Journal entry 7: Dungeon crawl

I'm writing this after 4 pints in an unlit basement wearing a pair of sunglasses which are fitted with a lens prescription which is many, many years out of date.

In other words, expect typos.

So our sidequest mission continues.  I'm noticing the parallels between Skyrim and Fallout 3 now.  Most notably, a lot of areas on the map are just an office block with no plot where I can pick up a few skill books and kill some things.  If an area doesn't appear to be terribly plot relevant, I'll probably just be able to get some skill books and call it a day.  Skyrim had plenty of places that were just holes in the ground with some vampires and other bits of scenery to make them look like hovels.  It's like that.

Fortunately I've explored the entire map north of the river and there aren't many samey dungeon/offices so that's cool.  Also, we don't have dungeons, we have offices or factories because this is the future.  You can feel free to draw any parallels you like between an office and a dungeon if you like.  There's a cutting commentary in there about corporate culture but I certainly don't plan to make it.

Mister Gutsy was a terrible robot.  All green lasers and tentacles.  I didn't appreciate any of that.  It reminded me of the mooks from the Mother series.  If you haven't played any of them, you should etc etc.  Start with Earthbound.

While I appreciate the role that propaganda has in a war effort, I'm not sure that I think soldiers in powered armour should be role models for kids.  Soldiers in powered armour do not want to play with you, Billy.  They want to get out of that armour and have a shower.  It's like they were expecting Team America troops to be plodding around the streets during peace time.  I don't like the implications of that.

Somebody set themselves up a secret radio bunker in a tunnel.  The reception can't have been great.

"The best way to solve a problem is to make it go away".

Now I don't like the skill that this bobblehead improves but I certainly approve of its message.  These are words to live by.  It might be Sir Vaulter's new mantra.

Incidentally, as I approach max level I'm ignoring energy weapons, explosives, big guns and most of barter.  Small guns have seen me through so far,

Beer in a school desk.  There's some cutting social commentary.

I took the child at heart perk because I wanted the extra dialogue choices.  More chatting means more ways to peacefully resolve my problems, not that I'm having problems with the old boomstick.  I spoke to this guy after breaking him out of his robot prison and he demanded a hall pass.  Child at heart let me lie to him.

Apparently child at heart does now, as the description of the perk says, improve my interactions with kids.  It also allows me to pretend to be a kid.  Well, it's far from the worst thing I've done on this positive morality run.

Bought some more gear for my home.  The home infirmary allows me to remove all my damage which is weird because spending an hour in bed does that, too.  Sir Vaulter considers 1 hour of sleep to be well rested.  In fact, Sir Vaulter only sleeps in 1 hour increments, usually every 4 days.  I'm getting rather worries about him.

Just a giant child holding an ice cream cone.  Nothing to report on here, really.

Oh, okay, the place with the big ice cream mascot is a slaver camp.  You're creating a weird first impression here guys but I can't really criticise based on appearances.  For one, that's not what good people do and for two, I wear whatever has the highest DR so I'm not what you'd call fashion conscious.

I couldn't get into their dumb human trafficking club for jerks without bringing them a slave from their top 4 list.  Except one of them was the nutcase with the sniper rifle from back in Minefield so he was out.  I was having my doubts about all of this but it sounded rather like a quest and so I was honour bound by the adventurer's code.  It's very restrictive at times.

I now have a mind control ray (technically a stun gun) and a slave collar.  I'm still on overwhelmingly positive karma.  Go figure.

I had three choices of people to enslave here.

A doctor
A former slaver and sex worker
An arms dealer

I didn't fancy the doctor because that could seriously jeopardise their community.  I didn't fancy the arms dealer because I knew him and he isn't often alone.  I also didn't fancy the sex worker because really, it's her body and I don't care how she chooses to make a living.

Her being a former slaver certainly helped me make up my mind, though.  The hunter shall become the hunted.  It seemed the only "good" choice (by which I mean less evil).  It was either her or Arkansas the sniper who's very dead now.

