Fallout 3

I recently got a new computer, or rather, I recently got a big pile of computer parts, which I have assembled into a working computer. (Hooray!) It's quite fast, especially compared to our last computer, which was around four years old.

One of the perks of getting this new computer was finally being able to play some up-to-date games. With this in mind, I purchased two new games: King's Bounty (an updated version of the original classic which I adored) and Fallout 3. I love the new King's Bounty - it's simple, colourful, fun, and highly addictive. I've already overdosed on it.

As for Fallout 3, I ran into trouble right off the bat. I installed it and patched it successfully, but as soon as I tried to select "New Game", it crashed, and Vista said it had no idea what was going on. I tried reinstalling, I tried running it with less graphics/sound, I tried a bunch of stuff. Then I thought to check to see if anyone else had this problem - and boy, had they! Lots and lots of people have been having this problem, and it looked like none of the reported fixes worked for everyone. There were hints on installing new codecs, tweaking video drivers, running in windowed mode, running without sound, renaming dll files... all sorts of nonsense, none of which worked for me.

Finally, I stumbled upon this post, which accurately described my problem and the solution to fix it. The problem was specific to my ASUS graphics card, and the software that came with it - for whatever reason, if you were running the software that monitors your graphics card, everything blows up. You just uninstall the monitoring software, reinstall the drivers, and everything is shiny!

And now that it's shiny, let me say how fun Fallout 3 is! Yay, I'm so glad I kept trying and didn't just return it to the store in a grumpy huff! I can see I'm going to enjoy hours of entertainment, beating up giant cockroaches with a baseball bat. And maybe there'll even be more...