Lagumbay.com Reflections on Love, Rage, and Fear

My first entry into the Fallout universe was with Fallout 3, which I enjoyed immensely. I liked its cool VATS combat system, its graphic carnage, and the wonderful choose-your-own adventure storytelling. Even the lock picking and hacking mini-games were cool. I actually wrote javascript code to help me compare the “hacking” passwords since I never was good at “Mastermind.” I liked Fallout 3 so much that I actually re-bought the game for the GOTY expansion packs…but only got halfway through Mothership Zeta.

Fallout: New Vegas isn’t about “The Wanderer” whose personal quest for answers led him to bigger events and storylines that gained him prestige and a place in history. No, Fallout: New Vegas is about “The Courier” whose personal quest for answers leads him to bigger events and storylines that gain him prestige and a place in history.

The story starts with The Courier getting shot in the head while trying to deliver The Pinnacle Chip to Gutierrez. The Courier wakes up at Doc. Brown’s house suffering from slight amnesia, which makes for a good tie-in to the stat-building start of the RPG. Strangely enough, The Courier had very similar stats to The Wanderer’s GOAT scores, which meant that I played the same sneak/snipe hack/pick style in both games.

There was the addition of what I considered a slightly Hitman-esque gameplay aspect with faction clothing. While I was dressed in normal clothing, Powder Gangers shot me on sight. Dressed as a Powder Ganger, a Powder Ganger shot me only after he realized that I got point blank critical hits on two of…

Wait, where was I? Oh yeah, two of his friends. It made things feel a little more 47, which was nice. If they could integrate blades of chaos into the game, that would’ve been even cooler.

Along the way, I acquired quests, appeased townsfolk, ticked off Caesar’s Legion, gained a really handy Eyebot, and died a few times since I was apparently highly allergic to Cazad…

Cazador stings. There were quite a few OMG moments early like the lottery at Nipton and the associated crucifixions done by Caesar’s Legion. Very early in the game, I came to the realization that I didn’t like those guys much and started to shoot them at any opportunity. At Novac, I ran across someone who felt the same way about the Legion as I did. His name is Cr…

Hold on a sec…his name is Craig Boone and boy does he have a story to tell! Of course I had to hang out with him a while before he trusted me enough to open up with the back story, but damn his story was heartbreakingly good. There were other companions, a few of whom were more pleasant to walk around with than Boonie (Veronica had the best one-liners), but it had been decided that Fallout: New Vegas was going to be…

Fallout: New Vegas was going to be the feel-good bromance story of the season.

And you know what? It WAS a good story as I had expected from a Fallout sequel/expansion. The combat system was fun. There were a few stats decisions that I regretted later on, but overall, the game’s story carried it through, and the decisions I had to make later in the game became…

The decisions later in the game became harder and harder to make as it affected how the game ended, whose faction won, and whom I wanted to have control of New Vegas. But the storytelling, the wonderful storytelling! The near-constant decisions and intersecting quest lines made for a very immersive…

The near-constant decisions and intersecting quest lines made for a very immersive game…EXCEPT FOR THE GOD DAMN LOCKUPS that required hard-reboots on my PS3. Even though I had the “save early, save often” mentality, saving immediately after leaving a loading screen (when entering a new area) took some time as the system seemed to be doing things in the background which cause the LOAD/SAVE functions to be greyed out.

I’ve frozen just after exiting a building, I’ve frozen at the VATS targeting screen, I’ve frozen after a slow-mo critical strike kill, I’ve frozen after completing a conversation, and I’ve frozen AT THE GAME’S OWN AUTOSAVE FUNCTION which ended up being corrupted by the hard-reset which cost me about twenty minutes of having to do things over. At first it didn’t seem to freeze up at all. Then the freeze-ups seemed tolerable, excusable even. Later on in the game, the freeze-ups just kicked me right out of stride. I had so many freezes at the battle for Hoover Dam that I actually stopped playing for the night. That’s like turning off Star Wars in the middle of the Death Star trench run. In the end, though, we bought and played the game. I finished one storyline and am about to finish another. Reluctantly, I have to admit that while game makers shouldn’t be able to get away with releasing a game that locks up as much as this game does; I think Obsidian has done just that.

In movies, it is said that good special effects cannot cover for a horrible story. In the case of this game, we have a wonderful story told by someone trying to do an over-exaggerated William Shatner impression. Fallout: New Vegas is immersive and compelling. I just wish it wouldn’t pause inapprop…

MOTHERFSCKER!!!