I found a tower block full of rich, snobbish pricks.  I wasn't too happy here.  Everybody was racist and very angry about me not being the right kind of person.  I think I needed a pedigree to be able to rent a place here and nobody really wanted to be my friend.

Since Sir Vaulter is a gentleman, I didn't burn the place down and feast upon the corpses but it was a close thing.

Nice place though.  Very Bioshock.

It was so fancy in here that the apartments all had two sinks.  I don't know what purpose that served but I suppose it's what people want.  I'll just go with it.

Somebody decided to put their whiskey and peasant food on display on a pedestal.  I think they were trying to poke fun at the great unwashed masses.

I bet these flats are being let by future elves.

As I spoke to Susan and waited for her to walk to work, she had a nice relaxing drink.  She pounded this bottle almost constantly for 3 full hours.  She must have a bladder the size of the Hoover Dam.

Nope.  Not upsetting in the slightest.  Nothing to worry about, my dear, you're just about to get a quick lesson in poetic justice.

Not one person in the slaver camp was willing to put away their gun so I didn't either.  Partially because I didn't want to look like a wuss, partially because I'm not 100% sure how to.

Nothing says classy like a heart shaped bed with a couple of bomb-laced slave collar wearing ladies on it.

A man killed a bartender.  Absolutely nothing happened.  I bet if I'd have show him first I'd have been arrested by one of these guys but since he was one of their mates, he can get away with it.  Figures.

I try to avoid judging people on appearances but hot damn, girl, I've never seen a face upon which so much of everything was wrong!

Within half a day of enslaving my first victim, I let her go.  She remembered nothing and I didn't feel like such a bad guy after all.  Yeah, I can fix this problem.

And she's dead.

OH WELL.

These liberated kids were giving off a slight Children of the Corn vibe.  Thankfully they went straight home, so that was cool.  Not like there are any problems with sending kids off alone through the hostile wastes or anything.

This was not a good day for compassion.

I'm a cyborg now.  If I can't come to a peaceful agreement with my robot brothers, I can at least meet them half way.  Plus it gives me things.  I mostly wanted it for the character flavour.

No need for the sandbags, guys.  I think the big gates really made your feelings perfectly clear.  No, it's cool, I don't need social acceptance.

Not at all.

FISTO!

I found a raider who tried to duckface me before he died.  Didn't end well for him ultimately but I like a bit of variation.  Well done, sir!

I fetched a nice old lady a violin and she gave me a magnum.  Okay.  I also, on poking around her home, found a teddy bear in the toilet.  At this point, I'm not going to question much of anything, all I can be certain of is that that bear has seen things.

The fan favourite, dogmeat.  Left him in the junkyard.  Like Dragonbjorn, Sir Vaulter works alone.

I found a bar where the "this is stealing" triggers hadn't been set.  As a result, I took this whiskey, immediately sold it back to its owner then slept on his bed.  Good times.

Oh yeah.  You look stable.  Why are so many people I meet demonstrably in need to psychiatric assistance?  Is it me?

She agreed to stop fighting her nemesis literally after I told her to stop.  I don't think her heart was really in it, really.

I checked her gear before she left.  She's carrying human flesh.  I think I just let a serious social problem onto the streets. This is actually quite bad.

And... you're my big bad boss fight.  Jesus man, did you paint that face on?  Draw it on with crayon?

I CAN FEEL IT!  I CAN FEEL THE GREAT BEAR SPIRIT FLOWIN' THROUGH ME AND CLEASIN' ME OF MY SINS!

AAAAAMEN!

Ugh, the Gary vault.

I'd read about this.  It was supposed to be creepy.  Lots of people saying "imagine walking around in the dark while people run around you shouting nonsensical things".  In reality, it wasn't scary in the slightest.  It all went wrong when I wandered into a room and 4 Garys started letting off their vocal responses at once, all repeating each other.  Suddenly the atmosphere was ruined and I started giggling.

