So, if you've been holding out on even one of the add-ons because 800 Points is too high a price, today you officially don't have any excuses. Tomorrow, you might, though. Reports say this sale is a Today Only deal. However, said report was filed yesterday morning and the sale price still remains on Xbox Live as of today.

UPDATE: Looks like the sale is over, now. Prices are back up to 800.

To date, I think the only add-on I've actually shelled out for (at full price no less) is Knothole Island in Fable II. Because — you guessed it — I chose money over my dog at the end of the game so I could buy Castle Fairfax. Vanity, thy name is sex change side quest!

Check out the sale here.

Holiday Deal Fallout 3 [Burn360]

Thanks for the heads-up, Caryn!

Here's the score: Bethesda sued Interplay, claiming the Fallout Trilogy bundle it was selling and marketing through digital distribution services was "confusingly similar" to Bethesda's Fallout 3 products going out this year. Bethesda also wants to terminate Interplay's contract to develop the Fallout MMO, a deal signed when Bethesda bought the rights in 2007 - for $5.75 million - from Interplay, the series' original publisher.

But U.S. District Court Judge Deborah K. Chasanow rejected Bethesda's request for an injunction, without giving any reasons, in a ruling first found by Fallout fan Web site Duck and Cover, and reported today by Gamasutra.

Court Denies Bethesda's Motion To Block Interplay Fallout Activity [Gamasutra]

Bethesda is bringing out a line of Fallout-themed avatar wear to the Xbox Live Avatar Marketplace on Thanksgiving day, giving players six new ways to show off their love for Fallout 3 and its creators, Bethesda Game Studios. There's three t-shirts priced to move at 80 Microsoft points apiece; the standard Vault 101 suit, complete with PipBoy, for 240 points; a Vault Boy suit for 240 points; and the pièce de résistance - a Vault Boy head that covers up your avatar's goofy cranium.

My advice? Just buy the head, and play Vault Boy dress up. It's simply the right thing to do.

Fallout 3 items hitting the Xbox Avatar Marketplace this Thursday [Bethesda Blog]

More than 1.2 million votes were cast for this year's Golden Joystick Awards, representing a 47% jump in votes over the previous year, and a great many of those voters were Activision Blizzard fans. While Bethesda's post-apocalyptic epic took home top honors, five of the fifteen awards announced last night went to Activision Blizzard games. Call of Duty: World at War took home awards for MSN Multiplayer Game of the Year and Nintendo Game of the Year; Guitar Hero World Tour snagged the Rampage Soundtrack of the Year award, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was named the ShortList One to Watch. With those four under the company's belt, it comes as no surprise that Activision Blizzard were named Publisher of the Year as well.

Other notable awards include Fallout 3's PC Game of the Year award, Left 4 Dead's Online Game of the Year, and Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars' Handheld Game of the Year win.

Check out the full list of awards and their winners below.

Family Game of the Year: LittleBigPlanet

Bliss Handheld Game of the Year: Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

Retailer of the Year: GAME

Mobile Game of the Year: Metal Gear Solid Touch

Nintendo Game of the Year: Call of Duty: World at War

MSN Multiplayer Game of the Year: Call Of Duty: World At War

The Rampage Soundtrack of the Year: Guitar Hero World Tour

Xbox Game of the Year: Gears of War 2

PC Game of the Year: Fallout 3

Amiqus Games UK Developer of the Year: Jagex

PlayStation Game of the Year: Killzone 2

Publisher of the Year: Activision Blizzard

Online Game of the Year: Left4Dead

ShortList One to Watch: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Ultimate Game of the Year, together with Zavvi.co.uk: Fallout 3

"Mainly I've used an x-acto knife and three tiny screwdrivers to do most of the carving," ceemdee said in an email. "I used some wood carving tools to scrap out the bigger areas on a few of the pumpkins and a needle is used to trace the image. They were all carved in the last four weeks. It's actually only four pumpkins (one a week) with three carvings on each. :)"

You can check out unlit views of the pumpkins here.

Got any more? Send pictures of 'em my way!

According to reports from Kotaku tipsters affected by the save and posters on Bethsoft's official Fallout 3 forums, the problem appears to be limited to folks in Canada (with one from Sweden) who have the PlayStation 3 version of the re-release. Limited though it may appear to be, the inability to play with characters cultivated over dozens or hundreds of hours in the complete Fallout 3 package is understandably frustrating.

