That brings me to combat and Fallout 3's controversially ported (from Fallout's 1 and 2) V.A.T.S. mechanic, which couples "action points" to a targeting system and affords you time to pause and ponder what you're after from a matrix of blinking body parts. Simple logic applies here, so head shots trump body shots, limb shots can cripple, and aiming at an enemy's weapon can actually spring it from their grip. While that sounds nice in theory, however, it tends to be dull and unimaginative in practice. Blame the game's dodgy enemy intelligence which hugs cover like you'd hug a zombie and only occasionally knows enough to kick up its heels and run. The temptation is therefore to power through with fast-kill head shots while dancing just out of range or from behind the sort of safe points the enemy seems totally blind to. It's a simple fact: When gamers spot shortcuts, whether by hook or by crook, they tend to take them.

A workaround of sorts is to dial the difficulty setting up, which makes chipping away at enemy health bars akin to jackhammering slabs of rock into pebbles. This is where the game's super mutants and slobbering bear-things and leering demonic reptiles regularly pound you into blood sausage because they've simply got more time to. You'll have to respond by employing smarter tactics like arm shots to momentarily knock weapons down or leg shots to hobble dogged sprinters and give yourself those precious seconds essential to finish them off. It's actually enough to keep things interesting roughly three-quarters of the time. The downside's that battles look a little silly, as adamantine combatants square off just yards apart, taking turns plugging each other with guns that could just as soon pick each others' noses as pulverize heads that explode like grenades inside of cantaloupes.

Speaking of, ? Think gruesome on a whole new plane of existence, with a camera that zooms on skulls and torsos as they split like grisly piñatas whacked with sledgehammers (and sometimes sledgehammers are literally involved). Heads pop off like thumb-flicked quarters and bodies disintegrate into giblets caught in slowed down Brownian motion or splatter-porn in zero-G-vision. I won't even try to describe what happens if you take Fallout 3's version of the original two games' "bloody mess" trait which ensures "you always see the worst way a person can die."

The only problem here, if that's even the right way to frame this, is that the game has a fairly subdued sense of humor and takes itself pretty seriously. There's a thin undercurrent of satire, but so attenuated from what it was in the originals that it's got players claiming the game's entirely joke free (it's not). On top of that, it's a thematically dark games, maybe even dark, whereas F was content to fire off campy non sequiturs like an impromptu encounter with the in the middle of the desert.

Think of the scene in the movie Pulp Fiction after someone gets shot in the back seat of the car, then imagine the conversation between Vincent and Jules dead somber, without lines like "Everytime my fingers touch brain I'm Superfly TNT, I'm the Guns of the Navarone...in fact, what the f*** am I doing in the back? You're the motherf***** who should be on brain detail!" It wouldn't work. It might even seem morbid or voyeuristic, and for the wrong reasons. The original Fallout games were hardly Tarantino films, but they somehow had the blood and comedy ratio down. In Fallout 3, the ballistic splatter is on the one evokes a sort laugh-and-cringe reaction, while on the other making you wonder just why that's so.