Fallout? Boy!

I've always wanted to love the Fallout games. I've tried the original and the sequel, and both instantly charmed me with their writing and the phenomenal atmosphere of their setting, and repelled me with the utter trudging misery of their gameplay. I'm sure that for the RPG-initiated, it's a perfect experience. Many people seem to claim this, in fact. Someday I hope to come back to Fallout and enjoy it as much as I ought to. However, for the moment, I am sad. I enjoyed Fallout Tactics a bit more, as there was more of a sense of direct involvement with the action, and the 'action points' system was made somewhat more bearable.

Don't worry, only five more turns before you have enough action points to move again.

BUT! A little while before the long awaited Oblivion was released, the developers, Bethesda Software, announced some exciting news - Interplay had sold off the rights to Fallout... TO THEM! Ahh, perhaps soon a nightmarish apocalypse world populated by diverse, fascinating characters would be ours - without having to point-and-click through hours of tedious random encounters! Perhaps instead, you could shoot the rat in the face yourself!

However, at the time, all Bethesda had to their name was Morrowind, a game beloved by many, but which I had found a rather detached and grinding experience, not having quite brought the RPG genre to real-time play even as convincingly as Deus Ex did several years previously! Still, the previews for Oblivion looked promising, and the screenshots were devastatingly gorgeous, so I allowed myself to be hopeful.

Urble.

Now, as an older, and eminently more Xbox-360-possessing man, I still have not played much of Oblivion. Expecting the most immersive fantasy gaming experience ever delivered, I was somewhat let down by the first twenty minutes of rat-bashing gameplay, and haven't yet returned to it. Where was the sense of interaction with the world? I still felt like a conveyer-belt avatar, shoved arbitrarily between checkpoints by cardboard cutout personages concerned far too much with their Ultimate Destiny. And with you stealing their stuff. GOD.

But then again, that's based on twenty minutes of tutorial dungeon. Probably ought to give that another go. Just as an aside, the game I was hoping Oblivion would be appears to be coming our way in the form of Bioshock. Keep an eye on that'un.

So yeah. The evidence of mine own eyes wasn't filling me with the greatest of hope, so why is it that on seeing the recently-released teaser trailer...

...I was still reduced to a giggling fool? Perhaps I'm just a sucker for pre-rendered CGI trailers. It's quite possible. But perhaps it was more than that. Perhaps it was the beautifully-rendered post-nuclear landscape revealed therein? Perhaps it was the classic Fallout device of optimistic 50s crooning accompanying images of horrific desolation? Perhaps it was the suggestion floating around that the graphics depicted here are representative of what the developers expect the final game to look like? Perhaps it was th- Christ in Heaven, was that Ron Perlman? The mighty Ron Perlman, back once again to resume his role as narrator?

"Yepfsh."

I'm havin' that.

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'Beat' Nick sometimes gazes forlornly on a sky empty of ICBMs.