So to speak...


Anyone who was awaiting another Interrupt Request should seek help will have to wait 'till later on Monday or Tuesday, depending on how the day shakes out. For a stand-alone substituted (with a heads up on NSFW language), Spoiler Warning has posted its second-anniversary episode. I can only aspire to such greatness. Back to my lame excuses, I had some family-time and what have you to keep me off the streets (and the computer), so I was unable to record and edit like I'd hoped. That said, I'm amazed at how similar Skyrim is to Fallout, and when comparing the two I start to think that what Phil & Dixie said so long ago about game settings wasn't pretty much on the money. I'm not saying there aren't differences in overall play, but there are quite a few thematic and mechanical ones:

- In my opinion, both series are post-apocalyptic. One is more obvious, having taken place after a nuclear war, but those ruins in Skyrim weren't always ruins. It seems that fantasy of all stripes requires ruins to be present, otherwise the heroes would have to get real jobs or take part in huge wars to get access to cool weapons and other random loot. Not to mention that the ruins in Skyrim were built by a more advanced civilization, since it'd take one with lots of spare (or bored) engineering capacity to make huge stone doors that sink into the floor and work thousands of years after they were built.
- Lights that last forever. In Fallout, lights are atomic powered. In Skyrim, I suppose they could be magic torches and sconces. Either way, most of your typical dungeon o' doom is brightly lit.
- Junk everywhere and immortal food. Keeping with the post-apoc thing, you could spend years in either game just collecting cooking utensils, tableware, and empty bottles left behind by long-gone people. Also, the vegetable you just gleaned from some farmer's field is just as apparently fresh as the one that you pulled from a container inside an underground complex sealed up centuries ago.
- Stupid, stupid NPCs. Nobody seems to get that as a wizard/gunner, running ahead of me is pretty much a bad idea for everyone involved.

I'm also noticing that both game series do tend to dislike my playing style which is driven more by finding places on my radar rather than by being told by someone to start a quest chain that leads me to a given area. If there are no locks on the door (or ones that I can't pick), I'll probably stick my nose in and mess up whatever the place was built to do for a given storyline. I can't help it if breaking & entering is more interesting than what a guy on a throne has to tell me about possible opportunities in state-sponsored robbery and killing, right?

Also...the BMMB is infested. Should we nuke Poland, or just their web servers?

"From orbit. It's the only way to be sure."