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camwynNotes From New Vegas 1: OW OW OW MY HEAD OW
Hi, folks. This is my attempt at a Camwyn Stinks At Videogames writeup for Fallout New Vegas. If you're seeing this, it meanseither I finished the writeup or I gave up on ever finishing itI wussed out on using 'don't post it until it's finished' as a motivation for finishing it. It's going up one chunk at a time. Call it a non-novel version of NaNoWriMo if you want. Given the size of this game it'll probably be long enough to qualify.
The first thing I need to say here is that my Camwyn Stinks write-ups have generally been done on my very first playthroughs, to capture the maximum AIEEEE factor. One of the greatest joys I get out of videogames is the discovery- seeing what the game's creators have done to make their world interesting, finding out for the first time what the action is like, having a completely new story unfold in front of me. Yes, I play video games for the story and the characters as much as for the action. If you haven't figured that out by now, go back over the writeup I did for Half-Life and then look for a writeup on Bioshock. Hint: there isn't one. /Because I never got the sense of a real character from Jack, that's why/. Pretty setting, kind of an interesting backstory, but the story that unfolded in the game itself just didn't do it for me and neither did the character.
Fallout New Vegas (and its stylistic predecessor, Fallout 3) is different. It's a damn big world full of all kinds of things, a sandbox the size of the Mojave Desert, and I am very, very happy with that. Trying to write up my first play-through on a game that easily takes fifty hours to complete (some people do speed runs; I am not one of them) would be like... well, it would interfere and get me killed a lot, I should probably be honest with that. I'm not always good at noticing whether I really did hit Pause or just glanced my finger against it, and guaranteed, if I stopped to take notes the first time I'd get my face chewed off by geckos or cazadors or something. That, and the initial release of the game was kinda buggy, so now that I've got the first Xbox 360 patch for it I'm good to go.
I know that I originally promised the adventures of Madeline, a generally nice girl who had the slight problem of every so often hearing the voice of Axolotl, Aztec God of Mutant Lizards, and whose battle cry was "I SERVE A DARK AND HUNGRY GOD!" because she was given a straight razor as her initial melee weapon. Changed my mind. Madeline was my first play-through. For this writeup I'm playing through as Janice, and I'm aiming for a character with more social skills than combat ones. Not that she isn't combat capable, because there's this whole thing with /not dying horribly of mutant lizard /about the game and all, but I wanna see how many challenges I can resolve by means of being talky rather than shooty. And thus, we leap head-first into the realm of the spoilers.
First things first, and let's get it out of the way:"War. War never changes."
Hi, Ron Perlman! Good to hear from you again! Where are we going today? ... Aaah, okay. The Mojave Desert. Apparently when atomic fire rained from the skies and people retreated to the Vaults, the Las Vegas area was largely spared, or at least was spared the worst of the nuclear destruction. So people've been rebuilding where they can in the Mojave, and New Vegas is currently operational, all shiny and glittery and about what you'd expect from Vegas. That's great. Hoover Dam's up and running. That's great too. The New California Republic is spreading eastward, which is kind of impressive considering the place started off from a wee bitty village called Shady Sands in game 1. That's fantastic. Aaaand then there's the MASSIVE MOB OF CRAZY PEOPLE ON THE EASTERN SIDE OF THE RIVER.
Screeching halt here.
The enemy in this game isn't going to be the Enclave and it isn't going to be some successor to the Master. It's going to be Caesar's Legion, a-
Okay, wait. Lemme back up. The primary evil people in this game aren't going to be the Enclave or the Master's successors. I have played through this thing once already and I can tell you that unlike Fallout 3- heck, unlike the first two games, from what very very little I have played of them (which is to say a few hours of game 1 and the opening cinematic of game 2)- you can side with Team Evil in this game if you want. And I don't mean 'make a single choice at the end of the game that causes you to get an ending where the bad guys win'. I mean you can start sucking up to the bad guys early on, do all kinds of things that cause the game's generally decent people to hate you, get yourself into the pay of the bad guys, and generally wind up a highly acclaimed and well-liked member of Team Evil. Heck, as a member of particular factions of Team Evil- but we'll go into that later. Caesar's Legion first.
