Journal entry 4: The Vault Hunter's Guide to the Galaxy

We're going to start today with a regular feature which I like to call "What the fuck, VATS?"

I don't think even Dirty Harry could blow a guy's head off like that.

Continuing on this Wasteland Survival guide thing, I wandered through a few towns, shot some more animals, generally took in the scenery.  I levelled a lot faster than usual too.  Seriously, I'm like level 6 or something.

I decided to be a good consumer and take in the ads around the local area.

These ads were put up before the big one hit.  Vault-tec, at least, was prepped for a bomb to drop so I guess they knew something was likely to happen soon (I haven't read up on all the lore and don't intend to, I fully realise there may have been a cold war raging for months prior to this).  That in mind, it seems a bit deranged to advertise things like Nuka Cola and Sugar Bombs.  If I'm fearing for my family's safety in the face of an impending nuclear fireball, I'm not going to want to buy nuke themed products.

Also, look at this kid.  He looks both surprised and slightly nauseated.  If the kid on the box isn't enjoying the product, there'd better be one Hell of a toy surprise inside.

This lady's face amuses me.  Just wanted to share that.

I'd been sent to go look into that factory which could fulfil my new personal goal of replacing everyone in the wasteland with robots.  Except that wouldn't be very polite, so I suppose it'd have to be a goal of creating many robots workers to help people in their everyday lives, plus a couple of hundred to help me shoot dogs and flies.  Onward then, into the robotorium!

I briefly thought this guy might have been Mr. Handshake.  I don't want him to shake anything of mine, let alone my hand.  Thankfully all the robots in here were turned off and happy for me to take all of their energy cells.  It's a good thing that the lasers built into robots run on the same cells as the lasers I carry.  I'd hate it to be like when the remote stops working, you only have AA batteries but the remote only takes these weird tiny round things with Chinese writing on them.

Robot weapons don't appear to degrade.  I'm hoping at some point there's an option to cut a robot hand off, wear it over my own as a glove and run around firing infinite lasers.

I've sworn allegiance to the 'bots already but I took it steady through here.  You never know if a robot has been programmed to kill humans or just "all the humans who aren't this one guy".  I didn't want to take my chances.

The raiders don't seem to have a sense of humour and I doubt they'd bother to haul a protectron all the way to the bathroom, so I suppose this guy just shut down and fell over while he was stood in front of the toilet.  Maybe it wanted to be human like that robot in Bicentennial Man.  Now there was a good movie.

The mole rats look a little too much like the Bad Moon that the night goblins worship in Warhammer Fantasy Battles.  I'm really concerned about that.

Also, fucking VATS etc, etc...

YEAH!  Not so hot on your own, chucklenuts!  Get shrek't!

What in Yoruk's name is that?!
God, the only thing these things want to do is lick me and spit at me.  I have a real problem with saliva.  Makes me feel sick as a dog.  I get a bit squicked out by body horror, too.  If I actually saw one of these things in real life, it'd be a God damned nightmare incarnate.

Have at thee, knave!  Rest assured that thine assault rifle will prove most useful to the noble cause of reclaiming these colonial lands in the name of fair Britannia once again!

I realise that killing one guy doesn't make me any kind of badass but this felt pretty great.

These guys are lovely!  I wander into their territory, they help me to kill centaurs and super mutants and then they tell me to go about my business and don't talk to me, don't give me quests, don't require payment, don't follow me, don't shoot me and don't seem to want to interact in any way!

This is exactly what I'm looking for in a faction.  Someone who'll solve all my problems and then leave me alone while they look for more of my problems to sort out.

Brotherhood of Steel, you guys are okay in my book.

Hmm.  A booth to defend yourself from radiation.  That he took a book with him but didn't take any food or water suggests that he didn't think radiation poisoning would be a problem if he just waiting a couple of hours.

