Fallout 3: Snuffing out a fantastic game

So after watching some videos of the new Fallout I started to feel like an old man wishing that things were a little like they used to be.

In summary, they took a fantastic game with a fantastic engine with decent graphics, and kept all but the fantastic game and fantastic engine. They took a turn based 3/4 overhead game on a hexagonal grid and made it into an FPS.

If I didn't love the game so much it wouldn't suck so badly. I'm sure the new one will still be a good game. A lot of FPSes are solid, and they're even fun to play. But it won't/can't be Fallout. It would be like converting Tetris into an FPS where the bad guys just happen to be squared off Ls, Zs, Squares, and Is. It might be the best FPS in the world due to other factors, but it wouldn't be Tetris in anything but name.

From the first part of the game when you're realizing that using any item starts an animation akin to the scene in Akira where Tetsuo is trying to keep his innards from spilling out, to the middle where you get to kill Kenny, realizing that Ian has a tendency to shoot you, and then seeing the perfect ending walk into a sunset where the rest of "Maybe..." is played out... well, the game was a work of art.

I even played it on a mac where the save routines were so ridiculously bad that saving was more hassle than it was worth, so you'd die more often than not. I still loved it.

All things come and go, but it's sad that today's kids won't have some of the things that I got to experience. Megatron was a fucking gun. Jazz was a Porsche. Han shot first. And Fallout was the opposite of an FPS.