Apparently the Legion is what happens when somebody gets the bright idea to a) model themselves on ancient examples of society and b) beat the living snot out of all their neighbors until the neighbors agree to play along. So basically a) and a) again. The Legion is composed of something like eighty-three tribes forcibly unified under one guy and his Roman-modeled command structure, and we are not talking the Roman Republic, oh no. We are talking one emperor and everybody else does what he says. We are also talking slave-tacularity here, because that's basically what happens to your tribe if you're not considered spiffy enough to be Legion yourselves. More on that in a later installment, though. To sum up: west of New Vegas you get the New California Republic, which is organization and democracy and taxes and central government structure; east of there is Caesar, which is slaves and soldiers and general fists of iron. Whee.
New Vegas itself is apparently run by Three Families under the auspices of one Mr. House, who nobody's seen in, like, ever, but everybody pays attention to because.... something. Ron doesn't say why. Okay, whatevs, we'll deal with that. Oh, and there's gangs. Lots of them. Better organized than the Raiders in the Capital Wasteland, more like the raiders in the first game, at least that's the impression I get here. Okay, we'll deal with that too. And how about you, the player character? Well, you're a courier for the Mojave Express. You run around the desert delivering stuff. At least until you meet Evil Chandler Bing.
... no, really, your character's intro to the game is waking up with their hands tied together in front of them while two guys in weird gang getups and one guy in a checkered black and white sport coat are busy digging a grave for you. Sport coat guy is voiced by Matthew Perry, so he's Evil Chandler Bing. Evil Chandler Bing apparently speaks entirely in Rat Pack and gambling slang, and when he sees you're awake he takes out some kind of poker-chip-looking thing and talks to you for a while, just long enough to get annoyed with the slang. In the end he tells you 'the game was rigged from the start' and then shoots you in the head.
I hate you, Evil Chandler Bing.
Anyway, that's the end of the opening cinematic. When the screen comes up again you're in ... somewhere that isn't the aforementioned grave, and someone is talking to you. Apparently, this is the doctor who saved your hide. Character generation is handled more smoothly here than in Fallout 3, where it was part of the mandatory tutorial. The doctor tells you you've been unconscious for a few days and he had to get some bullets out of your head, so he wants to make sure you're all right before going any farther. He asks for your name (Janice); he gives you a device to check on whether he got your appearance right, thus allowing you to customize your sex/race/age/facial features/hair (female, African-American, early twenties, one of the presets, chin-length black hair); he has you fiddle with an old Vita-Tester machine that looks like something out of Coney Island to set your SPECIAL stats (strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility, and luck- Janice has Int 8 and Cha 7 or something like that); he asks you some word associations and personality test questions to set your abilities; and then he asks you to fill out one more form for a bit of a history, which is where you get to set whether you want any Traits or not. Those of y'all who've only ever played Fallout 3 won't remember these. They're from games 1 and 2 and probably the deuterocanonical spinoffs which I haven't played. They generally provide one positive and one negative at the same time, and you only get two for the whole game. Things like Trigger Discipline- you shoot any gun 20% slower than baseline, but you're 20% more accurate- or Loose Cannon, which makes your attack speed faster but drops your damage resistance because you're more easily shot at. For Janice, I chose Good Natured. It cuts into your combat skills by 5% each but ups Barter, Speech, and several others by 5%. Yes, I know that's dangerous, I don't really care.
Doc Mitchell then gives you clothes and stuff. Depending on how you answered your questions 'stuff' may include a laser pistol. If not, you get a gun. Either way you get the shooty weapon and the slicey weapon, and in this case the slicey weapon is a straight razor rather than a knife or something else that would actually make sense. You also get a note about what you were doing when you got shot in the head. Apparently you were supposed to take some kind of poker chip to somebody in Vegas.
