It’s a brilliant trailer and since I had loved Bethseda’s 2 previous RPGs Morrowind and Oblivion (The Elder Scrolls III and IV) I was hooked. Knowing that it was going to be over a year till it was due to be released I read up on what it was about and also the 2 previous games. Liking what I saw, I bought both (also only a fiver – there’s a lot to be said for being behind the times) to get me in the mood and tide me over till the release date. They are great games and I was a bit annoyed I’d missed them the first time round – I was reminded of Exile (if anyone remembers that) with a dark, dystopian futuristic bent. By now I was anticipating Fallout 3 with the same eagerness I’d had for Bioshock.

Skip forward to 3rd November (it was released on the 31st October, but I had a heavy Halloween weekend) and I got my finally got my hands on the game. The intoduction level is genius – you start off being born! When you finally get outside the graphics are amazing. But. This game is has some serious issues. Sometimes you can play for maybe half an hour without encountering a stutter, but sometimes it can be as little as a minute before you’re left wondering if it’s crashed or not – which it also does a lot. The music in game is great – and even better when you tune into local radio stations which play 30’s and 40’s music (“Anything Goes” by Cole Porter is one of my favourites) including a few Ink Spots songs, but everytime the song on the radio changes the games pauses. This ruins the immmersion, plus turning the radio off doesn’t help, it still pauses in the same spots where you can tell that if you were still listening to the radio the song would change. Besides the radio is a great feature and really adds to the atmosphere as you pick your way through the beautifully decayed, radiation ravaged landscape.

It says a lot for how good the game is (or would be if it worked) that I’ve persevered with this unstable state of affairs for over 2 weeks now. There is no mistaking that this is a great game – but I’ve got to realise that at the moment I’m only seeing the greatness through small windows of unbroken play. Hopefully they’ll release a patch that fixes some of these problems soon (Oblivion had trouble on release too) but until then I’m backing up my save games and uninstalling.

It’s au revoir rather than goodbye