Fallout 3 was a huge surprise to me when I saw it showcased on X-Play during its E3 coverage back in 2008. What the heck is this game and where are the other two? I never heard of this franchise before since I’ve always been a console gamer and paid little to no mind when it came to the PC crowd. So even though I had little knowledge of the overall series I picked up Fallout 3 as a late birthday present and boy was I hooked. I loved it so much that I even tracked down Mac compatible copies of Fallout and Fallout 2. They’re fine, but a bit archaic compared to Fallout 3. That doesn’t mean I think they’re bad, but they’re not as easy to jump into nowadays.

Point is, I became a Fallout fanatic in 2008 and have remained one since. I've stuck with it even though New Vegas was a buggy nightmare that literally had to be patched in order to finish the game. I wasn't hot on Fallout 4, but it was still good. I enjoy them all even with the logic of the franchise making little to no sense. I mean how can a tin can encumber me and for that matter where does all your precious junk, I mean loot, go? Why is the world so dull and gray? Why is the A.I. so bad? My questions are numerous and thankfully I found some comics to poke some logic holes into Fallout.

25 Bad Dog!

Dogmeat is a useful companion in the Fallout series. In Fallout 4 one of his abilities is to randomly find stuff he can then drop in front of you. So he must have a good nose right? I mean he is a German Shepherd. Why doesn’t your character just tell him to find your child by sniffing some clothing? Well it’s a bit complicated and it is a bit of spoiler, but let’s just say your boy would be impossible to smell. Regardless of which, when I need some loot to craft, the last thing I want is a child running around. That would have been a funny Easter egg though if you could somehow beat the game really quick by telling Dogmeat to find him.

24 Finger Guns

Fallout 4 is jam-packed with weapons, be it long ranged or melee. Weapons can even be tinkered with. You could add an extra magazine or a larger scope. This is all well and good, but do you know what the most powerful weapon in the game is? It’s your tongue. If you put enough time and effort into your charisma and language skills, there’s not an enemy that could stand against you. Computers, doors, and other gadgets would bow to your whim. It’s kind of impossible to completely go passive with a silver tongue, as monsters aren’t willing to listen. It helps get you out of a lot of sticky situations with crazy survivors though. And that’s the power of a finger gun loaded with an insult!

23 Master Of Puppets

This is an officially sanctioned Fallout comic that Penny Arcade drew for Bethesda. Suffice it to say, it’s much longer than this. The comic is about twenty panels long and they are all roughly the same size as this. It basically tells the tale of Vault 77, which is home to one-survivor accompanied by a box of hand puppets. They’re not sentient. This guy is just crazy. Think of him like Mr. Garrison and Mr. Hat. This vault dweller believes they are real and thus murdering each other, but there’s a mystery to it. By the end, you’ll question ever putting a hand puppet on yourself again. I still can’t believe this is real. Penny Arcade actually wrote insane lore for a Fallout vault. I love it!

22 My Leg!

Fallout is a universe full of wondrous gadgets and medicines despite the fact that it’s set in a 1950s-like dystopia flash-forwarded to something along the lines of 20XX. One thing that has never made sense to me is the player’s health. Your four limbs, head, and torso, represent your health bar. On your Pipboy, you can see what parts of your body are completely drained of health and are thus disabled, which is represented by a dotted line like in the panel above. To me, it always looked like that body part was missing, which is why I laughed so hard at this comic. No! I’ve become a walking torso! Now that’d be a freaky thing to discover in one of these games.

21 Use The Mutant

At the end of Fallout 3, you’re presented with a choice. Someone has to turn on a switch to generate water, but this will likely kill whoever does it. If you kill yourself, well, that’s just kind of a lame ending so I wouldn’t recommend that. You could also send in one of your other human friends, but they’ll make you feel incredibly guilty. The most obvious answer? Use Fawkes, a super mutant, who will not die. My first playthrough I missed him so I made that terrible friend killing decision. I then came at it again with Fawkes and was like, why is there an option for me to go in there? There should be an automatic scene where he barges in to save the day. It just makes sense, but sense isn’t always Fallout’s strong suit.

20 Hobo Simulator

There are a lot of reasons why Fallout is a weird franchise. For one, you’re stuck in a post-apocalypse after a nuclear war. The games show very little color and it’s pretty bleak on its outlook on humanity. Given the current political climate, it’s not hard to imagine this becoming a reality, sad to say. You know, except less fun. Also, calling it a hobo simulator like this comic is a pretty apt observation. I may go around the wasteland feeling like a triumphant hero what with my saving of innocents and killing monsters. It may be a bleak future, but I want to be the best man I can. Too bad a lot of my journey involves digging around scrap piles like a homeless person. It’s a weird dichotomy.