Fortunately, Bethesda Software appears to be investigating the issue.

"Wanted to let you know I've been working with folks here at the office to investigate the issues with GOTY in Canada," assures Bethesda's Sr. Community Manager. "When I have more details to share, I'll let you know. Stay tuned."

So, buyer beware, especially if you're from America's hat and have invested heavily in the original version of Fallout 3. Kotaku readers, who's having similar issues? Who's getting along in the wastelands without issue? Let us know in the comments.

Thanks to Wolfsong, Evan and everyone else for the tips.

GOTY saves not working. [Fallout 3 Forums]
Fallout 3 GOTY - Now Available [Bethesda Blog]

It's something that's been gnawing at me for a while now, but as we approach Christmas 2009 – the fifth holiday season for the Xbox 360, and fourth for the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii – that gnawing has turned into some serious, unchecked mastication.

After all, a new hardware generation is meant to usher in a new generation of games to go with it. And not just games that look prettier, or sound better; titles that give you something entirely new in terms of game design and mechanics, something that could only be done by taking advantage of the latest in console hardware.

Yet I think only a handful of games this console generation have done so. Which ones? Oh, I'm glad you asked. Games like:

Dead Rising – There has never been a game like Dead Rising. It's open-world in appearance, but the entire game is built around the concept of navigating an endless sea of zombies in numbers previous consoles simply couldn't get on-screen at once.

Oblivion/Fallout 3 – Two games, I know, but they do the same thing, so they go in the same listing. Nobody ever forgets that first time you leave the Imperial sewers/Vault 101 and take in the world around you, realising that Bethesda haven't crafted a level, they've built a seamless, living world well beyond the scale of previous titles like Morrowind.

Yes, they also appear on PC, but remember, these games were also built from the ground up with consoles in mind, rather than being crude ports.

Wii Sports/Wii Sports Resort – To this day, the only games that have truly delivered on the promise of the Wii Remote, integrating it so naturally within the gameplay experience that you can't imagine playing the games without it.

So as good as Modern Warfare is, as good as Mario Galaxy is, I don't call them truly "next gen" games. Why? Because they fail my "next gen" test, that's why.

Here's the test: If a game can be ported to a console in a previous generation and keep its core gameplay and overall design in place, it's not what I'm calling for the purposes of this piece a "next gen" game. Mario Galaxy was great, but really, it's a GameCube title with some star-shaking stuff thrown in. Modern Warfare? Amazing, but as the upcoming Wii port attests, it used the 360 and PS3 primarily for better graphics and sound. LittleBigPlanet? Another great game, but the PSP version shows the core experience could have been done on a PS2.

Other games I think fail this test are Halo 3, BioShock, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Uncharted, Metal Gear Solid 4…OK, pretty much everything. You get the idea. Sure, they're nice and shiny, and have lovely pre-rendered cutscenes, and there are advanced uses of physics and AI under the hood, and most important of all, advanced online connectivity, but all of those are just tweaks, improvements, icing on the cake, candy for the eyes. None of them fundamentally change the way you approach a game, or a genre.

Not like Mario Kart and F-Zero did with Parallax scrolling. Or Mario 64 with its use of 3D. Or Grand Theft Auto III with its living, breathing city. Those games re-wrote the book. You just couldn't do GTAIII on the PlayStation. Or Mario 64 on the SNES. They were true "next gen" games.

Now, I'm not saying all games NEED to be 100% innovative. That's an impossible requirement. Ridiculous, even. Not every single game idea is going to bust outside the box. I like my latest version of FIFA or Call of Duty as much as the next man, and the world will spin just fine with the majority of games simply plodding along, doing what the last one did, only slightly better. Still, a man can want, can't he?

So why do we have so few this time around? What's the problem? There's refinement under the hood. There's games that some, and especially the developers, may disagree with me on (GTAIV, for example, or Halo 3 and its extensive multiplayer modes). And there are some who could argue, with a fair point, that the same problem plagued the previous generation.

Certainly the cost of development can't help. Worlds are built with engines, and engines are built on rules. If you wanted to come up with something entirely new, you'd have to do it yourself, which for many developers and publishers in this current economic climate just isn't feasible.

