Spoiler Warning Fallout 3 #4:
What Consequences?

By Shamus Posted Thursday May 13, 2010

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 103 comments

Slight spoiler: We didn’t beat the game yet.

Somewhere in the mid episode I said it would be nice if the subway was a single long dungeon, which I don’t actually think would be ideal. I just think it would be nice if some of the really piddly small ones were merged, and if the system as a whole followed a comprehensible route.

Having said that, I still think the steam tunnels and subways make up the strongest areas of the game. Despite the gripes in this episode, I do love doing them.

Part of the problem with this episode is that none of us were very familiar with Tenpenny. It's why Josh kept getting lost and why I don't know anything about the storage. Vipermagi gave a count of storage containers in the video comments. So let's do the full housing comparison:

Tenpenny:

1 wardrobe
1 footlocker
1 safe
1 desk

Megaton:
2 lockers
1 fridge
1 desk
1 file cabinet

So Megaton has 1 more container. (To me, this is significant. Even in Megaton I feel like I'm 1 container short.)

For travel access, Megaton wins by a mile. The travel marker puts you IN town, and you need only go through 1 door to get to your house. The Tenpenny one drops you OUTSIDE of town, and you have to go through 3 loading screens to get home. (Plus the annoyance of having to be buzzed in at the front gate.)

For shops, I suppose it's debatable. The shops in TPT have more money, but as far as I can tell they have less useful goods. If you need to buy ammo, Megaton is better, but if you just need to offload junk, TPT is probably better. Of course, this is a moot point since if you live in Megaton you have access to BOTH shops.

So really, the “reward” for blowing up Megaton is losing a decent shop and having to live at a much less convenient location with less storage and where all your neighbors are assholes. (Except for Dashwood.) Plus you have to spend the rest of the game looking at a ghoulified Moira.

Given the lack of in-game justification for nuking Megaton, it would be nice if they gave you some out of game incentive. They should tantalize you with a choice like this, not punish you for it.

500 caps? Please.

 


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103 thoughts on “Spoiler Warning Fallout 3 #4:
What Consequences?

  1. eri says:

    I have to admit, I really like the exploration aspect of Fallout 3. The office buildings are a little bland, but the subway tunnels are a lot of fun to go exploring… probably because they seem like far more plausible and intelligently-designed locations, and don’t have useless junk littered everywhere. The whole underground theme fits much better with the original two Fallouts as well, not to mention is actually plausible (you’d think all those buildings would have collapsed after 200 years).

    Oh, and yeah, haven’t watched yet. But yet again, I felt the need to rant about Fallout 3. It’s kind of scary how much you can talk about it… it’s such a unique brand of mediocrity that mundane topics suddenly become interesting to dissect.

  2. James Pony says:

    HOW CAN YOU GET LOST IN THE PENTHOUSE FLOOR? TOO MANY LITTLE MEN ON THIS TEAM.

    Also, there’s a mod that puts a fast-travel location on your Tenpenny balcony.

  3. Robyrt says:

    I was never a big fan of the subways after the first or second one. Fast travel is the only reason I was able to wade through 40+ hours of the game, and breaking that for several important locations is a one-way ticket to needless hassle. Plus, I like daylight and bright colors – not that Fallout indulges me on the second anyway.

    Fallout 3 makes a lot more sense if you ignore the whole “200 years ago” thing entirely. The only element of the story that can’t be explained by changing the number to “10 years plus a bombing run beforehand” is the generations passing in the Vaults. One possible justification: Vault-Tec was bored of waiting for their social experiments, so they included a time compression machine in every vault. Time passes 10 times faster in there.”

    1. Hmm, maybe the people in your vault were in there for 200 years, but the war was actually only 10 years ago. After all, the vaults were only an experiment. I guess having fast clocks would also account for only 50 years passing. The overseer could say that people weren’t ageing much thanks to the brilliant technology that only he had control over.

      1. Rutskarn says:

        Nah. There’s ghoul characters in the game that were around when the bombs drop, one of which appeared–younger–in the original Fallout chronology.

        1. Michael says:

          Rutskarn, at the risk of being a pedantic bastard… he’s not a ghoul. He’s a unique FEV mutant. At least that’s been the official story on him basically since day one.

          Fallout: Tactics was the only game I know of that actually assumed he was a ghoul.

          1. acronix says:

            The sprite they used for him in the originals doesn´t help neither.

  4. Factoid says:

    The single best house in the game is actually neither Megaton nor Tenpenny:

    Clear out the Super-Duper Mart and keep your stuff in there.

    Tons of shelves, lockers, boxes, a bed, etc….

