Caboose Heads for New Vegas

That one can be done without it but why?

I've had it already in the two previous runs and just picked it up for this one last night.

It also comes in handy for a couple of caves too.

The rebreather also fits nicely with the Reinforced Combat Helmet Mk2, makes it look kinda like a flight helmet.

Downloaded Dead Money this morning.

It's interesting so far but I haven't gotten very far at all in it. The concept of having to work with others is intriging and there are some interesting twists in the charactors themselves.

I'll say no more. I have had a couple of bugs, one of which locked me up once but it plays well.

I haven't gotten to the really bad guys yet but I'm heading there now.

I can't wait to discuss this with Veronica when I get back.

Laters!

Gotta love Cass. Not only is her perk stupendously good--+6 DT and no negatives from readily available whiskey is over the top--but every time I hear "Shhhh . . . we're hunting shitheads" as I engage stealth I'm forced to wonder why I'd ever carry around some other humanoid companion.

So I managed to make my way to the final, or at least I think its the final battle and damned if there's so much shit going on in the game with shit flying and fighting the fucking game locks up hard.

Now remember, as long as I don't have to kill the power to this particular contraption it'll continue to know the fucking disc it's running and most times it does this I can at least get to the dashboard, then go back into the game.

It was a hard lockup requiring a complete system shutdown. Damned controller was vibrating hard nonstop since that was the point it locked.

Sure enough, the open-close dance is on and since it's about one am the usual well timed swift kick is out else I will wake the household.

Shit. I had just loaded up on some gold bars (35lbs each! ) and dumped all but SM speciality items and was heading out whacking the bastard that brought me there too.

I'm so going to kick the shit out of this thing in the morning.

Well, twenty one hours later I sit here and have made it back to the Mojave.

I have to say it was fairly straightforward and rather entertaining.

There was plenty of death, oh yea, but once you get the hang of it you can take out the varing objectives with a little crainal effort fairly easily. I suspect a hardcore setting on this one would be brutal.

There is no going back. Anything of weight that could be acquired in the Mojave hit the ground and it took most all of my strength to get the speciality items back.

I liked it.

I'll go into it all further as time progresses and people have played it so it won't spoil anything.

about the only thing I liked from this DLC were the B.A.R., the superheated cosmic knife, and the promise of one hell of a showdown with Ulyses

To each their own I guess.

You know, I just realized how vague my understanding of the Fallout series actually is since I have been so reluctant to play the earlier portions of the series.

So I've been poking around a bit more and have found some of the information and speculations of not only the origins of but the direction to.
I have determined to get a full understanding of this series I am going to be forced to play the first games. Some of the refrences are there for a backstory from F3 on but they aren't so clear as to the others players in the series with the specificity I would like to have.
That said, I suppose I need to do that. The refrences to future confrontations are clear and I suppose it would do me well to not be going into it blind. I just don't like doing that, but given I came into this midship I need to head to the stern for a while.

Make sure you get fanmade patches for earlier games.

Replaced my damaged NV disc today.

I'm at a point where I'm needing to make some critical choices. I'm still in good with Ceasar but the quests for the NCR are reaching a point of them wanting me to attack Legion.

Those acheavements may wait until next round, unless I whack House and go the Yes Man route, then I'll get one of them.

One nice thing is Dead Money gave me another place free of a shitload of load pages to get through. Time to move out of Novac.

Yeah, I'll second Baba's motion on the patches for FO & FO2. There's one in particular, it adds in deleted content from the originals that were cut due to space limitations at the time.

I'm sure they'll seem dated compared to the current run, but the stories were brilliant and the level of game play was exceptional.

I remember one easter egg - I had finished FO twice already, and I went back and made a character at 20th level that had all the martial arts perks including 'Slayer', and was going to try to when the game without using any weapons or armor. I go into the Raider's Base, the 2nd closest town to Vault 13 and one that I always went to near the beginning of the game. The Raiders go nuts because I have the Slayer attribute, and start screaming and running away. In addition, the Raider leader thinks I'm his long last father come back from the dead to punish him, as this guy was evidently the only other slayer in the game history to that point.