I realised here that I could read a copy of the same book multiple times but get a stat boost from each one.  Odd, that.  I can't read the same literal book, Vaulter seems to eat them once he's read them but having read at least 3 copies of Lying: Congressional Style, I don't know what he's up to.  Maybe he only reads a chapter, gets bored and then eats them.  Dragonbjorn couldn't read the same book more than once.

I'm glad I took the "double stats from books" perk now.

Looking at the library from this angle, it actually looks almost normal.

This lady was nice.  Brotherhood of Steel again.  Asked me what the hell I was doing on her territory (sensible) and then respected my request to explore the library and told me to bring her books for cash.  This is even better than a quest.  This is a person who takes vendor trash and buys it for huge amounts.  Wikis like to call these repeatable quests, but quests give you experience sometimes and require you to do or fine multiple things.  This isn't a quest.  If bringing things to people like this is a quest, I'm just about to go for a quest to Sainsbury's to recover the ancient bagged tea of legend and the 6 pack of soaps plundered from the Leather stronghold of the Imperium.

Why is that company called Imperial Leather, anyway?  Did they misspell lather?

"Warning: 201 years overdue!"

For what?  I logged into this terminal as a librarian.  I suppose librarians aren't exempt from late fees but I'd like to know what I need to return.  Maybe it'd be like the Scott Pilgrim game where if you clear his balance at No Account Video, it turns into the best shop in the game.  Maybe I could buy and eat stat books.  I'd be down with that.

Brotherhood of Steel Paladin?  I'm less in favour of your organisation here.  That's a bit pompous.  If I run into a Templar, Knight or Inquisitor, I'm going to go right off this faction and probably get all pissy and start suggesting that they're future elves.  Looking back at my old posts, I seem to accuse anything I dislike of being an elf, being built by an elf or being a loosely connect elf by product.

I hope you guys are okay with that because I really don't intend to stop doing it.  I'm mature enough to realise I'm being petty and immature but not to stop doing it.

Shot off another raider head.  It broke off cleanly and span through the air sever feet.  I shot this guy with the second smallest possible potato gun of a pistol.

VATS!

Hockey masks give you +5 to unarmed.  I found that really charming.  I do love me a bit of horror.  It's my second favourite genre, right above comedy and right below David Lynch style chaotic mindfuck.

Go watch Eraserhead.  It's on youtube.  It'll change your life like it changed mine and you'll thank me for it.

I'm okay with the raiders taking prisoners but they don't look like the building type and these cages wouldn't probably fit through the doors to get in here so I'm left to believe that the library stored little torture cages in the children's section.

That actually makes me shiver a bit.

Sir Vaulter decided to chill in the death room for a while.  Nobody relaxes like the Sir.

While my actions might not reflect it, I'm now the most intelligent person to ever grace the surface of the Earth.  Intelligence has very little short term practical application but I sure am getting a lot of skill points which is pretty cool.  My long term plan is to get nerd rage to up my carrying capacity and then max out science, lockpicking, speech, small guns, maybe energy weapons.  Melee and barter can wait.  I don't trust myself with explosives.

Admin: FUCK YOU.  Usergroup: FUCK YOU
Raiders don't look like hackers either so... maybe some teenagers got into the system?

I wandered around the upper floor of the library looking for a way to download the archives.  I'm really enjoying the way this quest is laid out.  Either phone it in by completing the very easy immediate objective, lie about doing it or do the hard objective and get some more stuff.  I like optional quest elements, I feel like it gives you a real sense of reward for doing a good job rather than a "just enough" job.

As I wandered, I tripped a land mine.  Well, this place was under siege and mines are easy to carry, but quite why the only things being mines were some filing cabinets is anybody's guess.  I also liked the way that I had two ways to deal with this area, either destroy the gun turrets or hack the terminals and turn them off.  Shame that I needed science 50 to do the hacking, that seems very high for a newbie quest, but I had enough so I was fine.  Likewise for lockpicking, a normal lock requires skill 50.  You need to be half as good as an absolute master locksmith to open a "normal" lock.  If I was half as good as the best safecracker in the world, I'd expect to be a pretty significantly skilled guy.