    Once you kill the baddies they don’t come back and your stuff will never disappear when you leave it there. You can fast-travel directly to your front door, unlike Tenpenny which requires you to fast-travel to the tower, then go inside the tower, then go up the elevator and then into your house. Megaton is a little faster, but super-duper mart is the best spot IMO.

    1. Shamus says:

      I had no idea. I just assumed the place would refill.

      If I ever play the game again, I’ll probably live there.

      1. Factoid says:

        yeah, I mean you don’t get anywhere to put your bobbleheads and you can’t deck it out, but there’s storage up the wazoo in that place.

        Also if you need an extra storage container in either of the normal houses you can buy the nuka cola machine from the vendor.

        1. eri says:

          The thing I really hated about The Power of the Atom (and the whole game in general) is that the quest forces you into two roles: lawful good or chaotic evil. There is no real neutral option – or rather, whatever neutral option there is gets absolutely no reward whatsoever, since you can’t complete the quest. It’s impossible to be a third party who doesn’t want to take a side in this game, without forgoing a good deal of the game in the first place.

          It works backwards, too: quests brand you as arbitrarily good or evil simply because you want to go for the best/most immediate reward. If I blow up the bomb because Burke makes me a better deal (playing as a mercenary), does that make me as bad as the guy who blows it up because he genuinely wants to hurt people? Life in the wasteland is hard, and it’s really stupid to expect the player to be totally selfless in a situation where resources (at least canonically, not gameplay-wise) are supposed to be extremely limited.

          Really, the massive problem with this quest is that they never even tell you you’re going to get a house out of it; there’s no way to actually take that neutral, reward-driven approach unless you already know what you get in advance. If you do pick something, you get a huge helping of good/evil points, even if your intentions were purely selfish. It’s a classic case of designer myopia, and forcing the player into one set of morals that are assumed to be universal. At least in Oblivion, getting a house was an active decision and investment, not an accident…

          1. Sydney says:

            That seems realistic to me. People who don’t get involved typically…don’t get involved. Forgive the tautology, but…

            It's impossible to be a third party who doesn't want to take a side in this game, without forgoing a good deal of the game in the first place.

            …um, yes. It’s an RPG. If you don’t get involved (don’t bite quest hooks; don’t follow quests through), what exactly do you want?

            1. acronix says:

              I think you are confusing “no option” with “neutrality”, which can work in several more ways.

            2. Shamus says:

              “[…]what exactly do you want?”

              Fallout 1. :)

          2. SnowballinHell says:

            I recently started a play-through on this game and for some reason only then realized the absurdity of this mission
            The Weird bits:

            Lucas Simms – the good path, straight up offers 300 caps. you can SPEECH him up to adding another 200 caps = Grand quest total 500 Caps (I don’t include the house because when you get the mission, no house is mentioned)

            Mr. Burke – evil path, at no point does he really offer you anything (you can SPEECH him up to including 500 caps, his SPEECH check though is WAAAAAY easier then Simms…90 SPEECH and still only around 50%-60%)

            This is what struck me as a world breaker quest. If it wasn’t for the fact that Bethesda advertised this mission and basically told everyone the results, there would be no knowledge that you would be getting a house out of each deal. The NPCs never mention it during the quest and only the good path actually tells you of any reward before you complete the mission

            So the designers expected me to either take 300 caps (offered) and walk 20 feet, pop a mentat, and pass a skill check…or be offered nothing except vague rewards, drop a grenade, walk 2 miles and kill a dozen people that did nothing to me (except Simms’ kid…he pisses me off)

            Realizing this made me come up with the plan to ignore all previews and ads associated with Fallout: New Vegas….since I know I’ll be buying it anyway…just to see if the world makes sense on it’s own

          3. Telefon says:

            Perhaps the same could be said of all rel.. morality systems.

            I mean, as long as the game doesn’t know WHY you did something it can only judge you by your actions. An easy way to avoid this would be to call it a reputation system because hey, it makes sense for random NPCs to not know why you did X instead of Y right? All they know is what you did and what it looked like to them.

            A sexier way to have a sane morality system would be to have an NPC grill you on your motivations but that’d be sa nightmare to implement in a game like this. I could sort of see it working in Mass Effect though.

            I for one, did nothing at all with the bomb (no repair skillz) and wandered into Tenpenny Tower on my own, tried to help the ghouls move in peacefully, couldn’t find one of the people to persuade and after two hours of this got so annoyed I mined old Tenpenny’s balcony. MISSION COMPLETED, KARMA BONUS AWARDED.

            You can also have an awesome shootout with the guards right in the lobby and none of the residents care in the slightest. In fact they generally don’t mind you killing other residents.