Found a factory which contained infinite ants.  Again, nothing much going on in this place but a few skill books although I did nearly run out of ammo.  Pictured here, I'm hitting them with my fire stick and inexplicably nothing much is happening.  I'm getting the urge to take a shower after the scuttling noise but apart from that, nothing.

The ant queen.  I won't point out that she was too large to fit through any of the doors leading into this place.  No, that'd be pedantic.  Can't have that.

She did absorb 2 grenades and multiple clips.  I want to hollow her out and wear her as armour.  It'll ruin my charisma but I can deal with that.

Team America dropped off two guys from a helicopter with the express purpose of killing me.  That seems excessive.  It also seems like they should have just buzzed me and opened fire from the air 'cause that worked out very well in Half Life 2.

Ah, the raider hackers have been in the area.

And to finish, I bought the love machine theme for my house because I wanted another skill book.  First, we have a very vulgar light fitting.  I didn't appreciate that.

Next, love machine gives you two beds.  One of them is placed right in front of the door.  I don't think Sir Vaulter (or Moira if she decorated) understands how beds really work and what they're really meant to be for.  I don't intend to educate them.

And to end, a bath of dirty water bottles floating in...

God, I hope that's cloudy water.


Thought for the day:
I've only routinely sold anything to Moira in Megaton and only routinely bought from Moira and the Megaton doctor.

This can't be good for the economy.

Journal entry 6: Why we can't have nice things

Alrighty, everything's going well!  We're about to get clean water to the world, gonna become heroes, my game dad is back and he's proud of me, I'm saving all kinds of people from all kinds of other people... yeah!  This is great!

I noticed that by the time I'd got dad to the memorial where Project Purity was installed, I'd killed all the monsters inside so all the little missions he sent me on were just like little errands.  I felt like daddy's little helper for a while.  Honestly, after all the killing I've been doing it was really nice and dad either doesn't know about the killing or doesn't care.

Come to think, what even is morality?  Who decides that?  Clearly my actions are known around the wider DC area because assassins are coming for me because I'm too good of a person, but then a different kind of assassin comes for you if you're an evil guy.  Someone's got to be watching me.  I mean, morality can hardly be a measure of how moral I think my own actions are, otherwise I'd be calling the assassins to kill myself.

I don't have any kind of multiple personality disorder.  Dragonbjorn did.  There were at least 5 different people vying for control of Dragonbjorn's goat-bearded head at any given time and I wasn't always one of them.  Sir Vaulter is quite, quite well adjusted and mentally well.

The realisation that I have to assure myself that the actions of my avatar in a 7 year old video game are rational is not one with which I am comfortable.  I'm projecting a lot of myself into these people and all I do is break into shit and steal people's trousers.  I think that's seriously what I'd do in a world without repercussions.

 Within 10 minutes of me doing all the dad quests, a bunch of people arrived and decided that all this technology belonged to them.  They were the Enclave or as I will known them, Team America.  I need to point out that I was initially very much on their side.  They have nice little laser robots which deal with my angry wild animal problems.  They play reassuring messages on the radio about how everything will be okay, the government is going to fix everything, don't you worry.  They promise me things like baseball and hot dogs.  Hell, there might even be Budweiser if the Enclave have their way.  I don't care what people will think of me for saying this, Budweiser is kind of okay!  It doesn't taste of anything but it's a nice session kind of beer for a barbecue.

Anyways, a man confronts game dad and tells him that this technology belongs to Team America.  I'm actually okay with this.  It immediately seems foolish for game dad to try to build this magic water engine all by himself.  Partially because one man doesn't have the necessary resources to save the world unless he's Jesus or something, partially because game dad was dumb enough to get inside a life support pod because a scientist might be in a magic video game world but mostly because game dad still hasn't had the thought that it might be bad to leave super mutant corpses inside the fucking water purifier.  I think this is how you infect the entire world with FEV.  Seriously man, speaking as a relatively dense gentleman, that's just stupid.

Who cares if the Enclave take credit for the research?  I really think they could accelerate this whole process a lot!

