A little morbid lately...

Bad liver = bad outlook.  Normally, I transcend those moments, but every once in a while the clouds descend upon my brow and I am lost in fogs yet again.

Aye, aye, I!

I've been playing through Fallout 3 again.  At Level 8, my groupie shows up to give me a stimpak or bottle of Nuka Cola and pray these random items will help to keep me safe.

Thanks.  I take it personally, you know... :)

Fallout 3 ghoul

Fig. 1 - Doctor Barrows, chief resident at the Underworld Chop Shop

Yes, it's true.  Too much Fallout 3 and your skin will dry out and flake off, you'll lose your hair and begin absorbing radiation.  Especially flat-screen tv radiation.  You'll turn uncanny, and your condition will irreversibly bring you to the glow-in-the-dark stage.  Your brains will dry out and leak out like sand down your nose and out your ears and eyes.

Scary stuff.  Two days ago, I found Argyle and the unarmed bobblehead and knew I had to quit.  So I sold the disc back, for a 1950's song, to the game store.  Yesterday was my first full day of withdrawal.  I felt like my brain was bleeding.

A pity, though.  I never explored many of the places I found, like the National Guard Depot or Mama Dolce's Food Processors.  But those hopeful treks back to the alien mothership to collect power modules would lock up hard.  Maybe a glitch?  The same thing happened at Fort Independence, and the plague of tiny annoyances was near-biblical in Operation: Anchorage.  It could happen anywhere, but the bug mostly seemed to infiltrate the add-on stuff.  Bethesda can't debug their product?

It was enough.  I needed relief.  Been there.  Done that. Nicest grace note in the game? Have you found the last decorated grave in Arlington Cemetery? Look for a flash of brilliant color.

How to find Georgetown West

Fig. 1 - Rocksalt, male version

This conundrum is part of Fallout 3, viz., where to discover Georgetown West.  By "discover" is meant to actually go there and receive the official "You have discovered Georgetown West" message in green letters, top left of your screen.

The answer is, enter the Tepid Sewers once again†, and fight your way through any remaining mole rats and incidental raiders, heading due North until you come out in Georgetown West.  You may be attacked by Talon mercenaries, Super Mutants or both as you emerge.

You'll know you're near the exit when you run across a sandbag barricade and nasty piece of work called Rocksalt, who is the only named Raider in the game so far as I know. Random gender and appearance, s/he drops Rocksalt's Key. Instant hostility.

In real life, Georgetown West is a nice boutique-infested neighborhood on the C&O Canal — or it was, I haven't been there since 1975 — but in the game it's an isolated cul-de-sac surrounded by impassable heaps of postapocalyptic rubble.  By foot, only one way in or out.  Once it's named on your map, you can fast travel in and out as usual.  There's a grocer, a trader, a stealth boy, and a Nuka-Cola Quantum.

That just leaves Vault 87 (yes, yes, of course I've met Fawkes) and maybe Rockopolis "undiscovered," then I think I'll call it quits on this game.

^†This trot through the Tepid Sewers was part of Moira Brown's "mole rat repellent stick" Wasteland Survival Guide quest, and if you were doggedly persistent or maybe lucky, you might have discovered Georgetown West before you ever knew how hard it is to locate.  Thanks, and a tip of the Hatlo Hat to all the snarky fanboys who deliberately posted incomplete, wrong or misleading information.

Fun stuffed

Who knew?  Teddy bears are lethal.  (So far as I know, only in Fallout 3.)  You fire them out of the Rock-It Launcher.

There's a Sewer Waystation near Grayditch with a pair of conveyor belts filled with teddy bears — by my count 21 of them, but I may have missed a couple (or other stuff.)

I took them up to Mothership Zeta and dropped all 21 bears in the bridge nook for Sally, but they all merged into one or two bears for some reason.  There's a clean, secluded space in front of the Captain's chair, down a short flight of stairs on port or starboard.

I Ching versing Fallout 3

Fig. 1- Toy angles and hard edges, just like Troy.

Ok, a hypothetical.  In the heat of battle, you've just taken out your own follower with friendly fire.  Dismayed, downcast and distraught by the surprise, pain and accusations of betrayal in your companion's eyes,  you find a pre-war copy of the I Ching (Wilhelm translation).  Seeking solace you read, "Dense clouds, no rain from our western region.  No praise, no blame."

Neutral karma?  Hey, great!  Off the hook.  One tenth scale damnation is so cool...

Anchorage, you say?

Fig. 1 - Ubiquitous hula girls

Ummm... ok.  I convinced General Jingwei to commit seppuku (are Chinese Communist generals allowed to do that?  I thought they got "re-educated."  Seems to be a bit of cultural mashup there.)  So that was easier than I thought.  If that scenery is "Anchorage, Alaska," though, then Sarah Palin is a mutant space alien exiled to Earth for crimes against thing-kind.

What else?  When "Operation Anchorage," which is unexplained, by and large, concludes, there is a bit of mutiny among the disaffected.  It's hard to keep the two good guys alive if the firefight gets too heated.  Put yourself between the combatants before it starts, and shoot first.  Use the Lincoln Repeater.  If your other skills and perks support it, that thing makes you a murder machine.  Look to your armor first, right?  You're still wearing the Neural Interface suit.