On the top floor I found a way to turn a turret on.  This seemed silly but suspicious so I declined, walked around a corner and got shot in the face by a raider with a rocket launcher.  Problematic.  On a reload, I turned the turret on, ran away from it, lead the raiders out and dealt with the problem.  Again, unlike Skyrim, I really feel like I'm being rewarded for dealing with conflict in a non-standard way and while it was a pretty obvious setup to a puzzle, I really appreciated it.  It's very refreshing!

You don't want to hold on to the mini nuke because it makes you nervous?  You know exactly what atrocities I've been indulging in because YOU have asked me to perform them in the name of science!  Christ lady, I'm definitely the very last person you give enormous explosives to!  Have you seen what it's like outside?  That's because people like me had very big weapons!  This is how accidents happen!

I've got a few mini nukes now.  I'm not sure what to do with them yet.  I'm sure as hell not going to toss them like grenades.  Maybe I can load them in the rock-it launcher but that seems like a bad idea, somehow.  Putting high explosives into a souped-up leaf blowers is how you get to spend the rest of your life working in advertising for personal injury lawyers.  Or as a corpse.  Lord knows I'm good at being a corpse.

I finished the survival guide.  Moira thought I was super intelligent and wasn't afraid to tell me so, so she's been elevated from "quest giver" to "friend".  And quest giver is a pretty lofty social goal to start with, I'll have you know.  I love people who have quests that don't involve the stones of Barenziah.  I was given a book, a perk that makes me soak more damage and +6 to a couple of skills.

Now I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I was hoping for more than +6 to two skills.  I realise that she gave me a lot of cool stuff along the way but this quest took like 5 hours.  It was longer than the entire storyline quest of some games.  It does feel like a bit of a pat on the head, but stats is stats.

Oddly, even though the Wasteland Survival Guide is a very informative book, Vaulter is unwilling to read and eat it.  Maybe because he can't learn anything from a book he wrote himself.  I sold it back to Moira because it's okay to sell presents back to people who gave them to you if you don't want them.  Some people would call that rude, but at charisma 7, I think you'll find it's just refreshingly up front or at best, charmingly eccentric.

Thought for the day
For an irradiated, monster haunted, bandit strewn hellhole with no farms and water that's only considered clean once it's been heavily treated, there sure are a lot of healthy people wandering around.

Jourrnal entry 3: Everything explodes

Good day to you all.  It's been a while since writing one of these so there's rather a lot of material.  I also made a lot of bad decisions.  I think these are things that we can all enjoy together.

After getting my immaculate ass beaten several times and after having been told repeatedly "BUY BETTER GUNS, BUY BETTER ARMOUR" by my good friend and former longbow, Mr Huntington, I decided to do neither of these things because I need all the caps I can get to spend on stimpacks.

I need to buy stimpacks because my guns are terrible.

I should be learning something here but I don't have any of the learning perks yet.

Looking on the wiki for interesting things to do in Megaton, it told me about a sniper rifle hidden behind the town in a rock so I went to investigate.  It's not a bad gun but since it's pretty good, I'm too afraid to use it in case I can't find any more sniper rifles to repair it with.  I can't afford to hire a repair guy to fix my stuff so I'll have to just save it for a rainy day.

Since all water in Fallout appears to be irradiated, does the rain just outright kill people who aren't used to rads?  I'd better buy a mac and some wellies.

 On the way back from my little Shawshank-esque looting escapade, I shot a rat so hard that its head exploded.  Fucking VATS.  The rats in this world are super weird and I don't like them much.  They're more like toothy naked badgers.

Also, thanks to my friend Mr Pickup for pointing out that the reason that we have two headed cows is because of Forced Evolutionary Virus.  Okay, it's good to know where I stand on that, so thanks!  Everything in Skyrim is explained by "dragons or daedra did it" and everything in Fallout is explained by "bombs or magic science juice did it".

