For anyone who hasn't played Fallout 3 yet the game has my highest recommendation.
It plays like an updated even better playing version of Elder Scrolls Oblivion but with guns and is many things all at once in that if you want you can play it like a turn based RPG using the VATS system or you can literally have control of the action just like in a Halo or Gears of War game by pulling the right trigger and blowing someone's head off manually.
Its also both things at once in that you can choose to play it from either a third or first person perspective.
If it only had vehicles you could drive it as a series could probably come to top GTA or equal it in sales figures since the appeal of each game is quite similar ie a high degree of violence and chaos but the difference is Fallout 3's violence is much more well developed in that you can blow off individual limbs of your enemies and the graphics are better than seen in any GTA game to date.
So yeah thats pretty much it you can play the game pretty much any way you want to be it playing it to win it or just going around killing people and creatures and levelling up while exploring the wasteland or you could even play it like I am doing in that I always make my character as powerful and well equipped and stocked up on aid items as I possibly can and my current mission on my second playthrough with my good character is collecting as many rare and awesome weapons as I can.
There are two devastatingly powerful alien blasters you can get in the game one being named the alien blaster and the other falls from the sky after a UFO explodes completely in the air and you have to look around you and retrieve it as well as the alien power cells. The dog that you get from the scrapyard named Dogmeat really helps in finding the Firelance as it can be very difficult to find. The other alien blaster is always in the same place each time you start up a brand new game of Fallout 3 as its in a dedicated UFO crash location in the game where you find a dead alien body and a partially destructed UFO and when you are in the area of the crash site you get radiation readings and a new alien radio distress signal.
Bethesda seems to have gotten a better grasp of their radiant AI technology as well since you can find more random and awesome moments happening in Fallout 3 than you could in Oblivion.
So yeah definitely get this game if you like post apacolyptic game environments and a high degree of violence and survivalism bros.
If you play it without cheats you get the feeling that the game is giving you just enough ammunition and guns to survive from encounter to encounter ie you get the feeling you are barely scraping by but being provided enough to do just that if you are careful.
Its an awesome awesome game. :rock:
Be aware though that only the PC and Xbox 360 as of now are getting the downloadable content which consists of extra missions and weapons. PS3 at least for the foreseeable future has been left out in the cold.
