPS if you didn't.

V.A.T.S. is a basically brilliant system that basically let you freeze time for a moment and then select different parts of an opponent's body to target with attacks. Targeting was accomplished with the right analog stick or d-pad, basically selecting one of six regions of the enemy body to target: head, torso, right arm, left am, right leg, and left leg. Targeting the head did far more damage and was often an instant kill, but cost lots of Action Points (which regenerate over time, but slowly) and had low accuracy ratings. Torso was easier to hit but offered few advantages to doing so. The most efficient way to fight, and a time-honored Fallout tactic according to my expert, was to shoot to cripple an enemy's legs, let your AP regenerate, and then headshot an enemy to death. This was also visually interesting, as every enemy's animation set changed totally when crippled.

The V.A.T.S. system is likely to save the game for you if you don't have twitch reflexes, as you can take plenty of time to pick shots and shooting is automatic once you're in V.A.T.S. mode. Our only complaint about it was that in areas with multiple viable targets, trying to target specific limbs often ended up changing which target we were focusing on instead. This was particularly annoying in the Super-Duper Mart battles, where generally only one target in the area was worth shooting at, but there would always be about three more in the area for the camera to switch to unexpectedly and annoyingly.

When you aren't fighting or wandering about in Fallout 3, you seem to spend a lot of time in your inventory and status menus. This is not at all unpleasant, as Bethesda has gone out of their way to use Pipboys liberally to keep the menus interesting. For instance, when your limbs are crippled your Pipboy takes on an expression of cartoon angst, which returns to happiness as you use Stimpaks to restore your limb HP to full. Skills are self-explanatory and, while our demo didn't let us really exploit this, you seem to have plenty of non-combat and social skills that could be useful down the line if you invested in them. While you got a lot of Skill Points to invest at level up, it was obvious that making an all-mastering god-character wasn't going to happen. Perks added additional customization, as you got a new one at every level. One that seemed quite broken early on was "Nerd Rage", which let you get double damage at low HP if your strength was below ten. It's practically ideal for pumping absurd headshot damage our of a small weapon like you carry in the early game.

Our thirty minutes with Fallout 3 were over much too soon, and I was left hungry for more. The only real question is PC vs. 360 for the purchase, at least for me. Bethesda seems to have pulled off the impossible here, making a game that is interesting and exciting on its own (for a player like me), but also full of fun in-jokes and homages for Fallout vets (like Kou). Making a game, especially an RPG, that pleases even one small group of players can be pretty hard. Pleasing two very broad groups of players should be nearly impossible, yet here I am writing this. I am desperately excited to play a full version of Fallout 3 and get to really build a character up from level one to level awesome. That is the exact feeling a successful RPG demo should leave you with.

Anyway, enjoy the assets Bethesda gave me to put up for your viewing pleasure! It appears you can target roughly a billion points of the enemy's body in V.A.T.S. later on, doesn't it?

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