I have to say, you are the perfect example of what I'm trying to convey here. Your criticisms of Fallout 3 are hilarious. You don't stick to the main quest and just the main quest. No even in the original Fallouts did you do that (and Fallout 1 and 2 would be very short if you did). You are angry because of Chinese manuals in DC? I can buy myself a military manual today and place it in my house. It means nothing.
The original Fallout's radiation is different from the one in our world. The Fallout series is derived from 1950's pop culture, including extra-powerful radiation that mutates people. But you can also say the water is very dirty (I would expect that from the ruins of a city).
The game explains who the Brotherhood of Steel is if you bothered asking around. Power Armor is not too hard to figure out.
The Fallout series constantly refers to atomic bombs, not ICBMs. Remember, the Fallout series is derived from the way people in the 1950's lived and thought. ICBMs weren't around then. But in the Museum of Technology there is a Delta IX that is said to have been fitted with nuclear warheads by the military and all manned flights to the moon using it were canceled.
I don't know what the heck you were playing but there are plenty of good/evil choices and dialog in Fallout 3. There is also a lot of backstory that you have to personally discover.
Shooting with weapons are dependent on stats. It is an RPG, which means statistics management in today's modern gaming. I'm glad Bethesda didn't make the minigames of lockpicking and hacking tediously difficult. And did you bother ramping up the difficulty to Very Hard? It is an easy game later on but that is much later on.
I can understand if you don't like the way the game is played but the complaints you brought up are silly, with all due respect. Fallout 3 is also very pathetic as a shooter.

And I don't understand you. Radiation is radiation no matter what, and chinese CQC manuals written in chinese in middle of DC in time of war is ridiculous too. I bet on that in 50's they already known that water cannot be radioactive. On ohter side bethesda should put a warning on box " WEIRD SCIENCE MUMBOJUMBO INCLUDED" I have some education, i know how to read and write, so why should I forget all this just to admit that fallout is ubergame ? If I know something which is part of basic education, then i will stick to it. I have some common sence, USA have power armors, laser rifles, plasma rifles, they are using gauss acceleration technology (quite a nice piece of technology if you ask me, i just need better capacitators this time) then how could china get "fat boy" type A-bombs to DC? They asked USA to shut down their air defence ?
Or another holes in logic in this game - to disable A-bomb I need explosives 25, to disable shotgun trap i need 65 ? Why then we have hi-schools, if small kid can deactivate so complex technology as A-bomb.
Have you tried any other RPG ? Mass Effect for example ? Try just main story and it will take you at least 20 hours of gameplay, you have lots of text on backstory and even more story related information. Try KOTOR, KOTOR2 both have long mainstory. Even stupid datadisk for oblivion - shivering isles took me longer to finish main story line than fallout. Every game which I bought this year had longer gamplay time in main storyline than fallout (and lots of them was longer even including sidequests), you cannot deny it. Or Bioshock, it is shooter and it have better RPG "feeling" than fallout 3.
regarding lockpicks - with bethesda system all I need is lockpick 100% and thats all, instead of other games where in general every percent have influence, but maybe in bethesda they were thinging too much about hyping the game and money, so they were out of time to work on this game. BTW what were they doing all those years, they had engine, they have know-how. Even postapo feeling is destroyed by bethesda. 200 years old cars with fusion engines which could be encased in something really safe can explode after few shots? I hade kiddish speech and 133T but...ROFL. F3 makes me hapy in first minute, but in second one it slaps me in my face with it's stupidity. Totaly free game and most of time i have just two choices good/evil in basis? Sooo uber super cool killing freeform game and i CANNOT kill children ? So great game and after few hours I have plasma, flamer, lvl 20 and nothing can stop me ?
I am sorry, but I am PC user, not some console kid w/o brain, i require games which requires me to use my brain, not my basis instinct (kill, eat, shit, sleep). I do not need game holding my hand and telling me what to do exactly. I am looking for dragon age, then all people like you can tell me again how much RPG fallout is.
//edit: and i am still looking at this game as on new game, not as fallout fan, in which case it 2/10 game for me