Okay, whatever. You know what? Don't care. Got shot. Got dead. As far as I'm concerned Janice's contract obligation is over. Neither rain nor snow nor gloom of night' does not include 'nor pellets of lead to the skull' thank you very much. Janice will be going out into the wilderness to see what she can find anywhere else at ALL in the Mojave Desert that does not involve 'the people who shot me in the head', 'the thing I was doing when I got shot in the head', or 'getting shot in the head in general'.
I kind of hate to break it to Janice, but this being the Fallout universe, she's probably going to get shot in the head again. And the everywhere else.
Oh, yeah, about those clothes from Doc Mitchell. Doc and his wife apparently grew up in Vault 21. If you're female he gives you his wife's old Vault suit and if you're male I imagine you get his. I suppose you don't get your regular clothes back on account of having bled on them a lot. If you preordered the game somewhere you get a bonus download that includes some form of armor. Janice got a set of light metal armor and a few other things, but she still got that Vault 21 suit too. I'm not sure what the story justification for that is, or even if there is one; I'm gonna handwave that the armor is icky and stinky and gross because you bled on it after the whole shooting thing and say that Doc gave it back anyway. He suggests to you that you go look around town and talk to a girl named Sunny Smiles about learning to survive in the desert, and maybe go look for Victor, the robot who dug you out of your grave and brought you to him. And that's that.
Step out of Doc's door and once the light blaze fades from your eyes you get a rather nice view of a ramshackle little town composed mostly of one-story homes and the occasional Airstream trailer. There are plants here, which is more than you can say for the Capital Wasteland, and there are... giant evil sheep. No, seriously. Bighorners. They're, like, everywhere in this town and they come up to your shoulder and their faces look like they were designed by Mike Mignola or something. That's the big thing here, the giant evil sheep. And the plants-
Oh. Right. Forgot to mention. You have the option, before leaving the doctor, of engaging something called Hardcore Mode. You know how Gordon Freeman can go twenty-eight hours full tilt without eating, drinking, or sleeping, and how gorping down a medkit will patch Gordon up instantaneously? And remember how BJ Blazkiewicz could stuff an entire turkey dinner into his face and instantly heal up from Nazis pumping him so full of lead he'd set off an airport metal detector? Hardcore Mode is the opposite of that. If you activate hardcore mode, your Health meter and your Radiation meter are joined by Sleep, Food, and Drink meters. You have to sleep every so often or it cuts into one of your SPECIAL stats and then you die, I assume of fatigue toxicity. You have to eat every so often or it cuts into your Strength and then you die. You have to drink a lot more often than either sleeping or eating or it cuts into Endurance and then you die. Different food items reduce hunger by different amounts, and some of them affect your other stats as well, either positively or negatively (hint: raw gecko meat is really bad for you, but it'll keep you from starving; cooked gecko meat, mmm tasty). Drinking Nuka-Cola actually makes you thirstier, I guess because of the caffeine; you'll find Nuka-Cola here but for the love of Pete, if you're going to drink anything bottled and fizzy, make it Sunset Sarsaparilla, a locally bottled beverage that has the advantages of a) much less and b) no !*&()&)! radiation. Even the ordinary kind of Nuka-Cola gives you a few rads here...
Anyway. There's plants all over the initial tutorial town of Goodsprings. Some of them are food plants. Some of them are component plants- you can make healing powder or stimpaks from Xander Root and Broc Flowers, harking right back to Fallout 2. Thing is, you have to have a respectable score in the Survival stat to make anything good, so if you're going to go Hardcore mode, make sure you get yourself a good Survival score. Also be aware that food items will heal a certain number of hit points in addition to your Starve-O-Meter, but they'll restore those hit points over the course of several seconds, so stuffing a Nevada Agave Fruit in your face will put back one hit point every second for eight seconds rather than dropping eight hit points on you right away. In Hardcore mode stimpaks also take several seconds to heal you, so you'd better be prepared for the hurting to take a while to go away. And you'd also better carry a Doctor's Bag or two, because you can't just Stimpak a crippled limb back into place in Hardcore. I think you can still sleep your crippled parts back on but that's not always an option, so- Doctor's Bags, very important. Oh, yes, and do not forget that Rad-Away still works, but like Stimpaks it works over time. You want instant radiation purging, go find a doctor and cough up the caps.