      2. Jeff says:

        Eh, I wouldn’t live there. The robot butler with free clean water is nice, but the autodoc that clears addictions, radiation, and gives free drugs is awesome.
        Also the fact that “cold” Nuka is an awesome heal, and it stays cold permanently makes for an excellent source of heal pots.

        Although I admittedly never finished the game, having never bothered to go into the radiated vault. I did do everything else and went everywhere possible prior to that, giving me enough ammo to kill every town ten times over, and the cash to buy everything possible.

        1. ps238principal says:

          Eventually, I just used all the Nuka-Colas for the perk that lets you convert 10 of them into Nuka-Cola Quantum, which I then used to make Nuka Grenades.

          Why drink something when you can make it explode instead? :)

          1. Jeff says:

            While grenades in VATS is sort of amusing, they kind of are unpredictable which spoils my “sit back with popcorn and watch them gib” approach.

            I had something like 500+ rockets. I cleaned out Paradise Falls with a rocket launcher, and only a rocket launcher. Had to redo it twice because I killed the slaves accidentally.

            I really admire the barkeeper. Three psychos in power armor (+1 dog) with a rocket launcher, a minigun, and a combat shotgun walk in and just start shooting (with the crazy rocket guy shooting rockets point blank) and he runs towards the rocket launching power armored vigilante with a pipe and no shirt.

            He exploded with a rocket to the face, but still, very brave.

            The Evil-Only companion, by the way, is pretty tough stuff. While in a nightgown, she took one rocket to the head, and two to the chest before being taken down with a third.

    2. GoodApprentice says:

      I had a character who called the Super-Duper Mart her home. It’s a little dark inside but well centralized, and you’re certainly right about the storage space. There are dozens of boxes, endless display space for trophies, 2 refrigerators, a nuka-cola machine, beds, toilets for drinking, and a roaming sentry bot. If only it had a workbench, but I guess they’re easy enough to find. Oh, but the mess! Cleaning that place is a real struggle, since there must be a hundred shopping carts, cans, bottles, and about a dozen raider bodies. But, fortunately, there’s room for it all, and the place looks sweet when the shelves are full of weaponry and explosives. Open for business!

  5. Merle says:

    “Moria”? I think you may have meant “a ghoulified Moira”.

      1. Zaghadka says:

        After all, Moria has many levels and unfathomable depths, while Moira has one dimension, and an unforgivable high pitched squeal. They both make an RPG party run screaming in terror.

        It is easy enough to confuse the two.

  6. far_wanderer says:

    I love how you waited three days to make Burke and the guard forget, and even though they forgot they had apparently spent all three days standing there in the doorway waiting for you before they walked away.

    Josh picked up on the redeeming feature of Tenpenny Tower – it’s small and looks nicer. It may be easier to get to the Megaton house (although it’s actually only a second or two different in actual time) but once you actually get inside the Tenpenny suite is far superior in that you don’t have to run around all over the place and deal with your robot blocking the stairs all the time.

    The BB gun/Chinese Pistol thing would have been a good opportunity to mention how important it is to keep your stuff repaired, as the BB gun was in perfect condition while the pistol was at about 1/6th.

    You’re not the only person in the game smart enough to jump in the water. You are, however, the only person smart enough to figure out how to climb back out again.

    1. Heron says:

      In my latest playthrough the robot butler got stuck on my bed upstairs. Makes for an awkward night’s sleep, but other than that I never go in there except to get water from him, so it’s actually kind of nice.

  7. wtrmute says:

    In Fallout 1, the origin of Ghouls is a bit confusing. In one place it’s mentioned they are a result of FEV going into the air and entering a vault, and in another place it’s just plain radiation because the door of Vault 12 failed (that explains the glowing Ghouls there).

    So yeah, I go with the second explanation. Ghouls are created by radiation, Super Mutants by FEV. Obviously the guys at Bethesda agree…

    1. krellen says:

      The Fallout Bible also agrees. Ghouls (along with radscorpions, mole rats, and other mutated creatures) were supposed to be the product of radiation; an odd push to make the world more “science-y” led to FEV being used to explain everything, rather than just Super Mutants.

  8. Josh R says:

    I disagree that there should be more level playing ground between the two houses.
    If there had been a strong motivation to blow the place up, then I might feel differently, but if you are going to blow it up for the hell of it, it’s not really justifiable to expect an equal pay-off.
    What you forgot about as well, and I know a lot of people who left this quest til later on in the game did, was shoot, rob and burn megaton (figuratively) to the ground before even arming the nuke. That gives you a lot more money and evil karma then just blowing up the town did.

    things you missed :
    Jericho as a follower
    Strength bobblehead
    The armoury with a robot butler full of loot
    pummelling the faces of the annoying church of atom
    Breaking the legs of the greedy selfrighteous doctor and all his medical supplies.
    nailgunning moriarty’s limbs to walls
    The prostitute who comes with a nights’ stay
    the annoying shopkeepers who all think they are strong geting their legs shattered by mines.

