Flush with interactive videos of sinister ticket-taking robots and portable nukes blasting radscorpions into puffs of mushroom smoke, Bethesda's official Fallout 3 tie-in media site PrepareForTheFuture[dot]com is now officially live. Park your browsers on the Flash-tastic site and you'll find a dilapidated TV set aka "Radiation King" perched in the grungy rubble of a bleakly lit Washingtonian city.
Punch the keypad on the right of the set and you can cycle through nine deliciously sardonic clips (button number '7' appears to be missing) rendered in crackly black and white. Tim Cain's beloved Fallout series of PC roleplaying games brilliantly built on all those blithe government-produced 1950s "duck and cover" jingles, then juxtaposed them with incredibly violent scenes, like people on their knees getting their heads blown off by chummy "peacekeeping" soldiers.
Bethesda's done a terrific job capturing the feel of those clips, while catapulting the whole thing into the 21st century (can you believe the last two Fallout RPGs arrived in 1997 and 1998?). Take "The Story of Too Much," where a sugary narrator reassures us that "some things are good in small quantities, like cookies, candy, and puppies...as you may know, much of our electricity comes from nuclear energy...in small quantities, this fantastic friends keeps us safe, clean, and happy!" Cut to an alphabetical rundown of some of Fallout 3's bestiary, from Bloatflies to Mirelurks to Radscorpions.
Other videos let you sample aspects of the gameplay, answer sample questions from a G.O.A.T. (General Occupational Aptitude Test) and even poke around the V.A.T.S. (Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System) interface. Just make sure you wait until the intro video plays, because the interfaces load afterward.