SO. *ahem* Right. Goodsprings.
You know what? I'll talk about Goodsprings in my next entry. This one's getting kind of long.
Hi, folks. This is my attempt at a Camwyn Stinks At Videogames writeup for Fallout New Vegas. If you're seeing this, it means
The first thing I need to say here is that my Camwyn Stinks write-ups have generally been done on my very first playthroughs, to capture the maximum AIEEEE factor. One of the greatest joys I get out of videogames is the discovery- seeing what the game's creators have done to make their world interesting, finding out for the first time what the action is like, having a completely new story unfold in front of me. Yes, I play video games for the story and the characters as much as for the action. If you haven't figured that out by now, go back over the writeup I did for Half-Life and then look for a writeup on Bioshock. Hint: there isn't one. /Because I never got the sense of a real character from Jack, that's why/. Pretty setting, kind of an interesting backstory, but the story that unfolded in the game itself just didn't do it for me and neither did the character.
Fallout New Vegas (and its stylistic predecessor, Fallout 3) is different. It's a damn big world full of all kinds of things, a sandbox the size of the Mojave Desert, and I am very, very happy with that. Trying to write up my first play-through on a game that easily takes fifty hours to complete (some people do speed runs; I am not one of them) would be like... well, it would interfere and get me killed a lot, I should probably be honest with that. I'm not always good at noticing whether I really did hit Pause or just glanced my finger against it, and guaranteed, if I stopped to take notes the first time I'd get my face chewed off by geckos or cazadors or something. That, and the initial release of the game was kinda buggy, so now that I've got the first Xbox 360 patch for it I'm good to go.
I know that I originally promised the adventures of Madeline, a generally nice girl who had the slight problem of every so often hearing the voice of Axolotl, Aztec God of Mutant Lizards, and whose battle cry was "I SERVE A DARK AND HUNGRY GOD!" because she was given a straight razor as her initial melee weapon. Changed my mind. Madeline was my first play-through. For this writeup I'm playing through as Janice, and I'm aiming for a character with more social skills than combat ones. Not that she isn't combat capable, because there's this whole thing with /not dying horribly of mutant lizard /about the game and all, but I wanna see how many challenges I can resolve by means of being talky rather than shooty. And thus, we leap head-first into the realm of the spoilers.
First things first, and let's get it out of the way:"War. War never changes."
Hi, Ron Perlman! Good to hear from you again! Where are we going today? ... Aaah, okay. The Mojave Desert. Apparently when atomic fire rained from the skies and people retreated to the Vaults, the Las Vegas area was largely spared, or at least was spared the worst of the nuclear destruction. So people've been rebuilding where they can in the Mojave, and New Vegas is currently operational, all shiny and glittery and about what you'd expect from Vegas. That's great. Hoover Dam's up and running. That's great too. The New California Republic is spreading eastward, which is kind of impressive considering the place started off from a wee bitty village called Shady Sands in game 1. That's fantastic. Aaaand then there's the MASSIVE MOB OF CRAZY PEOPLE ON THE EASTERN SIDE OF THE RIVER.
Screeching halt here.
The enemy in this game isn't going to be the Enclave and it isn't going to be some successor to the Master. It's going to be Caesar's Legion, a-
Okay, wait. Lemme back up. The primary evil people in this game aren't going to be the Enclave or the Master's successors. I have played through this thing once already and I can tell you that unlike Fallout 3- heck, unlike the first two games, from what very very little I have played of them (which is to say a few hours of game 1 and the opening cinematic of game 2)- you can side with Team Evil in this game if you want. And I don't mean 'make a single choice at the end of the game that causes you to get an ending where the bad guys win'. I mean you can start sucking up to the bad guys early on, do all kinds of things that cause the game's generally decent people to hate you, get yourself into the pay of the bad guys, and generally wind up a highly acclaimed and well-liked member of Team Evil. Heck, as a member of particular factions of Team Evil- but we'll go into that later. Caesar's Legion first.
