My roster:

• Left leg, Sciatica. Game: Fallout 3. Who knew that sitting motionless, apart from the occasional spasmodic hand movement to unload yet another hunting rifle shell into the face of a Mirelurk, for upwards of 7 hours at a time on a sofa that rigidly enforces a text book bad posture would cause someone injury? My physiotherapist, it seems, who shook her head and tutted as I explained my addiction to the buggiest game in living memory. I now have 7 exercises to do on a daily basis in an attempt to loosen up my left buttock, the tenseness of which is throttling my sciatic nerve in a way that can only really be described as ‘fucking painful’. I generally forget to do my exercises. I am a bad person.
• Right leg, bruised foot. Game: Wii Fit. Having been diagnosed with sciatica (and not only the self internet diagnosis, which also involved a slipped disc and a potential knee cancer – hypochondria FTW!) I decided to compound the issue by buying Wii Fit. At first there was no issue, as I worked my way through onscreen yoga poses and did step aerobics, watched intently by the onscreen Mii-avatars of my entire family, whose vacant faces displayed a seemingly patronising look of encouragement. However, when I stepped off the balance board, put a wii-mote in my pocket and went for a virtual run I added to my continued catalogue of miseries. Who knew that running barefoot on a thin carpet covering a concrete floor could cause a debilitating injury? My physiotherapist certainly did, picking it out as a Wii-fit injury within moments of me limping into the hospital last week for my appointment. Luckily it seems that she is a newly emancipated gamer, loving her Wii-fit and Wii-sports to the extent that she had injured herself in an identical fashion. Rather than talk about my (rather fine) legs we rushed through the physiotherapy bit of the session and focused on the important ‘what games can be considered MAN games’ as her husband’s birthday was coming up and she wanted some inspiration…
• Left wrist, RSI like agony. Game: Puzzle Quest. My most recent injury and almost healed after a night of not sleeping on it. This is what happens to you when you decide to have a ‘quick go’ with a previous addiction and find your self curled into an uncomfortable ball, wrist jammed into the sofa at right angles, cradling your Gameboy in a claw like grip 2 hours after you were meant to be tucked up in bed waiting for the next morning’s glurgle-pluch-beep that indicates that coffee is waiting for you in the kitchen. It really hurt.

One useful thing about that final injury is that I can at least pin the blame for it on the evil that is Game.net’s mail order service. Tied in with reward points and offering free delivery, I pre-ordered a copy a of Mad World, the new Sega produced ultra-violent Running Man-alike, which they sent in the middle of last week hopefully for a release day (Friday 20th March) delivery. It is now Tuesday of the next week and I still haven’t had a chance to jam upwards of 20 road signs through the head of a single person. There is a gaping hole in my gaming life that can only be filled by road signs. Naughty Game.net, no biscuit. Or orders from me again. Especially as I have a branch of Game about 5 minutes walk away…

So, I now limp from place to place, occasionally waving my walking stick (a present to myself for my birthday, and pretty much useless for my current injuries, making me feel more than slightly a sham for having it. At least it did get me a seat on the tube on the one time I took it outside of the house. I need to get braver, take it with me and then wave it at the yoof. Although, as I live in Ealing our yoof is hidden away from the normal people by PCSOs with stern looks and exclusion orders. As is right and proper) at people I can see out of the window. My mother takes great delight in telling her friends that her son has been crippled by computer games and picks out Rock Band and my fake plastic drums as the aggressor. But as I repeatedly tell her this is far from the truth – Rock Band could never hurt me, apart from maybe break my heart.

Note to self: Buy new drum pedal, the old one is snapped in half and if I don’t start playing again soon then Rock Band will run off with someone else. That can’t happen.

