Buy this instead.

Anybody who's played Fallout 2 (and enjoys RPGs) will likely agree that it was one of the best games ever released on PC. Your actions throughout the game influenced an extremely dynamic montage of clips at the game's end, it was one of the only games ever to deal with sex and drug use in a mature manner, it was funny as Hell in a lot of places, the metaplot was convincing, compelling and genuinely gave you the occassional mindfuck without being pointlessly enigmatic, it did not treat everything as black & white good or evil (even the best of characters in the first Fallout game typically winds-up killing-off an entire city full of peaceful, terribly ill-fated mutant zombie people), the graphics were gorgeous for it's time (NPCs that had different death animations depending on how you killed them!? No WAY!), and it was one of the few titles to really break-away from linear gameplay. You didn't have to do any 'questing' at all, in fact. And the quests you could do were really engaging (for the most part. Some of the earlier quests were weak, but New Reno? Redding? Broken Hills? Those were some of the most memorable places in PC gaming history!). 

I can't emphasize enough how great this franchise was, up until Black Isle essentially imploded (Fallout Tactics was meh. It was pretty good for a tactical game, but fell short of the standard the franchise had set).

MattShizzle: I realize that you're probably going to try and re-iterate here that you think Fallout is gay / too hard. I'm actually interested in what you found 'too hard' about it, though? I mean, it wasn't terribly difficult to stay alive (assuming you didn't do something silly when setting your initial traits; the 'trial' in Fallout 2 made the beginning unecessarily not-fun for high-IQ characters, I'll give you that), and there were tons of save slots, and you could save whenever you wanted to. The toughest fight in the game is trying to take-out Navarro head-on, and even that isn't too taxing as long as you're wearing the game's best power armor, toting either a Bozar or a Vindictor and have plenty of stim-packs (oh, and the Sniper perk). Did you just find the quests too perplexing to figure-out?

I'm most certainly looking forward to this.

I love how you can kill anything and anybody, complete with gaping wounds and bloodsplatter, but drugs or sex is verbotten. Yeah. That's real smart.

They took out the sex too!!??

Man, fuck you Ausralia!!

(removed post - trying to quote kevin sans-video stuffed up, my attempts to fix it resulted in the second post below and that one actually has the reply)

Censorship is bullshit. I'm sorry.

Nevermind that the ridiculous, limb-flaying violence protrayed in the game coming-in second, somehow, to 'graphic' drug use and sex is retarded; why would anyone feel that because they are so squeamish about a certain topic, I shouldn't get to enjoy immersing myself in it?

A rating system is no replacement for proper parenting here. I agree that young children don't need to play games like Fallout or watch films like Kill Bill - but the reason given to children for this restriction should not smply be, 'Oh, you can't watch that, because it's rated 'X' by our arbitrary ratings system!'

It should be the parent's job and judgement call, and children should be given proper, well-informed explanations as to why they can't play (for example) Fallout 3. No government or agency should consider it their duty to decide what is or isn't appropriate for anyone anywhere to watch or play with.

I just thought that this would be a good opportunity to point-out a fact that Jack Thompson and I are actually in agreement on:

The ESRB is a joke.

This is a list of every one of the 23 games to have ever been tagged with the dread 'AO' (Adults Only) rating. The first thing you'll want to note is that the ESRB actually lie through their teeth:

Of the 23 titles listed, 22 are AO because they show nude pictures. 1 game is proclaimed as being 'too violent' for the masses, and frankly, Thrill Kill's coup de grace moves pale in comparison to the graphic butchery included in titles like Gears or War - the actual reason that the game was declared 'too violent' was that Electronic Arts (the lumbering Wal-Mart or Microsoft of the gaming universe) said it was, so the ESRB nodded in arbitrated agreement.

Then there's the matter of San Andreas's curious admission. Essentially, RockStar had some disabled content in the game involving a foreplay scene where the main character (who was black*) consensually grabbed the boobs of his (often white*) girlfriend over her t-shirt. No nudity at all. But the old white guys who run the U.S. found this offensive enough when Jack Thompson paraded around to various media outlets that they decided to force the ESRB to stamp 'AO' on it, and Wal-Mart subsequently pulled it from it's shelves...

...Oh, and speaking of which:

Wal-Mart (the biggest retailer of games in the states) has actually openly declared that it will not stock AO games. This has had the effect of every console developer on the planet stating that they will not allow AO games to run on their consoles, which has had the effect of the ESRB essentially never giving-out an AO rating. Which then makes one scratch their head and wonder what the purpose of such a rating might be to begin with. Hm....

So, what do kids learn from this (if anything)? Well, obviously, sex is way, way worse than gratuitous violence - and so is nudity in general. And so is inter-racial dating / foreplay*. Violence can, on rare occassions, also be bad - but only if the big men in business suits who know what's best say so.

(*: There are some people who would contest that idea that San Andreas's AO label has racist motivations. To those people, riddle me this: why is it that every single shot of the content in question used by media outlets and U.S. congressmen to damn the game involves the main character fondling a white girl? It's not like all of your girlfriends in the game (or even most of them) are white).

It doesn't make sense the violence is not an issue, yet the sex is when it's mostly no worse than what's on T.V. I mean the pussycat dolls can practically give you a long distance lap dance, and sure GTA has hookers and such, but most girls on T.V might as well be hookers so it gets to thinking they're singling out video games.

I don't see it.

where's this 'might makes right' ethics? 

...That, and the general American attitude (in terms of thosewho administrate it, anyway) that any problem can resolved with a appropriate megatonnage of TNT.