    All this and more could have been yours!

    On the topic of the nicest house, Dukov’s place would have been the nicest had you been able to fully access all the storage places without it counting as stealing. There’s also a letter box right near vault 101 (can’t remember the name of it) that is right by a quick travel point and can be used as storage for anyone.

    On ghoulified moira, you find out later in the game that because of the radiation their skin no longer degenerates and it potentially allows them to live forever. In a certain sense, you have saved moira, by blowing her up.

    1. eri says:

      Yeah, blowing the town up is kind of a waste. You lose out on some of the more convenient merchants, the better house, and a bunch of quests. Megaton is sort of the only major settlement in the middle of the wasteland, and serves as a nice midway point or hub. If I ever do blow it up, I wait until pretty much the end of the game so that I’ve done everything else there is to do.

      1. FFJosh says:

        We actually did a whole different cut of episode 3 at first where we did rob the hell out of Megaton and kill everyone. In the end, we felt it added too much time to the episode and broke stuff up too much–we ended the episode before we even got into Tenpenny Tower–and we ultimately scrapped it and did another take.

        It is a shame about the missed loot opportunities though.

        If only this game had… oh, I don’t know… say, five DLC packs full of overpowered items that break the game or something…

        1. eri says:

          Well, it’s not as if the game isn’t broken already. Your Let’s Play actually inspired me to go back to it, and spruce it up… about 20 mods later, including things like iron sights, far more damaging radiation, a new healing system, etc. and it’s both more challenging, more fun and more rewarding. Sadly, mods can’t fix the worst part of the game, which is the world and story itself.

        2. Josh R says:

          But you won’t be doing those for a while… I imagine.
          Also taking a game breaking piece of equipment (say, Chinese stealth aromour) would make the series a lot less interesting to watch.

          Also I’m curious as to why you are after caps, at that stage in the game it’s far more effective to trade your junk for their stimpacks, it adds a much larger cap-pool, allowing you to offload ALL your stuff to a single vendor, in most cases.

          Will there be a special spoiler warning release, perhaps at the end of the series or if you guys get ill and miss an episode, where we see you take vengence on Megaton? Or have you deleted it?

  9. Raygereio says:

    About the ‘cel’-structure in Bethesda games: considering that some people made a mod for Oblivion that removed the city gates and allowed you to walk into cities without a loading screen I’d say Shamus is correct and it isn’t a technical limitation.

    Also, I bought Fallout 3 this morning because of Spoiler Warning. Congratulation, making people waste their money was pretty much the only thing missing to qualify you for being a Let’s Play. You should either be proud or ashamed of yourselves, I let you decide which. :)

    1. Michael says:

      My understanding in Oblivion was, that it was more to prevent random wildlife from wandering into town and eating quest givers. Of course Oblivion’s AI is more than slightly homicidal. So the quest givers are all immortal. But that was my impression.

      So far as it goes, Morrowind, which runs on an earlier version of the engine actually doesn’t isolated exterior cells (except in Tribunal), so places like Balmora or Vivec are all contiguous with the surrounding territory.

      I do remember hearing something about memory issues on the 360 in towns in Oblivion though, now that I think about it. So it could be a memory limitation, that isn’t strictly part of the engine itself.

      1. Telefon says:

        You have to remember Oblivion was a Crysis-level system breaker back when it came out. I had a brand new Athlon64x2 and a 7600GT which was a pretty respectable midrange card at the time but Oblivion just creaked along in the mid-20FPS range with sudden sharp dips into slideshow territory whenever I triggered smoke/fog effects, encountered more than three people or rode a horse.

  10. eri says:

    The explanation for ghouls is that one of the vaults, Vault 12, was built (intentionally) with a door that did not close properly. The bombs went off and large amounts of radiation leaked inside, which mutated the people in there, but didn’t kill them. Necropolis in Fallout is actually the remains of Bakersfield, the city that Vault 12 was built under; it’s inhabited by ghouls, but pretty much nobody else goes there.

    Also, it’s established that the only ghouls in the world are from Necropolis, and all of the ghouls in Fallout 2 are left over from Fallout. So, while it’s possible to get more ghouls, they would have to be the result of massive amounts of radiation exposure over a long period of time, and not a nuclear explosion to the face. Thus, not only did Bethesda go against the canon of the games, they also decided to go against the established physics of the game universe. Good stuff!

    Of course, the only reason Moira doesn’t die is because they decided the Wasteland Survival Guide was just too LOLAWESOME a quest to be stopped due to something as petty as a nuclear bomb obliterating the second-largest settlement in DC.