Apparently the Legion is what happens when somebody gets the bright idea to a) model themselves on ancient examples of society and b) beat the living snot out of all their neighbors until the neighbors agree to play along. So basically a) and a) again. The Legion is composed of something like eighty-three tribes forcibly unified under one guy and his Roman-modeled command structure, and we are not talking the Roman Republic, oh no. We are talking one emperor and everybody else does what he says. We are also talking slave-tacularity here, because that's basically what happens to your tribe if you're not considered spiffy enough to be Legion yourselves. More on that in a later installment, though. To sum up: west of New Vegas you get the New California Republic, which is organization and democracy and taxes and central government structure; east of there is Caesar, which is slaves and soldiers and general fists of iron. Whee.
New Vegas itself is apparently run by Three Families under the auspices of one Mr. House, who nobody's seen in, like, ever, but everybody pays attention to because.... something. Ron doesn't say why. Okay, whatevs, we'll deal with that. Oh, and there's gangs. Lots of them. Better organized than the Raiders in the Capital Wasteland, more like the raiders in the first game, at least that's the impression I get here. Okay, we'll deal with that too. And how about you, the player character? Well, you're a courier for the Mojave Express. You run around the desert delivering stuff. At least until you meet Evil Chandler Bing.
... no, really, your character's intro to the game is waking up with their hands tied together in front of them while two guys in weird gang getups and one guy in a checkered black and white sport coat are busy digging a grave for you. Sport coat guy is voiced by Matthew Perry, so he's Evil Chandler Bing. Evil Chandler Bing apparently speaks entirely in Rat Pack and gambling slang, and when he sees you're awake he takes out some kind of poker-chip-looking thing and talks to you for a while, just long enough to get annoyed with the slang. In the end he tells you 'the game was rigged from the start' and then shoots you in the head.
I hate you, Evil Chandler Bing.
Anyway, that's the end of the opening cinematic. When the screen comes up again you're in ... somewhere that isn't the aforementioned grave, and someone is talking to you. Apparently, this is the doctor who saved your hide. Character generation is handled more smoothly here than in Fallout 3, where it was part of the mandatory tutorial. The doctor tells you you've been unconscious for a few days and he had to get some bullets out of your head, so he wants to make sure you're all right before going any farther. He asks for your name (Janice); he gives you a device to check on whether he got your appearance right, thus allowing you to customize your sex/race/age/facial features/hair (female, African-American, early twenties, one of the presets, chin-length black hair); he has you fiddle with an old Vita-Tester machine that looks like something out of Coney Island to set your SPECIAL stats (strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility, and luck- Janice has Int 8 and Cha 7 or something like that); he asks you some word associations and personality test questions to set your abilities; and then he asks you to fill out one more form for a bit of a history, which is where you get to set whether you want any Traits or not. Those of y'all who've only ever played Fallout 3 won't remember these. They're from games 1 and 2 and probably the deuterocanonical spinoffs which I haven't played. They generally provide one positive and one negative at the same time, and you only get two for the whole game. Things like Trigger Discipline- you shoot any gun 20% slower than baseline, but you're 20% more accurate- or Loose Cannon, which makes your attack speed faster but drops your damage resistance because you're more easily shot at. For Janice, I chose Good Natured. It cuts into your combat skills by 5% each but ups Barter, Speech, and several others by 5%. Yes, I know that's dangerous, I don't really care.
Doc Mitchell then gives you clothes and stuff. Depending on how you answered your questions 'stuff' may include a laser pistol. If not, you get a gun. Either way you get the shooty weapon and the slicey weapon, and in this case the slicey weapon is a straight razor rather than a knife or something else that would actually make sense. You also get a note about what you were doing when you got shot in the head. Apparently you were supposed to take some kind of poker chip to somebody in Vegas.
Okay, whatever. You know what? Don't care. Got shot. Got dead. As far as I'm concerned Janice's contract obligation is over. Neither rain nor snow nor gloom of night' does not include 'nor pellets of lead to the skull' thank you very much. Janice will be going out into the wilderness to see what she can find anywhere else at ALL in the Mojave Desert that does not involve 'the people who shot me in the head', 'the thing I was doing when I got shot in the head', or 'getting shot in the head in general'.
