A couple of weeks ago I began playing Fallout 3, and yesterday I finished the main quest. Totally awesome game. I don’t want to compare it with part 1 and 2 because it was years ago I played those, but let me just say that all three are great.

For those who don’t know: It’s a post-apocalyptic 1st person RPG (role-playing game). You walk around and explore, meet people, make friends and enemies (which you often have to battle), do various quests. There’s also a main quest, though it involves a number a sub-quests. But it’s possible to ignore the main quest and go about your own business. You can play a good or evil character, it all depends on the actions you take. An evil character might do things like shooting a shop owner in the head with his own shotgun and take his merchandise, and/or milder things like pickpocketing.

It’s amazing how much you can get into a game emotionally. Among other feelings, I experienced a sense of loneliness and companionship when playing. Loneliness when I had walked around by myself, away from settlements, for a long time, and companionship when I get back or met some friendly characters while traveling. I even dragged along a companion for the sake of company on some quests, despite the fact she probably made the game more difficult (I couldn’t sneak successfully, each time we approached an enemy she started to scream and shoot at them.)

The game world is completely fake, it’s a virtual world with virtual characters, but the feeling you get while playing is real. I suppose it’s not really any more strange than enjoying any good fictional story, but still.

This is an interesting article on how long term a company has to think in order to make money:

http://www.playstationuniversity.com/ps3-hardware-now-profitable-for-sony-3816/

May 16th, 2010 at 11:30 am –

Sony now no longer loses money on each PlayStation 3 console sold. Quite the achievement for a piece of hardware that originally cost the company in the region of $800 USD to produce, if not more.

No-one expected Sony to cut the price of the PS3 in 2009 when it was still a loss making proposition, but with the release of the improved PS3 Slim, the company gained some breathing space. However, with a new price point of $299, not even the Slim could turn a profit, losing approximately $18 per console as recently as this year. That is until we brought you the console’s latest revision.

So they sold PS3 at a loss for years, and that’s not even counting the years and immense investments they put into creating the console in the first place.

In short, they invest a lot of money and work really hard to create something we will like and buy. Thank you. Let’s now hope they (finally) make a lot of money on the PS3, so they have resources to put into creating new valuable products, like Playstation 4…