I have now played one hour of Fallout 4

Granted, most of this time was spent on a really choppy framerate at low graphics quality because I, being a moron, did not have my computer set up properly. And by "did not have my computer set up properly," I mean "I plugged the monitor into the motherboard instead of the video card."

So, anyway

My character can finally aim!


This is huge. In neither Fallout 3 nor Fallout New Vegas are you actually capable of hitting anything not directly in front of you. This is an extremely obnoxious problem under any circumstance, and especially awful in a game where resources, such as, oh, say, ammunition, are extremely scarce. (Confession: I have cheated scads of ammo into my inventory just to finish the f*cking game.) No more. In Fallout 4, my character has finally learned how to shoot straight. It is wonderful.

And, yes, I get that her abject failure to aim was tied into the SPECIAL system, but... no, it wasn't. I had 9 Perception in 3, New Vegas, and now 4, and only in 4 can she reliably hit anything.

Yes, she. Protip: always play Bethesda games as a female. There's a really good chance there's a perk somewhere in there that lets you do more damage to the opposite sex, and enemy mooks tend to be men. Also, in 3, the Black Widow perk leads to an utterly hilarious dialogue option at the first town you visit.

Hey, speaking of the first town you visit, this game's tutorial is short. Like, really short. Like, half an hour, tops (and I spent probably five minutes of that dicking around trying to figure out what was wrong with my graphics settings because the framerate was awful - see above). In fact, Bethesda seems to kind of be on top of this whole notion that video games are not interactive movies. (Aside from Daggerfall, of course, and confession time again: I have never made it out of Daggerfall's tutorial dungeon!) Morrowind didn't have a tutorial dungeon, Oblivion and Skyrim's tutorials were rather short, Fallout 3's was a bit of a drag. But compare that to some of the other games I've played recently. Saints Row: The Third made you do three missions before letting you sandbox. Saints Row IV had, what, four? Mass Effect 3, probably the worst culprit of the lot, runs for nearly two hours before letting you control your ship.

Well, it's not all sunshine and radiation-soaked roses, alas. There are some flaws in this game. The control scheme is completely gonked compared to the previous one, so prepare to waste your stimpacks thinking you're doing something else. If you're in first-person mode, forget trying to aim; your crosshairs disappear and you have to use the gun's sights. Finally, a lot of the music is recycled from the previous game. Now, while mowing down raiders to the tune of "Civilization" will never get old, it does strain credulity to suggest that a disc jockey in Boston was able to recover the same exact songs as a DJ in DC.

Also, thank Atom my dog cannot die, as the thing seems to insist on jumping in front of my attacks with a zeal not even Lydia could match.