    1. Someone says:

      Something that always bothered me about ghouls in general is that for the sake of adding one additional type of enemy that only 15 billion other games had, Bethesda kinda screwed up the whole “pointless xenophobia” theme.

      You know how all the previous fallouts kept going on about ghouls being feared and mistreated for no other reason than their looks? In Fallout 3 they try to keep going with it but manage to sabotage it at the same time. They actually give everybody a pretty strong reason to avoid ghouls and be afraid of them.

      Half of the game world is overrun with feral ghouls and there are several points in the game where it is suggested that a ghoul can lose his mind and become a homicidal zombie pretty much any moment. If ghouls look ugly and can lose their shit any moment in time and try to kill you, avoiding or even killing them is not pointless xenophobia, its plain common sense. And if they wanted to show us that not all ghouls are tragic victims, the inner ethics of the game shouldnt have kept insisting that they are.

      1. acronix says:

        They also fail at getting the “Ghouls are people too!” when every. single. ghoul. in the game calls you “smoothskin” or “human” and call theirselves “ghouls”. They are pretty much supporting the notions they suppousedly hate.

        1. ps238principal says:

          Just like some people in real life. And they are in the middle of a nuclear wasteland. If someone is chipper and happy, there’s generally something wrong with them that involves a fridge full of “strange meat.”

          1. Someone says:

            Well, they did this in old fallouts as well, I always just thought it was ghoul sense of humor. The real problem is that there is ONE tragic victim ghoul (Gob) and most of the other ghouls are assholes.

            Theres homicidal Roy Phillips, mr. Crowley, an entire settlement of ghoul wastelanders trying to kill you for absolutely no reason, that guy from point lookout, maybe others that I missed.

            Its like one part of the development team wants to adhere to the classic fallouts, and another part does everything the opposite way! Okay, that may be a stretch but its still controversial.

    2. GoodApprentice says:

      Oh, come on! If there was anyone who would walk away from that explosion in one piece, it would be Moira. Lord knows what sort of funky stuff is happening inside of her body after years of questionable, but potent, experimentation. I can totally see her being unkillable. Humour really is lost on some people.

    3. Namaps says:

      I always thought that keeping Moira alive was a bit of a joke. Of all the people in Megaton, she’s the only one you REALLY want to kill, and she’s the only one you can’t.

  11. Sekundaari says:

    I always just use the the closest container in the house. It never fills up (I think), and you can get it to show just e.g. armor like in the shops, by clicking the name.

    One of the metro protectrons, along the GNR quest route I think, was positioned so it went and asked a couple of super mutants for their tickets. If you find it, let it do it’s job, it’s quite fun. “Tickets please.”

    EDIT: The Vault tells the milk and the… other bottles are a reference to Howard Hughes. I know nothing of the guy though.

  12. Ravens Cry says:

    Is it just me, or does Moira look like Sheldon from Big Bang Theory?

  13. Senji says:

    What? NO one noticed you can click on the little titles like “items” and “locker” and it would sort items by what they are? Like you can click it and it would show Weapons: and then below only weapons, click again, AMMO, etc stuff like that.
    Theoretically you can use just a single container. But in megaton i used one of the lockers for weapons and Armour and the other for the rest of my junk.

    1. eri says:

      I had no idea about this.

      It’d be nice if the game told you.

      1. Sekundaari says:

        It’s in the manual, at least.

        1. modus0 says:

          Who reads the manual? ;P

          1. Vipermagi says:

            I do. Gotta keep myself occupied during installation :P However, I found out about it when I started pressing buttons at random. The arrow keys are used for switching categories as well.

            The tabbing is very useful when trading. I generally start with weapons and apparel, since they’re the heaviest. Aid is mostly lightweight/cheap, so those are always for the leftover money the trader has. Additionally, you can choose to only see the ammo the trader has for sale. Genius.

            1. Michael says:

              I love the “when I started pressing buttons at random” bit. This is how real gamers get their feature documentation. :p

          2. Volatar says:

            Steam copies include the manual?

            1. Gahazakul says:

              Actually a lot of them do come with a manual! If you right click a game in your library and click “visit the store page” on the right hand side of the store page under “game details” is a button labeled “view the manual” that will give you a digital copy of the manual! It isn’t there for all of em but it is a nice little thing.

              1. Volatar says:

                Yeah, I was mostly making a joke. The ones that need manuals usually have them (games like X3:Reunion)

          3. Raygereio says:

            I read it, after all you have to do something while waiting for the installation to finish. To bad that little tidbit of information isn’t in the very poorly translated Dutch version.
            Makes me wonder what else I’m missing.

      2. Blake says:

        I have it on PS3. Working out the difference between L1/R1 and left/right taught me pretty quickly about the different categories.

