Notes From New Vegas 5
Nov. 9th, 2010 11:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes From New Vegas 5: Mr. Scary Dog Hat Man, Also, Bugs
When last we left our heroine, she was making her way south from Primm and cheerfully ignoring the place's existence. Hooray for sandbox games, la la la, now let's go poke at the gas station! And at the highway patrol station! And at the horrible people with guns and leather armor and weirdly fixed grins on their faces who came out of the highway patrol station just to try to kill her! GOD DAMMIT.
These folks are the Jackals, one of the Mojave's raider gangs, and they are kind of pathetic. Well, not in any kind of way that makes me feel at all sorry for them, since they are kinda trying to kill Janice and take her stuff. But this is the Mojave Wasteland, and one of the gangs from the first game's achieved full tribal status, with customs and everything. The Jackals were mentioned in the background material for the first game, too. And now they're nothing but chem crazed weirdoes who run out at you cackling and shooting. Basically, they're raiders from Fallout 3 who haven't figured out that the Capital Wasteland's a couple thousand miles northeast of here. They're a little sad, but they're also a little homicidal, so the sad part doesn't last long. They need to die now. Kill them, pants them, and leave. Oh, and watch out if you go poking around inside the patrol station; there's some more Jackals in there and a couple of baby giant mantises.
About this point, Janice decided that she didn't really feel like going looking at places that might have people in them any more, since people kept trying to kill her. She figured, you know, she had some good armor and some good ammo and the dead Jackals had provided some stuff, so maybe that huge dusty flat to the east would be interesting to explore. So she happily strolled off the road to go and see what was out there, where all the dust was whipping around in the wind, obscuring the view of what turned out to once have been Ivanpah Dry Lake. And Ivanpah Racetrack, with pavement and a sign and weird Future Fifties-style wrecked cars. And ants.
Giant ants.
LOTS of giant ants.
Now, I don't like giant ants much, but I'll give the ants at Ivanpah Racetrack this: they do not breathe fire. Yes, in case you have not been playing these games, that is a valid concern with giant insects in this universe. Of COURSE giant insects will sometimes breathe fire. That is what they DO. If you start complaining about the realism I will hit you over the head with a radscorpion and send you home. This is Fallout, okay? If you want realistic post-nuclear anything then call up a British video store and ask them how much they want for a copy of Threads. And don't blame me when the nightmares start.
Anyway, the ants, they don't breathe fire. And while the soldier ants are big enough and tough enough to kill a newbie character several times over without breaking a sweat, they have this advantage over radscorpions: antennae. Those of you who played Fallout 3 will be nodding sagely by now, and probably also sighing with relief that Bryan Wilks is not around to tell you that to kill the Fuckin' Ants you have to 'shoot for the an-tenners'. God, that kid was annoying- anyway, yeah, the ants have antennae. If you can cripple their antennae they go berserk and start attacking whatever is nearest to them, which given their speed versus your speed often means they attack other ants. No, you don't get the XP for their kills, but you also don't get killed fighting eight ants. You might get killed fighting five or six ants instead if you're not careful, but you still stand more of a chance.
Janice was all too happy to shoot every antenna she saw and then fall back a little ways to wait for the survivor to come clear and be very carefully killed. When you're low on ammo you don't have the luxury of shooting into a scrum.
South was looking pretty good to her about then, mostly because there was some kind of giant statuary or something off to the southwest and she didn't want to meet up with people again for a while, so I sent her southward. It was getting dark by then and I figured, you know, there's a marker on the horizon that indicated something interesting to find; maybe it's a building with a front door and she can sleep in it or something. Unfortunately, this did not happen. Mostly because the Jackals at the pit stop were not the only Jackals in the area and there were about five of them holed up in the ruins ahead that Janice hadn't seen in the dark.
What I would not have given for a sniper rifle, but all Janice had was a nine-millimeter pistol and a ten millimeter submachine gun. The SMG proved useful once the Jackals closed to a reasonable distance, but she wound up in a really bad way regardless. Out of stimpaks, bleeding from several places, low on caps to the point where bipping back to Goodsprings to see Doc Mitchell was just out of the question... blech. Well, there were buildings off to the east a bit. If she moved very carefully and sneaked a great deal in the dark she might manage to creep into one and find a stimpak in a first aid kit or something.
Aaaaand then she got over the hill and saw the humongous fire.
Janice kind of hated her life at that point, but she also hated bleeding, so she didn't have much choice beyond creeping into the ruins of the town. It was mostly nice little ranch homes and a trailer park and a big town hall and a fire roughly half the size of a house and heads on pikes and some random guy in Powder Ganger clothes who ran up to her crowing about how he won the lottery. Bzuh. Before he explained more than "I won! I won the lottery! The only lottery that matters! Yeah, baby!" he ran away, so Janice kind of pinched the bridge of her nose and went on... and that's when she saw the other Powder Gangers. The crucified ones on the town's main street. Seriously, beaten-nearly-to-death-and-tied-to-crosses-to-finish-then-off kind of crucified. Janice had no love for Powder Gangers, of course, but damn crucifixion is a nasty death, so she tried to get a better look.
