New Vegas

I feel like I just keep talking about Fallout, but that's what I've been up to so what are you going to do? I decided to advance the main story a little bit last night, so it was time to head into Legion territory and have a chat with Caesar.

From encounters with his men, you might assume he's an asshole. But when you meet him, you realize he's a GIANT asshole.

On the bright side, he caught Benny for me so I was finally able to put a bullet in that two-timing rat fink's skull. Even so, I absolutely intend to come back later and kill every member of the Legion I can find at Fortification Hill, up to and including Caesar. I'll probably bring Boone with me for that, I imagine he'll enjoy it.

I was a little disappointed that the game didn't give me the option of tearing apart Caesar's philosophical arguments. I've got a 9 Intellect, you'd think that would be sufficient to tell him that no, I fully understand the concepts of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, and also he's a self-aggrandizing fascist hypocrite. Yes Caesar, please explain to me how the NCR is falling apart because it was a cult of personality centered around President Tandi, and how what you're creating is ENTIRELY DIFFERENT NO REALLY. I'm all ears.

What's that, game? You want me to shoot every Legionary in the head? Well, it'll be tough, but I guess somebody's got to do it.

Apart from the Legion being entirely awful though, I'm liking how it's not entirely clear who's best to ally with for the main storyline. The NCR are solid guys, but they're expanding far too fast. Backing Mr. House means an independent New Vegas which seems like a good option, but he's got that whole smarmy Andrew Ryan vibe going. Or I could try to replace House and take over Vegas myself; tempting but I worry that outside forces might think that House's death means they could try and take the city.  No matter what though, Caesar's gonna die.

I've gotten in the habit of putting together a blog post in my head / as bits and pieces in the morning and then cleaning it up and posting it at lunch. Mostly that's worked pretty well, but then comes a day like yesterday where I'm in meetings all day with barely time to grab lunch between. Combined with not feeling like I have any one thing to say a lot about I ended up skipping the day. Hey, I never promised daily updates after August after all.

Currently I'm mostly keeping to a 6 day a week schedule with Sunday as a day off. I've missed a day this week and last, but that still leaves 5 days of posts, which I feel pretty good about it. I've considered moving my book reviews to Fridays and just doing weekdays, but the more I think about it shooting for 6 days a week and accepting 5 when life interferes with a day is something I can probably maintain.

You know what also interferes with a post? A frickin' power outage. I went home for lunch and intended to finish up this post with a few screenshots. Not five minutes after I walked in the door, I heard a bang in the distance and the power went out. It's still out now, so I guess I'll use images from the Internet for now and consider replacing them with my own this evening. Assuming I have power then.

Fallout: New Vegas continues to monopolize my gaming time. It's interesting how Obsidian retuned things to make the game more difficult. Fallout 3, once you understood the game, really wasn't a difficult game at all. Encounters at higher levels mostly were just big bags of hit points that took forever to wear down while Dogmeat tanked for me. Part of this was due to how quickly you would find high quality weapons and armor. I'm level 12 in New Vegas and I've only recently gotten hold of some reinforced leather armor; by this point in Fallout 3 I had a unique set of combat armor.

New Vegas also has made perks more valuable by reducing how often you get them. In Fallout 3 you get one every level so you can get all the really important ones and still have room to pick up a bunch of extras. New Vegas gives you one every other level, so you have to pick and choose. The very best perks were also rebalanced to not be so overpowering (looking at you Grim Reaper's Sprint). In Fallout 3 I would have picked up Intense Training multiple times by level 12; in New Vegas I just chose it for the first time to bump my Luck to 6.

I've still yet to run into any Brotherhood of Steel, but I did meet my first representative of the Followers of the Apocalypse last night when I took on the job of getting an old solar power plant up and running. It's good to see the Followers still around and holding to their ideals of restoring knowledge and technology for the good of all. It means there's at least one faction I can wholeheartedly support.

I chose not to use the plant to power a space based laser cannon. Maybe next playthrough.