It can also be argued that a single jump in the mid-90's – from the 16-bit era to the N64 and PS1 – will long be the most significant in gaming, taking us as it did from 2D to 3D, and that subsequent generations can't be relied upon to deliver the same level of innovation. Fair, to a point, but then there are still plenty of games like GTAIII that were able to innovate well past the 32-bit era.

One final possibility, however, is that there is innovation going on in today's games beyond the superficial. It's just, we can't see it. Chatting with Bethesda's Todd Howard on the subject, he put this idea forward:

"I think the visual component of it is the one that everyone notices first, and it's also the prime part that benefits from what the new hardware gives you" he says. "So it's just harder to see the innovations beyond that, but they're there. I'd guess there's just as much pure 'design innovation' with this generation as there has been in the last few."

"Look at the basis now for how games handle physics, difficulty, controls, save games, or simple load screens. I know it sounds silly, but I get excited by innovations in loading screens, because they're the worst part of a game. I'm interested in how games simply start."

Promising, yeah, but does that really hold water when compared to more fundamental changes? Not really. "There's been innovations in AI, but it certainly hasn't kept pace with the graphic fidelity, which yields this overall feeling of it going backwards" Howard adds. "The environments are so complex now in games, that building good AI just to manoeuvre them takes serious time. But that's not an innovation, that's simply the AI doing what it could do before in a game.

"My hope is, as we developers turn the corner on how to make the games simply 'work,' that we can innovate more on how the games respond to the player, whether that is the AI, or socially, or something else."

Maybe that explains it, and in 30 years, we'll look back on the current generation as one where developers were finding their feet, laying the groundwork for sprawling, innovating and revolutionary titles of the future.

Fallout 3 AER9 Laser Rifle [Volpin Props]

[thanks Link257!]

The first DLC to hit the PS3 version of Fallout 3 will be Broken Steel, available Sept. 24. That will be followed by Operation: Anchorage and The Pitt on Oct. 1, and Point Lookout and Mothership Zeta on Oct. 8.

Bethesda also announced that the Fallout 3 Game of the Year edition for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC will be available at stores on October 13.

The Game of the Year edition includes the game as well as all five downloadable content packs. The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions will retail for $59.99 and the Games for Windows version will be available for $49.99.

Bethesda would like to send their fans a big thank you for sticking with them on the Xbox 360 Fallout 3 downloadable content front. Even after at least two of the five packs was released broken, you stood by the game, purchasing each new chunk of content as soon as it came out, from Operation Anchorage to Mothership Zeta. Your reward for such loyalty comes on October 1st, when the premium Fallout 3 Xbox 360 theme goes live. As long as you've purchased all five DLC packs by September 22nd, it won't cost you any bottle caps at all.

The rest of you can be prepared to pony up 240 Microsoft points. That's the price you pay - $3. Next time maybe you'll buy all the downloadable content, Dr. Cheapypants.

The video is of the entire level, eight minutes long, but to summarize - the guy gets a radio signal from a damsel held by slavers. He then busts into the fortress where she's held, shrugging off gunfire and mowing down raiders run-and-gun style (no VATS!) with a laser gatling, before reaching her cell. The slaver proposes that the player to buy her freedom - in a synthesized voice, it sounds like - but no dice. Down he goes, and then down she goes, on bended knee, to propose to her man.

Nontraditional? Absolutely. But for Fallout 3 fans, imagine being this guy. The process, going by the Bethesda studios forum threads, took nearly three months, start to finish, but it got the job done. Hubby-to-be said yes. Because love, love never changes.

The Fallout 3 Marriage Proposal [Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

The details of that case come from a complaint filed in the District Court of Maryland earlier this week. That complaint alleges that Interplay did not seek approval for the sale of the Fallout Trilogy bundle, which features the original Fallout, Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics. Bethesda claims that the title Fallout Trilogy is "confusingly similar" to that of Fallout 3 and takes issue with Interplay's marketing, sale and distribution of other Fallout packages named Fallout Collection and Saga Fallout.

Bethesda also takes issue with Interplay's licensing of Fallout games to digital distribution services Good Old Games (GOG), GameTap and Steam, which Interplay was said never to have sought approval or permission for. Basically, Bethesda takes issue with pretty much everything Interplay seems to be doing with the pre-Fallout 3 releases, believing they cannibalize sales of Fallout 3.