However, into the life of every hypochondriac a little rain must fall and one day you might be right about what you’ve got. So, when I found my leg hurt a little bit last week a quick internet search, after some helpful hints shouted out by some cow-orkers (including legionnaires disease and the ever present potentiality that is the brain tumour), led me to sciatica. I thought it sounded vaguely trouser related at first and it is, although very much in the legs and “lower back” (aka bum) areas. I’ve now seen a doctor, been diagnosed and loaded down with a small legion of drugs to take to make me all better. Although if ten days of being high on medication doesn’t fix me the plan seems to be to move on to getting someone to rub me a lot. I can see injury being much more interesting than I imagined.

Anyways, the most important thing about my discomfort, outside of extracting every potential ounce of sympathy out of innocent bystanders even to the extent of purchasing a walking stick (still in the planning stages as I want a cane with a silver skull on top and you can’t rush that kind of lifestyle choice), is to pass on a message of advice to you, the internetsworld. I have a fair idea how I came to be afflicted with my affliction and if I can help but one of you to avoid my own terrible terrible fate (to be high on government subsidised drugs for the next 10 days) then I feel my sacrifice will have been worth it. The  biggest change to my lifestyle in the last few weeks and in my opinion the obvious culprit is the playing of Fallout 3. Extended sessions sitting hunched on my sofa, hands clawing at the XBox controller as I discharge round after round of irradiatied post-apocalyptic ammunition into the limbs of super mutants and human raiders (all bad guys, as my “Paragon of Humanity” live achievement will attest), with minimal movement outside of the occasional picking of my nose have destroyed my lower spine and moved me a step closer to the skull topped cane of my dreams.

So, I say to you now – avoid the temptation of computer games, especially the evil of Fallout 3. They will tear out your spine, show it to you, play tunes Patrick Moore style upon the plinky plonky vertebrae and then stick back it in, slightly wonky. However, I only have three more missions to do in Fallout before I’m done, and it would be silly to let a mere medical issue stand in the way of 60 XBox points…

The “one in, one out” policy I am currently operating on my games shelf (a rule that I will break next week with my purchase of Rock Band 2, although I am justifying that by claiming that Rock Band is not just a game but a lifestyle choice…) was activated a couple of weeks back when I traded in the quite excellent Dead Space for one of the most eagerly awaited games of recent memory, amongst gamers of my vintage at least, Fallout 3. The original was one of the first games I played through to completion, even if it did take me almost a year to get into it enough to actually play it. The second was duly purchased, but I couldn’t get into it and it’s still sitting pretty much unplayed somewhere in my flat. The announcement of the third in the series filled me with worry – the original studio had disbanded, much to the dismay of Fallout fans, and the project was taken on by Bethesda, purveyors of Daggerfall, Morrowind and Oblivion, games that annoyed me enough that I gave up on them faster than Force Unleashed. Suffice it to say, my worries and doubts were all for nought – Fallout 3 is an excellent game.

I got home at about midday after buying the game, made myself some lunch and sat down to have a quick play. For the first hour or so I grumbled a bit about a few annoyances but then all of a sudden it was dark outside, my hands had seized up due to the cold, as the heating had gone off, and I needed to visit the bathroom in a somewhat urgent manner. It was 7:30pm – about 7 hours of play without noticing. Despite its many flaws, which I will enumerate shortly in my usual fashion, it is one of the most immersive and addictive games I have played in years.

The scenario is similar to before: The world is in ruins after a series of cataclysmic nuclear exchanges. However, humanity lives on both in the ruins and in hermetically sealed vaults, filled as the end of the world was chimed. You, in this iteration, are a citizen of Vault 101, known for never having opened its doors since their sealing, but a series of events forces you out into the outside world – the Capital Wasteland, the ruined remains of Washington DC, and from here the adventures begin…

As with the previous iterations there is a main quest, but as you interact with the rich world of the wasteland numerous other side quests appear, varying in difficulty and length, as well as the environment itself throwing at you monsters to kill and locations to explore. The map is large with at least a hundred named locations to find (with a ‘Find 100 locations’  XBox achievementto tempt your inner explorer) and there are hours of entertainment to be found in simply wandering.