And that's when she met the scary man in the dog hat.
I wish I was kidding. His name was Vulpes Inculta, and he was leader of a big ol' bunch of soldiers from Caesar's Legion. He wore Roman-styled armor and a helmet that was probably meant to look like a fox, given his name, but it basically looked like a dog hat. Maybe the Legion made them from mascot headgear attached to real helmets or something, I don't know. Anyway, Mr. Scary Dog Hat Man calmly told Janice "Don't worry. I won't have you lashed to a cross like THESE degenerates," and proceeded to explain that the Legion had come to this town a little while ago. Apparently Nipton was full of horrible people who were willing to sell each other out for caps, Powder Gangers who were planning to do something involving NCR hostages, diseased prostitutes, etc., and Mr. Scary Dog Hat Man was just utterly disgusted with the place. So he killed a bunch of people, rounded up the survivors, and passed out lottery tickets. Third place got enslaved, second place got their legs smashed with hammers, first place got to leave town alive, and everybody else had to die. Because that's just how Caesar's Legion rolls, baby, that's their idea of morality.
Once again I should note that this is a sandbox game. You have the opportunity here to tell Vulpes Inculta that you admire the purity of the Legion's justice, thereby opening the door to siding with Team Evil. (I should note that my copy of iTunes is playing "Crazy", by Seal, as I type this.) Janice didn't do that, but when Vulpes told her to spread word of what he'd done to everyone, especially the NCR, she agreed to carry the news. Mostly because she was, you know, bleeding and stuff, and while it is very nice to be morally upstanding and lash out in a mighty rage of righteousness that kills all the bad people around you, she had about as much chance of surviving that fight as a mouse nest does of winning an argument with a combine harvester. So Vulpes basically patted her on the head and told her she'd do just fine, then led his men off into the mountains, leaving Janice to have a fit of the screaming jibblies. (And to trip over a pair of scorched, burnt corpses named "Owen" and "Beru". Weird Wasteland has no respect whatsoever for timing.)
Once she was done with that Janice got to poke through the buildings in Nipton and patch herself up some. She stumbled across a Powder Ganger in the town store who cursed at her and called her names, but explained the whole thing with the Legion to her and mentioned that there were some Ganger captives that'd been carried off. Now, Janice had just finished talking to Mr. Scary Dog Hat Man, so she had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen to those Gangers. She didn't like them much at all, but Vulpes seemed fairly mellow towards her; she figured maybe she could talk someone into letting the Gangers go, or selling them to her or something, and maybe she could get the Powder Gangs to stop trying to blow her up in exchange for saving the guys. So she agreed to try and rescue them from slavery, at which point the guy in the store called her some more names and wanted to know where she was before the Legion showed up.
Kinda wanted to beat him over the head with a giant ant at that point.
Anyway, Janice made it out of there okay and reasonably patched up, and decided that once it got light again she'd head north and see about getting those captives away from the Legion. If nothing else, it'd reduce her risk of being shot in the head again, right? Especially since when she managed to locate the Legion raid camp, the Legionnaires seemed to be groovy with her walking right up to the captives. That was cool, right?
Well, no. Nobody at the camp actually spoke to her, which should've been my first tip-off that Janice wasn't going to be able to smooth-talk anyone. My second was the part where nobody at the camp had names, either. It's a bit meta, but nine times out of ten, the only people worth talking to in Fallout New Vegas are people with names. Janice, however, did not know this, so when nobody shot at her and everybody seemed okay with her being in camp, she walked up to one of the Gangers and selected the 'untie him' option from the menu.
Aaaaand the Legion opened fire. Great, just great.
Didn't have a gun in good enough condition to punch through Legion armor much, didn't have enough ammo to make up for quality with quantity, didn't have enough armor to survive the onslaught. Rather than die horribly again I reloaded the game and used a Stealth Boy. If you don't know the Fallout universe, these are basically invisibility devices that bend light around you so people see what's on the other side. You can still be noticed wearing one, but if you crouch and move slowly people just don't see you. Janice had scrounged one up somewhere, I forget where- maybe on a dead Powder Ganger who hadn't figured out how to use it or something. So I had Janice creep up to the Powder Gangers, make sure no one was looking, and untie them one at a time. The guys ran off, the Legion didn't bother shooting- I think they were all recruits and didn't really know what to do at that point- and Janice was able to mosey on out of there safely invisible. She found her way to a farmhouse with a mattress and a bunch of stuff in the refrigerator and no one to claim it, and that's where I closed up shop for the session. There'd be room for more trouble come the next day, right?