The Fallout 3 developer furthermore wants to officially terminate Interplay's rights to create a massively multiplayer online game with the Fallout license. Bethesda believes that Interplay has breached its trademark licensing agreement by failing to enter into full-scale development of a Fallout MMO.

Bethesda threatened legal action over the Fallout MMO earlier this year, claiming that Interplay was slow to develop such a game and had failed to secure the proper funding for the game code-named "Project V13."

In short, it appears that Bethesda wants Interplay to stop selling the Fallout Trilogy and pay up any profits it made selling the trademark infringing games.

Bethesda purchased the rights to the Fallout property for $5.75 million.

Earlier this week, tipster Dan M. snapped that screen pic of the 22 trophies. Tipster Player X went comparing trophies with someone in his friends list and noticed them, too. They're listed below.

Sit tight, PS3 owners, your wait is almost over. The DLC will release in the same order as it did for Xbox 360, beginning with Operation Anchorage, then the Pitt, Point Lookout and Mothership Zeta. Correction: Broken Steel will be the first expansion, followed by Operation Anchorage, then The Pitt, then Point Lookout and Mothership Zeta.

• Aiding the Outcasts (silver)
• The Guns of Anchorage (silver)
• Paving the Way (silver)
• Operation Anchorage! (gold)
• Into The Pitt (silver)
• Unsafe Working Conditions (silver)
• Free Labor (gold)
• Mill Worker (silver)
• Death From Above (silver)
• Shock Value (silver)
• Who Dares Wins (gold)
• Devil (bronze)
• True Mortal (bronze)
• Messiah (bronze)
• The Local Flavor (silver)
• Walking With Spirits (silver)
• A Meeting of the Minds (gold)
• Bog Walker (silver)
• Not of This World (silver)
• Among the Stars (silver)
• This Galaxy Ain't Big Enough... (gold)
• Alien Archivist (silver)

The August release of the fifth downloadable mission-pack for Fallout 3 wrapped up a hefty mid-year helping of new content for one of the most acclaimed games of last year.

The game's executive producer, Todd Howard of Bethesda Softworks, told me last week in Dallas at QuakeCon that he's happy with the roll-out. "We knew we wanted to do three initially and we'll see where that goes," he said. " I kind of had in my mind that the upper limit was five. Part of that was what I think people are willing to continue to pay for a game. And a lot of that is our own internal bandwidth."

With the launch of Mothership Zeta, Bethesda's met Howard's goal. Five game-expanding pieces of content, each granting players about four hour' worth of game time for $10, are now out on the Xbox 360 and PC. The packs are planned for a PlayStation 3 release this next month, with, according to Howard, about one new one per week, starting with the game's end-changing and level-cap-raising Broken Steel.

The DLC packs began development as work on Fallout 3 wrapped last year, about two months' prior to the game's late October shipping date. Howard recalled that he had two groups out of his 90-person development team working in parallel on the first two expansions, Operation Anchorage and The Pitt. "About half the team goes on to the next big game," he said, making no attempt to hint at what their next project will be. "The other half, which is mostly a lot of artists and designers go on to DLC stuff."

The creation of the DLC is the fun part, Howard said as the designers are freed from having to wrestle with technology and have fun. That liberation produced the early suggestions to throw aliens in, but Howard delayed that desire until Mothership Zeta. "That one kept coming up: 'We should do alien abduction, we should do alien abduction.' I thought it was hilarious, and I said, 'We should wait. That isn't like the classic Fallout. You kind of want to keep the footprint of aliens in Fallout small.'

"But once we got to the fifth one, it's like: It's really funny. It's a cool concept. We should do it.' And the reason I like it is I do like the DLC to feel like something new. And that one, just on the surface, is instantly: this is different. It's not more of the same, I'm out in the wasteland."

Howard called out Point Lookout, the fourth DLC, as one of his favorites, referring to it as "one of the biggest and best DLCs." That one, which brings the player to a spooky new island to have an adventure that plays as a microcosm of the original game was developed by Joel Burgess, lead level designer of Fallout 3 and Nate Purkeypile, one of the game's artists. "We knew we were going to do a fourth DLC, I said to them: 'I think you guys should do this,'" Come up with some ideas and pitch us. And that's what they did. That was on the case that, on a bigger game, they wouldn't have gotten that opportunity."

