28th August 2009, it was my 13th birthday. AllI had asked for was games or money to put towards games for my Xbox360, I had even sold a ton of Wii games just days before to buy somenew stuff for a system I had barely touched bar a few titles likeHalo and Gears of War. Anyway I ended up getting just over £100 intotal which for a 13th birthday in the middle of arecession I would consider quite a success. My birthday treat? A tripto Game and Gamestation (remember them days right?) to fill my armswith new games and then a meal with some friends in KFC.
But what I remember most about that day was not the money, buying allthem games (there must have been at least 12 because most had beenunder £10 in the pre-owned section) or even the very tasty KFC. Nowhat I remember most is having £10 left and not knowing what tospend it on. I had traipsed between the two shops as well as a quickstop in Argos to find one last game I wanted to buy. A girl whoworked in Gaamestation came up to me and recognised me from earlier,she questioned why I had come back and I showed her my last £10. Isaid I wanted something like I had never played before, somethingthat would would last me ages and a game that I would always want togo back to no matter how many years went by. After seeing that I hadbought the likes of Dead Space earlier on, she knew that agerestrictions weren't an issue (thanks mum). That's when she pointedit out, a game I had never considered and even thought it sounded abit crap at first. But she insisted it was great. £7.99 gone and notenough money to buy anything else, I but it in the bags with the restof my games. That game was instrumental in the way I critique gamestoday, it was also my first RPG and it's easily one of my favouritegames of all time. That game was Fallout 3.
We all remember the hype for Fallout 4 as soon as it was announced. 7years since Fallout 3 released (4 since New Vegas but I wasn't thebiggest fan of New Vegas) and it was well overdue. I pre-ordered thePip-Boy edition immediately to go with the rest of the Falloutmemorabilia I had collected since first playing Fallout 3. My tinlunchbox, bobblehead replicas, hoodies and t-shirts. A Pip-Boy woulddo just nicely next to all of them as well as the Fallout AnthologyMini-Nuke I had pre-ordered too. Alas the 10th Novembercame, Uni foiled my plans of playing it on launch day, but I had myPip-Boy and a day off the next day. I spent the first day clad in aVault 101 t-shirt, Vault 111 hoodie and my pip-boy on. I went to unithe following day still wearing everything but my Pip-Boy and I couldnot shut up to people who simply did not care for games about howgood Fallout 4 was.
Then the assignments started rolling in. Practical assessments,planning lessons for teaching, essays, a dissertation to start. Afterjust one day I didn't play Fallout 4 for almost another month. Thenby the time I went back, it wasn't the Fallout I remembered, thisgame was something else entirely and even now I can't decide whetherthat's a good thing, or a bad thing.
(Now shall I actually talk about the game seeing as it's my 200th review!)
In Fallout 4 you play as the lone survivor of Vault 111. After beingfrozen in a cryo-pod for 200 years following the beginning of theatomic war, you awake to find that your wife/husband has been killedand your son Shaun has been kidnapped. You venture outside to findthat the world is not as you knew it, what was once Boston,Massachusetts is now the Commonwealth. You load up and you head intothe heart of the city, in with the raiders, ghouls, super mutants andinto a civilisation terrified of a mysterious organisation known asThe Institute to find your son, only to find that the rabbit holdgoes much deeper than you would ever have possibly conceived.
From the get go it's easy to see that Fallout 4's story, at least inbasic description, is not too dissimilar from Fallout 3's. Familymember goes missing, you leave the vault in search of them only tofind that there's a nasty group of people trying to take over thatarea of the wasteland and you get dragged into it all. Though it'snot until much later into the storyline of Fallout 4, very near theend actually, that it really begins to distinguish itself apart fromit's predecessor and provide a much more interesting story thatultimately has a better pay off than Fallout 3's ever did.
