Today's Song Big Iron by Marty Robbins

Today's post will be short and straightforward.  There is only so much variety you can put into a project like this.  Well, there is only so much variety you can put into a project like this with the amount of time and effort I am willing to expend upon it.  At some point you start to pick a song and you have to wonder if you cave covered it already.  When I selected this song had had the nagging feeling that I had already covered it.  Turns out I hadn't but I had done something similar so this post will feel a little familiar.

This song is featured in Fallout: New Vegas.  In 2010 when I did this project I covered Mighty, Mighty Man, a song featured in Fallout 3.  LAst time I talked about how games like Fallout and Bioshock gave me a taste for Big Band and Swing music.  New Vegas has more of the same but it also throws in a little Cowboy music.

The one thing Bethesda did better than Interplay with the Fallout series was incorporate music.  It is probably the only thing Bethesda did better.  I won't get into the choice for first person of third person isometric, they each have their merits.  When Fallout came out in 1997 and Fallout 2 in 1998 there wasn't a lot that Interplay could do with music.  The computers had a lot less memory and processing speed.  That lack of power meant the creators had to make choices that modern creators need not trouble themselves with.  Music was not a choice many creators made in the late 90's.

Fallout created a retro-future feel and Bethesda wisely stuck with that even though they scrapped a lot of what made Fallout Fallout when they made Fallout 3 in 2008.  Part of Bethesda's concept for a retro future is a lot of music from the past.  Even though cannon says the wars that ended in the nuclear annihilation of most of the planet started around 2050, it seems that no music less than one hundred years old survived the Big One.  Maybe in the Fallout universe they stopped using vinyl early and magnetic media did not survive and only acetate is around to be rediscovered by those trying to restart civilization and rebuild culture.

You never get a satisfactory explanation in game for why the game's music is so old relative to the fall but the fact is the music works.  The goal of Fallout is to put you in the future as imagined by people in the 1950's.  Bethesda got that right.  The music helps to reinforce the feel.

For those of you who care and have played neither game, New Vegas is better and there is little reason to play both.  If you want to check it out let me know and I'll loan you my copy with all the DLC.  It is a good game if you like console RPG's.

Bethesda decided to let us know that at E3 this year, there would be an event.  Cryptic, huh?  The internet and blogosphere are thinking make Fallout 4 is coming.  If it is, I look forward to it.  Maybe you and I will run into one another in the Wasteland?  Maybe I will help you out against a pack of Deathclaws, or maybe I will watch them finish you off an loot your corpse.  Either way it should be fun.

Later

Bob