The single design directive for Point Lookout, Howard said, came from something he thought the first DLC releases lacked. "It it felt like the other DLCs didn't do what the game does best, which is give me a wide-open area to explore. So let's do a DLC that gives you that in a new way."

The DLC's now done, all available for PC and 360 users and soon playable on the PS3. Bethesda's moving on. Five got the job done.

The next announced Fallout project is Fallout: New Vegas, currently in development at Obsidian Entertainment.

We've been to Alaska in the past, Pittsburgh in the present, and we've even taken a field trip to Point Lookout State Park, so really, is there anywhere left to go but up? Mothership Zeta takes Fallout 3's protagonist far above the chaos of the D.C. Wastelands in order to experience a different kind of chaos aboard an alien spaceship. New weapons and armor aid our hero in his or her quest to escape alien captivity and perhaps save humanity from a threat worse than nuclear annihilation.

How does Bethesda's post-apocalyptic masterpiece fare in this strange new setting?

Loved
Great Moments In Sci-Fi Adventure: Mothership Zeta is a classic tale of pulp science fiction. Boy (or girl) meets aliens, boy is experimented on by aliens, and boy leads a ragtag band of prisoners in a revolt against their alien captors in order to save the earth. You acquire alien weaponry, uncover secrets of alien technology, and eventually find yourself back on the planet with enough new hardware to make a high ranking member of the Brotherhood of Steel weep. While most of the action is standard Fallout 3 fare, only with the player using new weapons to kill new creatures, several impressive set pieces really make the downloadable content sing, including a thrilling conclusion that will leave you seeing stars.

Space Tongue In Space Cheek: Mothership Zeta might take place in the shallows of space, but its sense of humor is quite down-to-earth. A motley cast of characters joins you on your quest to escape the alien's vile clutches, adding much-needed laughs to what otherwise would have been a rather plain adventure, despite the extraordinary setting. It's comforting to have other humans with you in this strange locale, even if one of them leads you on a wild, Star Wars reference-riddled ride through the ship's waste disposal system, and other is a Samurai that speaks extensively in Japanese, which no one else in your "crew" understands.

Hated
I Am Generator-Bane: You will be blowing up a lot of generators in Mothership Zeta. Almost every major objective in the downloadable content involves blowing up generators, to the point where when you come across a quest with a different objective, you'll still be keeping an eye out for them, just in case. It wouldn't be as annoying if there were different ways to take out said generators, but no... it's all pretty much the same thing.

As the last of the planned Fallout 3 downloadable content, Mothership Zeta isn't quite the ending I had hoped for. As grand finales go, it's got grand in spades, but is sorely lacking in the finale department. Don't get me wrong here...it's an excellent experience, but it just doesn't deliver the sense of closure I'm looking for in Fallout 3. At the end of your adventure you're back on the surface, a bit older, a bit wiser, a bit better armed, and wanting more. Bethesda has said that taking the level cap past the 30 established in Broken Steel would unbalance the game. Fair enough. If we can go no further, give us a grand finale.

Mothership Zeta might not be an ending, but it's a roller coaster of a space adventure that's well worth the price of admission, especially if you hate power generators.

Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta was developed by Bethesda Softworks and distributed to the Xbox 360 and Windows for download on August 3rd. It's also announced as coming to the PS3 later. Retails for 800 Microsoft Points ($10 USD). Played PC version. Played the core quests, got a bit sidetracked, sampled the new weapons, raised my hero from Level 29 to Level 30 over the course of about five hours.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

The contents of those bottles could be from the old Nuka-Cola recipes back in January; the labels sure look like it. The guys put six more photos up, one of them looks like glow-in-the-dark Quantum - or, well, a bottle of blue soda held over a light in the guy's hand.

Enjoy the party and your beverages, gents.

Nuka Cola Machine [site]

Nothing gets me in the mood for a little retro post-apocalyptic science fiction action-adventure like a little operatic chanting. It worked for the original Star Trek series, and it sure as hell works here. The trailer gives us a glimpse of some of the new toys and outfits we'll get to play with in Mothership Zeta, as whoever we've deemed hero of humanity journeys unwillingly into outer space to save the human race from whatever it is those aliens want to do with us. I'm expecting a vicious probing, but then that's what I always expect.

