I did eventually beat the opening quest of Fallout. I went to Necropolis, talked with the ghouls, and was successful in retrieving their water chip. On the way out I had this pang of guilt about leaving the ghouls with no running water. This begs the question, at least in my mind, what are the ethics involved in a choice like this? Realistically I could give less of a shit about them. I used them as a tool to level; killing everyone that wasn’t basically a named character on my way through. Even with that, though, I still felt this weird guilt about leaving them to die. In the end, I searched out and found the “junk” and used it to repair their water pump so they wouldn’t all die (again?) of dehydration. Pitiful.

This also bring up a point: when have you actually “beaten” a game? Like Fallout 3 for example, once you complete the main quest line to find your dad without any of the DLC you are done. The game is over. The DLC basically re-activates you and lets you continue on after that; something I found quite refreshing. With the original Fallout I always assumed that the game was over when I took the water chip back, but that could not be farther from the truth. Now, the damn overseer wants me to go and destroy some lab where someone is creating mutants. This guy really needs to keep his hands out of everyone elses’ business. I know from reading ahead that mutants will apparently attack the vault if I don’t do this, so what choice do I have? I guess I’m going out to destroy a lab. Ugh.