19 Take My Money!

E3 2016 was the E3 of dreams. There were so many incredible announcements that had both the press and fans screaming for joy. One of those was Bethesda’s first ever E3 press conference wherein they announced, showed off, and gave a release date for Fallout 4. Then they revealed the special edition with the Pipboy and my eyes lit up. I tried to get one, but they sold out in the blink of an eye. Who wants a small, sleek Apple Watch when you could have a bulky monstrosity on your wrist? I’m partially joking and partially not. I mean the Apple Watch is a Pipboy essentially, but with a modern design. The Pipboy isn’t even real. It’s just a dock you can put your phone into so you can pretend. Is that really better than Apple’s thing?

18 Technology Barrier

There’s a lot of cool stuff lying around the wasteland even though everyone’s mentality is stuck in the 1950s. The best technology comes from the organization known as The Institute. Basically, they have the best stuff including laser weapons and even androids. You’ll come across their loot throughout the wasteland, but since this is Fallout you can’t take everything with you. I’ve left hundreds of their weaponry behind for literal junk I needed for crafting. I couldn’t possibly have come up with a better comic than this. It’s the perfect illustration of my thoughts exactly. Wouldn’t it just be easier for me to collect their guns, hand them out to the populous, and then storm the proverbial castle instead of gluing tin cans together to make a better scope?

17 Which Way Did He Go, George?

Fawkes is an incredible companion to recruit in Fallout 3 and his usefulness hits its peak at the end. He stands far above any other Super Mutant in the wasteland since he actually has a brain that can think. His fellow Super Mutants on the other, well, not so much. Calling them stupid wouldn’t be enough of an indicator. That said, they’re incredibly dangerous if they do see you. They have a lot of HP and they hit hard. Don’t be surprised if your limp body goes flying across the landscape after a few hits. Thankfully, their bad AI makes sneaking around them incredibly easy no matter how over encumbered, or loud you are. Their hearing is bad, but again, their eyesight is pretty decent.

16 Interplaying With Itself

This one deserves a bit of a history lesson in order to understand the joke. Interplay was the original developer and creator of Fallout before Bethesda bought the rights in 2007 in order to make Fallout 3. At this point, Interplay was basically no more than a name, or at least not the thriving company of its heyday. Regardless of size during this deal, Interplay held the right to make their own Fallout game, which was planned to be an MMO. The condition was that Interplay had to raise $30 Million dollars and have the project in production by 2009. Interplay missed both goals so for a long period of time Bethesda, or more like its parent company, Zenimax, fought a legal battle to get the MMO rights away from Interplay. The whole thing is about as shady as a hobo in a cardboard box.

15 Music To My Bleeding Ears

Fallout gave me was an appreciation for old music. I’m not talking about classic music from like the 80s, or even 70s. I’m referring to tunes from around the 1950s and before. There’s something about listening to that style while killing things that makes the juxtaposition so engaging. My first taste of this was in the original BioShock. Fallout 3 added the radio station, but there wasn’t much to listen to akin to something like Grand Theft Auto, which houses a ton of music. It got better in Fallout 4, but there’s still not that much. Thirty hours is pretty generous. I got tired of the same old tunes after a few hours. Is it really that hard to licenses these old-as-dirt tracks?

14 Toilet Water Saved My Life

Here’s another odd thing about healing. The best medicine in the game is Stimpaks. They’re basically needles you inject into yourself. If your limb is broken you have to inject one into that body part before it can start healing from other stuff. If you have no broken body parts then you can gain health back by pretty much anything as long as it’s edible whether that’s some old cereal, fruit, or yes, even water. Thing is, the water in Fallout is radiated. That’s why the water purifier was such a big deal in Fallout 3’s plot. So you could drink from the bowl of the toilet and feel all better again, but it’d probably mutate you unless you have the proper perks.

13 Wandering Aimlessly

Fallout is one of those open world games where you can play for what seems like minutes but is actually hours. I like following the story, but I’m in no hurry. I like to take my time and explore every nook and cranny that looks interesting. If I’m on route to a quest marker and I see something interesting along the way I’m going to peek at it. This may then take me somewhere else and so on. Painting one’s journey through the wasteland as a cat following a laser pointer is another ingenious way to describe the Fallout experience. Even if you don’t follow this aimless tradition and are only in it for the main stuff you’re going to get distracted by something. I guarantee it.

