Underpolished

[Too-DAMN-Much]

yeah.... i gotta admit, i love fallout new vegas just as much as fallout 3....
but.... well.... i can't say obsidian entertainment did it quite as well as bethesda did fallout 3, why?

1. the radio stations, fallout 3 versus new vegas, a no brainer win for FO 3 there, i ENJOYED having the radio stations playing in fallout 3, now it's always the same three songs, barely any commentary and gets annoying VERY FAST i guess it could be chalked up to the DJ guy "three dawg" not having a new vegas counterpart to chronicle you're ongoing adventures in nearly realtime, but it's just not true, the voice acting in fallout 3 versus new vegas seems quite a bit more sparse and just slightly cheap in general, i won't say quantity won over quality here, but.... it is a bit lacking and i can definetly tell they tried to cut corners there with this latest one.

2. crafting, sure you can make a ton more stuff than you could in fallout 3 in new vegas, however as fucked as this is to realize, weapon crafting seems to be completely and totally gone, what the hell were they thinking?

"hey, let's throw away all the work we did on crafting last time and start something totally new without including things that are already done"?
yeah it seems like it, no clue why.

and it's not just that weapon crafting is gone either that's one thing to be sure of, i'm griping about some of the actual recipes as well, let's take.... gecko hide tanning to start with, it's psuedo suggested by tutorial NPC sunny smiles as a decent way to make money by hunting geckos for their hides, noting how little untanned hides sold for i eventually noticed the campfire option to tan the hides which actually does sell for a pretty fair price however given the insanely large amount of turpentine (which isn't as common as you might think, you need two per hide and most vendors have (if any) one or two at best) required to tan a minute or two at best of collected hides it's totally unfeasible to make much money doing this and the turpentine has weight too i admit, not the biggest issue but playing on hardcore with ammo given weight my character could barely carry around enough ammunition to defend itself before picking up the careful packing perk, turpentine weight totally throws that back out of whack and it's hard to come by as well.

3. the fourth wall, it's not broken often and shouldn't obviously be so this is a wholly non major thing here kind of, the immersion is rarely if ever broken and you really can get a good feel for your character's personality with the dialogue choices, but it seems to have come at a cost.

a lot of the better puns and jokes that in a cleverly hidden way used to almost poke fun at the player without actually being obvious about it seem to have been omitted as well and the "wild wasteland" perk/trait really doesn't do much of anything except make you wonder why you bothered picking it, i grabbed it on my first playthrough character and didn't note anything too "wacky" or "wild" and the few changes i did note (one weapon has an alternate version with it selected and some encounters are slightly different with it too, but by "some" i mean almost next to none) have yet to be funny or wacky or silly at all in any way, moreso either just plain confusing, busy hiding in the realm of obscurity, or just plain non-existant.


i did kinda get a giggle out of how much mr. house seems like the father from the adam's family on a computer screen however and i can't say i'm not enjoying the game, just.... it's not all green skies and mushroom clouds like it should be.

ah and i just reminded myself even, the level of "post nuclear apocalyptic atmosphere" WAY too toned down in this one, i can't even find a single nuclear missle direct hit site that's accessible without clipping, where's all the "we've been nuked to hell" die in a half second radiation you'd expect? this isn't a western for fuck sakes, at least not the usual type of western
and yeah, i know on the missle hits, i know mr. house shot most of them down as he eventually says.... but..... it feels less like fallout and more like a cheesy underdone john wayne movie rip off.