By following Chris Furniss's simple instructions, you can whip up a ton of hand-made Nuka Cola caps, Med-X and Buffout, then scatter them across your tables and floors accordingly.

Best part? They're cheap and easy to make. Well, that and you get a little slice of Fallout without the whole nuclear armageddon thing. That's also a plus, I guess.

Fallout Cosplay Accoutrements: Make your own Nuka Cola bottlecaps, Buffout and Med-X [Weekly Geek, via Offworld]

Not only that, the original design of Fallout 3, by Black Isle, there were no plans to include Dogmeat. But Bethesda ultimately brought him back. It seems bizarre that they could have left out a dog companion, one of the most motionally fulfilling features of the original two games.

The Escapist's latest issue examines canines in gaming, and no such study would be complete without a discussion of Dogmeat, the unwaveringly faithful follower your Lone Wanderer picks up in all three Fallout titles. The game's creators never imagined how attached players would become to the dog, going to hell and back to keep him alive until the end of the game.

Junktown Dog

"Dogmeat was definitely inspired by The Road Warrior," says Cain. "Leonard Boyarsky, the art director ... had that movie running continuously in his office, and I think he remarked on several occasions that having a dog in the game would be really cool. [It's] why we wanted a dog in the first place."

Many pieces of the Fallout games were inspired by The Road Warrior, from the opening "newsreel" monologues (narrated by Ron Perlman of The City of Lost Children, another inspiration according to Cain) to the games' stylized leather armor and medical braces. One of the most vivid images from Bethesda Game Studios' Fallout 3, the latest installment in the series, is that of the Lone Wanderer with Dogmeat by his side, a mirror image of a scene from Mad Max. Even the breed is the same: Both are Blue Heelers, known for their loyalty, trainability and heterochromia (one blue eye, one brown eye).
image

What isn't derived from The Road Warrior is Dogmeat's name; that likely comes from a scene in the 1975 film A Boy and His Dog where Vic (Don Johnson) refers to his mutt as "Dogmeat."

"A Boy and His Dog inspired Fallout on many levels, from underground communities of survivors to glowing mutants," says Heinig. "My understanding is that (Fallout designer) Scott Bennie settled on the name 'Dogmeat' for the character, and it's likely that he did pick that from the story in question." Good thing, because according to Bennie, Dogmeat's original name was "Dogs**t."

In the original Fallout 3 (aka Van Buren), designed to near-completion by Black Isle, there were no plans to bring Dogmeat back, but fortunately for dog lovers he made it into Bethesda's version as a presumed descendant of the original dog who - according to the developers - perished in a "force field accident." Fallout 3's Dogmeat not only follows and defends you, but will fetch food, ammo and weapons (even boasting the curious but helpful ability to pilfer things from locked containers). When he goes missing, he can often be found waiting patiently outside Vault 101, perhaps inspired by the final scene from A Boy and His Dog where "Dogmeat" waits outside a vault for his owner.

[...]

Dogmeat's unwavering devotion lets players "Pet the Dog," a fiction trope wherein a potentially despised character appears kinder by demonstrating a love for dogs: In Equilibrium, Cleric John Preston slaughters a dozen policemen to save a puppy; Discworld's Lord Vetinari (veterinary?) is an ex-assassin with dogs named Wuffles and Mr. Fusspot; even Richard Nixon had Checkers. In an uncaring wasteland where you can play a total psychopath if you so choose, Dogmeat is a moral compass: Though your needle might swing towards good or evil, his center always holds strong provided you protect him. If you don't, his death becomes a sad reminder of the consequences of reckless slaughter.

For many reasons, Dogmeat is arguably the most successful NPC companion ever, according to Chris Avellone, Level Designer for Fallout 2, creator of the Fallout Bible and Chief Creative Officer of Obsidian Entertainment, developer of Fallout: New Vegas.

"One, he doesn't talk, so the players can project a personality on to him," says Avellone. "Two, he's effective in combat ... and three, he's a dog that stays with you through thick-and-thin. I don't think there's a deeper 'awww' sentiment than people have in their hearts for their pets."

- Michael Fiegel