Alan take

Episode 5 takes a surreal and weird turn.

It starts off with Alan and his agent locked up in jail and the FBI agent saying the manuscript pages were evidence that Alan planed everything. Then things quickly go crazy as the darkness busts into the police station and sucks away FBI agent. The sheriff quickly believes Alan about the evil darkness and helps him and his agent get to a helicopter and fly to the power plant that the crazy lamp lady lives in.

Then after more fighting with shadows Alan finally makes it to the heart of the power plant where the last writer who was taken by the darkness left something. Turns out that it was a page the writer written describing an event in Alan's childhood, where he revived a little light switch to help his fear of the dark. This is surreal since it attributes a real event in Alan's life to the fiction of another person, yet the fact that the note is there is the result of Alan writing the story of his escape. So one writer is causing events that leads to another writer to cause the first writer to write that event.

Alan baked

In chapter 4 a lot that was hinted at before is fully explained.
Alan got fished out by the guy who runs the local psychiatric clinic for artists, and when Alan woke up he tell him that he has been a patient there and everything has been a delusion. This of course is a lie an Alan dosen't believe it for a moment, despite being heavily sedated. Alan meets up with 2 heavy meal singer who had also been manipulated by the darkness and they tell him that the answers he's looking for are back at the farm. The darkness then attacks the place and in the chaos Alan discovers that the doctor is actually using the clinic as a front to harness the power artists get through the dark force, so he can shape reality.

Alan escapes and after another long slog though forest, and an awesome heavy metal stage show, finds the farm house and learns that the crazy lamp lady (who knew the original writer) held the key to stopping the darkness and saving Alan's wife. Also in a drunken dream Alan remembers what happened during the missing week. After the fight between Alan and his wife, the old woman grabbed the wife and pulled her down into the lake, Alan dived after her but couldn't find her. The old woman then appeared before Alan and told him that if he wrote a story where the wife came back then it would become true. So Alan wrote like crazy for the week straight and along the way the old woman tweaked the story so that it would describe the darkness getting stronger. Eventual Alan realized he was being manulated so he re-wrote some of the story so that he was the protagonist and described his escape, using the spirit of the former writer in a hard diving suit as his rescuer.

Alan then wakes up to find the FBI agent pointing a gun at him.

Alan stakeout

A lot more is revealed in episode 3.

The back story seems to be that the lake Alan was staying on has some dark force within it (may be supernatural or alien) and in the 70's a writer and his girl friend was staying there. The dark force some how took control of the girlfriend and was using the writer's writing as a conduit for it's power, growing stronger and causing weird events to happen. Then the volcano under the lake erupted and destroyed the island, the writer disappeared and the girlfriend seems to be the dark old woman that keeps popping up. The only one at the time who wrote about the strange events was a local reporter who was friends with the couple, but after the eruption she lost her mind and became this game's version of the Twin Peaks Log Lady, ranting about the dark constantly.

It also appears that during the missing week Alan was holed up in the cabin writing the events of the story playing out now, in order to some how save his wife. Also the old woman has been modifying the pages he wrote to fit her own needs, building in power again.

Back in the present, Alan and the agent visit the waiters and she drugs them so they fall asleep until nightfall. When Alan wakes up he's surrounded by the police and an FBI agent has shown up to arrest him. Alan escapes and for some reason the dark force appears too help him by taking out the cops, but then it may just be that it is taking them out of the way since it also tries to kill Alan. It's kinda odd since It sounds like the force controlling the old lady needs Alan, but it keeps trying to kill him, maybe now that he wrote the manuscript he's a threat.

After escaping from the police Alan goes to meet again with the kidnapper, and after a long run through the mountains he finally catches up to him. The "kidnaper" says that he has no idea where Alan's wife was and never had her, then he gets sucked away by a dark tornado and Alan gets knocked off into the lake. The last scene in the episode is of a had pulling Alan on to a boat and it's superimposed with the image of a hard diving suit that shown up now and then.

Alan Retake

After a short flash back to 3 years before the current events, Episode 2 starts with Alan in the police station trying to explain (without sounding crazy) what hapend the night before (or week before). He then gets a phone call from a man calming to have his wife hostage (which I don't believe) and tells Alan not to talk to the police and meet him in the woods at night. Alan's friend/agent then shows up and Alan tells him everythign, though he only believes that the wife has been kidnapped.

