Eight Months of Gaming

One Must Fall

Fallout 3 is a game that needs no introduction - at least if you're a PC gamer and have been around a while. If you're not a PC gamer and have stuck mainly to consoles through the years, chances are the only taste of the beloved Fallout series you got was a hack-n-slash spinoff Brotherhood of Steel, released in 2004. In all fairness, let's forget I mentioned that game, shall we? The original Fallout game made its debut in 1997 and is still referred to by many as the RPG to end all RPG's. A year later, Fallout 2 was released, thus turning the Fallout name into a franchise that would rival the likes of the ever popular Diablo series. Now, ten years later, the third installment in the series surfaces as Bethesda Softworks (maker of The Elder Scrolls series) takes the reigns. Much has changed, but Bethesda has made it clear that they are not looking to create The Elder Scrolls: Fallout.

While Fallout 3 might be referred to as a first person shooter, its cult followers know better. The game is very much an RPG with deep statistical character progression that will result in a different experience for each gamer who plays it. In this role-playing experience of epic proportions, the story unfolds thirty years after the events in Fallout 2. The year is 2050 and Vault 101 where your character's lineage took refuge during a nuclear holocaust is now open. In an attempt to investigate the disappearance your father, you emerge into the mutant-ridden wasteland that is Washington D.C. While there are countless ways to play Fallout 3, Bethesda has made sure that the outcome is also varied. In fact, there will apparently be 200 ending scenarios. So, if you're the type of gamer whose goal will be experiencing each ending, this may well be the last game you buy! Look for Fallout 3 on PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 later this year sometime between Halloween and Christmas.

The city of New York lies in ruins. Thick black smoke pours from the rooftops. The remaining inhabitants of the city are in a state of panic. As the camera pans past images of an alien stronghold and destruction and lands on the image above, the tagline reads, "You can't know what control really means . . . until you lose it." This is the scene portrayed in the recently released teaser for Spider-Man: Web of Shadows.

While very little about this game has been released at this point, the developers have given us just enough to believe that Web of Shadows has the potential to be the Spider-Man game that fans have been waiting for. If the fact that this game is not based on a movie isn't appealing enough, players now get to play both good and evil sides amidst a number of other characters from the Marvel Comics universe. Spidey now has the ability to build his own combat system from the ground up by gaining experience and choosing which new powers to upgrade. While RPG elements are nothing new, they do help to break the monotony of what could be another boring sandbox game. Regardless, if the developers can nail the whole web swinging aspect that the previous games didn't quite do, I think we're going to see a lot of happy people.