Dude... um... wow... I'm kind've at a loss for words here... I'll just give you a Merry Christmas and leave it at that... =/

merry christmas to you too :)

Holy hell, Sykop4th, you just negated almost every single point you tried to make in a single post. I'm full of arrogance? You must be the god of hypocrisy and befuddled meanderings then.
Read up on Fallout lore before you start making personal attacks, your arguments are so lax with information and just assaulting me saying that I need "hand holding" as a defense mechanism for the fact that Bethesda is horrible at exposition and staying relevant to canon.
EDIT: I just have to mention the absurdity of your statement that people on the east coast made Jet because they had no knowledge of it on the west coast. Do you realize that the possibility of that happening is so incredibly puny it makes my mind reel?

Whatever you say, Nixon. I'm through arguing with megalomaniacs. Have a merry Christmas. ^^

In Fallout 1 and 2, are Ghouls created strictly by radiation? As I understood it, Ghouls were the result of exposure to both radiation and the FEV virus. (i.e. radiation alone does not produce Ghouls).
One of the many many things that bothered me about Fallout 3's story was that Moira instantly became a Ghoul after coming in contact with the radiation from the nuclear blast that destroyed Megaton (no exposure to FEV is implied in any way).
Also, did the entire idea behind Project Purity strike anyone else as asinine? The GECK is a one shot deal. The citizens of Vault 8 used the GECK to create Vault City, not to sustain it. They still required Vault 8 to generate power. How would it be used to permanently purify water? And what is the point of purifying water without purifying everything around the water as well? Even if the water is initially pure, radiation would seep back into it due to erosion of the land around the water. And why, when it is activated, is the control room flooded with radiation? Why is the Vault 101 Dweller not able to use Rad X and Rad Away to reduce the effects and escape the way Col. Autumn did? I found the forced sacrifice extremely trite and obnoxious.
Also, if President Eden and Col. Autumn didn't agree concerning the use of the FEV virus in Project Purity, what reason would Autumn have for opposing the Vault 101 Dweller when he returned to activate it (provided of course that 101 doesn't intend to use the FEV vial)?
The more I play Fallout 3, the more disappointed with the story I become. Not only because it fails to adhere to many fundamental plot devices of the Fallout universe, but also because many of the unique plot devices it uses are nonsensical and poorly explained (if at all).
On a less serious note, how many of you, upon entering Little Lamplight, wished more than anything that Fallout 3 allowed you to kill children? For me, that was the most obnoxious, nonsensical location in all of Fallout 3.

No, ghouls are only created via radiation, the ghouls at Necropolis, for example, substantiate that fact. They were all victims of radiation in Vault 12, the door of which didn't close entirely, allowing radiation to seep in and transform the residents into ghouls.
Harold isn't a "real" ghoul, he's an FEV mutant, he just happens to look like a ghoul as a mixture of the fact that he was somewhat of a prime normal and he didn't have full blown contact with the FEV.
Although Moira still doesn't make much sense in that case, as far as I know, becoming a ghoul is a gradual process, instantaneous accumulation of high amounts of radiation leads to death. Most ghouls are similar to those that resided in Vault 12, mutated slowly over time by a persistent intake of radiation.
As for Project Purity, it was an extremely ham fisted way to incorporate elements from both of the original Fallouts, Project Purity itself is just a glorified Water Chip, and the GECK I assume was shoved in because of its familiar nature, not to say anything of how its function was entirely altered.
I assume that Autumn was certain that the player was going along with the President's plan, that's the vibe I got, of course, he doesn't make it entirely clear. But that's Bethesda's writing for you.

