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When the United States is busy electing a president this fall, the developers at Bethesda Softworks will be hoping that gamers are enjoying their time in a nuked Washington, D.C.

And, no, there's no connection.

I spoke with "Fallout 3" executive producer Todd Howard recently about his team's game, a sequel to the beloved top-down role-playing game PC series that is getting a first-person/third-person "Oblivion"-style treatment from Bethesda.

No political statement intended, according to Howard. The timing of the release of "Fallout 3" so close to a national election is "all a coincidence," he told me. Development of the game started in 2004 without any sense of when it would come out. For all the opportunity of staging a post-apocalyptic action role-playing game in a bombed-out Washington circa 2277, Howard maintains the game "has nothing to do with the current state of affairs."

During our half-hour interview, Howard could be more affirmative about some other stuff, though, like how the game's dog behaves, why his game will finally do justice to the nation's capital, and what his favorite perk is in the game's humorous upgrade system: Read More...