Well folks, the day has finally arrived, and I’m ready to kick of the first chapter of my pseudo Let’s Plays! The first game I’m tackling?

Fallout (Mac)

Unfortunately, the seeming inability to play the game in a windowed mode (exacerbated by the fact I’m playing the mac port) combined with copy protection means that there won’t be any screenshots this time around, but I’ll try and make these amusing enough to make up for it. Let’s get some of the preliminaries out of the way before moving forward.

The Choice
Thanks are due to everyone who responded to my twitter and facebook posts, and to all the Talking Tyrants that filled up a thread with suggestions. I ended going through a lot of choices before deciding on where to start. At first, I thought I’d pick something that I’d either already played through a fair amount of (Dragon Quest IV) or that required a very small time investment (Half Minute Hero), but at the end of the day, I realized that my initial problem was games boring me. To that end I wanted something oozing with story, and that knew how to tell it well. All signs pointed to the Fallout series being as close to a sure thing as I was going to find, and considering I’ve been chomping at the bit for some post apocalyptic action after renting Fallout 3 a few months back and subsequently watching A Boy and His Dog and every Mad Max movie, there wasn’t really even a choice anymore. After scrounging up a mac port, I ended up playing a trial game for a few hours, just so I could get a feel for the interface and the way the game worked. Now that I’m pretty comfortable with the game’s world and systems, I’d say I’m ready to start the honest-to-goodness playthrough.

On Spoilers
I’m not going into this completely spoiler-free, as I did some research ahead of time. That said, I’m only using spoilers in the net-hack sense (game mechanics) and not the Final Fantasy sense (story). I’m fully prepared to fuck myself over as part of the learning process, but wanted to arm myself with at least a bit of information about which stats are important, and some benefits/drawbacks to different traits/perks, and inventory management (pickpocketing your allies for great profit!). To this end, I found myself a pretty decent FAQ and just read up on the author’s general character design philosophy. Beyond that, I’m keeping myself as free from information as possible, beyond what I was already privy to. It’s also worth noting, though this may be obvious from the LP nature of this endeavor, that I will not be spoiler tagging any of my content here. If you’re planning on playing Fallout at some point, and don’t want to have plot points revealed to you, turn away now. For the rest of you, let’s begin.

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** This post is kind of long and rambly, so if you’re looking for me to cut to the chase, click here. **

I had a conversation with a friend the other day about beating video games in which I divulged that I can pretty much count the RPGs that I’ve played to completion on my fingers (on one hand, depending on your definition). He was, of course, appalled by this revelation, and when pressed for a reason, I came back with what tends to be my problem with games in general.

The thing is, I have some real OCD behaviors when it comes to gaming. It’s not that I need to min/max my stats for ideal efficiency or that I need 100% completion before I’ll consider a game done. Rather, my compulsion is that I need to feel like I own 100% of whatever accomplishments I achieve. This makes sharing a controller difficult, because even if someone else plays through 30 seconds of a Mario game while I’m taking a piss, when the controller finds its way back into my hands, it feels like my playthrough has been tainted somehow. Odd, but true.

This tendency gets exacerbated when RPGs enter into the mix, because as I’ve gotten older, I’ve lost the ability to play games for more than a couple of hours at a time unless I’m really into it, and as this can stretch a 40+ hour game into multi-month territory, I almost always find myself playing something else at some point. This would be all well and good, but once I return to an RPG after a significant enough amount of time has passed, I invariably feel lost. I don’t remember what I was doing or what plans I had made for my equipment, skills, et cetera. Even when I turn to an FAQ or walkthrough for a refresher, I still feel like I’ve picked up somebody else’s save and am taking control from where they left off. This of course leaves me at an impasse and I end up starting games over from the beginning countless times — see previous paragraph.
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