Man, I am just grinning ear to ear playing this game. You'd think, given how many times I've worked my way through these opening hours, that I would be sick of it by now, but there's just something about creeping through Springvale Elementary School, beating raiders to death with a baseball bat, while listening to Malcolm McDowell's virtuoso voice performance on the Enclave propaganda station that is like gaming comfort food to me. I would vote for John Henry Eden, even though I know the truth about the Enclave's genocidal agenda.
So far, I've mostly been on this sort of nostalgic autopilot. My general goal is to travel in my father's footsteps at least until I can get the Galaxy New Radio antenna fixed, but I've done these early quests so often that it's easy to let myself get sidetracked "for just a few minutes." That's how I disarmed the nuke at the center of Megaton, raided the Super-Duper Mart for the certifiably insane, but delightfully adorable Moira Brown, and worked briefly as an assistant plumber.
The only real snag I've faced is the situation at Greyditch. Maybe it's the longer draw distance possible on the PC, but it seemed like the kid accosted me about the quest from much farther away than usual. And it was kind of hard to say no to a helpless young boy who runs up to you, tells you that his father is missing and possibly dead, and that giant, monstrous ants have overrun his town.
Unfortunately, the game's level scaling kind of hates me here. I was able to take down a few of the ants, but at an unacceptably high cost in ammo and medicine. I eventually wound up abandoning the kid in a single-occupant fallout shelter. He should be safe enough for the six hours or so (probably in-game months) that I wander around building up levels and exploring various random ruins. Assuming, of course, that I don't get distracted and let this quest completely slip my mind.
This game does that to you. It's just a big, vibrant (if completely destroyed) world that has something to engage your interest and waste your time at basically every turn. I've played it for three hours already, and I haven't even begun to get to the point where I can conceivably talk about starting to make a dent in its total content. I'm maybe 1-2% done (spending 300 hours on Fallout 3 does seem a little excessive, but I don't think it's a bad assessment, because the pace accelerates as you become more powerful and unlock more fast travel locations), and I could not be more thrilled.
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