I kind of hate to break it to Janice, but this being the Fallout universe, she's probably going to get shot in the head again. And the everywhere else.
Oh, yeah, about those clothes from Doc Mitchell. Doc and his wife apparently grew up in Vault 21. If you're female he gives you his wife's old Vault suit and if you're male I imagine you get his. I suppose you don't get your regular clothes back on account of having bled on them a lot. If you preordered the game somewhere you get a bonus download that includes some form of armor. Janice got a set of light metal armor and a few other things, but she still got that Vault 21 suit too. I'm not sure what the story justification for that is, or even if there is one; I'm gonna handwave that the armor is icky and stinky and gross because you bled on it after the whole shooting thing and say that Doc gave it back anyway. He suggests to you that you go look around town and talk to a girl named Sunny Smiles about learning to survive in the desert, and maybe go look for Victor, the robot who dug you out of your grave and brought you to him. And that's that.
Step out of Doc's door and once the light blaze fades from your eyes you get a rather nice view of a ramshackle little town composed mostly of one-story homes and the occasional Airstream trailer. There are plants here, which is more than you can say for the Capital Wasteland, and there are... giant evil sheep. No, seriously. Bighorners. They're, like, everywhere in this town and they come up to your shoulder and their faces look like they were designed by Mike Mignola or something. That's the big thing here, the giant evil sheep. And the plants-
Oh. Right. Forgot to mention. You have the option, before leaving the doctor, of engaging something called Hardcore Mode. You know how Gordon Freeman can go twenty-eight hours full tilt without eating, drinking, or sleeping, and how gorping down a medkit will patch Gordon up instantaneously? And remember how BJ Blazkiewicz could stuff an entire turkey dinner into his face and instantly heal up from Nazis pumping him so full of lead he'd set off an airport metal detector? Hardcore Mode is the opposite of that. If you activate hardcore mode, your Health meter and your Radiation meter are joined by Sleep, Food, and Drink meters. You have to sleep every so often or it cuts into one of your SPECIAL stats and then you die, I assume of fatigue toxicity. You have to eat every so often or it cuts into your Strength and then you die. You have to drink a lot more often than either sleeping or eating or it cuts into Endurance and then you die. Different food items reduce hunger by different amounts, and some of them affect your other stats as well, either positively or negatively (hint: raw gecko meat is really bad for you, but it'll keep you from starving; cooked gecko meat, mmm tasty). Drinking Nuka-Cola actually makes you thirstier, I guess because of the caffeine; you'll find Nuka-Cola here but for the love of Pete, if you're going to drink anything bottled and fizzy, make it Sunset Sarsaparilla, a locally bottled beverage that has the advantages of a) much less and b) no !*&()&)! radiation. Even the ordinary kind of Nuka-Cola gives you a few rads here...
Anyway. There's plants all over the initial tutorial town of Goodsprings. Some of them are food plants. Some of them are component plants- you can make healing powder or stimpaks from Xander Root and Broc Flowers, harking right back to Fallout 2. Thing is, you have to have a respectable score in the Survival stat to make anything good, so if you're going to go Hardcore mode, make sure you get yourself a good Survival score. Also be aware that food items will heal a certain number of hit points in addition to your Starve-O-Meter, but they'll restore those hit points over the course of several seconds, so stuffing a Nevada Agave Fruit in your face will put back one hit point every second for eight seconds rather than dropping eight hit points on you right away. In Hardcore mode stimpaks also take several seconds to heal you, so you'd better be prepared for the hurting to take a while to go away. And you'd also better carry a Doctor's Bag or two, because you can't just Stimpak a crippled limb back into place in Hardcore. I think you can still sleep your crippled parts back on but that's not always an option, so- Doctor's Bags, very important. Oh, yes, and do not forget that Rad-Away still works, but like Stimpaks it works over time. You want instant radiation purging, go find a doctor and cough up the caps.
SO. *ahem* Right. Goodsprings.
You know what? I'll talk about Goodsprings in my next entry. This one's getting kind of long.
