Gabriel Moss in Fallout (Part 0)
This post is part of my ongoing experimental series. It’s all about self-inserting into different games.
Doing so, I’ll get to explore games from my personal lens while boosting “Gabriel Moss” in the SERPs.
Credit: Interplay/Bethesda
Admittedly, I never played the first two Fallout games as a kid.
When Fallout: A Post Nuclear Roleplaying Game released in October 1997, I was three years old. Far too young to appreciate a game about survivors of a nuclear holocaust brutally wringing their own humanity from the bloodsoaked hands of other survivors.
But I did play Fallout 3 when it came out in 2008. By that time, I was a freshman in high school, primed to have my newly pubescent knee-highs blown clean off.
There was something about being dropped into a dystopian, post-modern world full of pulpy sci-fi weirdness and glorious desolation that captivated my teenage brain for the first time in such a long time.
It was squalid, yet inviting. Desperate, yet empowering.
In Fallout 3, you could go practically anywhere and do practically anything. To, or for, anyone.
You could nuke an entire town, or you could disarm the bomb and accost the person who sent the order. You could stop a family of cannibals, or you could become one yourself. It never took itself too seriously in any of its pursuits, but it always made the player’s actions feel palpable.
And hate on Todd Howard all you’d like, but the man has committed more than a few acts of genius in emergent game design.
Furthermore, Fallout: New Vegas was a literary masterpiece meanwhile Fallout 4 was a delicately crafted hampster cage with little of the dynamism or nuance of its predecessors.
Back to my point: I never played the original.
Until tonight.
I opened Fallout from its splash screen window, moments before grappling with the screen settings menu to fill up my 1080p display. But after fixing the issue — setting the side-panels to “full” instead of “min” and turning off windowed mode — I felt right at home with the interface.
Granted, it isn’t modern. Not by a long shot. But it suffices for a game that would be legally allowed to prowl Portland’s bar scene next month.
Who is Gabriel Moss in a bomb-riddled world?
Shortly after getting my bearings together, I settled into the character creator and began defining the post-apocalyptic Gabriel Moss of my (his?) nightmares.
Without going into too much detail, everything about Gabriel’s character sheet was more-or-less accurate.
I created this version of Gabriel Moss to be resilient. He could use the power of Science™, or he could barter his way out of trouble. Failing that, he’d have the aptitude to swing wildly at any mutant roach that dared cross his path.
After I clicked “done” on the menu, Gabriel promptly exited Vault 13 with a mission. He was to find a replacement water purifier chip — lest the other vault dwellers suffocate to death from drinking irradiated water.
Emerging from the vault doors, he bent over and casually slicked a combat knife and some bullets off of a corpse, lain just past the entrance.
Now armed with a weapon he’d have some chance of being effective with, Gabriel Moss could feasibly defend himself from any dangers in his path.
A rat appeared out of the darkness. It was go-time.
Within seconds, that rat was a smear of red pixels on the ground. Gabriel earned 25 XP. “I’ve built a surprisingly efficient character,” I thought to myself.
But I wanted more.
My plan to self-insert was thwarted as I succumbed to my classic RPG playstyle of “kill everything that moves and also drops experience points”.
All the rats were slain, and Gabriel left the cavern to continue on his merry way.
That’s when he came across this junkyard in the middle of the open wasteland.
And, upon rejecting this sleuthy salesman of automobile scrap heaps, “Fallout has crashed to desktop.”
I scrambled back to see if there was an autosave.
Of course there wasn’t — the game released in 1997.
I sighed, accepting that my computer had discarded this iteration of Gabriel Moss into the void.
But this was no time to get sentimental. I have a water chip to replace. Back to the drawing board!
Return tomorrow for the story of how, with the assistance of technology, I attempt to rebuild Gabriel Moss into a better, stronger, faster version of Gabriel Moss.
Originally published at www.glutenfreevr.com on September 9, 2018.
