[Update] Review: Fallout: New Vegas

With this past month being the sequel month of the century, some of them can get swept under the rug, or brushed aside, or even blown to smithereens in a nuclear holocaust. Of course I am referring to the epic expansion pack sequel, Glitchout Fallout: New Vegas. New Vegas takes place in 2281. Three years after the events of Fallout 3, and 39 years after Fallout 2.

Fallout: New Vegas’ story is based around a package courier that is set to deliver a platinum chip. But, as it turns out, more than just the recipient is interested in the contents of this pack. Matthew Perry A man in a striped suit explains that this isn’t just bad luck, but a completely planned out ordeal. After this heart-felt welcome, you are promptly shot in the face. At this point I would have said *spoiler alert,* but as seeing as this is the opening cinematic, you can’t avoid it.

While the opening credit begin to roll, you sit back and wonder, wow, is this game going to be “everything that happens to this point?” or “Now, what?” For those of you guessing the latter, ding ding, you are correct.
You come out of your coma in a white blur, being talked to by Doc. Mitchell. He does all the warm up junk that happens with ever RPG game. You know, a/s/l what is your name, is this your face, what perks do you want, what traits do you want, here is some stuff, wanna play hardcore mode? You know, the normal things. Upon leaving his home, you are hit AGAIN, with a white blurry light and thus completing your first quest. “Ain’t that a Kick in the Head.” And for those on Xbox, you just a friendly notification and 10G to your name.

OK, and now my first official opinion comes into play. However much time you plan on playing New Vegas, be sure to get an Egg Time or Alarm clock to stop playing after 1-1.5 hours. I say this because after this time, your chances to glitch out, freeze, hang-up, fail, or otherwise screw your game up rise exponentially. I also say this because reading comments from other online forums told me to do the exact same thing. For which I ignored them. I thought, it is a video game created and produced by a reputable company. There is no reason I should be limited to enjoyment. I was wrong. I spent a good amount of time in Doc. Mitchell’s home looting and taking everything I could carry, only to find out my game froze after I opened Doc’s door. Fail Number 1.
Pressing onward. For those of your that have never played a Bethesda game, you should not start with this one. That is not a burn, or bash, or anything abusive. There is just so many extras added to New Vegas, that you will miss out on what it should feel like to actually play and enjoy an expansive RPG. Lol. Burn.
Mean thoughts aside for now, New Vegas welcomes you with open arms to Goodsprings. Your quest tracker begins telling you to either ask around about the man who shot you, or optionally, talk to Sunny. Personally, I wanted to avoid the man who shot me. He did it once, why wouldn’t he do it again. So, I made my way directly north to the fantastic place that is New Vegas. Which, is the dumbest idea I could have had. I had no usable weapon. No Stimpaks. No Rad-Away.
While I ventured upward, I listened to Radio New Vegas, with Mr. New Vegas detailing the events of the story. Which by the way, Mr. New Vegas makes me miss Three Dogg a million times over. The music for Galaxy News Radio was fantastically wonderful. The music from Radio New Vegas is good. But, Galaxy News was better.

Ok, back to the topic at hand, while moving north, I found Black Mountain. A super mutant haven that is completely covered in radiation. I died instantly. If the rads didn’t do it, the stealthed super mutants did. Ok, noted, avoid Black Mountain until you have something good to kill them and some Rad-Away. So, I went past Black Mountain to what looks like an abandoned quarry just east of the Make Shift Great Khan Camp. This also turn out to be a lose-lose. While the quarry looked pretty open, it turns out I was wrong again. The quarry was covered with deathclaws. And I found out very quickly how the new Damage Threshold works. Apparently, enemies and the courier have a Damage Threshold. And now deathclaws have more HP than anything else, and they have more DT than anything else. So, since my crappy guns only kill one. I died.
For the record, north is a dumb way to go.
Without going into any more detail of the storyline, I need to cover the nitty gritty of what makes this game good, and what makes this game avoidable.

First and foremost, just like other Bethesda games, Fallout: New Vegas is incredibly and dynamically involved. The side quests, optional storylines, and expansive environment. You can spend nearly 40+ hours on side quest, and exploring the world. New Vegas has over 200 locations to discover. Which means over 200 potential stories and secrets to explore. One of my favorite locations is Vault 11. Second of which being the Crashed Vertibird.
With that obvious perks aside, the downfalls are pretty numerous. First and foremost, the game decides to freeze at some of the most unfortunate times. Entering doors can sometime lead to entire game crashes. Too many NPCs on the screen creates framerate disasters.
The graphics are unchanged from Fallout 3’s engine. It looks like nothing has been upgraded. Everyone is a pail shade of grey. Eyes aren’t luminous. Blue eyes and brown eyes look exactly the same. Character faces never look pretty and are always on the bad end of ugly.
As I mentioned near the beginning of this post, playing for over 1-2 hours is very troublesome. Load screens increase in time for 5 seconds to nearly 20 seconds. Then from 20 seconds to sometimes over a 1 minute. And this occurs at every load screen. Door to door. Fast travel to fast travel. It makes the game very frustrating and very annoying. With each minute you play longer, loud times increase, and crashing occurs more frequent.
These opinions and review comment are strictly for the Xbox 360 version. The PC version for me is completely unplayable. Conversations are running at 5 fps. Battling runs at 4 fps. There are “patches” and work around that communities have created. None of which have fixes the issue at hand. A game company released a bad game. And people buy and play it. Not cool.

Score for Xbox 360: 6 / 10 – Without a major patch release to fix the glitches, I can’t ignore the bad despite all of the good.

Score for PC: 3 / 10 – I’m not going to get into it. Just Google Fallout: New Vegas PC issues. You’ll see. It’s lucky to get that.