Does Anyone Still Care About Fallout 3?

Of course there are people out there who still care about Fallout 3. Somewhere in a basement there is a person who has put a facade on his/her door so that it looks like the giant gear protecting the entrance to the Vaults. That person will always care. But I'm not sure that game holds any real sway over me.

I distinctly remember finishing Fallout 3 proper after exploring everything there was in that world with a mild sense of relief. It was cool. It was huge. It was glitchy as hell and it froze too much. Now though there are add-ons available for the PS3 and I could not help buying Broken Steel the day I accidentally found it on the PSN Store. Months after it was supposed to be released it showed up incognito, and low and behold, the next week Operation Anchorage and The Pit popped up as well. This brings up some faults with PSN that are best left for another time.

Regardless, once I started playing the expansion it was hard to remember why I loved the original game so much in the first place. I remembered it being full of glitches, but DAMN! In the first five minutes of playing I was stuck in place after a scripted scene and had to reload. seven minutes later I got in a firefight and the game froze in VATS. And had I ever thought this game was pretty? The whole purchase looked like a mistake.

But then a funny thing happened: I started having fun. It took some time for the mental gears to shift into place but when they did it all came back to me. The game itself is laughably broken at times. And it's so big it's hard to immerse oneself too deeply in any one area, let alone all areas. But there's a certain something about that game outside of all it's pieces. Something that makes all those jagged shards fit together into a really amazing whole. It feels animate. Or something close to that. Something good.

So in spite of everything I was expecting I still care about Fallout 3.