I bought Fallout 3 when it came out the other day. Duh. It’s fairly similar to Oblivion, which I was hoping for (I liked Oblivion. I have never played Fallout. So sue me.) and it’s… really good. I was planning on posting about my various role-playing adventures in the game, but no reliable method of screenshot capturing stopped this immediately. (I got it for a console, not PC. Again; so sue me.)

So, a quick review:

Firstly, the character creator is fairly less in-depth then I’d hoped. Most of the guys look the same unless you move the sliders to ridiculous extremes, and any given face looks just about the same no matter what race you give it: unless you design a face to be Asian, you can’t just move the slider to “Asian” and make it look as such. Also, no matter what, your character will always sport the same scowl; you can’t change anything about the mouth except for the size and color. Also, why is the number of options related to facial hair so much less than that of regular hair?

The tutorial, however, was alot better: none of Oblivion’s “I have seen your face in the stars” nonsense; it actually makes you feel for Vault 101’s characters. When you leave the vault, practically nothing compels you to go anywhere, so you can just follow your instincts. A few other changes from Oblivion exist, some good, some not. First, the positive (I apologize for the bullets, but this time you can bypass the lawsuits and bite me):

• Items are repaired by using other items of a like nature, not repair hammers; so if you’ve got, say, two half-damaged handguns, you can use parts from one to fully repair the other.
• Your Pip-boy 3000, which replaces Oblivion’s journal, is actually a computer, which helps to explain some of it’s more esoteric features.
• Items and ammo are few and far between, and you’ll likely need all of them on long treks, assuming you don’t just fast-travel everywhere.
• The date is actually displayed in standard earth units, which helps you make vague comments (September already? I hear it’s feral ghoul season)

Of course, some of the changes suck as well. Namely:

• Dialogue: It’s fairly obvious wihich ones will earn you positive and which will earn yyou negative karma (For example, “Fuck you”, which is a disturbingly reccuring option, tends to not make you very popular)
• Character creation: You get way fewer features this time around, as I’ve mentioned.
• The world: why is it that, to get anywhere in the south end of the map, you have to travel through miles of subway tunnels?
• Currency: Why am I so poor?

All in all, I like the game, even though it’s sucking up all of my free time and I’m far more popular in the game world than I am in reality. Plus, you can shoot a guy so hard, his head falls off. His head.

I know, I know, you people (I’m still under the delusion that this site gets visitors) were expecting an update concerning pumpkin scooping. You want it? Alright. I’ll spare you no detail:

I arrived at the compound at 9:30am. These two women told  me to walk along a path to some “palettes”, which had pumpkins on them. At this point, I was expecting, y’know, painter’s palettes. For painting. So I followed the path along some admittedly cool-looking pumpkin carvings, which seemed to be expertly scooped (gulp). I reached the end of the path, looking around for some “palettes”. There were none. There was only a pavilion, which was roped off. I jumped the rope and serched around the area, finding just benches, knives, and several cans of Raid. Which is used for killing ants. Gulp.

But no palettes. I backtracked along the path, then tried taking the other path at a fork in the road I hadn’t noticed before, but it led to the same place. Fortunately, at this point, one of the people in charge came and pointed out some “palettes” (which are those wood grills you hit people with in Half-Life 2) that held about thirty pumpkins, and informed me that these were the rejected pumpkins (so, there’s a quality standard then. Dammit.) and needed to be moved ten feet to the left to rot away in piece. She gave me some gloves, and I started lugging them around. I figured out what the can of Raid was for at this point, by the way.

After that, which took about half an hour, she gave me the job that I did the rest of the time: Not scooping pumpkins, but moving them out of their boxes onto some other palettes (wood grilles). Not rotten ones, but newer, significantly heavier ones. She also told me to clean them, but I didn’t bother. After I did this for two hours, still no one had shown up, and I was dirtier than the pumpkins I was carrying.

So that’s why I didn’t update: It made a two-paragraph post. That’s it. Fortunately, Over the week I had not one, but two, public-restroom escapades (No, not like that. You have a filthy mind. Shame on you, imaginary reader.) They both took place between noon and one o’clock, both in the same school bathroom, and both sucked.

So, on Tuesday, I go to the bathroom. I, ahem, step up to the urinal and begin, as it were, and some guy walks up right to the urinal next to me. Now, this is in clear violation of guy code; there was a perfectly good urinal that wasn’t uncomfortably close to mine, which would have given the guy not one, but two (2!) buffer urinals. So, I blame this other kid for what happened.

My cell phone, which has the oh-so-convenient feature of simultaneously ringing and vibrating, went off. My pants started vibrating, and loudly emitting the Free Credit Report.com Song. The vibrating freaked the hell out of me , and the song definately scared the guy next to me, as he moved a urinal over. Like, while peeing. I have never seen someone successfully do that before. So, I answer the call, only to listen to some old guy asking for a Bradley. Ooh. Wrong number.

On Thursday, I had another rather interesting encounter. This time, I had just finished washing my hands, and there was no paper, so I wiped them off as best I could in my pockets, then pulled the door’s handle. Off. Like, the door’s handle became a separate entity from the door. And I was trapped. In the bathroom. Another person was in the bathroom with me, but he seemed quite busy in the stall (I mean he was taking a shit. Not that.) I managed to bang the handle onto the door, quite loudly, which probably creeped him out, and left. Later on in the day, by the way, I saw a guy leave and just take the handle with him. I wonder if it’s still gone.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering if the reasone I hadn’t been posting is that I got into the Resistance 2 beta, you’re totally incorrect. I did get into the beta, yes, but I’ve been largely unable to get into any games. The first day I had it, I was fine. It was awesome, even the severely nerfed carbine and shotgun. And the online Co-op is nice. Especially this one time where we had like six Ghostbusters Medics shooting at the ginat guys at once, and everyone started humming the Ghostbusters theme in perfect harmony. Beta gamers are polite like that, not like their “Dude I am so totally high right now” non-beta bretheren.