It seems the New Vegas DLC just can’t balance itself, right? First Dead Money was full of cramped environments and brutal difficulty with game designs that worked against the game. Honest Hearts has a very open area to explore, but the characters are pretty underwhelming, as is the overall story. You meet some travelers who are part of a caravan trying to get across Zion National Park, and they hire you to protect them. Of course, there’s more than that, so when you enter, you see three rival tribes fighting against each other. You have the dead horses, white legs, and sorrows. The White Legs want to prove themselves so they can work for Caesar’s Legion, but the Sorrows want to stay, and the Dead Horses are a rogue “extra” tribe. Of course, in Fallout, there’s some sort of third-party hand in the pot, and that’s where Daniel and Joshua Graham come in.
Joshua wants to fight the white legs, and Daniel wants to run. Without getting into their backstory too much, you help each other out on various missions, but most of them are fetch missions and aren’t very inventive. I was really disappointed with this and kept expecting some more exciting missions. Even Dead Money had some exciting missions, despite its major flaws. The characters seem interesting at first, but after the initial dialog stuff, when you meet them, you never do much more with them. This is due to the DLC’s short length, running at about 10–12 hours. There are hardly any side missions, and it feels like the huge area gets wasted since you don’t really get to explore it much.
The area is full of huge canyons and cliffs that surround a lake and a couple of rivers. The area is a pain to navigate because it’s hard to find how to get to high-up areas due to all these layered cliffs. Some of the areas are great to see, and they really captured the national park feeling with abandoned camps and cars on the road right when the bombs fell. So there is a nice charm about the area, and seeing some trees and rivers is a nice change from the dried-up Mojave. Other than that, the environment is full of vicious animals instead of just people, so that’s also a bit different than the Mojave and Dead Money.
Other than that, the DLC is worth a purchase, but don’t expect 15+ hours and tons of new weapons or extra stuff. It’s the best New Vegas DLC so far, but it’s also not the best it could be. I hope the third and fourth DLCs are a lot better and are finally on par with the excellent Fallout 3 DLC add-ons.
I have a feeling the Fallout series has a curse that the first DLC release isn’t very good. Dead Money tries to do things with the game that it can’t do, and it makes the DLC very hard and sometimes boring, but the story, characters, and underlying reason why you’re in the Sierra Madre are great. You start off by following a signal to the Sierra Madre Casino, but then you’re knocked out and a collar is put on you. You’re told to find three people to help you open the casino and bypass its defenses.
The three characters are great to talk to and learn about. Dog/God is a super mutant with schizophrenia; Dean Domino is a British stage actor turned ghoul; and Christine is a mute who was tortured. After you find each character, you must take them to their designated spots in the villa. This is the second part of the DLC, but by the time you get here, you’ll have cried up a storm. The game features heavy stealth and hand-to-hand combat, so people who put points into the classes will breeze through it. There are guns, but the ammo is scarce, and people who invested in energy weapons have no shot here.
The ghost people are extremely hard to kill, even if you are at level 30. You’re mainly forced to use melee with bear trap fists, spears, and knives. If you invested in guns, you’re going to have a real hard time here. It doesn’t help that all your equipment was taken away and you stuck with the few armor pieces in this whole 8–12 hour DLC. It’s light armor, and it sucks, but it’s better than nothing. There are no vendors here, just vending machines. Oh, but wait, you can’t use caps. You have to use Sierra Madre Casino chips that are scattered everywhere to buy stim packs, ammo, and everything else. Yes, why would they work against the system that’s already made and working? It’s very odd and makes playing the game so frustrating because you’re scrounging and looking for exploits in the game design to not die.
It doesn’t help that the DLC is very maze-like, and this is bad for this type of game. Where are the open areas? Nowhere. It’s just corridor after corridor, and it’s dark, bleak, and boring to look at. Everything looks the same, and it’s not very nice to be in either. Not in a good way either; I felt cramped throughout the whole ordeal, and it gets worse when you get in the casino to figure out how to get into the vault. I hope Obsidian doesn’t force us to do things the engine can’t really do next time. Part of the frustration comes with the beeping collar. Let it beep too long, and you blow up and die. There are speakers everywhere that emit a signal, and you have to run around until it stops, but this is trial and error. Run down the wrong path, and the signal won’t stop there, so you die. Yes, save constantly, or you will tear your hair out.
This mechanic is probably the most flawed since Fallout isn’t meant for this kind of stuff. I started hearing the beeping in my sleep; it goes off so many times. Some speakers you can shoot and others you can’t, but good luck that you do not get tired of this. Overall, the story is excellent, and I really felt attached to the characters. The ending is probably one of the most interesting I’ve seen in a game, and I’ll say this part because it won’t spoil anything. There are gold bars, and you can carry as much as you can, and they are worth over 7,000 caps each!! I saw these and tried to stuff my pack with them, but they weigh you down quickly. I decided to drop everything except one weapon and my armor to carry about seven of them. People who have the Rat Pack perk will take advantage here.
