JimK:  If you do not power through the main storyline of Fallout 3, and instead try to explore all areas of the map, enter all subway tunnels and talk to everyone you meet?  The game will go on for-fucking-ever.  I don’t think it ever ends.  I think that somehow Bethesda has managed to incorporate some kind of time/space bending technology whereupon the longer you play, the longer there is left to play.  It Never. Fucking. Ends.

God bless ‘em.  There is more gameplay packed on this disk than was contained on Orange Box, and that is saying something, but I am getting sick of talking to people and getting shot by the Enclave and walking.  Dear God the walking.  I know it only makes sense in this post-post-post apocalyptic setting.  Fuel would be impossible to come by.  Well…sorta.  See the Enclave have flying machines, and I CAN’T STEAL ONE (yet? Don’t tell me if I get that ability later).  WTF.  Maybe I’m too GTA-trained, but if it exists for an NPC, I should be able to use it.

Anyway…my point was that Fallout 3 never, ever ends.  I suspect that when I have done every side mission that can be done (I ruined a couple of them by, you know, slaughtering everyone in the town), at that point the game will perform some kind of shimmy and pull an entire new game’s worth of new side missions out of the ether and I will never play anything but Fallout 3 again for the rest of my life.  I am now the gaming equivalent of Sisyphus, doomed to reach 99.98% completion before the gods dump more previously unknown content on me, sending me back to 10% again.

I will probably die with this controller in my hand, trying to decide if I should convince someone to give me the item for which I am questing, or maybe just blast their face and take it.  Oh Fallout 3…I wish I could quit you.