By contrast, Fallout 3's "capital wasteland" which extends around the remains of cherished structures like the Washington Monument and Arlington Library and Jefferson Memorial hits much closer to home. who thought Bethesda's marketing poster of the Washington Monument in tatters surrounded by "ravaged" American flags was in poor taste may have been overreacting, but the reaction encapsulates precisely what makes Fallout 3 unique: Where Oblivion whisked you off to another world, Fallout 3 brings its not-so-other world home to you.

It's a world that comes disturbingly alive in the breathless spaces out amongst the nothingness that conceals feral dogs and giant mutant scorpions and deranged sendups. You hear it in the crackling radio broadcasts picked up by the Pip-Boy 3000 and the jingoist jeremiads of a faintly Kennedy-like entity who intercuts his broadcasts with "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." It's part of the chilling, bewildering surreality of listening to Billie Holiday's "Easy Living" or The Ink Spots' "Maybe" as you wander between parks and abandoned science labs like Snowman in Margaret Atwood's with nothing but decaying water towers and tilting power poles as reference points. Are the voices on the radio real or imaginary? Intelligently looped by live bodies or simply tenacious recordings? The answers are there, if you want them.

Cobbling together a living meted out in Nuka-Cola bottle caps (America's post-apocalyptic currency and the drink of choice for vault dwellers) is risky business as you navigate derelict minefields and scavenge frequently not-empty houses and schools and factories for fire-hose nozzles and surgical tubing, tweezers and cigarettes, leaf blowers and little tubes of wonder glue. The capital wasteland's a constellation of bygone wonders, and whether you're building bottle cap mines out of soda-pop tops or slipping rail spikes into the business end of rifles you've improvised from scratch, everything is eventually worth something to someone. The game has cash holes if you want to waste money fawning over your junk flat, but it's better spent keeping weapons in tip-top shape and your invisible bandoliers replete with spare ammo.

Just scraping by can feel like rolling boulders up mountains, which is where Bethesda's intuitive understanding of how players weigh options and test hypotheticals or scrabble for their limits pays dividends. It's also Bethesda's way of sneaking in the pros-and-cons it chose to drop from character perks. Food and water which heal you while slowly irradiating your body are surprisingly available but offer different ratios of helpful to harmful. Toilets are terrible, rivers are better, and sinks are best. Pop a pill and you can reduce your radiation. Or pay a doctor to. Or avoid combat (more of an option later in the game when you have companions who'll step up while you stand back). Or use lots and lots of stimpacks. Or wear different types of clothes and armor which shield you from different sorts of negatives. Or just run away and get to a bed to sleep that flesh wound or crippled limb off.

If you do choose to fight, and most people will, you're going to need guns and lots and lots of bullets, which are almost a secondary currency unto themselves here. Whatever your preference -- small, large, or energy-based weapons -- it often takes a dozen hits to put an enemy down. By the time my pick of the game's four endings faded to credits with half the total possible quests completed and 42 hours on the clock, I'd killed some 300 people and creatures. Some in less mundane ways than others, but even the least interesting and rudimentary seeming ammo can be precious when you're three levels underground and cornered, turning up in bundles of a dozen or less if it turns up at all. This is where competence hacking computers to open safes or wiggling bobby pins around in keyholes to spring locks on ammo boxes becomes essential, not to mention diverting entertainments in their own right.