They rent a cabin and that night Alan goes off to meet the kidnaper, and along the way the typical insane darkness stuff happens. The agent sees the darkness force from the cabin and is then surrounded by hundreds of darkness crows, so he now believes Alan is not crazy. Alan finaly meets the kidnapper and he demands the full manuscript (that I have been finding pages of) becaseu it controls reality. Alan fights with the kidnapper but he get away and Alan has to walk and drive back to the cabin to save his agent from the birds. In the epilogue the agent gets a call from a local waitress that she has all of the manuscript, but when she hangs up it's reviled that the creepy old lady from episode 1 is controlling her some how.

This episode took me longer than it should since due to a wrong turn in the driving section I missed the last collectable in the level, so I had to go back and run through the whole episode a second time. At least this gave me practice fro when I do the nightmare play through and have to run for my life every step of the way.

Alan lake

Finished the first "episode" of Alan Wake today and it's so far rather interesting.

So far Alan and his wife take a vacation to a small town in what looks like Vermont or Maine, and right off the bat things get weird when they get directions and the key to the cabin they are renting by a shadowy old woman in a mourning dress who promptly disappears. Then after an argument with his wife Alan storms out of the house at night and he hears his wife scream, rushing back in he sees her in the lake behind the house. He dives in and then suddenly wakes up in a car accident a week later, with shadow monster people trying to kill him everywhere and pieces of a story he dosen't remember writing describing future events. At the end of the episode he manages to contact the local sheriff and finds out that the cabin and whole island he was staying in hasn't existed since the 70's.

The game also has 260 or so collectables, but unlike the orbs in Enslaved, they are easy to find with a guide and most are interesting even with out the achievements. One of the more interesting collectables is a TV program of a little twilight Zone type show where some one invents a machine that alters quantum probability so that nothing can harm him in that reality. The draw back of this is shown quickly in with each time the machine works it means there is a reality that it failed, and with such a failure rate it's only a matter of time before it fails in the featured reality too.

Well that's forty-five down...

Finished off Enslaved today, and the ending puts an interesting level of depth to the story.

In the last levels Trip, Monkey, and Pigsy steal a giant mech monster and use it to storm the slaver's pyramid base. After a huge boss fight Pigsy sacrifices himself by blowing up the mech to destroy the remaining defense, and that touching moment is ruined with the "smokey bacon" achievement popping up...

Then it's revealed that what the "slaver" is doing to all the people is plugging them into a mass Matrix like simulation of the early 21st century New York (which Monkey sees glimpses of in the masks he picks up). This way he is giving the people a escape from the hostile dangerous wasteland of the real world, but by force. Monkey is even drawn into this simulation but then Trip kills the controller and ends the simulation for all the slaves. So in the end thousands of people are freed from a content illusion and now have to face a harsh reality, and the game dosen't say if this was good or not or even what happens next.

I may go back at some point and pick up the rest of the achievements, but for now it's on to Allan Wake.

Quads

I decided to forgo the rest of the orbs and any other out of the way achievements, they were just grinding the game to a halt and sucking all the fun out of it.

So today I just played normally and just focused on the fun and game play, and I finished 4 chapters. The only time that I used an achievement guide was to find the hidden masks, since I'm more interested in where that story is going than the achievements for it.

Story wise, in chapter 8 Trip and Monkey manage to get the big vault doors open only do find Trip's father dead and his dying message playing. Trip decides that she can't free Monkey yet since she need his help going after the slavers. In chapter 9 they track down an old friend of Trip's father named Pigsy then in the next 3 chapters they go after the parts needed to fix Pigsy's flying bus thing.

The odd thing about Pigsy is that he's not animated as well as Trip and Monkey. While Monkey and Trip have super mo-capped faces that show subtle movements, Pigsy's face moves like a rubber mask. It may just be all the metal bits they tacked on him that messes up the animation, or they just didn't mo-cap his actor since it's a minor role late in the game.

Welcome home!

Finished 2 more levels today, well mostly.