Graphically it is quite beautiful, with the Capital Wasteland rendered in glorious detail as day turns to night and shadows move across the land. The centre of the city is complete with the landmark buildings, in the expected states of disrepair, and the out of town wastes are put together in an intelligent manner with hills and the dried up remains of the Potomac providing scenic views as you search for cover to avoid rampaging super mutants. There are towns on decaying freeway bridges, settlements in underground stations, the remains of satellite uplink stations pointing their dead dishes towards the sky, and countryside dotted with the remains of civilisation ready to be explored.

It’s not without its problems, immediately noticeable in the ill-advised third person view. The default view is that of the FPS – over the gun, through the eyes of the hero. However, with a tap of the left shoulder button you zoom through the back of your head and see yourself from above and behind. At this point realism disappears at anything over a slow walk (the slow walk used in the gameplay videos put out as trailers), as with any greater speed the connection of foot and ground is broken and you skate across town and country in a rather immersion breaking fashion. The first person view is not without its problems, with its totally smooth movement feeling especially strange after Isaac Clarke’s loping run in Dead Space. However, as long as you don’t use the third person mode, easier said than done with its annoying button assignment, you can get used to the motion in FPS mode and the game doesn’t suffer too much.

Despite its various FPS trappings, this is at heart an RPG. Taking its lead from the engines behind Morrowind and Oblivion, it combines the first person viewpoint and realtime attacks with a stats based approach to hits and damage. You have the traditional base traits, customisable with your appearance during the “birth and childhood” intro to the game, along with a pile of skills which can be specialised as you level up as you play. On top of those you receive an additional “perk” at each levelling, giving you immediate stat gains and special effects (from animals not attacking you, to experience points clocking up faster, to a mysterious trenchcoated stranger sometimes appearing in a fight and gunning down your opponent with his inexhaustable .44 magnum). Experience points are earned by completing quests, killing enemies and successful skill usage (from picking locks to disarming mines and coercing people) and tick up at a good rate as you progress through the missions.

The key to the combination of FPS and RPG is VATS (acronyms rule!) – The Vault-tec Assisted Targeting System. While you can fire your weapons at will in true FPS fashion, you can also drop into an “action point” governed mode in which you can use up those action points by selecting areas of your target to attack, each with a corresponding percentage likelihood to hit, and queuing up attacks. On clicking the ‘go’ button the action drops into a cinematic camera mode showing the outcome of your attacks, as well as any counter attacks, occasionally (and more frequently as the game goes on) leading to slow motion cataclysmic damage to the various extremities of your target and, sometimes, yourself. Action points tick up slowly when you are outside of VATS, whether you are running around avoiding your enemies or finishing them off. VATS was often quoted as a divisive factor in previews by fans of Bethesda’s games and the original games in this series both, but I reckon it works well in practise, combining the old combat system with the new gaming perspective at the same time as bringing in the now almost obligatory cinematic scenes. It takes some getting used to, with shots in FPS mode often not hitting despite being seemingly on target due to the stats based targeting operating under the covers, and VATS mode sometimes indicating you can hit a target when your weapon is hidden behind cover, but once you are used to it it becomes an integral part of the way you play, especially as later perks make it a continually more powerful tool.

