Fallout 3

I had no intention of playing Fallout 3. Gorgeous Hair said he was going to wait till the "game of the year" edition came out, and he kept to his word. Purdy Teeth, GH and I were hanging out playing it shortly after he got it. The next day Purdy Teeth owned a copy. Two days later, I did.

That's excessive, by any measure. It's a damn old game now, but none of us was willing to wait to borrow the game. Do I regret spending that money when I could have waited a month and borrowed it from either of them? Nope.

Fallout 3 is nothing short of fantastic. It makes every RPG I've played in the past decade seem impossibly archaic. The fact that Final Fantasy 13 is going to come out next year with a "you stand there, I'll stand here, I'll hop over and hit you, now you hop over and hit me" battle system is pathetic. This game is everything a RPG should be.

A small example: Megaton is a town with an unexploded nuke in the center of it. The mayor would love it if you'd disarm it. You can either do it for free for good karma, or you can charge for the service. Mister Burke would like you to detonate it, and he will pay you much better than the mayor. You can do either of those things. You can kill Burke, and you can kill the mayor. You can get the mayor to arrest Burke, and have Burke kill the mayor for you. And everything in the game is structured like this. There's no one path. Not even close. Now that all three of us are playing it, we've been amazed at how different each of our games is. We fight with different weapons, run with different people, do different quests.

The game's huge, dense and a joy to exist in. All other RPG's have been put on notice.

4 stars