Charisma is a worthless stat, and Perception is not much better. I like to set those to 1 so I can beef up the other stats.

putting more into strength and endurance.

but i just found a unique gatling laser called Vengeance, so i'm good to go. and i use fawkes as a fighting storage cabinet as well.

1) Find Bethesda buildings East and West. They are right next to each other. They will be surrounded by raiders, several of which may have sniper rifles. There is also the occasional Giant Rad Scorpion, so watch out.

2) Save!

3) Go in the buildings and kill everyone. Several Raiders have flamers, and one also has a Big Guns Skill Book. There is a safe with the Lock Pick Bobble Head too. There are also some combat shotguns set as a trap, and some grenades, also set as a trap.

4) Wait, or sleep, for 3 1/2 days, and then repeat. All of the Raiders will be back, and the one with the skill book will have another copy for you. You can raise your Big Guns Skill to 100 using this method.

If you raise the difficulty, you will get more xp as well, but those buildings are packed with heavy Raiders, so be really careful.

I'm going to preface this with a general spoiler alert, not for plot points, but for strategy/perks, so read on at your own peril:

Since you have the Game of The Year edition, which includes the Broken Steel expansion that raises the level cap to 30 (instead of the original 20), you might want to keep the following in mind:

- When you reach level 30 you can choose the "Almost Perfect" perk, which raises all your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats to 9, so it won't really matter anymore how your original character was "built". Additionally if you hold off on collecting the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. bobbleheads until after you have the "Almost Perfect" perk, you can then raise all your stats to level 10.

I think (but I'm not 100% sure this is how it works) that once you have all S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats at level 10, all your skills get automatically raised to 100 (even though once you reach level 30 you're going to be pretty close already).

Hope this helps.

so far i'm on level 24, i have one last mission to go in the main quest, and i've beat Anchorage and Point lookout. I've got Pitt, Broken Steel, and the Mothership expansions left.

should i beat the main quest before finishing the rest of the expansions?

right now i'm just scouring the map with fawks, finding all the locations on the map and collecting items/geomapper loactions...

I just leave her at the house in Megaton, so I don't have to worry (started doing that when Dogmeat kept dying on me on my first playthrough, since I believe the Puppies! perk was added later with Broken Steel).

If you want to level up quickly, the best way to do it is to get yourself in as many fights as possible. As I was approaching level 30, I went through the Bethesda Ruins (as another poster pointed out) every 72 hours (that's how long it takes for enemies to respawn, IIRC), the military camp south of the Regulator HQ, etc. Once I got to level 30 I started avoiding fights, especially once I got the Chinese Stealth Armor from Op. Anchorage.

The order in which you do the missions is up to you, except for the Broken Steel missions, which you will only be able to access after you beat the main Fallout 3 storyline.

As I mentioned in another post, in this playthrough I followed a guide, because I wanted to make sure that I saw as much as possible of the game (and there were quite a few things I had missed in my previous playthroughs).

In case anyone is interested: the guide I followed was the one by Haeravon on gamefaqs.com. I recommend it because it's very comprehensive.

dogmeat is good going up against raiders, but dogmeat vs. enclave soldier or dogmeat vs. mister gutsy = dead dogmeat.

do you know how many tech items you have to give to casdin at fort independance beforehe lets you into the building? i hearthere's alien blaster cells in there...

When I first came across the Outcasts, the Enclave (with all their high tech loot) hadn't started attacking me yet, so I brought him some conductors. But once I saw that I only got bullets in return (which I had plenty of) I lost interest. But now with the Enclave after you, you should have plenty of excess tech items to give him. Actually I might go back and do it myself as well, since I've never seen Fort Independence from the inside.

armor imaginable. however, i refuse to give away suits of power armor for two stimpaks. it's bad enough coughing up a laser pistol for a stimpak.

(ok, resident evil 4 turned me into a huge cash\ammo hoarder )

I've got some of the lockers of the Megaton home filled with all kinds of guns/armor/food etc. that I never used. I also tend not to spend money and just build my inventory by looting, so I also have a ton of bottlecaps.

Overall if you only get a couple of stimpacks for a power armor it's a total ripoff. Besides the fact that I have more than 300 stimpacks in my inventory.

You can also simply try to pickpocket him for the key to fort Independence. Or just go in guns blazing...

for sellable stuff, one for food\health & stealth boys.

plus love shack theme or house. if i ever get desperate, i'll pawn off all the booze

Downstairs locker by the front door for sellable stuff and books (once all my skills hit 100 I started collecting).
Locker opposite is for weapons.
Fridge for food.
Upstairs desk for crafting materials. (even though the only thing I ever really craft is Deathclaw gauntlets)
And the filing cabinet for clothes/armor.

I went with the Vault theme this time, after always choosing the love shack theme before.
Most of the stuff I hoarded I'll never use, but it's just comforting to know it's there.

do you need a schematic?

The Deathclaw gauntlet requires schematics, which you can find in a few places around the Wasteland, the simplest is in the F. Scott Key Trail & Campground (SW corner) in a trailer.

