Fallout: New Vegas - pt 2 Good Morning Goodsprings!

Cut-scene over, I wake up in Doc Mitchell's. Assuming you've played the game, you know the scenario. I'm a courier that has been left for dead in a ditch and saved by an over-friendly robot named Victor, then brought from the brink of death by Dr Mitchell. I couldn't help but be grateful to this man. Not only did he save my life but he did it for free. In this game accessing free medical care is extremely hard, considering how easy it is to get seriously hurt. On top of this uncharacteristically socialistic move, I can take pretty much anything from his house without losing karma. Despite my wanting to be a somewhat 'moral' anarchist character, my methods of getting through these games involve lots of sneak and stealth skills, and stealing and lock picking, so I tend to start out my games in the evil and work my way to heaven as I earn my own means of survival. I chose skill and attribute points to accommodate this, as well as high intelligence and science. I will try to up my speech also, as that enables me to get the endings I want far easier. Now, unlike in Fallout 3 (F3) in New Vegas (NV) my choices for personality and skills are much more limited. I can only pick a few things, which raise significantly at the expense of other things. Personally I prefer being well-rounded over specialised in many ways, but I understand why many RP'ers enjoy this, so that every character they create has a slightly different experience in this world. When it came to perks, I was happy to see an option to charm the same sex as well as the opposite sex. A silly afterthought it may be, but it's amazing what a small shoutout to the LGBTQ gaming community from the games themselves can do to make people feel more at home in the wider gaming community. In somewhere like the US, which has a lot of open and deep-rooted homophobia, I would imagine that this little line in the sand to say "hey, we know you're out there, and we're on your side" can make a world of difference to someone feeling alone and rejected. The character creation was near exactly the same as on F3, which was a bit boring, but there was nothing wrong with it, I suppose. It defaults you to a caucasian male rather than random (meh) and makes you pick between male and female. But other than that it gives you plenty of options on gender presentation. At least as a female character. You don't have to worry too much about sexualisation at this point, because unless you're using a mod, your character will look worn, ragged and plain. I quite like that, honestly. I don't know if it's trying to be realistic, or if these games prefer spending time on pretty environments over pretty characters, but I'm fine with it. All player characters have the same of two body shapes, depending on sex. My Seregon is a pale skinned female character with a purple boy's cut, if you must know.

So I step out of the house into a pretty big town. The houses I break into don't have much personality or individuality but there's a good atmosphere in the town itself. I talk to the locals about the robot and my attack, fairly early on coming across a woman names "Sunny Smiles. Cute name. Anyways, it's her job to teach me how to fight by shooting geckos around town. Apparently this is her occupation and she goes out regularly on her own with little trouble, despite super speed and fast bites. Unfortunately for her though, because she is in the beginner arena, as it were, it doesn't seem like her HP and shooting power are up to much. Presumably the latter is to give me a chance, and the former is in case I want to make an easy kill for bad karma. Either way, her fighting skills apparently do not compliment my 'step back, hide, and snipe from a distance' techniques, as she had got herself killed before I'd made 4 hits. Did I mention Fallout is a fairly hard game? When you are level 1, the killable NPCs don't slide down to level 1 to match you. I started F3 quite a few times before getting into it enough to be bothered to venture outside of Megaton because a Molerat could kill me easily and even a Radroach took 7 or so shots to finish off. Once you level up it's mostly fine, but it is a challenge till you break, say, level 15. 1-3 might be okay for people who love rushing in to fight, but me? It took me ages before I didn't hide from giant spiders and run the fuck away from the dragons in Skyrim!

Not Smiling any more =(

Most the characters here aside from the robot aren't hugely interesting. There are 2 main women. Well, 1 now. They're written okay. Ms Smiles is a slight cliche young-peppy-girl-with-a-gun, crossed with our tutorial leader in Red Dead Redemption. Actually I think there's quite a few times where the person to show you the ropes is female, usually in games with male leads. They act sort of like hardcore hosts for safety information tapes. F3 and NV in general are decent with race and gender. There are a whole lot of NPCs and they come in a wide range of colours, fairly realistically represented for the United States. I wouldn't say it doesn't fall into any traps and cliches here, particularly with gender, but I get the impression that a lot of the time it is randomly chosen what race a character will be, and sometimes gender too. This can be great in a lot of ways because it avoids a lot of issues around stereotyping, but it can lead to characters occasionally seeming a bit bland or 2D without their lives or personality being affected by their culture or gendered upbringing. From playing F3 or Skyrim, I could assume that there just isn't really gender oppression in this world, but I'm very well aware that this game is going to confront me with highly misogynistic characters and societies, so it would be interesting to see the effects. A lot of history has been lost in the Wastelands of Fallout over the years, and many people have been killed, groups scattered, new 'tribes' reformed,  (though I'm not a fan of them being called tribes and imitating things like Native American names etc) new (old) types of slavery so it's perfectly possible that culture, race, and a large chunk of racism has also been nuked out, and people have found other things, like the persecution of ghouls, to rally around instead.

So finally I come across Ringo, the dude who is hiding from the Powder Gangers. I... totally put off this quest until later. I spoke before how I feel about attacking a largely black former chain gang, especially as when I come across them, they aren't hostile to me. Course, I pretty much blow myself up on mines going near them, of which them seem wholly unconcerned, but that's beside the point! At this stage of playing at least, it seems good form not to get too involved. If they step up in trying to seize territory or I see them attacking somebody unprovoked then I'll step in. For now this guy is safe and the town is calm. I want to learn more about them and see if any other options are open to me. I do minor tasks like checking out the school house and fixing radios. There are a few things interesting around, like graveyards which give me an option to unbury the dead, apparently, but mostly not. I spent quite a while wandering in one direction until I would get killed by a bunch of fairly hard giant scorpions and motherfucking deathclaws. Like I say, not a low-level friendly game. Eventually I manage to find an outpost called Sloan, where I am able to get my vegan-brain some comfort by patching up a wounded but friendly molerat, called Snuffles. I can even have a one way conversation with the ugly sweetheart. Apparently I can turn her hostile with my NCR reputation, but I plan to keep it fairly neutral. Not far from this post were angry deathclaws, as expected. I died after it chased me. I thought if I hid behind the person who had apparently been keeping them at bay all this time, he would be able to save us, but apparently Sunny Smiles' curse lived on in this bloke too, and snuffles and himself went down with me. But not to worry about Snuffles, coz saves and respawning are awesome, awesome things.

Find me something cuter in this game. It's a challenge

So, I'm going to leave it here for this post. In the next, I'll be meeting the main two factions. Sorry there wasn't a huge scope for analysis in this section, but I'm writing a part of the game I already played. Hopefully when I speed up I will notice more things just as I'm going along.

Later Days!

I need an edgy Anarchist sign off. Ideas in comments

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