I then shot a rat so hard that it burst into flames.  I did this a lot.  What bothers me, and it's a problem that Borderlands has too, is that if I shoot an enemy with a hot weapon, it won't be immolated unless the last hit reduced the last of its health.  I'm not looking for realism, really I'm not, but I find this all very peculiar.  It's like the only thing keeping people from setting on fire at all is force of will.

Set entirely on fire until there's no physical remains to speak of, but I can still pilfer things from the corpse.

Alright.  Alright, Fallout.  We'll just play it your way.

This wasteland is actually kind of pretty.  Good thing too because there sure is a WHOOOLE lot of walking to do.

Fallout 3, like Skyrim, has absolutely hilarious doofy dog faces.  Look at this guy!  Look at his smooshy face!  Brave little guy!

I shot him.  We had a good time.

Sir Vaulter gets all pissy at me for drinking out of a toilet but it quite happy to loot and eat dog meat.  Hey, I'm not one to judge,  I mean, I eat pepperami sticks, pot noodles and Ginsters' pasties, there's almost no limit to what I'll willingly ingest but this was a mutated, irradiated dog.

Just think about what you're doing here.

I'm realising that since food gives you rads, I'll never eat.  I don't want to accumulate rads because I don't want to take anti-rad medication.  I know that a lot of things in the game that count as "medication" are actually addictive and I really hate debuffs, so I'm sort of apprehensive about taking radaway.  Besides, look at this place.  Are there really pharmaceutical companies mass producing little foil blister packs of pills to help with radiation sickness?  I could be eating little chunks of asbestos.  I wouldn't even know.  You think there's a Glaxosmithkline out in this irradiated hellhole?  I bet that stuff's made by hobos under bridges.  Probably been peed on and pee gives you rads.

I found a weird bog with brown fog coming off of it.  I don't think you get brown smoke coming from things unless it's something drawn by someone of age 10 and below who wants to convey that the item in question is a bit stinky.  Since it gave me rads, I'm thinking it was a septic tank leak.

I went into VATS when a few raiders approached me and VATS immediately allowed me to home in on a grenade which had just been thrown.  However, I was made to feel a little silly as I was given a 0% chance of hitting it.  After exiting VATS, the grenade immediately went off right next to the raider, doing no damage to me.

VATS: killing fools without even hitting them.  I think VATS is shorthand for some kind of Carrie-esque mental powers.  That's why it makes people's heads explode.

Is that why dad wanted me to leave the vault?  Is it because I'm not like the other kids and can't be trusted to live with people who aren't thinking nice thoughts all the time like that one kid in the really awesome episode of the Twilight Zone which got recreated into a fucking terrifying segment in the Twilight Zone movie?

Yeah, I want to be that kid!  I'll send all the super mutants to the cornfield!

MOTHER OF CHRIST IT'S JEFF GOLDBLUM

Noodles give me the same rads (there's another pot noodle joke in there somewhere) as eating irradiated dog meat.  That's my first problem.  My second is that the raider here was carrying a bowl of loose noodles but didn't have any pockets.

Where did I get these noodles from?

I'm certainly not eating them.  I bet they're inexplicably warm.

Yep, just going to butcher a giant monstrous fly.  Nothing wrong with that.  I wonder if it's like blowfish, get the wrong bit of the fly and you're dead within 24 hours.

Probably not.

I'm not sure how one can be able to walk with a crippled entire torso but Vaulter, a true gentleman's gentleman (not in the Jeeves sense), merely stiffened his upper lip and carried on regardless.

A warrior of the realm has nothing to fear from internal bleeding, lung punctures and intense physical pain.

All this crippling was probably brought on by my attempts to visit a minefield for a quest.  "Visit the minefield, walk to the middle of it and try to pick up some live samples" is the most bullshit, irrational quest I've ever seen.  It's absolute suicide.  However, what am I supposed to do, not complete a quest?  That's not how it's done.

