So it's no secret that Fallout 1, 2 and 3 are awesome. I know a lot of die hard fans of the original two were worried that Fallout 3 was too much of a deviation in game styles, and I certainly was too. But I trusted Bethesda, because Oblivion is freaking awesome. And it turned out very well. It's not just the modern generation of gamers who appreciated it. There was so much of the first two games reflected in the third that it wasn't just a great Bethesda game, it was a great Fallout game too. The downloadable content is another story, but we'll leave that alone since I already covered it.

Some people liked Fallout: Tactics. I did not, but plenty of legitimate Fallout fans did, so that is what it is. For those of us who had the misfortune of playing Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel... well, I'm just not going to get into that, either. It was absolute garbage and was tagged with the Fallout name just to generate sucker sales. I bought mine for $4.99 in a Media Play bargain bin, and I'm not really sure it was worth that.

Now, to segue to my next topic, let me tell you about a little development team called Obsidian. Did you play Neverwinter Nights? Awesome, right? Right. What about Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic? Fantastic, as well. Did you play the sequels to those two games? If you did, you will have noticed that it's like the mechanics that made them really stand out were removed. What you were left with were two games that on their own could have been called decent, maybe even good. But since they were the sequels to two absolutely amazing games, it just felt cheapened.

Who was responsible for the first of each amazing series? BioWare, another of my recent favorite developers. BioWare, like Bethesda Softworks, is really good at making games that seem familiar enough that they're easy to get into and play, but have new ideas implemented that just keep drawing you back. Unfortunately, they're also good at passing off their sequels to Obsidian. Yes, Obsidian's development team is like a trivialization engine. You put something great in, you get something decent out.

Which leads me to my final point. Fallout: New Vegas (wasn't that the name of a town in that awful live action Double Dragon movie?) is being developed by Obsidian. Now, if you're really into the series, you'll know that some of the original developers of Fallout 2 work for Obsidian. My fear is that being around all of the mediocrity that powers Obsidian has made the point irrelevant.