When last we left our heroine, she was making her way south from Primm and cheerfully ignoring the place's existence. Hooray for sandbox games, la la la, now let's go poke at the gas station! And at the highway patrol station! And at the horrible people with guns and leather armor and weirdly fixed grins on their faces who came out of the highway patrol station just to try to kill her! GOD DAMMIT.
These folks are the Jackals, one of the Mojave's raider gangs, and they are kind of pathetic. Well, not in any kind of way that makes me feel at all sorry for them, since they are kinda trying to kill Janice and take her stuff. But this is the Mojave Wasteland, and one of the gangs from the first game's achieved full tribal status, with customs and everything. The Jackals were mentioned in the background material for the first game, too. And now they're nothing but chem crazed weirdoes who run out at you cackling and shooting. Basically, they're raiders from Fallout 3 who haven't figured out that the Capital Wasteland's a couple thousand miles northeast of here. They're a little sad, but they're also a little homicidal, so the sad part doesn't last long. They need to die now. Kill them, pants them, and leave. Oh, and watch out if you go poking around inside the patrol station; there's some more Jackals in there and a couple of baby giant mantises.
About this point, Janice decided that she didn't really feel like going looking at places that might have people in them any more, since people kept trying to kill her. She figured, you know, she had some good armor and some good ammo and the dead Jackals had provided some stuff, so maybe that huge dusty flat to the east would be interesting to explore. So she happily strolled off the road to go and see what was out there, where all the dust was whipping around in the wind, obscuring the view of what turned out to once have been Ivanpah Dry Lake. And Ivanpah Racetrack, with pavement and a sign and weird Future Fifties-style wrecked cars. And ants.
Giant ants.
LOTS of giant ants.
Now, I don't like giant ants much, but I'll give the ants at Ivanpah Racetrack this: they do not breathe fire. Yes, in case you have not been playing these games, that is a valid concern with giant insects in this universe. Of COURSE giant insects will sometimes breathe fire. That is what they DO. If you start complaining about the realism I will hit you over the head with a radscorpion and send you home. This is Fallout, okay? If you want realistic post-nuclear anything then call up a British video store and ask them how much they want for a copy of Threads. And don't blame me when the nightmares start.
Anyway, the ants, they don't breathe fire. And while the soldier ants are big enough and tough enough to kill a newbie character several times over without breaking a sweat, they have this advantage over radscorpions: antennae. Those of you who played Fallout 3 will be nodding sagely by now, and probably also sighing with relief that Bryan Wilks is not around to tell you that to kill the Fuckin' Ants you have to 'shoot for the an-tenners'. God, that kid was annoying- anyway, yeah, the ants have antennae. If you can cripple their antennae they go berserk and start attacking whatever is nearest to them, which given their speed versus your speed often means they attack other ants. No, you don't get the XP for their kills, but you also don't get killed fighting eight ants. You might get killed fighting five or six ants instead if you're not careful, but you still stand more of a chance.
Janice was all too happy to shoot every antenna she saw and then fall back a little ways to wait for the survivor to come clear and be very carefully killed. When you're low on ammo you don't have the luxury of shooting into a scrum.
South was looking pretty good to her about then, mostly because there was some kind of giant statuary or something off to the southwest and she didn't want to meet up with people again for a while, so I sent her southward. It was getting dark by then and I figured, you know, there's a marker on the horizon that indicated something interesting to find; maybe it's a building with a front door and she can sleep in it or something. Unfortunately, this did not happen. Mostly because the Jackals at the pit stop were not the only Jackals in the area and there were about five of them holed up in the ruins ahead that Janice hadn't seen in the dark.
What I would not have given for a sniper rifle, but all Janice had was a nine-millimeter pistol and a ten millimeter submachine gun. The SMG proved useful once the Jackals closed to a reasonable distance, but she wound up in a really bad way regardless. Out of stimpaks, bleeding from several places, low on caps to the point where bipping back to Goodsprings to see Doc Mitchell was just out of the question... blech. Well, there were buildings off to the east a bit. If she moved very carefully and sneaked a great deal in the dark she might manage to creep into one and find a stimpak in a first aid kit or something.
Aaaaand then she got over the hill and saw the humongous fire.
Janice kind of hated her life at that point, but she also hated bleeding, so she didn't have much choice beyond creeping into the ruins of the town. It was mostly nice little ranch homes and a trailer park and a big town hall and a fire roughly half the size of a house and heads on pikes and some random guy in Powder Ganger clothes who ran up to her crowing about how he won the lottery. Bzuh. Before he explained more than "I won! I won the lottery! The only lottery that matters! Yeah, baby!" he ran away, so Janice kind of pinched the bridge of her nose and went on... and that's when she saw the other Powder Gangers. The crucified ones on the town's main street. Seriously, beaten-nearly-to-death-and-tied-to-crosses-to-finish-then-off kind of crucified. Janice had no love for Powder Gangers, of course, but damn crucifixion is a nasty death, so she tried to get a better look.
