You've also possibly heard that the main story's ending is awful, and to be perfectly honest, yeah, it's a problem -- not even a choice so much as a gun to your head and an irrelevant cutscene that pays shallow homage to the hell you've scrabbled through. And when it ends, it really ends. No continues or trying up unfinished business or pushing through to the game's level 20 cap.

There's an easy solution, of course: Don't finish the game. There's so much more to do anyway before you chamber yourself like a bullet and pull the trigger on the epically anticlimactic and frankly bewildering finale. So don't do it. That ending will wait, and your appreciation for the game will be better for it.

But now I'm dithering, because in the end, Fallout 3 is really more about moments spent hunkered under paint-blistered girders propping up a Red Rocket gas station next to a sputtering Nuka-Cola vending machine taking shots at snarling mutants while The Andrew Sisters and Danny Kaye croon "Bongo, bongo, bongo, I don't wanna leave the Congo" over your Pip Boy. It's spying birds circling like vultures over cities and wondering whether they're ciphers for something else, something hidden. It's standing in the gloomy miasma of Megaton's dual spotlights at twilight, or following Lucky Harith's pack brahmin around the capital wasteland, getting into trouble and sometimes not getting back out again.

Did I mention the kid in the cave who wants boxes of Sugar Bombs? The guy who wants me to detonate a nuke? Someone's telling me to check the Potomac, that there's a scribe paying dearly for vintage books. And last I heard, there's a conclave of ghouls living out there, somewhere, in the hills and cities.

PCW Score: 90%