Natural Born Killer

This is beyond thrilling. I put Ol' Painless away - your time has passed, mein leibling, but you served me well - and whip out the Alien Blaster. I'm concerned: will this live up to my expectations? Resolutely, I take aim; the Brotherhood goons don't look particularly concerned. And then, I shoot - one, two, three, four, each in the helmet. One by one, they erupt into balls of blue flame, and then disintegrate into an oddly delicious-looking white powder. Just like that. No weapons being withdrawn, no, "Hey, buddy, that was my best periwig," just death. Pale, pulverulent death. This gun is breathtaking.

The Blaster is similarly effective on the hordes of mutants and Brotherhood soldiers that follow, and everything goes swimmingly until I run into Sarah Lyons. Lyons is the surprisingly youthful and hot-bottomed daughter of the scraggly old Elder Lyons, boss of the Brotherhood's East Coast wing. She's the most attractive character in Fallout 3, too - not that that's saying very much - so it pains me to have to kill her. I do it anyway, of course. Except, unfortunately, she gets right back up and continues ordering her squad around. I've been warned about quest-flagged invulnerable NPCs in Fallout 3, but this one really catches me off-guard. I decide I'll just deal with it, because I know what's coming: a heavily-scripted scene where a Super Mutant Goliath - a giant-sized, nuclear warhead-wielding version of the common-or-garden Super Mutant - crashes the Brotherhood's party, and not-so-very-subtly invites me to be the big, day-saving übermensch.

I'm kind of resentful that I'm being shunted into a set-piece, but I plough through it, and take a moment to study the dismembered beast on the ground before me. We're not all that different, are we, comrade? I stare into the abyss of its now-severed torso, and am reminded of Neitzsche's famous proverb. Then I turn around and head straight into the Galaxy News Radio building, where Three-Dog lies in wait. I bypass the Brotherhood guards at the front - patience, my pretties - and make a beeline for Three-Dog's studio. And sure enough, there he is, and despite the fact that I've significantly depleted his show's listener-base over the past few days, he seems happy to make my acquaintance.

In main-quest terms, I'm supposed to be here to ask him about the whereabouts of my father. The dialogue options present themselves thus, and I am suddenly overcome by cynicism. Does it really matter if I ask him nicely or rudely? That I threaten him with violence? Would it even make a difference if Three-Dog were actually a five-year-old girl in pyjamas, holding a one-eyed teddy? At the end of the day, whether the conversation becomes heated or not, I'm still going to get the same quest to fix the same bloody satellite dish, and I'm still going to get the same information I need to find where my father is hiding.

Everything else is window-dressing on an otherwise linear quest-line - all roads lead to the Ultimate Sacrifice, it seems - and so when I do finish my compulsory conversation with Three-Dog and rend him to ashes with the Alien Blaster, I feel somewhat disempowered. I can now skip the satellite quest and go off and find Dad on my own, sure, but the second I do, I'll just become part of the system again. Ordinarily, I wouldn't mind, but ever since I've been gleefully carving up the Wasteland, I couldn't imagine anything more dispiriting. So I decide I won't. This is it. I'm making a stand.

I exit Three-Dog's compound and void the rest of the Building of Brotherhood scum. Then I stop. Walking outside, I summon up the fast-travel interface and visit a few of the places I metaphorically, if not literally, wiped off the map. There are still several isolated areas to be extinguished - not the least of which being Rivet City, the smaller-than-it-sounds town inside an ocean liner - but it doesn't matter anymore. For as far as the eye can see, I am king. Drink to me.