The missions are at the core of what makes the game, with the main story line driving you along and side missions popping up as welcome distractions from the rising intensity of the plot. It’s not the most surprising of plots, treading the path of many a post-apocalyptic story and mining the last two games quite extensively, but it rumbles along gaining speed and dragging you along with it. It does helpfully let you out from time to time to explore the world and work on the other missions dotted around and this is the main strength of the game. The large map hides towns, villages and caravans as well as Vaults and military bases, all full of booty, as well as bad guys, monsters and allies. Sometimes you’ll crest a hill only to see the wasteland stretching away into the distance, with ruined towers and buildings all around, sometimes you’ll turn a corner into a town and see a scripted set piece setting up a mission playing out in front of you, sometimes you’ll just find a bunch of skeletons and debris that hint at what was happening before the apocalypse. Not all of the missions are excellent, with a couple of annoying fetch and carry ones thrown in for good measure, but when they are good they are really good. From the surreal high point of Tranquility Lane (a rather good chunk of science fiction) to the tedious low point of The Waters of Life (a boring, overly extended fetch and carry mission), they keep you eager to finish (and get the loot and achievement attached to the succesful completion of each) and seek out the next one.

They are not without their problems though, with my completing at least one mission before having properly starting it (I accidentally found the mission completion location and finished it without being assigned it) and the flexibility in the number ways of finishing missions, with most offering at least one way to finish both with and without the murder of innocents, does sometimes lead to you accidentally finishing a mission in a different way to the one you were aiming to by accidentally performing a mission finishing action (be it paying someone off or taking their head off with a shotgun).

I’ve now played through the main storyline and there is one further problem – due to the ability to wander around and level up at your own speed, as well as dipping into the story when you feel like it, I’d hit the level cap by the time I’d hit the end of the game. Tooled up with the best armour and weapons in the game the cataclysmic final mission was a bit of a stroll, taking minimal effort or tactical thought. On top of that, when the final mission is completed (in, as usual, one of a variety of fashions) the game simply ends. You get the traditional cut scene (stuck together from a variety of different potential pieces, based on the choices you made during the game) and some credits and are then dropped back to the title screen ready to start again. Luckily I had a save game not too far back from the end and have now returned to the wastelands to explore and finish the rest of the game, but the abrupt end (especially after the lack of challenge) did grate somewhat.

The mission system along with my issues with the graphics are just minor annoyances. The game is also rather buggy on my XBox (with reports suggesting that it’s the same on PC and PS3 as well), with numerous occurrences of monsters and people being stuck in walls and rocks, and it also suffers occasionally from horrendous slow down, sometimes lasting for several juddering minutes, although that has yet to interrupt a battle. There are numerous random graphical glitches, but they hit their peak for me when I was exploring the wasteland and saw the effect in the video below:

Displaying region bounding boxes and slowing down massively is not fun. Luckily I had a large super mutant following me around as a body guard and he gunned down the radscorpions that decided to try and eat me just as this hit, but it does seem that the game might have benefited from a bit more QA (as is so often the case). The PC has a first patch out already and I’ve heard tales of both and XBox and PS3 one going through the various approval processes at the moment.

Also, the controls are occasionally inconsistent, with X sometimes being a confirm button and sometimes being a cancel button, the shoulder buttons paging in some inventory views but not others and a general confusion of function on occasion. The interface is sometimes clunky, with no immediate cancel button in dialogue, and occasional unexpected losses of control of your character for “especially important” plot points but not for others. However, you don’t hit the graphical glitches all that often and the others fade to being a background niggle, as the rest of the game delivers the experience in such a manner that a few mere annoyances barely chip away at it.

With the game now “over” it’s quite scary that I am continuing to play as much as I am. I’ve been advising easily addicted acquaintances to avoid buying the game for now, having seen its dangerous effects on my sleeping patterns (Leading to my standing statement of “There is no sleep, only Fallout” when people ask me why I am looking tired). I suspectthat my sustained playing sessions have heavily contributed to my current inability to walk (maybe due to a slipped disc or bad posture induced sciatica – wikipedia is not a friend to hypochondria), and I’ve seen several cow-orkers dragged into its tempting maw. It’s a good game mechanic made into a great game by the story and missions, but pulled back from the brink by a few QA issues and some dodgy interface decisions. However, when I close my eyes all I see is the ruin of the Washington Monument lit by the ignition flame of a rocket leaping from the arms of a gnarled super mutant. I think that means I’m addicted.

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