The minefield quest was very, very frustrating because my framerate on this game is sort of lousy.  I'd step up to a mine, press disarm and immediately walk half a pace forward missing my target and sitting on the mine.  Then some prick with a sniper rifle popped out and started using his infinite ammo to blow up cars.

I hate Minefield.

The pier area was pretty.  Almost nothing tried to kill me, either.  The people were nice, there's lighting... I think I'll retire here.

With a name like Grandma Sparkle, I knew we were going to be friends.  She didn't have much to say, sell or do but I didn't kill her because that's not the gentleman's way.

You know all those times that I kind of made fun of mudcrabs?  When I called them noble, dignified warriors?  I met a mirelurk.  This thing is a bipedal mudcrab.  I hate, hate, HATE it.  So violent!  It's just an armoured carapace and a series of limbs designed to deliver horrible scary pinchy death!

I think the Fallout continuity is pretty much The Elder Scrolls' continuity except that it's in the far future of Tamriel and magic has died out.

I wasn't sure if these things look more like mudcrabs or like the aliens from the original movie adaptation of War of the Worlds (the old one where they actually NUKE the martians).  Mudcrabs, I think.  I killed one and went for a bit of a look around, at which point 4 more of them appeared, backed by 2 radroaches, and decided to let me know what they thought of me killing and looting from all those mudcrabs way back when.  Suddenly, a burst of patriotic music from the distance and laser fire from a source I couldn't identify...

Thank you flying robot friend!  God bless you and your kind!  Robots in this game are amazing!  They help me whenever I write cheques that my arse absolutely cannot cash!

I started doing some rat repellent thing and the magic stick I was given hit rats so hard that they burst.  I didn't even need VATS.  I think if I had used VATS, you'd have been able to see the explosions from the moon.

 "And be sure not to kill any mirelurks..."
Um... shit.  I already bagged 5.  Well, the robot killed 4 but he doesn't care about his kill count so I'm having those.

I entered the horrible lair of the mirelurks.  Don't kill them, she says, so I equip my rat botherer and move into their lair which will now be known as "the mausoleum of endless suffering".  I did not have a good time in there.  Despite dying like 10 times and then panicking and getting lost, I had two big problems:

• The bastards could open doors when I shut them behind me thinking I could hide and plot my escape.  They don't have hands, how are they working the handles?
• They appear to have had some form of psychic bipedal mudcrab wizard down in the bowels of this place because something was throwing blue plasma balls at me! 

I'm never coming back here.  Well, unless there's a quest.  You know how it is.

A little hard to see, but this government-looking building was surrounded by benches facing it.  If there's one thing I like to do when I'm eating lunch, resting after a long stroll or just stopping to smell the roses, it's staring at a large building from a distance of 30 feet.

I saw this place and thought it might have been Rivet City.  It looked like a large open area surrounded by spiky railings.  Nicely fortified, seemed like a good candidate for a human settlement.  I started looking for an entrance.  Someone began shooting me.

Now I don't know much about this game but I gathered that I may be in a spot of bother here.  I decided to flee when my guns didn't achieve much.

I ran into a shopping cart again.  The mall is like 5 miles away.  Was it flung by the blast or do super mutants need something to help move their corpses around?

And now, make yourselves comfortable for I have a tale to tell.

Having safely escaped from the mutants which were shambling after me with very big guns, I saw a large statue of a muscular man by the river.  It was naked.  I immediately started to wonder if it had a dick and so approached it looking squarely at its crotch because about half of the screenshots I take are "a funny thing happened to me" and the other half are "this is a funny situation and I bet I could get a decent picture of something to comment on".  Statue dongs fall into the second category.  As I approached, before I got too close I fell in the river, having been fixated on this thing's crotch.  Filling with radiation, I scrabbled for the shore as the game repeatedly offered me the helpful action of "drink".  I made it to shore and realised that I was right outside the super mutant barricade again and they were all stood outside waiting for me.  Awkward.  I tried to take one out and his 4 friends came and utterly ruined me.

I then went back to the statue and realised it had no balls.