  14. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Coincidentally Ive just started playing metro 2033 a few days ago,and if you guys havent reminded me of how silly fallout 3 is,I would never have spotted the amazing things this beautiful post apocalyptic game has.For example,the ragged human settlements have parts of them dedicated to pig farming.Yes,actual sensible way of producing food in a post apocalyptic future.Wow.

    You really should try it.Its a good game.

    1. Michael says:

      Having played through it, its a very good game. Though a couple sequences are utter BS.

      EDIT: I took out a spoiler, my apologies.

    2. acronix says:

      Metro 2033 makes a lot more sense. (But then, almost everything makes more sense than Fallout 3, except for the Fable series). But it felt so short it made me angry.

    3. SnowballinHell says:

      Metro was the first FPS I’ve enjoyed since Duke Nukem 3D (god I’m old…and maybe a little bitter :D )
      The setting would be typical post-apoc depressing, were it not for those little villages you come to. The tunnels all have a cold, eerie, green lighting scheme, while all the villages are lit with low wattage bulbs with lots of warm ambers and oranges

      First controlling village sequence, while moving through and listening to everything around me and looking everywhere…the people seemed really ALIVE to me…in one small portion of Metro, I felt more connected to a single NPC then every character in the entire game of Fable 2 (including my own character)

      1. Michael says:

        I remember Duke, if it’s any consolation. But I have enjoyed a lot of FPSs between then and now. I’d offer suggestions, but I’ve no idea what went wrong. :(

    4. Jenx says:

      Well yeah, the guy who wrote the book actually took his time to explain a lot of things about the way people live in there. Then again, I don’t really know how much the game sticks to the original metarial, so…

      (Two question though – does it have Satanists? And does anyone mention headless mutants?)

  15. FatPope says:

    Concerning the comments about the crazy gas option: where I’m currently sitting I have, not two feet way from me, a switch that will flood the entire room with xenon gas if I press it, thus killing me and everyone else here.

    Of course in my case it’s to actually stop fire but still, I do love to toy with my “kill everyone in room” button.

    1. swimon says:

      You have a button that kills everyone and the instructions to press it if a fire starts… Are you a mook to a super villain?

      1. acronix says:

        I guess it has an addendun of “After pressing, run like hell!”

    2. Hugo Sanchez says:

      I think that begs the question, Where the HELL do you work?

      1. FatPope says:

        It’s in my university. One of the computer labs here. Apparently computers are more important than mere human lives

        1. Hugo Sanchez says:

          So…. ANYONE can press the button? This strikes me as a serious security oversight.

          From a monetary standpoint, replacing the computers could cost them more or less than money lost in tution, depending on the number of people in the room.

          1. FatPope says:

            Well you need security access to get into the room, plus there are cameras and all. Furthermore I assume the actual release would be preceded by much alarms and lights and whatnot

        2. ehlijen says:

          It’s alarmingly common to have fire fighting systems intended for rooms with lot’s of computers spew poison gas rather than water or even other less poisonous gasses.

          The idea is that it has enough warning klaxons and works slowly enough to let everyone get out before it kills them.

          What’s unusual though is that it’s triggered by a button. Usually it’s purely heat/smoke sensor activated…

          Still better than a fire extinguisher with a warning label that says:
          “Keep away from heat!” (right outside the chemistry labs at my old school…)

  16. Guile says:

    Moira turns into a ghoul if you nuke Megaton?

    Awesome! I had no idea, since I’ve never done it (ironically, mostly so I could keep doing the Wasteland Survival Guide quest, but also because I actually really liked Simms).

    And now my computer no longer runs Fallout 3, so I’ll never be able to.

  17. Joe says:

    Why haven’t you read those skill books yet? I mean, otherwise they’re just eating up valuable inventory space/weight…

    1. Blake says:

      There’s a perk that doubles their effectiveness.
      My character has read about 90 books so that one perk has given me an extra 90 skill points.
      Definately worth holding them for a few levels first.

      1. Vipermagi says:

        Hmm.. Most of my characters get stuck at ~15 books. Still 15 skill points, so it’s not bad, though.

        I always wondered why Missiles and Mini Nukes are weightless, but comics have a weight of 2 (sidenote: same as a Chinese Pistol :P ).

  18. B.J. says:

    A better evil option for Megaton would be for you to take over the town with the help of Tenpenny’s goons. Kill the sheriff and the guards, threaten them with the nuke, and post some Tenpenny stooges with the player as deputy. Just as evil, lots more beneficial.

