It's weird how Fallout 3 can have so much gameplay and so little plot. For example, it took me about four hours to get through the Mothership Zeta expansion, but I can summarize it thusly: an alien spaceship beams me up, I get probed, and then escape. For awhile I thought the little girl Sally was suspiciously knowledgeable about the ship and its workings, and that there would surely be a shocking plot twist involving her, but that was surely just my fevered imagination, because nothing I saw on the ship even remotely hinted at the possibility (again, aside from the fact that there's this ten-year girl who knows how to hack into alien technology).
If I really think about it, I guess the point of Mothership Zeta is that it's sort of an homage to 50s sci-fi, where the aliens are just this incomprehensible malevolent force, and nothing they do makes a lot of sense (for instance, I enjoyed listening to the recordings of my fellow abductees from throughout history, but nothing ever explained exactly what the aliens wanted with them). Sally then, is probably just an archetypal plucky young heroine who assists the daring action hero. She'd probably make a good protagonist to a more interesting stealth-based game.
Still, it wasn't a total waste of time. I got an alien disintegrator that has become my go-to weapon in the capitol wasteland. There's something indescribably satisfying about scoring a critical hit and then watching your enemy collapse into a pile of blue dust. I think it's the sound that does it for me. It's a weird sort of static-y chime that triggers the part of my brain that says "bonus." I also got to see Fallout's version of Earth from space. Let's just say humanity really did a number on it. It really looked like a total shithole. I think that's actually a limitation of Fallout's vision of the apocalypse. The nuclear winter notwithstanding, if human beings ever did wipe ourselves out, it probably wouldn't take too long for nature to bounce back hard and erase virtually every sign that we ever existed. So things should really be green and lush instead of bleak and brown. I think that'd be an interesting version of the apocalypse to see.
Anyway, once I was off the alien ship, the main quest advanced at a pretty steady clip. I caught up with my father in Vault 112. He was a prisoner in Dr Braun's virtual reality - a black and white suburb with a 50s sitcom vibe called Tranquility Lane. Dr Braun had been using his control over the simulation (and let me take a moment to remark on how hard it is to pin down Fallout's tech level here, because full 3-d VR simulations don't really jibe with the analogue retro-future of the rest of the series - it just feels weird to go into the Matrix while using a computer with a monochrome CRT monitor) to sadistically torture his fellow survivors. Since the man is a genuinely bona-fide scientific genius, this just feels like a pathetically wasteful way to spend eternity. Ordinarily, he makes you jump through some hoops, tormenting the other vault dwellers, before he'll give you information, but it's possible, if you talk to the right person (or, say, have played this level so many times you know exactly where to go) to short circuit the entire quest and shut down the simulation from the inside. This involves unleashing the simulated Chinese army onto the residents so they'll die in real life and condemning Dr Braun to untold centuries of nothing but himself and whatever AI he can drum up for company (it's no more than he deserves, sure, but it makes me wonder what the original plan for Vault 112 was - surely Vault-Tec had a way of getting Dr Braun back, for the value of his intellectual property if nothing else).
Anyway, having rescued Dad, he immediately drops into his self-absorbed old habits, going back to Rivet City to start up Project Purity again, as if he had never left. He makes me clean out the basement and flip some switches (and in some of the game's most obvious padding, dividing this mission into two trips thanks to some "forgotten" fuses). While in the intake pipe, "clearing a blockage" the Enclave attacks Project Purity. Strangely enough, the blockage doesn't clear until after it's too late for me to stop the attack.
You know, I'm thinking I might have been too hard on the Pitt. I didn't like how it railroaded me into impersonating a slave, but actually Fallout 3 seems to do this all the time. In Mothership Zeta, you're beamed directly into a prison cell. At the Jefferson Memorial, you arrive at the Rotunda after your father has gotten into a showdown with the Enclave, and a locked door prevents you from intervening has he activates some kind of radiation bomb as a preemptive suicide strike. Later, after you retrieve the GECK from Vault 87, you're ambushed by the Enclave, who apparently have exactly one copy of the grenade that instantly lays your ass out, regardless of how powerful you are. And, of course, the game's original ending was notorious.
Still, the escape was pretty thrilling. I finally got to take the fight to the Enclave (though, now that I think about it, prior to strong-arming my father, they haven't really done anything to me, and I can't even really blame them for Dad's death because that willful bastard literally brought it upon himself), and scored a whole bunch of nifty new power armor. Aside from having to reload when my itchy trigger finger accidentally took out a Brotherhood of Steel turret (and honestly, you put a turret in a monster-infested sewer and you can't really be surprised when a survivor gets nervous and takes a shot at it), it was a quick and easy trip.
After that, I have to avenge my father's death by bringing his dream to life, so that means a trip west, to Vault 87, in order to retrieve the GECK. I already mentioned how this trip ends, so let me briefly complain about the beginning. Little Lamplight, the town that lies in front of the vault entrance, is without a doubt the worst location in any of the fallout games, and a strong contender for one of gaming's most ill-conceived ideas.
Right away, the town endeavors to make you hate it by it's choice of welcoming party - Mayor McCready is a hostile, paranoid, foulmouthed piece of human garbage, and incidentally a pre-teen kid. In fact, the whole town is kids. My brain ties itself in knots trying to figure out how this could possibly function. It's like, I guess numbers and tradition could probably get people to move out when they turn 18, but there's no way that the people who stay behind could master the skills necessary to keep a community safe and prosperous. And where do the new kids come from? And why don't the residents of Big Town just come back en masse?
It's not worth thinking about. What's worse is that, unless you're like me and lay waste to Paradise Falls as an incidental sidetrip on your way to somewhere else, McCready will force you to go on a tedious fetch-quest before he lets you in. Once you get through, it's not so bad. Vault 87 if a fairly typical sci-fi dungeon. You get to meet a frendly super mutant named Fawkes who will walk through some intense radiation to retrieve the GECK for you (spoiler alert - this is part of what drives people crazy about the original ending). And on your way out, you fall to a bullshit ambush.
Because of course you do. How else will the game get you to the Enclave base, to be interrogated by Colonel Autumn? As a plot turn, it's fairly dramatic, but as an example of Fallout's famed player agency, it stinks. Just to get my revenge on the story, I decide to cooperate with Autumn and tell him the password to Project Purity: 2-1-6 (which would take, I don't know, a long afternoon to guess with manual brute force, so way to go, Dad).
And the bastard shoots me! Which is pretty much the Enclave in a nutshell. They're not just pricks, they're self-destructive, needlessly wasteful pricks.
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