This kind of thing happens to me more often than I'm comfortable with.

I saw this thing being signposted as Rivet City and figured it was an ironic name for somebody's weird treehouse.  Oh well,  Quests are quests, let's take a look.

Oh.  Right, that's a city, sure enough.  Bloody hellfire.

Upon entering I realised that my caps situation was getting quite bad and so resorted to stealing everything that didn't have karma loss and which had a cost which outweighed its weight.  I spent 10 minutes looting pool balls from a bar to sell to be able to afford a better gun.  This post apocalyptic setting sure does have a very real sense of desperation.

I then stole from a church donation box.  I got an awful lot of lockpicking experience from it.  This is some very negative reinforcement and I'm not comfortable with the implications.  I've frontloaded a lot of good karma though so on average, I'm still kind of a good guy.  I followed it up with breaking into the priest's bedroom because hey, in for a penny, right?

Don't you know who I am?!  I'M SANDER FUCKING COHEN!

"That's not all a robot can be"?

Sir, when you invent a robot with a name like "Mr. Handshaker", I'm quite sure that robots can be many, many things.  I'm sure Mr. Handshaker has been forced to do some terrible things by curious bachelors.  I mean sure, I might be kind of deviant but... well, it's got to cross your mind, right?  It'd sure be a popular labour saving device.

As the game moves on, I'm starting to look more and more like the offspring of Flashheart from Blackadder goes Forth and Peter Perfect from Wacky Races.

Mister Buckingham sir!  Good friggin' GOD I love all of the robots.  This robot is what I wanted my character to be!  A post apocalyptic future butler!  Most of my dialogue choices for Mister Buckingham were very disrespectful.  I think Vaulter needs to get that stick out of his delicate bottom and remember who he owes his life to.  Twice, in fact.

Oh boy.

So on the top of the ship I met a man who wanted to commit suicide because his life had no worth and nobody remembered him.  Except people did remember him, they just thought he was a bit odd and quiet.  I talked him down and he thanked me and left.  I then walked over the his jumping spot to see how far down it was, got a little close to the edge, slipped and fell to my death.

This scene needed a laugh track.

Oh, this prick.  Not only did I have to go swimming to get to him, not only did he live in a mirelurk infested boat, not only did he booby trap every inch of the upper deck he was on, he's the key to two quests.  TWO.  And he totally acted as if it wasn't a problem at all for me to have gone through his Home Alone gauntlet.

He claimed to be an expert with computers.  I'm not sure why he needs a server exactly because unless he's doing some kind of really fiendish gene sequencing, I'm going to assume that future computer terminals are a lot better than the tech we've got now.  So why he needs a server is sort of beyond me.  I'm not sure it's even a server, it looks a little too much like somebody tried to make a thing which looks like a server so they could claim to be good at computers.

I used to work in tech support.  There's little more dangerous than somebody who thinks they're good with computers because they know the difference between a dot matrix and an inkjet printer.

"... you could have access to all the robots you'd ever want!"

You want to be careful making a statement like that, miss.  You have no idea how many robots that is.  Seriously, you don't give the monkey the key to the banana plantation.  We're talking Skynet here.

I'd like to point out precisely how bad an idea it probably is to put a scope on a magnum.  Especially in a world where all the mechanical stuff is falling apart.  This thing probably kicks like a Buckaroo set.

I found a tiny plastic man at the end of this day.  It made me smarter.  I've no idea where I'm keeping it.

Thought for the day
I got good karma for paying a lady 25 caps to buy a pistol to help her deal with her former slaver.  25 caps will not buy you a potato gun.  Furthermore, being a slaver, I can only assume that the gentleman in question was packing some considerable heat.

Since Rivet City has a pretty stern approach to crime, I'm either condemned a woman to death by slaver or by city militia.  Either that or she'll be kicked out of the city and die of radiation, exposure, wild animals, bandits, malnutrition, dehydration...

I could have informed the authorities but instead I encouraged vigilante justice.

I don't really understand this karma thing.