With two different endings and choices being a big part of the three characters, you should enjoy this part of the game. You can only get this if you are a hardcore Fallout fan; otherwise, you should just pass. It’s way too hard, and the mechanics work against what’s already established.
Fallout 3 was a phenomenon like no other. With such care and time spent on a license that completely reimagines it, it is daunting, but Bethesda pulled it off. With its haunting and eerie atmosphere, huge selection of lore-friendly weapons, excellent story, dialog, and character design, Fallout 3 became an instant classic of the last decade. New Vegas continues this tradition, but Obsidian (the original developers of Fallout 1 and 2) is on one board and has changed the game slightly, which will either piss fans off or please them.
New Vegas starts out with you being buried alive after being shot. You are a courier, but a robot named Victor digs you out, and Doc Mitchell patches you together. As you come to him, he talks to you as you select your character design and special, just like in Fallout 3. While it’s not as memorable as Fallout 3’s baby scene during this setup, it works just fine. As you step out into the Mojave Wasteland, your eyes adjust to the light, and you’re set loose in Goodsprings, which is New Vegas’s equivalent of Megaton. You meet Sunny Smiles, and she shows you the ropes of the shooting part of the game, and from there you’re on your own.
The first thing you will notice is that the engine has had a slight upgrade, but not by much. The game still uses the Oblivion engine from Fallout 3, so it’s obvious Obsidian is playing it kind of safe. The game is also full of desert wasteland, and Obsidian did the impossible by making a desert feel fun to play in and not deserted, empty, and boring to look at. Of course, like in Fallout 3, you headed toward the DC Metro area. In New Vegas, you’re heading to the Vegas Strip to meet Mr. House, who can help you figure out what exactly happened to you.
In the meantime, there are rival factions battling it out, mainly the New California Republic and the Caesar’s Legion. The NCR wants to order in the Mojave and wants to take over the Strip, but Caesar’s Legion wants to enslave everyone. There are other smaller factions that you must decide what to do with, and each one has tons of missions that will ultimately determine how easy the end of the game is. Speaking of missions, that’s one thing you will notice. There are tons and tons of them, but the game is missing the epic set pieces that Fallout 3 had. Instead, it’s just quest after quest, but they are all designed brilliantly, and no one is ever the same.
New Vegas still has the VATS (Vault-Tec Automated Targeting System) system, but nothing about it has been changing. There is a new first-person iron sights view, so with this, you will rarely use VATS now. This helps make the action faster and speeds things along. Everything else from Fallout 3 is here, but a major addition is modding your weapons. You can find or buy things like clip extenders, silencers, and scopes to add to your weapons. Additionally, you can also break down ammo and create new ones, as well as make aid items from items found throughout the wasteland and cook them. These new additions are minimal, and some people may not even use them, but that’s ok. There are a ton of new weapons and enemies, and everything you expected from Fallout 3 is here.
New Vegas also has amazing dialog, characters, and quests, and there is a ton of it. There are quite a few companions to have to tag along with, and there seems to be an infinite amount of spoken dialog. Player choices still play a huge role in the game, so don’t think those are gone. The biggest feat for New Vegas is that it, yet again, portrays a believable, enrapturing world and feels every part as amazing as the Capital Wasteland. There are a lot of Easter eggs and tidbits for fans of the classic 90’s Fallout games too. New Vegas is just an amazing and engrossing game that you can’t get yourself sucked out of. The addition of gambling is a good example of something that can be done at any casino and can be a lot of fun.
The game does have a few flaws, such as the copious amount of bugs, the characters looking ugly still, and the fact that it feels kind of dated. While the engine is solid and works for this game, it just needs a huge overhaul for Fallout 4, but die-hard fans will appreciate the familiarity. On a side note (that doesn’t affect the score), the game has a huge moderator community. Within the first week of being out, there were over 1,000 mods. While most of them are junk, there are some amazing mods that you must have that will make you not want to play the game without them. Character mods to make them look better, sexier, clothing add-ons, quests, weapons, you name it. I can’t play the game without these amazing mods, but for people who don’t care, New Vegas is a great game.
On an end note, New Vegas really sticks true to the RPG genre with tons of perks, a level 30 cap, and somehow makes item sorting fun. Pulling up your Pip-Boy to check your map, fast-traveling to discovered locations, or finding little-hidden gems and secrets in the nooks and crannies of the world is satisfying. Before you know it, 8+ hours will pass, and you’ll go to bed with a smile on your face, knowing that the Mojave Wasteland is safe with you around. Or is it?