What's amazing is that there is almost no way you'd ever normally get to 20th level to get that attribute without dealing with the Raiders WAAAY before that, but they programmed that bit of storytelling in any way.

One of the coolest and best developed games of all time, and the reason we are still talking about the series years later.

There are a couple of different triggers for the raider leader thinking you're his father. High luck and wearing a leather jacket are among them. I'm not sure offhand, having not played the original Fallout in a long while, whether these also trigger some reaction from the rest of the camp.

Yeah, the fan patches are pretty much mandatory. Pick 'em up at No Mutants Allowed. That's the best spot I know of for picking up patches and mods of the first two games.

And on the easter egg note, the one that always sticks with me is that in Fallout 2 you really should play a female Chosen One by the name of Buffy. You get a very nice early easter egg boost.

That wasn't this one, because everyone started yelling 'the slayer!' and running away from my character. LOL. I don't believe I was playing with a fan mod at the time.

But yeah, NMA is a great resource.

We all lovd the lipstick lesbian shotgun wedding in fo2 and also bridge keeper from monty python shows up

I think that they should just bite the bullet and remake both the original fallouts in the new game engine and do very little to the mechanics of the games other than the obvious. I still think that your number of followers should be directly related to your charisma stat. This would be much cheaper than writing an all new story for the next one...

In the current combination of game engine and game rules, companions are not nearly useful enough for even that to justify anyone creating a character with a charisma higher than 1. For tying charisma to the number of followers to be useful you have to significantly weaken the protagonist and give more direct control over followers than the engine currently allows.

To remake the first two games you'd also have to adjust the game engine to allow your character to kick giant ants and other enemies in the groin. That was an integral part of the first two games.

And shotgun weddings and child killings fo2 was darker then fo3 and new vegas.

The perks are nice, but not nice enough to sacrifice some other useful stat for charisma.

Personally, I find that ED-E's perk makes Boone's perk superfluous. If I can detect someone on sensors and there's a line of sight to shoot, spotting isn't difficult. Boone's more useful, IMO, when his perk is totally negated by the fact that you are playing a melee/unarmed character who can't snipe. His default gun and skills make him a pretty good sniper who can kill things while they charge at or concentrate fire on the crazy guy approaching with a bladed gauntlet drawn.

On the perks and companions more generally:

Gannon, Veronica, and Rex have perks that are totally useless. Veronica is an easy early pick-up with useful unarmed combat skill and weaponry if you're running straight for the Atomic Wrangler and New Vegas Medical Clinic to start the game, and Gannon's quest is the only way afaik to get the best armor in the game, so you might have each of them along for a bit, but none of these three have perks worth keeping around.

ED-E's perk is good, and since the alternative is Rex I've always got ED-E along.

Raul's perk is a convenience that is usually no longer useful by the time I pick him up. Reduced wear on gear is much more useful before you have a huge stockpile of caps and weapon repair kits.

I don't care for Boone's perk, but between his rifle, gun skill, and default headgear he's the best companion in terms of his own combat ability.

Lily's perk is useful. It would be more useful if more things didn't die from a single sneak attack critical from a good rifle. I haven't played around with stealth boys a lot, but tripling their duration sounds like a good thing.

Rose's perk is fantastic. By the end of the game you should have boosted survival all the way to 100 even without her perk, and her perk is effectively better than two toughness perks if you've done so. I don't start boosting survival until my main combat skill is maxed out and my utility skills have hit 75 where they can be maxed out temporarily with a magazine and wardrobe change, but that gives plenty of time to hit 100 survival. Once my survival is over 50 or so I don't drop her except to do Arcade's quest.

Well, I started the first Fallout, damn this takes forever.

Never been much for turn based games like this.

