Fallout 3

I'm a console gamer, I'd be the first one to admit that (I just did). But I love the fact that PC's allow you to mess around with game mechanics in ways that you can't do on console games. So after I finished playing Fallout 3 (a game which I cannot heap enough accolades on. This game kept me playing it until 4 am nightly... during finals week. There are not many games which I feel that strongly about besides KOTOR 1 and 2 and Star Wars: Battlefront), I was hungry to mess around a bit with the detailed game mechanics of this beautifully made RPG.

If at this point you have no idea what I'm talking about, Fallout 3 is a video game that takes place in an alternate universe where the world never veered from 1950's ideals and aesthetics. In the game it is the year 2277, 200 years after a great nuclear war devastated much of the world. Your mission is to escape the oppressive vault (a massive underground shelter built before the war) and to find your father who recently escaped from the vault. Along the way you will fight villains and slightly more irradiated monsters (I forget... is 3000 rads slight?). If you are still not with me, a video game is an entertainment device that makes pretty colors and sounds.

One game mechanic I really wanted to test is what would happen if I overloaded the game engine. So I went out and bought the PC version of the game (keep in mind the fact that I am in college so this means that I will forgo food for the next few months because of this purchase).

How I would go about overloading the game was simple, I would access the debugging function of the game and find a small enclosed room within the game that would be perfect for spawning a whole mess of Deathclaw's.

If you don't already know, a Deathclaw looks like this.

There is a small bar in the dilapidated city of Megaton (the city is built around an unexploded bomb) that fits the bill quite nicely. It's small, enclosed, and full of test subjects. Once in the bar I press the "~" key to open the debugging window and type in: player.placeatme 000AF836, 50, 1, 1

What this code does is to spawn 50 Deathclaw's (represented by the hex code "000AF836") right at my position. Now, ordinarily, I'd be dead before I could blink, but I took precautions against this by using the debugging feature to make myself invulnerable earlier. The fact that I'm also floating well beyond the reach of any Deathclaw a feat also accomplished by using the debugging feature.

The carnage was incredible. Pretty much everybody (excepting me) was dead within seconds. In fact, they died so quickly that their bodies were forever frozen in midair, stretched beyond human limits, their twisted faces attesting to the surprise of having dozens of killing machines appear out of thin air. Naturally I took many pictures which I will now present here:







Join me next time as I continue to exploit the horrifying Fallout 3 universe.