Op-Ed

Fallout Boy

And yet I wonder if I'm being entirely fair. After all, Fallout 2 was widely criticized as a quick cash-in on the critically acclaimed original Fallout, a rushed to market product that suffered from a clumsy launch. This game which is a hallmark to me of the "old days" of PC gaming, a stark contrast to the commodity product that is Fallout 3,was burdened with the same qualities at its own release.

As I try to reconcile my discontent with Fallout 3, I am forced to ask whether the problem is one with the industry, or one with me.

I am a dinosaur, a relic of a dead era. I have strong and enduring memories of playing games like Ultima, Zork, Wing Commander and Wizardry on a PC that would be catastrophically outclassed by the modern cell phone. This is the equivalent to being lost on modern indie bands because I'm so busy listening to Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd. It's not just t that tastes and desires have changed since the advent of the cassette tape, much less the CD, but is there really much benefit trying to reinvent the past?

Do I really want a Fallout 3 that is just a coda on the already outstanding symphony of the first two games? What is left to do in that vein? When I think about it from that perspective I realize that my true desire for Fallout 3 and, frankly, the revisiting of a bygone PC gaming era is a virtual impossibility.

I want to do it all again for the first time.

There is a reason that sequels usually have a property of diminishing returns, and it has little to do with the illusion of creative bankruptcy or the fallacy of lazy development. The problem is that the traditional sequel is trying to recapture a moment that is only valuable because it had never been captured before. It's not just that developers and gamers are trying to recapture lighting in a bottle, they are trying to capture the lightning that has already struck.

I don't mean to suggest that everyone who played earlier Fallout games should necessarily feel disillusioned with the latest iteration. I think perhaps that initial instinct of the past when the Fallout fanbase was up in arms over Bethesda's tenure was probably correct, that the less I cling to the past the better equipped I will be to enjoy the game. In the end, I wasn't really able to do that. The more the game tried to convince me it was a Fallout game, the less I believed it; mention of G.E.C.K.s and water purifiers didn't invest me in the gamespace, it transported me to the first time I played.

Nostalgia is a wonderful and terrible thing.

Sean Sands is a freelance writer, co-founder of gamerswithjobs.com and addicted to those miniature hot dogs that get wrapped in tiny croissants. Delicious!