Because my wife is a great human being and fine American, she got me Fallout 4 and a PlayStation 4 for my holiday combo gift. The only problem at the time was that it came to house well before and I was here when the UPS guy left everything outside…in the rain. What can brown do for you? Leave your new gaming system to the fate of the elements, apparently. Luckily, nothing was damaged. Unluckily, I had to wait a month, knowing what I was getting in a kind of psychological torture test, with it somewhere in the house haunting me like the Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe’s classic tale. Another week and I may have started having conversations with it in my head. “Did you sleep well, PlayStation? I’ll see you soon!”
It lived up to everything I hoped for. The graphics are great, the game is possibly one of the largest ever made, and the dark reality of the post-nuclear world is intense…but it’s still a game. I know this because I was getting lit up with bullets in a frenzied battle with some mercenaries and was near death. As the bullets began ripping through my body, I paused, pulled up the Pip Boy and began eating Sugar Bombs cereal and Insta-Mash to get my health back. She commented, “You can just stop it like that and eat? In the middle of that?” Duh! Of course in the middle of a gunfight I can do that. Just like when you’re a kid getting pelted with snowballs – TIMEOUT! TIMEOUT! I have my force field on! OK, that’s not very realistic, but then again neither is getting healthy by cramming your face full of food. If that was the case, I’d be the healthiest I’ve been in a long time right now because I’m fat. I hurt my knee last week changing the kitty litter. The extra beer and nachos I had that night did nothing for me, sadly. In fairness, I didn’t test it on getting shot in the arm.