Other: Fallout 3 Update: We Have Contact!

I finally caved last night and went to Fry's to get a new video card that could handle Fallout 3. Halfway there, I realized I had forgotten the printout of the supported video chipsets. Crap. I was too lazy to go back and probably wouldn't have made it before closing, so I decided to give it a go.

You can always tell the Fry's newbies (or the inveterate morons) at the Burbank Fry's because they drive the wrong way through the parking lot.

I'm looking at video cards and.... holy crap, there are cards that cost over $500! WTF! And you practically need a water-cooled system with a 6 billion watt power supply for some of them!

I refused to pay more than $100 (and I would rather have gone way below that) for a card I really only wanted for one game. I finally found one based on the NVIDIA GeForce 9400GT chipset. that looked like it would work with my power supply, which I guessed was about 300W (turned out to be 288W, but close enough), and ran about $70 (less $10, assuming I actually get one of Fry's notorious rebates), was PCI-X (because I knew I had a slot for that), and had 512Mb of on-board RAM. Sounded good, and if it clearly looked like it wouldn't work, I just wouldn't open it, and I'd bring it back and stand in the returns line for an hour.

I got home and... the GeForce 9400 chipset wasn't on the list. I looked at the box, and the copyright date was 2008, so I figured it was so new that, eh, the 9600 series was on the list so hopefully this was close enough. I put it in and... it worked! Fallout 3 started! Yay! It even autodetected the card and said I could get away with Medium-quality graphics over performance! Wow!

I played for a little while, but I was pretty distracted. I didn't even make it out of the Vault alive yet. Damnable radroaches. It doesn't help that I suck at real-time combat. The old games were turn-based, but I'm too spastic and easily distracted to handle real-time well. Maybe I'll get into it more when I can sit down with it this weekend.