And that's when she met the scary man in the dog hat.
I wish I was kidding. His name was Vulpes Inculta, and he was leader of a big ol' bunch of soldiers from Caesar's Legion. He wore Roman-styled armor and a helmet that was probably meant to look like a fox, given his name, but it basically looked like a dog hat. Maybe the Legion made them from mascot headgear attached to real helmets or something, I don't know. Anyway, Mr. Scary Dog Hat Man calmly told Janice "Don't worry. I won't have you lashed to a cross like THESE degenerates," and proceeded to explain that the Legion had come to this town a little while ago. Apparently Nipton was full of horrible people who were willing to sell each other out for caps, Powder Gangers who were planning to do something involving NCR hostages, diseased prostitutes, etc., and Mr. Scary Dog Hat Man was just utterly disgusted with the place. So he killed a bunch of people, rounded up the survivors, and passed out lottery tickets. Third place got enslaved, second place got their legs smashed with hammers, first place got to leave town alive, and everybody else had to die. Because that's just how Caesar's Legion rolls, baby, that's their idea of morality.
Once again I should note that this is a sandbox game. You have the opportunity here to tell Vulpes Inculta that you admire the purity of the Legion's justice, thereby opening the door to siding with Team Evil. (I should note that my copy of iTunes is playing "Crazy", by Seal, as I type this.) Janice didn't do that, but when Vulpes told her to spread word of what he'd done to everyone, especially the NCR, she agreed to carry the news. Mostly because she was, you know, bleeding and stuff, and while it is very nice to be morally upstanding and lash out in a mighty rage of righteousness that kills all the bad people around you, she had about as much chance of surviving that fight as a mouse nest does of winning an argument with a combine harvester. So Vulpes basically patted her on the head and told her she'd do just fine, then led his men off into the mountains, leaving Janice to have a fit of the screaming jibblies. (And to trip over a pair of scorched, burnt corpses named "Owen" and "Beru". Weird Wasteland has no respect whatsoever for timing.)
Once she was done with that Janice got to poke through the buildings in Nipton and patch herself up some. She stumbled across a Powder Ganger in the town store who cursed at her and called her names, but explained the whole thing with the Legion to her and mentioned that there were some Ganger captives that'd been carried off. Now, Janice had just finished talking to Mr. Scary Dog Hat Man, so she had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen to those Gangers. She didn't like them much at all, but Vulpes seemed fairly mellow towards her; she figured maybe she could talk someone into letting the Gangers go, or selling them to her or something, and maybe she could get the Powder Gangs to stop trying to blow her up in exchange for saving the guys. So she agreed to try and rescue them from slavery, at which point the guy in the store called her some more names and wanted to know where she was before the Legion showed up.
Kinda wanted to beat him over the head with a giant ant at that point.
Anyway, Janice made it out of there okay and reasonably patched up, and decided that once it got light again she'd head north and see about getting those captives away from the Legion. If nothing else, it'd reduce her risk of being shot in the head again, right? Especially since when she managed to locate the Legion raid camp, the Legionnaires seemed to be groovy with her walking right up to the captives. That was cool, right?
Well, no. Nobody at the camp actually spoke to her, which should've been my first tip-off that Janice wasn't going to be able to smooth-talk anyone. My second was the part where nobody at the camp had names, either. It's a bit meta, but nine times out of ten, the only people worth talking to in Fallout New Vegas are people with names. Janice, however, did not know this, so when nobody shot at her and everybody seemed okay with her being in camp, she walked up to one of the Gangers and selected the 'untie him' option from the menu.
Aaaaand the Legion opened fire. Great, just great.
Didn't have a gun in good enough condition to punch through Legion armor much, didn't have enough ammo to make up for quality with quantity, didn't have enough armor to survive the onslaught. Rather than die horribly again I reloaded the game and used a Stealth Boy. If you don't know the Fallout universe, these are basically invisibility devices that bend light around you so people see what's on the other side. You can still be noticed wearing one, but if you crouch and move slowly people just don't see you. Janice had scrounged one up somewhere, I forget where- maybe on a dead Powder Ganger who hadn't figured out how to use it or something. So I had Janice creep up to the Powder Gangers, make sure no one was looking, and untie them one at a time. The guys ran off, the Legion didn't bother shooting- I think they were all recruits and didn't really know what to do at that point- and Janice was able to mosey on out of there safely invisible. She found her way to a farmhouse with a mattress and a bunch of stuff in the refrigerator and no one to claim it, and that's where I closed up shop for the session. There'd be room for more trouble come the next day, right?
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Date: 2010-11-09 10:27 pm (UTC)