yea i'm a little confused as to why they didn't just use the GECK instead of using the GECK to create a water purifier... if the GECK could create a utopia in the wasteland, I'm assuming it could purify the landscape of its radiation, thereby doing the job of the purifier as well as cleansing the land. Don't really get it myself.
F3 did do a pretty poor job of explaining the back story of the world. I've played F1 and F2, so I didn't even think about it, but looking back I could see how newbies to the Fallout world would have no idea what some of the factions were or what they were about.
My main complaint about F3 is still the fact that raiders utterly outnumber any other group in the wasteland. That many raiders could not exist on the meager supplies if all they did was slaughter each other. With that many utterly hostile factions that close to each other, the DC wasteland should be pretty much void of life as they have either 1) killed each other off 2) starved to death since there isn't enough supplies to go around.
Would have been nice to meet more friendly, or at least not automatically homocidal, people in the wasteland. I don't mind hostile in the way of 'don't get near me or i'll blow you up' hostile, but straight out 'I will kill you' is just stupid.
Oh, and wasn't Jet created from brahmin dung or something? All Myron did was discover it on accident, then he experimented on slaves until he got the right ratio (lots of slaves died in the process). He was no genius, he was just smart enough to keep trying until he succeeded by blind luck and had enough people to kill to get there.

According to Fallout canon (at least from FO2), the GECK only has the ability to transform previously arid and inhospitable land into something that is able to support plant life for farming. It's not on an excessively large scale, it was about enough to establish Vault City (which originated from Vault 8). Since Vault City only takes up a small portion of land in Fallout 2, it's safe to assume that the GECK is only viable for enabling the growth of contained communities of a certain size.
Since Vault 8's population numbered in the hundreds, it would be enough to provide the growth and agriculture for a small city.
Fallout 3 pulled a major retcon with the GECK, it's more of a terraforming device, which completely alters a certain radius of land into fertile soil. Of course, it does this by making a big blue explosion that possibly kills everything nearby, which I guess is on par with what we would should expect from Bethesda.
There are a few ways to explain the differences between FO2's GECK and FO3's GECK, but none of them are presented in the game and are simply bits of speculation fabricated by people musing of the possibilities.
This is one of my major gripes with the game, there's little to no exposition. Telling some interesting physical stories by just exploring the environments and looking around is fine, it's welcome in fact, but Bethesda seems to have thought that it would be enough to completely do away with extensive exposition. People wouldn't even really have to read the backstory if they didn't want to, Bethesda themselves set up a great system for providing information through computer terminals, it's just sad that they didn't even consider delving into even a tiny bit of that potential.
What we get now is a very amatuerish product. It's like Silent Hill Origins, it wasn't developed by Team Silent, it's very different from the other games in the series, and it has this incredibly explicit "fan fiction" feel about it. Fallout 3 suffers from that same affliction, if not worse.
Most people would attribute this to "game logic", of course, that's a hollow excuse with little to no meaning. The only way for Bethesda to create compelling environments with enough for the player to shoot at was to fill it with a plethora of enemies.
If they hadn't done so, the game most likely would've been far more tedious than it already is. Of course, this is one of the problems that their transposition of Fallout to Oblivion caused, Fallout's setting is not suited for Bethesda's gameplay.
Jet is cultivated on Brahmin dung. Jet is essentially a form of specially engineered mushrooms that is later harvested and processed with several other ingredients in order to produce the most potent result. Myron IS extremely intelligent, his dialog with a high science character makes that quite evident, he understands everything about Jet, the exact science of it, down to the reasoning as to why it's so addictive in the first place.
However, Myron was trying to perfect the drug, to increase the potency of the drug so that addiction would be absolute, he wanted to make sure that anyone that took the drug would stay on the drug with no way of coming off, he accomplished that. Of course, in the process, it took hundreds of lives, shifting between "it's a bit too strong" and "it's not strong enough", but what does a dick like Myron care about that?
Jet is an incredibly lethal drug if not created properly, that's why the Mordinos needed Myron in the first place.
EDIT: I forgot to mention that in FO2 the GECK only possessed various sorts of seeds and chemicals that could transform arid soil into usable soil.