12 War Never Changes

I believe what the artist is going for is a joke on Fallout’s opening line since the original. “War never changes.” It’s been used in other games too like Metal Gear Solid 4 as an homage. The line represents that no matter what time period you’re in, war is always going to be a bloody battlefield, whether it’s with sticks, swords, guns, or laser weapons. War is war. That’s part of the joke’s commentary, but I also think it’s a play on the fascination with cel-shading in games. Personally, it’s my favorite aesthetic and can make even the most boring design appealing. After Fallout 4 I felt a bit fatigued from the formula. If Fallout 5 were exactly the same formula, but with cel-shading, I’d be pumped. That’s just how my mind works.

11 N’Synth

One of the bigger plot lines of Fallout 4 involves Synths, which is just another name for an Android when it comes right down to it. People are afraid that The Institute is trying to replace people with Synths. This then leads to a more mechanical form of racism and profiling. Most of these Synths are evil by design and are essentially programmed to wipe out those deemed unnecessary to The Institution. There are others out there that just want to lead normal lives. This brings us to our joke. If the game was programmed well and AI wasn’t glitchy, it might be easy to tell who is a human and who is a robot. Since the code is a bit, er, let’s say broken, everyone looks like a bad robot.

10 Overkill

Whenever you kill a monster you can search the body for items. Sometimes they’ll strangely have money, but mostly, they’ll just have meat, or limbs you can grab for crafting. Humanoid opponents can be looted for clothes and weapons. These principals at heart are great but consider this. There’s a perk in the game called Bloody Mess, which gives players a chance to essentially explode their opponents with a critical hit. If a body were destroyed into giant red pustules of meat, there’s no way they could be searched for items and yet everything is always still intact. The same applies to high-powered weaponry too like the Mini Nuke Launcher. Even stranger is a laser weapon, which can disintegrate opponents into piles of ash. Explain to me how that can be looted.

9 Fallout 4: A Sim Paradise

I loved Fallout 3 and I was sure Fallout 4 was going to as amazing if not better than it, or New Vegas, but it was disappointing. Bethesda said that the sim elements of building towns wouldn’t get in the way, but they kind of did. They hampered what I really wanted to do: explore the wasteland. Now I had to worry about warping around to settlements I saved so they wouldn’t fall back into enemy control. Not only that, but certain story missions required you to use those building mechanics and if you didn’t invest time into getting parts, those quests would then be a pain. Why over complicate the game like this? Let those that want The Sims play that game. Get it out of Fallout!

8 Don’t Wear That

Companions are amazing portable storage centers, but of course, they’re not the brightest. Sometimes when you give them certain items they’ll equip them. It could be a weapon or even a piece of clothing. It doesn’t matter if that item is worse in power or defense either. They’ll just randomly decide to change. It’s like, no I didn’t give that to you to wear. I just needed someplace to store my stuff. My valuable, valuable, stuff I collected like a pack rat hobo. On the other hand, sometimes I give them a good weapon and they don’t use it. I only wish something as funny as this comic’s scenario happened to me. If it did I think I’d have that companion continue wearing the dress. That’d teach them a lesson.

7 Where Does It Go?

I’ve always wondered where your items go. It’s not like you’re wearing any sort of backpack. They didn’t even make the slightest allusion to that fact. Even if the backpack were small it’d at least give me something to go on. Maybe everything is warped into your Pipboy like this panel illustrates. I never thought about it like that before. I wish I could see myself use items from the Pipboy menu. I bet your character does just suck them right up from a hidden module. It all makes sense now, unlike eating apples to regain health, or injecting Stimpaks into your head to heal your leg. The logic just doesn’t compute. It doesn’t matter though. As soon as you start up Fallout, all natural laws case to exist.

6 A Beautiful World Of Gray And Slightly Lighter Gray

Fallout 3’s color scheme was dark, drab, and unsettling. A lot of gray, brown, and black with a greenish tint. Bethesda took that to heart in order to brighten up Fallout 4’s design. Compared to Fallout 3 it’s a work of art, but when you compare it to another lush open world like The Witcher 3, well, all compliments go out the window. It’s still a lot of gray, black, and brown, but this time the sky is clear and blue. That and the lighting overall is better. One thing that didn’t change between games is the people. They’re indescribably ugly. Hey Bethesda! Do your developers wear blindfolds when they create these monstrosities? Even characters that are supposed to be designed to be attractive are simply not.