To build it you need a Deathclaw hand, medical brace, leather belt and some wonderglue. It's a great weapon, especially if you have good unarmed skill. I usually used it for sneak kills on enemies, and I got one hit kills nearly every time except for the really strong enemies like feral ghoul reavers, super mutant overlords etc. For those however I more often than not managed to land a paralyzing punch, and was then able to finish them off while they were stunned.

Another great thing about the Deathclaw gauntlet is that it ignores armor, so no matter what the enemy is wearing you get the same effect.

You can read up on it here:
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Deathclaw_gauntlet_%28Fallout_3%29

and i don't get much use out of the dart gun. however, deathclaw gauntlet sounds cool...

Is actually pretty good for a run-and-gunner, as the scorpion poison cripples the legs. I frequently used it on one playthrough just to give me some time to think while facing a tough Super Mutant.

One of the "ingredients" of the dartgun is the poison gland, so it makes the darts you shoot poisonous automatically.

I actually built one but I never used it. Now I'm intrigued...

Here's some info (what I said above was from memory, there might be mistakes, but I can't read the wiki on my phone)
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Dart_gun

scattered all around the Capital Wasteland, and I think that there are some for sale at various traders throughout the region.

I think it's the best non ranged weapon. Especially since it ignores armor.

The railway rifle feels underpowered to me. Considering it shoots railway spikes it doesn't seem to do much damage. And I never figured out how to work the rock-it launcher...

in it. the heavier the item, the more damage is caused. problem is, in order to cause enough damage, you have to carry way too much weight in junk... you could load it with 7 ashtrays or tin cans, and not inflict damage, or you could load it with chunks of iron...

The Deathclaw Gauntlet probably does the second most functional damage if your Unarmed skill is high, and you have Unarmed Perks.

The Fatboy is the most powerful.

My character was built around stealth and unarmed skills, so I got lots of one hit kills. One moment a raider is standing there minding their own business, next moment they're a Jackson Pollock all over the floor. Very satisfying.

and my vision gets red, blue and some hints of green. I think I just became addicted to it.

of the Game of The Year edition. It took me about four months.

Since I had already played Fallout 3 (but only the vanilla release), I didn't even do much blind exploring. I used a guide from gamefaqs to structure my playthrough and to make sure I didn't miss anything this time around. And it still took me four months!

Boy, did I ever get my money's worth out of that Steam sale!

And now on to New Vegas!

I haven't seen any news about Ep.3. I try to check out PCGamer.com about once a day, and every time they do an article about Valve, the comments are full of requests, nay, demands for Episode 3. It would be nice to at least get them to acknowledge they're working on Ep.3 or Half-Life 3 (when the Episodic development cycle takes as long as that for a full game, they might as well drop it).

We can only hope that 2012 is the year...

fallout 3 is a game that has an active mod community expanding and customizing the game endlessly it seems

http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/top/alltime.php

I

i started replacing the graphics with my own hand drawn ones. my goal was Snoom; a Doom 2 where the main character was... Snoop Dogg. i never finished it... it was too time consuming. each sprite had like 16 different versions i had to draw. but i had the graphics forthe knife, pistol, machine guns, and audio finished. i wish i still had those files.

Everytime I picked up a shotgun or shotgun ammo it said "this is my boomstick!" Somehow that never got old...

"it's snoop dogg! get that muthafuckah!"

I started my 34th(?) playthrough a couple days ago. Of course it's much better with mods installed as Riftaxe mentioned (unless you're playing on XBOX/PS3).

It had the wrong feel to it. Fallout to me is small towns trying to make it by. FNV had only 2 such towns. The whole game was from the beginning between three major power blocs. The fact that Obsidian kept changing the formids in the main file made modding difficult. I've shelved it probably not to be back to.

Edit: They also added "modern" weapons to the game, probably in order to get COD players to buy it. Yet more things that look and feel out of place.

Fallout 3 allowed the characters to become gods fairly quickly. I have to turn the difficulty up all the way when I play F3, but not when I play NV.

Oblivion was even worse in this regard. You can become so godly that all the monsters become almost pointless.

But the storyline and background just simply suck.

I got addicted to Superindendo's ..(yea, l990s version..of

Star Wars.. first game. I played forever.
I eventually won, and stil have that system, and that game.
I remember the rush, but the games change, the rush doesn't.

are Lockpick, Speech, and Unarmed.

Unarmed does the most damage, outside of Fatboys and Bottlecap Mines, and Lockpick and Speech will handle every other situation.

Medicine is also good, but not as important.

I usually have a high explosives, because landmines are so much fun.

but they don't deal the damage unarmed deals.

The laser Gatling gun (Vengence?) is really fun though. I killed every killable character in Megaton with it on one of my play throughs.

I do wish the Energy Weapon Bobble Head was more accessible in the beginning of the game though. At least the Cyborg Perk gives a bonus.

people to shreds!

in close combat, the laser pistol is remarkably powerful if you can get 5-6 critical headshots in a row!