Bought the xbox 360 version of new vegas plan on porting a modded pc saved game to the xbox version.

Not sure what exactly your mod ideas are there baba but be careful, some mods can get your machine banned from Live.They frown on mods there, especially ones to games that have online multiplayer capabilities.

My modded saved game i downloaded work.

There's tons of way to play the game that are successful - I ignored my survival stat entirely and was no worse for wear. I used Rose only for her sidequest. I agree the whiskey perk is a great one, but quite frankly I didn't need it, and only used chems really at the end of the game (where I used a LOT of them, lol). I played a high Int character with high computer and lockpick skills for access, and went with energy weapons for my main gun which I could then recycle, often using Veronica's perk. Boone and Veronica were my longest companions, with Lily and Rose next. I tended to keep Ede, just because Rex was such a pain to keep track of.

But there's ways to make just about every character concept work. And yes, high speech and barter from Charisma is one of them.

You do know that one of the prostitutes name in fo2 was fanny mae named after the bank. Kinda show the twisted sense of humor those guys had right demiurge?

Agreed, my characters always have a decent Charisma, because I'm playing that guy who can talk his way out of murder charges and make his enemies piss their pants at the sound of his voice. In fact, my characters are always charismatic intellects who prefer the space provided by long range weapons. That's just the kind of guy I play.

High speech and barter from Charisma can work, but so can almost any deliberately suboptimal character. If you want those skills high--and speech, at least, you really should want to be high--then investing in skills at level up and with tagging is how to do it.

There is an overabundance of skill points available so that it is easy to effectively max out all the skills you need to, whatever your starting SPECIAL. Even high intelligence and luck, which increase your total pool of skill points far more than any other stats, aren't really necessary. All of the other stats besides charisma have useful effects beyond the skill points they generate. They unlock useful perks and affect things like carrying capacity, spotting ability, hit points, action points, etc.

Charisma is slightly useful in Vegas if you like to play hardcore mode because it buffs your companions, and keeping your companions from dying in hardcore mode is important, mostly because you'd like to keep your companion perk. Still, if you really want to keep your companions alive in hardcore, liberal use of "Wait Here" is your only remotely reliable option that lets you go anywhere in the game and doesn't involve a lot of reloading, and it makes Charisma pointless.

Well, I've done a bit in 1 and a bit more in 2 and frankly I'm fucking tired of dying and enjoyment is really little more than a bump above zip.

Not sure if I'll do any more on them, at least for now, I just can't seem to find any fun in them. It's more of a task to me and a tedious one at that. I've gotten to where I'd rather scrub the toilet than deal with 1 and 2 any more and tactics i'm not even going to try.

If you guys found them interesting then more power to you but I suppose I've been spoiled with the 3D fps versions. This just kinda sucks in comparison. I can't imagine even thinking about doing them a second time, I'd have to be doing life plus a day to even think of going there.

Pah.

I've got to get this fucking 360 replaced asap.

You have to be very careful at the beginning of the first two games. Your SPECIAL stats are much more important than in Fallout 3 and Vegas. If you want survivability, always start with the Gifted trait; without it you have to sacrifice intelligence anyway to create a character with good survivability, and the downside is negated by bumping up intelligence. I'd suggest, at least in Fallout 2, taking Small Frame as well, because there are other solutions to your carrying problems in that game, so the extra stat point is essentially free.

Be certain to max out your agility from the start. Being able to run away is critical, and being able to hit/retreat from slower creatures is the best way to safely take on the early melee enemies you'll meet given the turn based combat system. High perception is also key as it will let you sequence first in combat. I'd strongly suggest a starting SPECIAL in Fallout 2 of

S: 4
P: 9
E: 4
C: 4
I: 9
A: 10
L: 8

Don't make the mistake of trying for a lot of hit points; you survive much better by not getting hit in the first place. It's all about agility and perception; if you move first and you move fast you're not getting hit.