Collector’s Edition: If you want to pony up another $30, you can get a beautiful and well-put-together special edition. The biggest attraction is the real poker chips from each faction of the game, plus the 200 platinum chips. The playing cards are beautifully drawn, and each card features a character on the back with a bio. The quality is amazing. You also get the comic book and making-of DVD. Is it worth it? Hell yes.
Game of the Year is one of the hardest decisions because so many games are created every year. But to come out on top the game must be excellent in its genre (usually re-define it) and have great production values, and not feel repetitive, and usually, it changes the way we think about games.
What sets Red Dead apart from all of these other excellent games is how authentic its world is. It feels so real and feels just like the wild west. With excellent voice acting, a huge open world to explore, lots of missions, and it’s just the subtle details that make it a winner. Hunting, gambling, horseback riding, even down to the drinks, attitudes of the people, clothing, accents, it just all adds up to something spectacular and really shows what a game can do. It’s Red Dead’s subtle details that truly make this game shine over the others.
RPG’s most important element is the story. This is what sets RPGs apart from other genres. The games also must have excellent lovable characters and good combat whether it’s turned based or real-time. RPGs also tend to be very long, but they are getting a bad rap in Japan due to never changing their formula.
While New Vegas isn’t as good as Fallout 3 just the sheer vastness of the wasteland, the memorable characters, and the deep amount of content the game provides. There are a seemingly endless amount of quests, and the game has excellent dungeons, great shooting mechanics, and the mod community for the PC version is enormous, and New Vegas wins because the game lasts beyond the box, and it stays true to RPG standards: Leveling up by killing, completing quests, and tons of loot.
By now, everyone with a 360 has either played or owned this game. There’s so much about Oblivion that it would take pages and pages to describe it all in detail. The main story is that you have to restore the dragonfires so the realm of Oblivion can’t come back to Cyrodiil. The story is very interesting, and the side quests add to this. To start with, you make your character with an absurd amount of detail, and you can even name and customize your own race, abilities, etc. In each city in Cyrodiil, you can choose to join guilds such as mage, fighter, thief, etc. You complete tasks for the guild leader, and you get a recommendation from the head of that guild. You can train there to raise attributes and rest. Now, when it comes to talking to people, the game uses facial expressions to show you what the NPC is feeling. You can persuade people via a little mini-game that takes a while to master.
Now let’s talk about combat. The combat is very deep and simple at the same time. You block with LT and attack with RT. You can use magic, swords, bows, katanas, staffs, etc. As you use your weapons, they deteriorate, and you can repair them with hammers or at weapon shops. Some weapons can have attributes like causing your foe to be paralyzed for 30 seconds or something like that. You can use scrolls, which are magic attacks for defense, and offenses that can be used once. When you level up, you have to go to sleep so you can meditate on everything you learned. It takes a long time to level up in this game, but it’s well worth it.
The vastness of attributes is insane in Oblivion. The combinations of alchemy spells and everything combined just, literally, make it infinite. Now let’s talk about vastness. The game is huge—bigger than all the GTAs put together. Anything that you see, you can walk on or climb. You can ride a horse there or just go there for the hell of it and discover something new. You can pick plants for alchemy, you can find new weapons…or just completely useless stuff like bones, cups, vases, quills, mops, shovels, etc. Some stuff is worth thousands, and some stuff is worth nothing at all. You’re probably wondering how you travel such a huge amount of land. Well, the map lets you warp. Thank God for that. Of course, you can’t warp inside a building, but you can get the idea. Now the game can let you go good or evil depending on whether you steal people’s stuff, pickpocket, murder, etc. Or you can choose to be rude to people during conversations. Technically, there are some flaws.
The graphics are still pretty good by today’s standards but show some age, just a tad compared to recent next-gen games. The music is outstanding, and the voice acting is superb. There is some texture popping up here and there and hitting. The constant loading is also annoying, but with recent software updates that have been remedied, this is some. You just have to get this game. It’s so big and so deep that you’ll play it for hours and hours. Also, with all the expansions out there, I wonder if there is an end. A note to casual players: stay away. The vastness and depth will turn some players off and will turn JRPG fans off.
With the second expansion for Oblivion come some great quests and some loot that are well worth your time. Knights of the Nine starts out in Anvil, where you overhear a crazy priest ranting about an order of crusaders that protected magic armor but failed, and some evil dude is trying to steal them all. It’s a little more detailed than that, but the story is so deep and involved that it would take me forever to explain it all.
One thing about Nine is that all your first objectives aren’t marked on your map; you have to find them yourself. Oh, don’t worry, you get another map handed to you, and you have to compare it to your map and mark it. They aren’t hard to find at all, but this means no warping to them. You have to travel on horseback all across Cyrodiil and find these temples to pray at. This can take anywhere from one to two hours, depending on how you play.
