Well I am a bit older than most guys here and Fallout was the very first game where you could literally do anything. Be a bad guy, good guy, hustler, gambler, get married and pimp your wife out for money, become a porn star, target enemies in the groin, kill children, rob graves, you could quest or just kill your way through, and you could hone in so many combat and technical skills. You could hack computer systems, repair old technology, lie your way into anything if you were good enough at it.
The game was literally endless. If you have never played it I highly suggest you go through.
After watching all the game trailers on gametrailers.com I see how they have made the game fast paced. Which takes out the strategy part a bit and makes it more action based. They took out groin shots, and of course you can't kill anyone you want in the game like you could in the previous two. They also took out killing children.
I will be honest, Obilvion sucked big balls in my opinion. In fact I think that most fantasy games post 2000 have kind of sucked. They lack the feel of old school final fantasy with a good story line. I think that most FF games after 7 sucked as well.
However, I hold high hopes for this game. It seems that they made a good balance and when reading through their forums all the fanboys brought up everything I would about the game, and Bethesda confirms to all of us they are all die hard fall out fans.
If it sucks I have also reserved left 4 dead which comes out like two weeks later.
My old PC wouldn't play COD4, so I just played it for the first time like a week ago for the most part. It was fun. I also reinstalled HL2 ep2 since I can't remember if I beat it or not.
I am not much of a gamer anymore really, and mostly have been using my Mac for almost everything I do. However, I really look forward to playing Fallout 3, Left 4 Dead, Starcraft 2 (even though it is three separate games now!) and Diablo III. My PC was old so I thought it was time to finally build a new one.
thanks for the full response, I like the way you look at things. I played a bit of fallout 2 but never dove into fallout 1.
I'm definately going to pick up fallout 3 after what you have said. I recomend that you play through the half life 2 series from start to finish even though it can get a little boring at times, because it has one of the greatest stories for a game ever, its worth playing to the end just to see what happens