To celebrate the 2014 winter olympics, we’ve started playing a fun new game here at WNV called “Sochi, or Fallout Wasteland?” The rules are simple enough, the mediator describes a scenario, and the contestants have to determine if it happened in the smash hit, post-apocalyptic video game series Fallout, or if it is currently happening to a reporter or athelete in the very real city of Sochi, Russia.
Ready to get started? I know I am. Click or tap on the Answer panels to see the correct response. Let’s get going!
1. You are trapped in a room. You must collect 3 lightbulbs to barter for the parts needed to escape and continue with your other objectives.
2. There are palm trees visible from your current location.
3. A dictatorial leader rules with an iron fist.
Well, kinda. John Henry Eden had way less power.
4. Giant fire-breathing ants infest the ruins of a city.
No evidence of turboants in Sochi. Yet.
5. Hungry, feral dogs roam the streets (and on occasion, hotel hallways.) Government-funded kill squads poison as many as they can, leaving the bodies where they fall.
6. Gay people exist.
7. The water is brown, sludgey, and incredibly dangerous to drink or expose your skin to.
8. Ruinous monuments of a once-great and expansive empire tower above the dilapidated cities and barren landscape
Sochi has nothing to build monuments to.
9. The populace has begun taking various home-brewed drugs to escape their bleak reality.
Drugs in Fallout are highly useful for survival, and everything is professional grade compared to Krokodil.
10. A deep void within the very walls of your soul haunts you even after your return to the safety and comfort of the real world.
Fallout is actually pretty fun.
That’s all for now, we’re going to head back to the harsh and barren wastes and attempt to eke out a desperate subsistence in the hope that we can try to forget what we’ve seen in Sochi so far.