After finally getting out of New York city in chapter 5, chapter 6 and 7 are about Monkey and Trip reaching Trip's home and finding it (unsurprisingly) filled with corpses and everyone else taken away be slaver mechs.

I managed to get 100% of the orbs in chapter 6, but one last orb eluded me in 7 even after going though the level three times. I eventually called it quits and I'll get it tomorrow with the help of youtube.

If at first you don't succeed, You-Tube it.

I manged to get through 1 level today, after 5 play-throughs...

the main problem was that the 5th level starts off with a big open area that you use the flying cloud with for the first time. Spread around this area is dozens of orbs to collect and there is no way to tell if you got all of them until you finish the level, and then you just get a percentage. So I finished the level with about 96 %, so I red did it and found 4 or 5 more orbs that I missed. Then i was 98% so I went at it again and looked all over the rest of the level to see if I missed any orbs there, which I hadn't. So then I look on YouTube for a video with the location of all the orbs, and I find 3 more. So I finish the level and now it says 99%. It then took me 2 more tries to finally find the 1 orb that I kept over looking!

Also it's odd that the only pre-rendered cut scene that I have noticed so far looks far worse than the actual in game graphics.

The Serkis is in town!

I got through level 3 and 4 of Enslaved, and the plot didn't advance much more than getting from point a to point B. I took a while since I had to do some sections twice to get orbs/masks I missed.

The really interesting thing though is I came across these collectible mask items and each one flashes photos of some guy in modern time. After seeing a couple of them I thought to myself "Is that Andy Serkis?", and then listening to Monkey's voice again I was reminded of Cookie from King Kong (one of Serkis' few face roles). So I checked on line and sure enough Monkey was not only voiced by but performance captured by the master of mo-cap himself (which explains why the character animation looks amazing).

What's with Serkis playing primates? First he was King Kong, now a guy named Monkey, and next he's in Planet of the Apes!

Read my lips

Well Enslaved is definitely a change from New Vegas. To sum up the difference would be quality over quantity. While F:NV was a huge open world with freedom to explore dozens of quests and story lines, Enslaved is a very linear in both story and game play but has incredible lush visuals with excellent voice acting and amazing animation.

The story so far is that the tough guy Monkey and tech girl Trip were aboard a slave air ship but managed to escape into future New York that has been grown run with plant life and over run by robots. In order to get Monkey to help her Trip puts a modified slave control head band on him and he grudgingly leads her to the crashed airship so he can find his "ride". The story is apparently a re-telling of the Chinese classic "Journey to the west", but since the closest I ever came to reading the story was watching a few episodes of Dragon Ball all references will be lost to me (except the power pole and flying nimbus).

I only progressed past the second chapter today due to the fact that I am playing on hard mode and trying to get several achievements as I go. Along with meticulously trying to get every one of the hundreds of power up orbs laying around I was also trying to not get hit once on the first level and not dying on the second. This lead to me restarting from check points many many times, but now that those are done things should go easier.

Well that's forty-four down...

Well I managed to save the president and connect the securitrons much faster than I figured so Ialso dealt with the Khans and had time left to finish the whole thing.

The final battle was pretty much the same as the one for Mr. House, only difference is that in the end I managed to convince the NCR to walk away peacfully instead of shooting them all down.

At 47 days this is by far the longest I have played one game so for for this blog (Persona 4 probably beat it), and odd are that it's going to retain that record for a long time.

Tomorrow it's on to Enslaved: Odyssey to the West.

300 years of experience

Well Arcade's companion quest was the gather up the remaining members of his father's old Enclave squad, This took a lot of fast traveling all over the map and a lot of speech checks. In the end though I managed to convince them all to help me secure Hover Dam for the NCR (which I would then take over) and for my trouble I got a nifty set of Fallout 2 style advanced power armor. At the end of the quest Arcade left to help the Followers in the upcoming battle so I'm down a companion again, but he did leave an even more nifty set of advanced power armor that was his father's.

So all that is left for tomorrow is to save the resident again ad link all the scurcitrons into the network before the big final battle. I'll be getting Lily again in hopes that her hidden side quest will activate before the end of the game (and a nightkin is handy to have around).

