playing Fallout 3

I think I reported earlier how Fallout 3 installs ok, starts up ok, and plays ok *until* you get to this point early where your gf has just told you the cops are coming to arrest you. As soon as you exit your room, some script is triggered and the game crashes to the desktop for me.

So I let my son run it a bit on his computer (32-bit) and do some saves, so I could try to run from one of his early saves...which worked just fine.

In one sense, F3 is "Oblivion with guns". Except that I don't think it's as interesting...and my son has already finished the game, in just a few days...apparently when you complete the central quest sequence, the game terminates. Not interesting.

Have had some trouble with it, in terms of mouse-responsiveness, etc. It feels a little jerky in comparison with Big O.

I don't really/yet like the skill-leveling approach. Big O did this well...I.e., if you spend time sneaking, your sneak skill goes up. In F3, you have to get XP in order to level up, and then have skill points to spend to level-up individual skills. So there's little value to sneaking very much.

Son says you can read multiple copies of a skill-book and increase that skill multiple times.

I haven't gone very far yet, but it's not as interesting as Oblivion. It does have a lot of similarities, but the terrain isn't as interesting or variable (at least as far as I've gone). Looks like burned-out wasteland. Which of course it should, but that's all there is. I'd have definitely gone for more of the Wash DC buildings. It's not like that would be hard to do, since you could go photograph the outsides, and paint those results onto the models as wall textures...and a work acquaintance is telling me he knows how to extract a 3D point cloud from an image sequence taken as you drive past a bldg...instant-3D model!