My new PC (running XP not Vista) is working great and I have been playing Fallout 3.

A LOT of F3. Im totally hooked. Im loving the game. I want to play every day, all day. Its nice :)

Im level 12 and have about 30 hours on my save game, which includes a lot more hours of die-restart time. I've heard characters can reach level 20 so I am guessing Im about half way through.

On first impressions, the game is definitely related to Oblivion. The character animations are similar, the map is similar, the dungeons are similar, the way you look and walk is similar, even the voice-overs are similar. Which is not a complaint since I loved Oblivion too.

They have added a number of niceties - at the end of your tutorial you can change the way your character looks and re-jigger the stats. Later in the game you have many opportunities to change your appearance which removes an annoyance that would make people restart the game.

On my original PC, I had problems with the PIP Boy but I think those were graphics glitches and they are mostly gone now. On the other hand, there are still glitches. The game crashes once a session or so which usually require PC reboots to fix; restarting the game just causes it to crash again. Fortunately, I havent lost any data. I dont play many games that crash this much but its infrequent enough that I am definitely able to play it.

The game looks great, especially on my new game PC. No slowdowns at 1650x1080 and high details although there are issues with object pop-in. Since you want to see things far away and you have weapon scopes, they way they handle depth is not always perfect. I will look in a direction and see empty hills, walk closer and suddenly there are buildings and baddies there... Frustrating but I imagine a sacrifice for frame rates.

Its also a little annoying that the game UI was clearly designed for consoles and their simplified controller schemes. But they did a much better job than Oblivion and the game is playable without mods. Which is good because I havent seen any mods yet...

The only downside is that the game is such a downer. Bioshock, STALKER, The Road, Jericho, even Serenity are all similar in tone and atmosphere. I am already a worry-wort and spending hours in a toxic world of mutant Armageddon has been giving me nightmares and making me even more paranoid.

Bioshock and STALKER comparisons are worth mentioning.

STALKER is a true FPS game while this is really a turn-based game hybrid. STALKER does have the same Mad Max nuclear wasteland atmosphere though and you will spent a lot of time wandering around opening containers in both games. In fact, opening containers and managing my inventory is one of the things I spend the most time on.

I've heard designers say that inventory management is a game "feature" that breaks up the action between fights. But in both of these games there were moments when I wondered if I was playing a inventory game or a RPG...

Bioshock is an even more similar game. 1950's feel, dark, grim, trapped in a vault/trapped under water. As I play this game I find myself thinking of Bioshock all the time which is pretty unusual for me.

I feel that Bioshock did environments much better although they did have a much smaller and more contained world to model. F3 has a lot of low-res textures of trash and empty rooms where I find myself thinking of Bioshock and how much more interactive it felt.

If you are into that sort of thing, Bioshock was even creepier with far more disturbing characters. I never felt good about myself in Bioshock (to be honest I felt kind of dirty playing the game) whereas here I kind of feel like Im being a good samaritan by removing Mad Max-style Raiders from the world. Most of the time.

The quests in F3 are entertaining although there are not a ton of them so far they do offer a lot of play. Just getting from A to B can be a struggle and the AI does not seem to give up, which is not a good thing. Run into some mirelurks and they will follow you to the end of the earth. The other day 3 of them chased me into a house where they ate everyone in the room! Did I mention a lot of restarts?

Considering how tough some fights are, it would be nice if the AI would let you run away but its also impressive how reactive the game is. The NPCs react with each other in a fun way. I often run across them fighting each other (instead of me) and get to watch the show. Since Im a goody-two-shoes, killing NPC's hasnt been a real advantage for me but if you want to be evil, it might make this a uniquely adaptable game.

The downside of this is that main characters can die, sometimes quiet easily. I spent several nights trying to find a quest giver to do a turn in. Eventually I found my way to a great wiki which informed me that he was probably dead. Even better, there were instructions on how to find an NPC (I found his corpse inexplicably outside the city) and on how to resurrect them. Awesome.

I spent a lot of time with Oblivion on wikis but hardly at all in this game. Another example of how they refined this game and made it simpler.

In particular, the character development is much simpler. In Oblivion, you had to raise skills by using them which was separate from leveling up through experience. I spent many hours alone in my house practicing my skills in Oblivion. None of that exists here. You get a single house for your stuff and skills are raised by assigning points. Much simpler.

Yes, I have fallen for Fallout. Easily one of the best games of 2008.