Kingdom Factory

So I went through the normal procedure of talking to Mr. House and activating the mk2 securitrons then went off to visit Caesar. Since I was prety much maxed out I figured that I would put a dent in the legion while I was there. Once I got my gear back to activate the Securitron army I then proceeded to super punch every member of the legion I could find, right up to Caesar himself. I know that it won't have much of an effect on the story, but after having to do the Caesar play through it was payback.

I then went off to make a house call to Mr. House, and punched his clock even before he had a chance to talk. After that I set up Yes-man in control of the securitron army and finally unlocked Arcade's quest line, which I'll do tomorrow.

Today I also got two new games. I found on sale for 15$ a new copy of Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom, and since I had my eye on it since it came out (nice looking action fantasy with a good score) I picked it up. A couple days ago I realized that I didn't have a portable Harvest Moon game I could play anymore since my 3DS lacks the GBA port for Friends of Mineral Town (and I lent away my old DS), so when I saw Rune Factory 3 for 20$ at the same time as Majin I bought it too.

The home stretch

I decided today to finally work towards the final part of the play through, here I side with Yes-man and take control of New Vegas myself.

First off I killed Benny again, and then thoroughly talked to Yes-man and told him to ignore the BoS, the Boomers and the Great Khans since I dealt with them already (still need to talk with the Khans a bit more). Then I get tasked with investigating the Ultralux and Gomorrah and also kill Mr. House.

This was the first time I fully investigated the Ultralux, the previous time I been there was in the Caesar play through and I rushed through the fastest way possible. This time I managed to track down the rancher's missing son and prevented the White Glove Society from returning to their canabal ways.

At Gomorrah it was business as usual, stopped the bosses plas of attacking the strip and saved the day (for the 4th time).

Tomorrow it's off to pay a visit to Mr house and Caesar.

Helping out around town.

Today I finished up some quests that I had collected along the way.

First I went around and delivered some supplies for the NCR after one of their caravans were ambushed. Then I helped out the Followers of the Apocalypse by getting some notable transients off their addictions and convincing the local bar to sell medicine to the FotA. While at said bar I also helped them out with some "accounting" and "human resources" issues. I also sorted out a desuite The Kings were having with the NCR, wich all told got me quite popular in the area around the strip.

How would you like your eggs?

Today I ran around all over the place killing dangerous animals in order to collect eggs for the arena, all in all it was mostly uneventful. The only tricky one was the giant poisonous wasps, since I tend to use power gauntlets they tend to get in at least one sting before I can hit them and then the poision does more damage then they could alive. Fortunately Ed-e and the doctor were handy enough with laser weapons that they killed most before they got to me. One of the easiest was the giant legendary deathclaw, which I killed in 3 hits. It's kinda odd that a bunch of flying bugs are more of a threat than a 14 foot tall super monster.

Tomorrow it's off to find more quests!

Enter the dragon!

Finished off the jobs for the BoS and in the end got to become a full member, even given power armor training! It was the least they could do after I not only saved their lives, and ended the lock down, but also set them up with the biggest radar system in the state. Then I went off and helped the town of Prim sort out their problems, it's normally the second big mission you get but I never managed to finish it till now.

Also today I got the new and improved Atlus release of Divinity II: Dragon Knight Saga, and added it to the list. Even though I didn't pre-order it, I still managed to get a copy with the bonus art book!

Eugene Fitzherbert!?

Continued doing more quests for the BoS, including one that took me to a disturbing vault.

The story of the vault is told in an interesting nonlinear way through recordings and text messages found scattered around the place. The exerment of this vault was that some one had to be sacrificed every year in order to keep the vault running, and the first one was the overseer. So quickly the process of picking a new overseer and a candidate to be sacrificed merged into the same vote, and a whole mini social order raised up around the election (which usually was the least wanted person in the vault). Then one year a woman was tricked and blackmailed by one of the groups, so she killed most of them and then was elected to be sacrificed, but as her one act as overseer she banished the elections and made the sacrifice a random draw. In order to prevent this the gang that blackmailed her formed an armed uprising and during the battle all but 5 vault dweller died. Figuring that it's all pointless now they refused to sacrifice any one, and that's when the computer told them that they passed the test and it was all an experiment to see if they would stand up for the life of others.

