Yeah, that one. I'm given three options of where to look, and the first place I pick… Henry's Hideout or Hideaway or something, can't recall, and the place is infested with Rad Scorpions. I think I'm going to hold off on that and give the Super Duper Mart a try first :p

Ok, I know which one you are talking about now, with the ants. Those things are hard!

I made good progress on it, but the game crashed on me and I had quite a set back there :(

Yeah, it's challenging. For some reason I had better luck with the laser pistol from the supermarket, but ammo is low. Make sure you're eating the Ant nectar from the solider ants before facing down more than one at a time, the fire resistance helps quite a bit.

I haven't had the game crash on me yet. I had it freeze on me for maybe 5-10 seconds once, in VATS, but it was only the once.

It's crashed on me a few times already, but I do tend to save often anyway so normally its not a big deal. It was late and I was getting ready to quit anyway, was just trying to find Marigold Station from Grayditch before I quit.

I've also found the laser pistol to work quite well, particularly on a critical strike that just melts the ants.

I'll have the weekend to try to battle rad scorpion and fire ants, though :p

This was one of the games that I have been waiting for. I promised myself that I would not make any major purchases until I paid off my credit cards (going to happen in the next couple of days) and that means that with the money left over I should be able to purchase my CPU and RAM for my new system. So hopefully by the end of November I'll be set up and ready to play Fallout!

Any lack of forward momentum in the RaM project will be on your heads for reminding me this game is out…. *grin*

Lord knows I haven't accomplished anything on my MUD because of this game :p

Just when I think I might be able to tear away from it for a few nights, I get a new character concept and get hooked all over again!

First thing I ran into on my favorite character was a pack of Talon Company jerks at the supermarket.

A police baton can go a long way…

As can a sniper rifle from a good distance away, waiting for them to pop their head back up. Critical hits are a beautiful thing, though seeing every enemy die in the same explosive way from Bloody Mess gets old after the first 300 kills.

I beg to differ.

What's fun is doing an "uppercut" like maneuver with the sledgehammer and watching their heads fly!

My first/main character is a male, very high karma, very sneaky sharpshooter type.

My second character is a "black widow" type of female, very evil, hand to hand fighter who doesn't know the meaning of sneak. I'm also trying to recruit a lot of people with her. Right now I have Dogmeat and Jericho (decked out in Brotherhood Outcast armor). The game plays very different when you aren't trying to kill things from a distance, but rushing headlong swinging spiked knuckles or a sledgehammer.

Yeah, it offered a pretty different game. It does tend to have that lean towards ranged combat though, much like older fallout titles. Running up on a super mutant who's bringing a minigun up in your direction is never a painless ordeal, when all you have is a sledgehammer.

I've been waiting to see how that works out. I just reached level 4 with my new character and have yet to encounter a super mutant (haven't really crossed the river yet) but I'm eager to see how well my melee/hand to hand holds up.

I'm thinking about stacking the "iron fist" perk as many times as it will let me, and see if I can't make my unarmed damage outpace the melee or ranged weapons available.

Are you supposed to be able to use VATs in melee or unarmed? Is it stat based? I remember in older games you could target body parts with melee and unarmed, I'd like to be able to punch people in the head…

My experience with that is two-fold, number one - you're usually limited to only one or two hits of melee in VATS - especially at higher skills where your attacks have a lot of knock-back. You end up knocking the enemy out of range and then VATS ends.

Also, Melee doesn't seem to scale very well at all, unless you have one of those named super sledges or something, but to be honest I didn't spend a whole lot of time on it.

Edit: One last thing, do not pursue the main quest until you're completely done exploring the world. If you chose to do the main quest, I recommend you stop after you get the power armor (if you're into the power armor). You'll just have to trust me on that.

While manually aiming, you can target specific body parts. More often than not you'll end up crippling the head of a human(oid) enemy before you kill him, with unarmed.

And Tesla armor looks funkyyyyy!