If you revisit the Outcast Outpost, you may find yourself stuck in the elevator, which will not respond to up or down button, and the steel doors won't open.  However, it's not a freeze or normal glitch, because you can turn yourself around, look up and down, and zoom on the locked door.  What is going on?  It's probably a glitch, yes.  But you may have just gotten yourself in an inconvenient place during a super mutant attack on the outpost.   If my conjecture is correct, the doors should open when the A.I.'s finish their battle outside.

Also, finally disarmed that big bomb in the middle of Megaton, and got my own house (and a few interior decoration options) from Moira Brown, the naive shopgirl at Craterside Supply.

Yes, I'm aware there's a real world out there.  The only one that counts is my family.  Politics, economics, elections....  Eh.  I vote.  I'm retired, I'm 67, and I much prefer the obvious acerbic fantasies of Fallout 3, bugs and all.

Two Weeks Later?!

Button Gwinett, NPC
(note the white powdered wig!)

Considering all the extant glitches, lockups, temporary freezes, tone deaf "nice" dialogues with children and the "freedom" to play Fallout 3 any grotesque way you feel like (and apparently some of you FEV failjobs feel like Jack the Ripper or Jeffrey Daumer) — considering all that — it should not have surprised me when the sophomoric ending came and everybody died except the narrator and his or her sophistries. The game can be amateurish, at times.

It ends. Like that. Pitched battle, impending disaster in the water purifier, rushing in where angels LOL at the stupid storyline, saving the world. But deader than Spock from radiation. Flash to white. Interminable sepia-toned testimonial to follow.

So there you are, dead, without so much as a so-what left in this game. Shouldn't we have ignored the main quest for another hundred hours or so?

Not to worry, children. If you bought the Game of the Year edition, you have four or five ways to continue the action. In fact, one of the them is automatic. After the sepia junknotes, before the credits roll, you regain consciousness "two weeks later."

My sarcasm level topped out at 110 (off the scale) on this level, but  then I found the hilarious Button Gwinett, so it won't be awhile before I reenter the simulator...!  The one NPC, absurdly, in the whole game who can understand and relive American history from memory.  Unlike Abraham Washington, who's got it all ludricrously wrong, a bit like Sarah Palin.

You know you've done it...

These are some Fallout 3 sure things.   You know you've done them.

In Megaton, you paid the princely sum of 120 bottle caps for "that" room in Moriarty's, you slept in the big bed, and 48 hours later you looked for the "How was it for you?" button.  The "action" on screen was awfully mundane.  Like it didn't even happen.... Maybe it was all in your mind?

You got the Hamilton's Hideaway weapons cache key from Three Dog and went there expecting cake.  You got radscorpions up the wazoo instead, but by dint of many saves and a lot of strategizing around the problems, you discover the raiders are dead and one of them has a combat shotgun she won't be using any more.  Works just fine on radscorpions if you keep your head (and catch a bit of luck).  When you finally find the weapons cache, it seems kind of paltry, but you get a mini-nuke!  So you take the goodies to Flak and Shrapnel's down in Rivet City, where you sell enough stuff to buy a Fat Man.  You travel fast to Anacostia Crossing, where you notice with deep satisfaction the group of three young Talon Mercs standing too close together.  With a heart of ice, you launch the Mini-Nuke and wonder where you can find another one for free?

Later, travelling West from Megaton, you notice the same four (or is it five?) Raiders camping in the gully just beyond the billboard.  You sneak up and launch a missile into the group, taking them all out again.  With a fine tactical regard for the possible, it occurs to you to wonder if a single missile would have taken out the Talon Mercs at Anacostia Crossing.  Too late....

You found Vault 112, but your Science and Lockpick skills are too low to save Dad.  You wonder how to raise your Intelligence. Maybe read a book?

By the time you've cleaned out the Evergreen Mills Bazaar, found Madame's Key and finally met Smiling Jack, you want to use your combat shotgun on his head.  The guy is rude, but he sells stuff.  I'm not sure offing him is bad karma, but his label is green, not red.

I've stalled out

My time, focus, attention (my wife would chisel in the much chillier word, "obsession") has stalled out on Fallout 3.  As usual, I can't figure this version out either.  It is filled with improbable mayhem in an post-apocalyptic Westworld sort of thing, where nothing can possibly go worng (sic, sic, sic).  In a world where everything has already gone about as wrong as it can get, maybe the one last thing to exclude from humanity's future is humanity.  The game is unrelentingly sarcastic on this point.

But it's fun.  You play with karma.  For example, too much thievery and nobody trusts you anymore.  Does the game include forgiveness?^†  Obsessive fun.

^†It does! Give purified water to the dying beggars (well, they say they're dying) who squat outside settlements like Megaton or Rivet City. Alternatively, you can donate to the sanctimonius clerical errors who preach to postacalyptic, but tiny, congregations. The going rate is 100 caps to redeem your own soul from pawn.