4 of the 5 killed themselves after hearing that...

One thing that I found out today which blew my mind was that Arcade Gannon, the doctor that's my current comanion, is voiced by Zachary Levi.

Uh, go fish?

Well I won 30 out of 53 games of Caravan, and I still have now idea how to play it! Near as I could gather from the poorly written instructions you have to build 3 stacks of cards totaling between 21-26 each, and the face cards act as modifiers, beyond that it seemd random. The game would start and I would put down cards, then randomly I would suddenly win or lose, and the cards would disappear before I could see what happened. Other times I would build up the 3 piles to 26 and then just wait until the opponent ran out of cards, which would usually meant I won.

When that annoying nonsense was over I went about doing whatever quest I could find. I helped the Boomers again, then did a bunch of missions for the NCR, and finally worked for the Brotherhood of Steel. I'm not sure which factions will hate me after I try to take over New Vegas by myself (other than the NCR) so I'm doing what missions I can now before they are blocked off.

The whole gang

Finished off today the companion quests (more or less) and also took care of some other achievements.

First off I took all the money I had and went to the major weapon dealer and bought every weapon mod they had, and the weapons that they were for. I then waited 3 days for them to restock and repeated this until I had the weapon mod achievement. I didn't bother keeping that progress since I can kill a deathclaw with 2 punches so having a slightly lighter hand gun was pointless.

After reloading my previous save file I went off to find Raul Tejada, the ghoul mechanic. He was being held prisoner by a crazy Nightkin running a radio station, but after I fixed the Nightkin's robot I was free to make Raul a companion. His quest line needed to be first unlocked by talking with various people who were getting on in years, after this he told his life story and realized that he still had some fight left in him despite being a few centuries old.

Then with Raul in tow I went after the quest to get Rex, the cyborg dog. The quest line was rather simple, after doing a job for The King I was allowed to look into a way of healing the dog. After a few quick travels I brought Rex to the doctor that introduced me to Lily and finally made use of the dog brain that I've been carrying around in my bag for weeks.

I then Picked up Ed-e, the military Eye-bot, after a quick fix up job and then convinced the doctor Arcade Gannon to join up too. Ed-e's quest required me to talk to several people and then wait several days between each person, then after several days of doing this Ed-e returned to my party fully upgraded. Arcade's quest is only triggered near the end of the game when I'm planning the attack on hover dam, so he's just around as an extra gun for now.

With all the companions registered I got the achievement, so I then went hunting around to collect up all the snow-globes for that achievement too. Also along the way I got the speech and computer hacking achievements, so all that's left is to win 30 hands of the card game Caravan (which I have not played once) and finish the game as an independent.

A failure to communicate

I took a break from companion gathering today to do another achievement mission. The first part of the mission was to visit 6 NCR outposts and give them updated security codes, then I had to revisit 3 of them to confirm conflicting reports, then finally confront the person responsible for the reports. All told it should have been 12 quick fast travels and taken no time at all, but with the super load times that developed the whole thing took over an hour!

Tomorrow it's on to picking up more companions.

Companions will just slow you down.

Completed the companion quests for Lily Bowen and Rose of Sharon Cassidy today, and some where along the way killed the loading time.

Lily Bowen use to be a 75 year old grandmother before he was turned into a crazy nightkin, and her quest was surprisingly easy. Compared to the previous two, where I had to run all over the map to trigger event flags before I could even start their mission, I just had to walk to her location and have 1 conversation with a NPC. Then the quest itself was rather simple, we fast traveled to a nearby cave, fought some wild animals off for a broken stealth-boy, passed a speech check, then passed a science check to finish it. There is also a unlisted side of her quest where you have to convince her to take her medication or not, but it occurring is totally random and I could not get it to happen before moving on to the next companion.

Rose's quest line was a sort of backwards, I had to do several other quests before even being able to recruit her, but then her quest came up automatically. She use to own a caravan but it was attacked and she wanted to check out where it happened, then after fast traveling to the site of several other wrecked caravans she realizes who killed them. Turns out that the large local caravan company was working with a local arms dealer to drive off the competition. Instead of going in guns blazing and killing everyone I used stealth to sneak in and find evidence to incriminate them both, and then handed it into the NCR to finish the quest line.