    1. Tizzy says:

      What an awesome racket you’d have there! “Say, it’s a mighty fine city you built here. It’d be a shame if something happened to the bomb that’s sitting right in the middle of it…”

    2. Someone says:

      I always felt that the whole “ugly heap of scrap” excuse seems to be made up. Tenpenny should have had a real reason to blow up Megaton, a hidden agenda instead of just shits and giggles. It would be awesome if he did it to remove an old enemy of his, or a possible competitor, or just out of revenge or something. Something that justifies blowing up an entire town, which you would have to find out. It would be awesome and fallout-y if you could speech him into admitting it or find it in his notes and confront him or somebody else about it. Then you would have the option to blackmail him, talk him out of blowing up the town… Damn you Bethesda, there was so much potential there!

      1. GoodApprentice says:

        I thought it well reflected the world’s general sense of apathy: life has little value, no one bothers to clean up, technology is more important than civilization, all unpure life needs to be destroyed etc, etc.

        I also read a rather funny and far-fetched article that claimed the two “home” locations represent the classic conflict between male and female, that Tenpenny Tower (the penis) represented the destructive and territorial nature of the male, while Megaton (the womb) represented the life-giving and nurturing nature of the female. I don’t really believe the argument, but it makes me smile whenever Megaton opens herself up to me, or I see Tenpenny tower standing erect in the distance.

      2. Hugo Sanchez says:

        Actually, I liked that it was so simple as him thinking it was an ugly blight on the landscape, which is itself terrible. I think it shows just how cold people have become, and how borderline insane tenpenny must be. Think about it, Rich guy, who casually shoots anything and everything from his tower. If you look outside the door, there is a line of milk bottles. I know what that suggests to me!

        Tenpenny is a madman, Human life is expendable, He’s the ultimate hedonist. Hell, it’s not even about the money with him, since he won’t let in the Ghouls.

  19. Luke Maciak says:

    Shamus, I don’t know if any of you guys were aware of this but there is a trick to the hacking game. There are special character sequences that will remove dud passwords from the list, or give you a failed attempt back. Basically you look for matching braces or brackets like this:

    [$#<@SF#$/]
    {$#&/^;@(&}”}
    etc…

    If you put your mouse on the first bracket, the whole “word” will light up and you can select it. Sometimes you can remove all the duds this way.

    1. Shamus says:

      Wow.

      Didn’t know. Thanks!

      1. Knight-Templar says:

        I found it odd the number of people who don’t know that trick. But then again, I’m one of those fools who played through half of Mass Effect 2 before picking up on the “skiping” trick to scaning.

        1. Volatar says:

          ….Skipping trick to scanning?

          ….YOU MUST SHARE THIS NOW!

          1. Irridium says:

            When scanning, if your on the 360 tap the trigger over and over really fast. It’ll move the icon fast and you won’t have to scan at the breakneck speed of a snail.

            If your on the PC just move the mouse quickly.

      2. Sekundaari says:

        Again, the manual saves the day ;)

        Maybe it’s in one of the pop-ups too.

    2. ps238principal says:

      If you get very lucky, it replenishes your whole stock of guesses.

      1. Miral says:

        That’s actually more annoying than helpful though. I usually open by looking to remove all the duds, so I don’t *need* my allowance replenished. And unfortunately you can’t tell which one will replenish your allowance in advance, so you can’t save it for later. And it’s often faster to just click on three or four words at random, then exit and retry, rather than muck about trying to do it “properly”.

        1. Sekundaari says:

          I usually take a couple of guesses, then start looking for these strings. I only rarely need to start over.

  20. guy says:

    Except for harold, ghouls are the product of radiation. There, done.

  21. Ramsus says:

    I too organized my spare stuff with different things in different storage spaces. Mostly I did this just because I thought it made more sense to have a weapons storage, an armor storage, a things that can be used to make other things storage, a clothes storage, and a things I want to sell but the shops are out of money storage than it did to just cram things randomly into places even if I could organize it due to an in game feature.

    I was definitely annoyed with the subways and the general inability to navigate downtown DC sensibly. At several point I found myself wishing I could use nuka grenades and such on walls just to make it so there was a reasonable way through the area.

    On my first play of the game I literally was over there exactly where those super mutants spawned, had the raiders shoot at me, killed them, went over there to loot them, and then had super mutants appear out of thin air where I just was start shooting me.

    While of course it’s silly I like the Moira becoming a ghoul thing. It’s the kind of joke thing the old Fallout games would do on occasion and makes sure you can still do the best series of quests in the game.

    Also, when are you guys going to get Dogmeat so you can go stuff him in your house forever so he doesn’t run strait at raiders with nukes and die? (That is literally one of the first things that happened after I first got Dogmeat. I immediately reloaded to an earlier save and was like “Bad boy! From now on you’re a guard dog you mangy flea-covered suicidal quasi-companion!”) Where Dogmeat was useful to a degree in the original fallout games I’m pretty sure the meat that you can harvest from his corpse is the only meaningful use for him in this game.

