Fallout 3/Tear Jerker


 * "If anyone can hear this, this is Bob Anderstein. [My] family and I have taken refuge in a drainage chamber not too far from a radio relay tower outside of D.C. My boy is very sick, needs medical assistance. Please help if you can. We're listening for your response. 3950 kilohertz." Exploring the source of the signal reveals their sad fate.
 * There's just a lot of little things that get you down. A skeleton behind a sealed door with a pistol in its hand, a note from a nurse dying of radiation sickness who laments that she'd prefer to die last so she could take care of her patients, a corpse in the wilderness with a note about a man who killed his kids in front of him... who doesn't exist in-game, denying you the satisfaction of enacting some justice in this sick sad world.
 * The story of Little Lamplight and Vault 87. Little Lamplight began as a series of caverns that a troupe of children happened to be taking a field trip in during Armageddon. Vault 87 was in an adjacent cave complex. The kids pounded and pounded on the door begging to be let in, but a man inside said that they were "already dead" and should go away. That man was one kid's father, who believed his son killed in the holocaust, and his voice a hallucination.
 * Right outside Vault 101, there are a couple of skeletons. And a picket sign saying, "We're DYING, assholes!"
 * At one of the Drive-in theaters, there are two skeletons embracing on the hood of an old car. And if you check the mailboxes in the various small towns, you'll eventually find rejection letters from the Vault program.
 * In one house, the player can find the undisturbed skeletons of a couple spooning on a bed, apparently sleeping peacefully when the bombs fell. There's a child's skeleton in another bedroom. The child's room has a crutch and medical brace nearby. Yeah, basically they killed Tiny Tim.
 * In another random house, you can find a skeleton in a bathtub. Also, a toaster.
 * When some characters are killed, they'll cry/mutter the name of a loved one as their last words. Even for gamers who enjoy playing evil characters, it can be heart wrenching to be reminded the man you just shot had a wife or kid.
 * One drawn-out side quest involves trying to gain entry to  where a family had taken shelter. Once you get in, you find four skeletons and a feral ghoul.
 * There is one house in Georgetown where a robot sits silently in a room, untouched for the two hundred years since the bombs fell. When activated on a certain command, the robot will drolly float to the child's room where a small charred skeleton lays where the child died sleeping, with its teddy bear still cradled in its hands. The robot, not realizing this, will read its designated bedtime story...There will come soft rains.
 * This one is especially tragic if you think of it as the parents possibly preparing their children for what the war will bring...
 * Going to Arlington Cemetery invoked this feeling in me. It seems so sad that all the sacrifices and suffering of the ages experienced by all these soldiers was in vain because the world that they fought to protect and uphold was all destroyed in the nuclear fires of the Great War. Even after the apocalypse all it brought was a sad new chapter in humanity's long history. It got me to thinking if perhaps the men in those graves were luckier then we for the dead have seen the end of war, the survivors of the war have not because war never changes.
 * Talking the Ant-Agonizer into surrendering. She immediately drops her supervillain persona, and is reduced to begging you to let her go. She sounds about three seconds from crying the whole time. To bad there isn't a way for your character to hug her...