Somewhere while doing Lily's quest the time it takes to load an area jumped dramatically. I'm not sure what triggered it, maybe keeping track of more than 2 companions, but loads that once took several seconds now take almost a minuet, making getting anywhere much slower. Also the game has gotten much more unstable, with the frame rate drooping way down at points.

With this post Fallout: New Vegas has surpassed Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection as the longest time I have spent on one title, and there is still a week or so of game play left. It's odd how I had heard that New Vegas was smaller than Fallout 3, but I have already spent 2 weeks longer on it than Fallout 3 with all the DLC.

I Could Make You Remember to Forget

I finished the companion quests for Veronica Santangelo and Craig Boone today.

For Veronica's quest I had to visit the BoS bunker and then go off to find a piece of tech that would convince them that hiding out in a hole and hoarding energy weapons is not a solid long term plan. I had 3 options for how to do this, either check out the heat ray at the power plant, investigate the super plants the NCR are experimenting with, or get a super gun from the Boomer's vault. Since they all gave the same results I went with finding the gun (may come in handy), and then I spent 20 minuets running around a vault maze being irradiated all to heck to find it. When we got back though the BoS still refused to change their tactics, dismissing the gun as a 1 off, and the guards out front of the gate said they didn't want to see Veronica around any more. Kind of a downer ending for such a upbeat companion.

To start Boone's companion quest was a little more tricky, I had to fight with Caesar's legion in several locations but I had already finished most of them before picking him up. Fortunately there was just enough story flags left to trigger the mission by stopping a legion spy in the NCR and killing a whole town of legion troops. At this point Boone finally explains that he had to kill his wife when she was about to be sold as a legion sex slave, and he thinks it was karma for the innocent people he killed while in the NCR. So we then went to the site of the battle where he killed those civilians just in time to fight off a large group of legionaries looking to make slaves of the near by town. The quest ends when Boone is convinced that his job is to pay off his bad karma by killing off the legion to prevent what happened to his wife happening again.

Tomorrow it's on to helping another schizophrenic Nightkin.

A breath of fresh air

Finished the DLC today, and it's good that I was at a high level since I needed every skill I had.

I first had to track down the mute, who was mistaken for the star of the opening of the casino and taken to the top hotel room, and she had a voice again. The reason for this mistaken identity I found out later was because the ghoul was the one who trapped the mute in the auto-doc and had her voice box altered to sound identical to the starlet since her voice opens the casino vault. Then I had to track down the ghoul who was trapped in the theater where he was supposed to perform opening night. In order to disable the holographic security of the place I had to find several keys and recordings, but first I had to pass a series of high level science conversation checks to prevent me and the ghoul from getting killed. After that I found the nightkin in the kitchen and was about to blow the whole place up with a gas leak. Thanks to some high level speech conversation checks I was able to merge both parts of his personality together.

With everyone safe I went back up stairs to have the former mute open the door to the vault, but first I had to convince her with a speech cheek not to try and kill the guy who put us through all this. The vault it's self was a huge maze with every manner of hazard (except the ghost people) and was a pain to navigate, but in the end I got to the main safe. Then with more science skill checks I tricked the mastermind of the operation to come down himself and locked him down in the vault. After that it was only a matter of walking out of the front gate and back to New Vegas.

In a nice segue, the last bit of the DLC is a message from the mastermind of the operation to his former student, who was not only the former girlfriend of the mute but also one of the possible companions. So I started right up on my quest to get all the companions starting with her, who turns out to be a brotherhood of steel scribe that excels in unarmed combat. Her upbeat and joking personality is a very nice change to the normal gloom of the wasteland, sort of like Moira Brown from Fallout 3 but not so fatally optimistic. To unlock her personal quest I had to travel to several locations, but with all the map uncovered it took a few seconds, now I have to go to the Brotherhood of Steel base for the first time not intending to blow it up.

