Eventually ' "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" warbles from a Radiation King radio as the camera pulls back past flickering vacuum tubes, a dashboard hula girl, grab bars, a lunch box, a toy truck, a teddy bear, cracked carriage windows, until you're finally out in the great charcoal ruin of a denuded city. It's an apt enough metaphor for the game's opening moments, formative vignettes that trigger like a shotgun version of and see you born in blood, friended, tested, abandoned, and finally hurled from your underground "sanctuary" into a sterile post-nuclear wilderness.

That moment -- when you step out of a centuries old vault whose digital numeric '101' alludes to the binary insularity of your life thus far -- parallels one in developer 's last game, , the part early going where you emerge from the Imperial City's sewer canals into a sprawling world and the seatbelt suddenly snaps off. It's a birth metaphor, of course, only instead of birch trees and witch grass and glinting ivory colonnades, you're thrust into a wind tossed lunar-scape littered with carbonized trees and wobbling highway stanchions, the rust-mottled lattices of once-buildings bracketed by piles of rock that bulge like geological tumors. There's something indescribably beautiful about all that. Catch the sun flaring as it sets against some junk town with walls and walkways quilted together from sheets of rusting metal and it's hard not to view it somewhat romantically. This really isn't how the end of the world would look (it'd almost certainly be blander and uglier), which turns out to be almost a blessing from a game that might otherwise encourage hardcore Prozac-popping just to muscle through its swathes of grunge-gray and bleached-brown.

But jot this down: This isn't Oblivion, whatever elemental traits the game's inherited as Bethesda's third reworking of the technology. Oh it's got the same view-locked dialogue menus, the talking heads, the camera angles and jerky realtime melee, the foraging through crates and barrels re-imagined as supernumerary toolkits and file cabinets and metal boxes. It's even got the same visual quirks, like collision problems with walls and ground objects when playing in third-person mode, phantom-phasing as people enter or leave cordoned off in their own "load" zones, and bodies that uncouple from the world when positioned over piles of debris and sloping turf.

On the other hand, the game's edgy, menacing soundtrack might a well be antipodal to Oblivion's stately marches and airy leitmotifs. Gone are Oblivion's cascading libraries of wordy books, replaced by scores of scorched and completely illegible tomes, which if you think about it, almost counts as a joke. Your arm-strapped inventory management tool (aka "Pip-Boy 3000") manages to squeeze all your stats and carry metrics into its stylishly monochrome -style screen without sacrificing ease of access or clarity. Oblivion's use-it-or-lose it stats are history, replaced by Fallout's classic skills and perks (minus the cons) distributed manually as you accrue experience points instead of based on the number of times you pull the trigger on a laser rifle or plasma gun. And the game world is finally staffed with static creatures -- no sycophantic spawn pockets that level up with you and tag along wherever you go like murderous groupies.

But here's the difference that matters most: Oblivion was a fantasy world with a fantasy world's problems. Build a magic staff. Gather precious alchemical herbs. Restore the lineage of noble kings. Nobly wander around clapping random demon portals shut and saving the world from giant lava-lathered demigods. The words you're looking for is Wagnerian. And it was.