In late 2010 a blockbuster employee recommended me this new game called “Fallout: New Vegas”. I’d never played Fallout before and knew next to nothing about it. An hour later I was in my bedroom entering a dusty hot Mojave, shooting bottles, and killing mantises in a dilapidated school house- Goodsprings. It was, okay, I guess? I really didn’t get why she had told me to give it a try. The graphics were aggressively mediocre, the movement was comical, there didn’t really seem to be anything interesting going on, and the landscape was inhospitable, it was ugly. I thought nothing of pausing the game for hours and doing other stuff around the house.
Later that night I picked the controller up and something incredible happened. That week I spent 60 hours exploring the Mojave, crawling through the underbelly of New Vegas, liberating slaves, and exploring ruined industrial complexes. I was barely sleeping, 3am meant bottle caps and xp. The most incredible stories started unfolding in-front of me, rich in lore and deeply relatable surrealism. I was in a gang, I was building an arsenal, I was being hunted across the desert by assassins. I had a gay traveling companion, and a dog. I was the wanderer, the defender of the people, I was- Courier 6.
I’ve played hundreds of hours of New Vegas, almost once a year since 2010 I’ve decided to go back and wander. And each time I find new things, get sucked into new stories, live out incredible adventures. Because that’s what this game does. It’s a relic of an era where the left over scraps of a game (fallout 3) could be scraped together by a passionate team in a short time- and molded into one of the most incredible RPG adventures of all time. It’s that perfect emergent property of the right people at the right time, who wanted to tell their stories. Fallout New Vegas has gone down as my favorite video game of all time. And it earned it.
There’s something so special about those first memories of New Vegas- the ones where I didn’t think I liked it. Because I had no idea how special of a thing I was about to find, the love I would feel for that dusty hot Mojave, for Good Springs. Former Blockbuster employee, woman of the video store of a bygone era, where ever you are out there in the world- you changed my life.
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I'm writing a story with the setting in a video game, what cool easter eggs or gaming pet peves should I include?
Ex: Room behind waterfall; an NPC walking at that weird pace where walking is top slow and running is too fast
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No, Pac-Kong isn't a clever mix of Pac-Man and Donkey Kong; it stands as one of the worst rip-offs of the latter that I've ever played, by a considerable margin. Even after all these years, the meaning behind the "pac" in the title remains a mystery to me. While forgiving the simplistic graphics — expected for an Atari 2600 game, the console's charm lays in its titles' gameplay, not in their visual appeal - the evident deficiencies in this game are inexcusable..
At the apex of the tower lurks an Octopus (though it resembles more a giant yellow bat) hurling bananas (or bat-like creatures) at our hero. Dodging these bats or airborne bananas presents a challenge; they never cease movement and sway in a manner that makes you struggle to discern when you've been hit until you lose a life - The feeling of "it wasn't even close" prevails often.
The most infuriating aspect emerges when jumping between platforms separated by gaping chasms. Precise timing is imperative; pressing the button when our hero's last foot grazes the platform's edge is the only way forward. It's an exasperating exercise, leading to countless instances where apparent success is swiftly followed by a plummet to failure.
Somehow, I managed to clear the first loop (just two stages) without any deaths, but the sheer frustration led me to opt-out. Continuing seemed pointless unless I was seeking a nervous breakdown.
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I'm trying to figure out what she's thinking...
"But Honey, weren't we supposed to f*** tonight ?"
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173. Mattel Electronics - Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Cloudy Mountain (1982)
The first AD&D console game, Cloudy Mountain tries, somewhat successfully, to capture the spirit of D&D. In this game for the Mattel console Intellivision you play as three adventurers, which are all basically the same guy, it just counts as three lives, as you attempt to win the Crown of Kings from the Cloudy Mountain.
You star off outside a mountain range, armed with three arrows and a bow and you have to enter increasingly more difficult mountain dungeons to get an axe which allows you to move through the forest, a boat that allows you to cross the river and a key that allows you to open the gate to the cloudy mountain in which dungeon you can finally retrieve the two pieces of the Crown and win the game. As you go along you also get quivers which give you more arrows to fight monsters with.
Rudimentary by today's standards, the game does capture the idea of plot advancement and dungeon crawling, with its randomized maps that are only revealed through exploration that were common to many of the simplest D&D adventures. With some neat sound design and streamlined controls this is a pretty fun game. You can find someone on YouTube (Winslinator) finishing it to 100% completion in under 2 minutes... try doing that with Baldur's Gate III!
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