    1. Blanko2 says:

      actually, he was very useful for me.
      also with the broken steel DLC he is INDESTRUCTIBLE because he levels with you.
      a level 30 dogmeat will never ever die. (and if he does you can get the PUPPIES! perk which gives you an EVEN MORE POWERFUL DOGMEAT WHAT IS THAT.

      1. Will says:

        I KNOW. I downloaded Broken Steel unaware of the Dogmeat thing, i have dropped literally ten missiles right into Dogmeats face, and unloaded four Combat Shotgun shells into him at point blank (the missiles were collateral, GHOULS EVERYWHERE, the shotgun was an accident) and i did, oh maybe 5% of his HP.

        Dogmeat soloed the Super Mutant Behemoth outside of GNR. As in he took it on, it attacked him, i shot it in the face with the Fat Man, Dogmeat survived and bited the Behemoth to death while i stood there going ‘whaaat’?.

        1. FFJosh says:

          This happens with Fawkes as well, who is undeniably the most powerful follower in the game. Even in the normal, unpatched version, he can take a direct hit from a nuke. But with Broken Steel, there is literally no way to kill him once you reach a high enough level.

          Seriously, try it. Bring him to a wide open field and open up on him. You won’t even see his health drop.

          1. Vipermagi says:

            I blew him off some roof with ~80 mines once (no more than 6 Bottlecap, rest ~equally Frag and Plasma). He died. More than fifty mines! Just think about that for a second.

    2. evileeyore says:

      “I too organized my spare stuff with different things in different storage spaces.”

      I do this as well but it’s a holdover from the first two Fallouts where shelves in your “home”* only had soo much room…

      * Whatever building you take over to use as a house/base of ops.

  22. Blanko2 says:

    i’ma liking that intro.
    you guys are having a lot of trouble with talking over each other on this one.
    i can’t decide if that is preferable to the previous one’s “moments of silence”

    but yeah, it’s still good and still funny.
    also:
    STEEEEEEVE!!! NOT STEEEEVE!!!

  23. Miral says:

    You guys seem fairly cavalier about your health. Running right up to the gas pocket and intentionally exploding it in your face, rather than setting it off from a safe distance? Running through the water picking up a charge of radiation? Madness. (Of course, my own overly-cautious attitude wouldn’t make for good viewing. And probably explains why I’m level 19 but only about a third of the way through the game.)

    1. acronix says:

      I guess he plays that way to show all the hazards the game has.

  24. ehlijen says:

    Another advantage of the Megaton house over the Tenpenny one:

    You have a closet.

    That tiny room in one of the corners upstairs is perfect for the following:

    Get a companion (for me it was the gatling laser supermutant)
    Go home and open the closet
    Maneuver him in front of the closet door
    Tell him to wait here for you
    Push him into the closet
    Close door
    Leave

    That way you don’t have to endure their silly excuses at the end of the game and always know that back home, there’s a gatling laser supermutant safely stored in your closet…

    …or is that one of the things that make me wierd?

  25. Jeff says:

    2 random comments:

    Dogmeat + Rocket Launcher + VATS = Watching helplessly as your dog, in slow motion, plays fetch with your freshly launched rocket, blowing both your heads off.

    Also, I generally carefully rob the Megaton armoury and carefully assassinate the sheriff for his gun.

  26. Gavin says:

    A short man steps out from a nearby doorway and comes along side you. He says to you “I hear you’re looking for the videos without going through the, shall we say, proper channels?” He winks suggestively as if to underscore the illicit nature of his offering. “Well, I have a way of getting my hands on the goods, if you know what I mean. Good clean HTTP download, all straightforward-like.”
    You say:
    a) I don’t know what you’re talking about. La la la la la.
    b) I’m happy with my current service thank you.
    c) I might be interested. Meet me behind the barn at 0300 hours.

  27. Cody says:

    You guys should implement a order that you guys are allowed to talk. Say it goes Shamus, Ruskarn, Josh. If Shamus just said something it doesn’t mean that Josh can’t speak until Ruskarn has but if Josh and Ruskarn start to talk over each other it just defaults to Ruskarn and Josh has to stay quiet. That way you guys aren’t stuttering and stammering over each other until you figure out who to let speak first. or something like that just to find a way to decide quickly who is going to talk and who is going to shut up when everybody starts talking at the same time.

    1. Rutskarn says:

      That’s actually not a bad idea. I’ll try to remember to bring that up before today’s recording.

      1. Cody says:

        Damn it, I knew I was spelling your name wrong. If only I hadn’t written it so many times I’d be able to pass it off as a typo.

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