Terrible welcoming comity

Ran the 3 other accomplices around the DLC today to set up breaking into the casino, and each had their little side quests to draw things out. First the Nightkin had to get to some control switches, but before his intelligent side could do the work needed the simple side had to be fed with the remains of 2 ghost people. Next the mute had to be brought to power station to activate it, but in Spoony fashion there was a fuse box that had to be replace with 3 fuses scattered around the area. Then the ghoul had to be brought to a broken wire that he had to hold together to activate everything, but first 2 holographic guards had to be found and activated in order for it to be safe.

Then my character had to get to the bell tower to send the signal to launch everything, while avoiding every death trap in the game. I finally get into the casino only to find the 3 other team members lying on the ground and my character quickly blacks out. I then wake up to find that the casino security has stashed the other party members all over the place and tomorrow I'll have to go track them down again.

A motly crew

Well I finished the missions to collect up the 3 (or maybe 4) other members needed for the casino hist, and the writers sure came u with original characters. First there is a Nightkin with a split personality, one is mostly mindless but obedient, the other is intelligent but argumentative, and both are violent. Then there's the laid back scheming ghoul celebrity, who is about as trustworthy as an Yao Guai. The third is a Brotherhood of Steel member who was operated on by a robot to remove her voice and mess up her mind, so now she speaks in gesture (which the fallout conversation system dosen't support so it's described in text).

So next I have to go to the together areas of map and organize the 3 NPCs to trigger events that will open the door to the casino.

Wandering days are over

Well I finally managed to get a map marker on every location in New Vegas, so now when I do any quests I just have to fast travel from one place to another. Another benefit is that with all the discovery and killing this that got in my way I have already leveled up to level 20, and the last 15 levels (which are a harder grind) will fill in quickly with quest EXP.

Originally I planed on collecting up the available companions next, but since I read that the Dead Money DLC has a bug that messes up one of their quest lines I decided to do the DLC first. So far the Dead Money DLC reminds me a lot of the Pitt DLC, same events where you are quickly stuck in a hostile envroment with all your equipment gone and you can't get out until you solve the quest. although I only got far enough in to get the mission objective, collect up 3 other companions and break into the casino, and looked around a little.

What the hell are we supposed to use man? Harsh language?

After taking on a giant evolved centaur and it's gang I managed to finish the melee weapons achievement and then moved on to unarmed one. I was expecting this to be the most difficult one, but with my strength at 10 and a handy shock glove I was able to kill anything from a giant rad scorpion to a super mutant in one hit. Kinda odd that one punch is more powerful than 3 grenades.

while going though the remaining locations I didn't find too much interesting, and there was mostly giant insects in most places. What they lacked in variety though they made up for in quantity, and over 100 squshed bugs later and I already had the unarmed achievement.

So now that those achievements are out of the way I can use what ever weapon I want any time now, but currently I'm liking the 1 hit kill of the shock glove so I'll keep with that for a while.

Live change

Had an unusual time playing New Vegas today.

First, before I even started I checked out the 1 day only sale on Xbox Live and the DLC expansion pack Dead Money was on sale for 5 buck. I figured that it's a good deal since any future DLC combo discs would be about 20$ for 4 DLC at the cheapest.

So I bought it then went on with playing the game (surprised to receive a message that the DLC also raised the level cap to 35), planing to do the DLC after I finish exploring. The first place I got to was a crash site surrounded with high powered robots, and apparently cattle rods don't do much damage against robots. So I used my last pulse grenades and mines to get rind of most of them and used a shocker glove to get the rest (counts towards unarmed not melee).

After exploring a few other locations the web browser I was viewing the location map on disappeared. Turns out a nasty little mal-ware program snuck on my computer and was messing u my browser and every other program. So I deleted the program and then ran a full virus and spyware scan, and while that was going I finally go back to the game.

With the browser off while the scans were running I couldn't check where other locations were or what plot they were related to, so I played it safe and just explored the 2 close ticks on the compass. After that I decided to compensate for the melee hits I missed from the robots by taking on some deathclaws. A whole family of Deathclaws in fact, including 2 alpha males and a giant mother. Surprisingly the knock out effect of the cattle prod has the same effect no mater the size of the creature, so I picked them all off one by one with the cattle prod and then finish them off with a Riper and then shovel when the Riper broke.

So the scans should be done by tomorrow and it will be back to exploring the wilderness.