War, it's fantastic. We love it; we can't get enough of it. It's all over the media, film, art and especially videogames. Despite the horror, destruction and poverty it causes, we're all over it like barbarian invaders, crazed emperors and Republican presidential candidates. The Fallout series takes its influence from 1950s cold war culture, an aesthetic more recently found in Bioshock. Fallout told the tale of some idiot actually nuking the planet, forcing humanity into vaults, deep below the earth, away from the irradiated surface. The first two games revolved around survivors leaving their own vaults to explore the land above in a 2D isometric RPG tale of discovery. The world was filled with small communities of survivors, mutants and 'radscorpions'. What made Fallout stand-out, however, was its scalpel-sharp sense of black humour, creating a game simultaneously hilarious and self-aware. It showed how, in the face of annihilation, all one could do was laugh.
Xbox 360