Now, surely the corporate weasels at Interplay don't feel the Fallout franchise has more appeal to console gamers who've never heard of it than PC gamers who continue to worship it. The simple fact is that console games are currently selling in far greater numbers than PC games, and Interplay has to follow the money if it hopes to survive.

Unfortunately, Brotherhood of Steel isn't a real Fallout game; it's really just a sci-fi audiovisual mod of Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, with a couple of new elements kludged onto the Alliance engine. Brotherhood's existence at the seeming expense of a genuine sequel has already alienated hardcore Fallout fans, and its Xeroxed gameplay structure surely won't win many new ones.