the fallout 3 nuke is fucking stupid
The Fallout 3 nuke is stupid because it exposes all the weaknesses of the game all by itself.
1) The world building is bad. There's no reason for anyone to live in Megaton. All it has is sheet metal hovels and a nuke that could kill everyone some day, particularly if the protagonist of a Bethesda game came by.
2) The choices you're given are stupid. Defuse the nuke and keep the status quo, or detonate the nuke for the sake of having a big flashy choice. That's all the reason you're given. The old guy asking you to detonate the nuke doesn't have a reason. He just wants nuke to go boom because it would improve the view. His supposedly smart assistant guy doesn't seem to mind that he's working for a fickle moron. No one cares, least of all the people writing these quests.
3) The morality system is stupid. You do Good choices to get Good points and then Good people will see your Good points and think you're a cool guy, and Bad guys will hate you, and vice versa with Bad choices. The choice to burn a populated town off the map in a nuclear holocaust immediately makes this fall apart. Why would slavers think you're a cool guy because you made their living environment more radioactive and removed a source of commodities they trade in? And why would people no longer care that you nuked a town if you get enough Good points for doing Good things?
4) The story is stupid. This one is tangentially related to the nuke. The main quest is about getting a water purifier working. There's several water purifiers already in Megaton. One of them is already working, and another one is fairly easy to fix up, and both of them are safe to use. The plot relevant water purifier required hyper advanced ultra rare miracle technology to even start working and then it still kills people left and right. If you blow up Megaton, no one cares about the loss of apparently vitally important water purification technology, and also one way to get your morality points back to Good is force feeding bottles of purified water to homeless people. No one else cares about purified water. I guess they just have enough. Kind of makes me wonder why I'm jumping through all these hoops for something no one cares about.
I had to go through Little Lamplight to complete the main quest. Little Lamplight. No one deserves this.