Once this is done, you head to the Priory of the Nine and get the whole scoop on all the armor pieces and their locations. This is the most time-consuming part of the expansion, but it can take you about 2–3 hours or more, depending on how you play. The armor pieces are special and have magic attached to them. You can also find two weapons and a shield, so you can deck your character out in the powerful crusader armor.
There aren’t any new enemies or anything that is really new, like in Shivering Isles, but it’s $10 that will last you a good 5 or more hours. The whole expansion is very well done, and it keeps you hooked and makes you never want to stop. Looting the 8 or so dungeons is great and allows players who may have beaten the game and skipped out on this to squeeze some more Oblivion awesomeness out of their disc.
With the fourth (and hopefully not final) Fallout 3 DLC, we are once again almost as disappointed as the first DLC outing, Operation Anchorage, where Bethesda mistakenly takes you out of the Capital Wasteland and into the redundant dead world of an alien spaceship. When you get the signal from the downed ship in the Capital Wasteland, you get beamed up and stuck in an alien prison cell where you must, throughout this adventure, fight your way off the ship with a woman and a little girl (who causes more trouble than wanted) to a final standoff with the captain of the mothership and finally an epic space battle.
Most of the DLC has you running around places blowing up these “cores” that will shut certain parts of the ship down so you can get to the bridge. While this sounds repetitive, nothing is as bad as the ship looks. With lots of 50’s cheesy alien sci-fi-looking infrastructure, it all looks copied and pasted throughout the entire thing, so after about thirty minutes, you’ve seen it all. There are three new weapons in this DLC: the shock baton, the atomizer, and the atomizer rifle. While these sound powerful, the aliens are some tough meat if you haven’t downloaded the Broken Steel add-on, so you can level up to around 25–30. With me being 28 years old, I still had a hard time fighting off the various droids and aliens since some have this invisible-looking armor that is a pain to break through.
While there are a few epic moments in the game, such as when you get to shoot a death ray at Earth and see a huge mushroom cloud appear, it makes you feel powerful. While not spoiling them all, I’ll move into items you can find, and these are probably worth more than anything in the Wasteland. Most of the items are alien crystals varying in size, along with some alien food, alien biogels, and various odds and ends that are worth tons back on Earth. You actually end up with so much that you can’t find enough people with the caps to purchase it all.
Once you do get back to the Wasteland, you’ll quickly forget what happened since there isn’t much narrative except for the hidden audio journals scattered throughout the ship. This really isn’t a way to progress dialog in Fallout 3, since most are interactive. After everything is over within the 2-3 hours it takes to beat this DLC, you’ll feel like you were ripped off about $5 and want a refund. Mothership Zeta is skip-able, but hardcore fans should really take it for a spin.
The highly anticipated Point Lookout is finally out, and it does not disappoint. With this being the fourth DLC available for Fallout 3, you’d think Bethesda has started to run out of steam, but it seems they’ve just gotten started. The DLC starts out with a boat docking near the Jefferson Memorial and talking to a strange Tobar, who tells you all about Point Lookout, Maryland, and all its great treasures and adventures. Sure, it sounds great for the heroine of the Wasteland, but just how dangerous is it? Well, extremely, and especially if you are under level 25 and without the Broken Steel DLC, because the bog hillbillies are extremely tough to kill even with the Tesla Cannon (you get this in the Broken Steel DLC). Hell, even the Rocket Launcher won’t kill them with one shot (it must be all that moonshine they drink).
While not giving too much of the story away, you meet one AHOLE of a ghoul. Try to find a woman named Nadine, a deceptive brain, a strange cult, and a woman who has you help her with her family recipe of moonshine. The DLC is nothing short of amazing when it comes to the atmosphere since it’s just as lonely and creepy as the stuff on the disc (and The Pitt), with lots of fog, bogs, creepy hillbillies, strange buildings in the distance, and rads. Yes, since most of the DLC has water in it, you’ll be getting irradiated quite a bit, and this means you will need to bring some RadAway and Rad-X with you.
One mission even requires you to swim away from the island and locate a sunken submarine underwater. You have one store in the game in the carnival; there’s a motel you need to explore, a mysterious mansion, and a few other buildings, but there’s a lot to explore on this HUGE island, so you’re in for about 4-6 hours of great gameplay and story. Bethesda seemed to have concentrated more on exploring this time around than weapons or anything like that. There are a few new parks, the double-barreled shotgun, ando the lever-action rifle, but there are a ton of supplies to loot and grab. So much, in fact, you’ll have to head back to The Capital Wasteland just to sell it all. I believe this is a great DLC and is well worth the $10 (hell, I’ve paid $140 into Fallout 3 already), so don’t be afraid and come down to Point Lookout and explore!
thebinarymessiah.com 
Yep! The fact that I forgot about this game until you made a comment proves that.