MTV Cribs - Sanctuary Hills Edition

It's no surprise to anyone that I love Fallout 4. I'm not a casual gamer - I don't dip in and out of games, I don't impulse buy, and I squeezed every drop of gameplay I can out of games. So the games I go for tend to be those I know in advance I'll love (Assassin's Creed can stay out of this for now).

So, I love Fallout 4. But, even though we've had it since Christmas, I've not completed the main mission yet. I've spent my time tooling around doing side quests, accumulating companions, and establishing settlements. Oh, such settlements.

In fact, the one thing that's consistently disappointed me in the Fallout series is the main storyline. The denouement of Fallout 3 irked me, I disliked the whole business in New Vegas where we had to pick sides in order to progress, and in Fallout 4... well, it's telling that I've halted my game before the end of Act I, preferring instead to build towns in mirelurk-infested swamps.

Here are five things I love-love-love about the game:

1. VATS

I suck at first-person shooters; no one's surprised by this either. My coordination's rubbish, I have no spacial awareness, and the controls of anything more complicated than Llamatron confound me. So HURRAH for a game that lets the good players use iron sights and the sucky players use a dedicated targeting system (an opinionated targeting system, I've realised - what internal criteria lets it decide whether a certain enemy is "Raider Scum" or "Psycho Raider" or whatever? How prejudiced.)

Without VATS, I wouldn't enjoy Fallout nearly so much. I like dumping all my bonuses into intelligence / charisma and not having it significantly hamper my character. I'm certain I never progressed far with Skyrim, in contrast, simply because I was rubbish at combat.

2. Watercooler moments

This is what Fallout (and Skyrim) does best, isn't it? When four or five people get together and start comparing stories:

My sister accidentally seducing her companion in a crowded submarine when all she'd wanted to do was have a nap. My son dressing Jun Long in the Grognak costume to cheer him up. The Fat Man my husband modded to fire eight nukes at a time, with which he frequently blows himself up.

Some of the moments are scripted (the teddy bear reading on the toilet! The sentry monkeys in the insane asylum! The Witchcraft Museum filled with nope!) but the best are the random stupid things you do, then immediately run to tell someone about.

3. Settlements

Not so much my own settlements, which are functional and un-ridiculous (with the exception of Sanctuary Hills, see below), but everyone else's. My husband (who never got into Minecraft or Sim City or anything like that) freakin' loves building settlements. His towns have market places and bars with disco balls and dining rooms with play areas for the kids, and all his walls line up and all the lights work. He has towns you could live in. I have two shacks and a confused brahmin wandering through the vegetables.

Every time my husband logs in, he has to give you the tour of his latest settlement. God love him, he is so proud.

4. Trolling

Something we discovered along with the husband's keen love of virtual towns is his equally keen love of physics. Or, more accurately, his vast annoyance when you ignore the gravity and, say, build a stairway in the middle of your settlement leading to a shack balanced on nothing. He twitches every time I walk past it.

Logging in on someone else's save is also popular. I changed Jacob's username to Jaybum, he changed mine to TitsMcGee. I removed his power armour, put him in a dress and selected TAKE ALL from his workbench. He built another staircase in the middle of Sanctuary, put a platform at the top, stood my character on the platform, then removed the staircase so I was left balancing fifty feet in the air with no way to get down. He was careful to take off my power armour first so I couldn't jump, and to place the fast travel pad up on the platform so I couldn't fast travel to the ground.

I am currently plotting revenge.

5. How much we care

Everyone else in my extended family has played the main mission, so when they want to discuss it, they go up to the bathroom, shut the door then complain in overexcited whispers. When the husband puts an extension on his swamp-mansion, he calls us to come look. We giggle to ourselves when someone is strolling unawares towards a queen mirelurk. We complain about our favourite companions. We've each picked a different faction to support, and complain greatly about them too.

We love this game.

The reasons we love it, sadly, have little to do with the main storyline. We've found our own fun. Which is great in one way, but I'm sad that the story itself hasn't captured us. And, I'll be honest, even though we love this game, we don't love it as much as we could. I'm not invested in anyone like I was with Boone, for example. Or even with Charon.

But then again, I haven't finished the game. Maybe it'll change my mind yet.

practice

This is something you'll know if you're a musician, or have ever tried living with a musician:

Practice is a sonovabitch.

My husband plays the guitar. Plays it pretty well, in my slightly-biased opinion. He's owned his guitar since he was young but it's only in the last few years that he's started practicing properly. Like everyone, he started out with three chords and Green Day's Time of Your Life; two years later he has a dozen chords and maybe twenty songs (of varying difficulties and competencies). He has calluses and is always losing his plectrums. So, he's a guitarist, basically.

(I also maintain the fiction that his guitar infuriates me. I'm always accidentally kicking it or knocking it over or spilling coffee on it. Actually I quite like it. Shh, don't tell.)

Anyway, the point is that my husband didn't become amazing at guitaring overnight. There were days and weeks and months of Time of Your Life and scales and bloody Tenacious D and failed bar chords. There's the "Does this sound in tune?" question every day (twice a day if I've kicked the guitar recently). There was nearly the loss of an eye whilst replacing an A string.

But he's stuck at it, and over the days-weeks-months there's been gradual but obvious improvement. And he's still practicing. Every day, in the free moments while waiting for me to get ready to go out, or while running the bath for our youngest, or when I'm watching TV (see, the annoyance is mutual). And he's still getting better, every day.

Practice is a bastard. But sadly, it's a necessary bastard.