Game dad died of radiation poisoning.  So... yeah, there's that.  I'm not sure why all my companions have to die.  I think I just have a hard time relating to people.

After some time and a lot of running through tunnels, killing Team America (who are decidedly on my shit list now) and curing heart problems in other NPC followers, I hit some kind of Brotherhood of Steel base.  The Brotherhood will henceforth collectively be known as Big Daddies because I'm not sure how much human is inside some of their suits but they're kind of okay if you get on the right side of them.  My science friend (and I use "friend" loosely here.  She hasn't tried to kill me but she was kind of confrontational) demanded a chat with the Biggest of the Daddies.  I decided that, since game dad was dead, it was probably a good time to ignore this quest because now there were half the people working on Project Purity and it sure as Hell wasn't going very well when we had two scientists working on it.  One scientist isn't going to do well, especially when there's now enough radiation in the chamber to give Hulk leukemia.  Also, just going to point out, now the water purifier is full of corpses and it's radiated.  All dirty water in the wasteland is only dirty because it's irradiated!

 I found Team America power armour.  It was surprisingly crappy!

I'm also too dumb to work out how to put on a powered helmet.  I can understand the armour.  I figure that it's effectively a little mech that you need to learn to pilot like a gundam or something but a helmet?  Do I need training to learn to turn on the HUD?  I already have a HUD, we can ignore that part of the magic science hat, so why can't I just cram it onto my head?

Also, why... do I have a HUD constantly in my field of vision when all my personal computing power is on my wrist?  And why can I see VATS in the same colours and fonts?  Is my pip-boy wired into my brain?  God damn, I've seen how this kind of thing ends.

 Found my first gore bag.  It contains items with no value and no actual use.  Maybe I can eat these if I get the cannibalism perk but I don't want to get that because that's not what good people do and I'm a good person, I swear to God I'm a good person.  I'm not even on trial here.

I don't know why Sir Vaulter even entertained the idea of picking this stuff up.  Dragonbjorn would have thrown them at children.  Sir Vaulter is a gentleman.

POWER FIST.

Now you know it's a bad idea to give me something like this to play with!

I find it strange that I'm not smart enough to use a powered helmet without training but the power fist is totally okay.  I feel like inappropriate use of what's essentially an engine-driven piston attached to my wrist could lead to my arm being torn off.  I've shot people apart with nothing more than a pistol so it should be more than possible with something like this.  Apparently it's fine though.

Shame I can't equip two at once.  I guess once you got the second one on, you'd have to have someone take it off for you which would mean I wouldn't be able to use stimpacks to heal any more because I wouldn't be able to use my magic watch.  You see, I can't use my first aid kit unless I look at my wrist computer.  I suppose I poured all the drugs in the stimpacks into the pip boy and now it just administers a controlled dosage when I press the button.  How this uncripples my head is anybody's guess, but when you get down to it, how an injection of stimulants causes me to heal a bullet wound to the noggin that's so bad I'm literally concussed and possibly brain damaged...

Future medicine is amazing.

Hey, look ma, I'm Wheatley!

Doctor Li looking unbelievably sinister as she conducts a conversation in the shadow of a man suffering from a heart murmur or whatever.  A stimpack can cure a brain wound but this guy needed maybe 3 or 5 of them to temporarily cure his heart condition.

Really.

You're just selling these things, right?

Blah, blah, science.  Blah, blah, politics.  Blah, blah, quest.

Yep, eff this, Sir Vaulter is out.

I got nerd rage because that seemed like a min-maxxy thing to do.  Then I noticed that it only works when you're about to die.  It's cool though, the damage resistance is pretty good in a pinch, it sometimes lets me carry more stuff when I need to fast travel and it's sort of cool from a narrative perspective.  Besides, the rest of the mid level perks were a bit naff.

BUSINESS.  All we need now is a picture of a black guy shaking hands with a white guy and we've got a corporate advertising strategy!  Very dynamic, very inspiring.

I don't call people Mister President Daddy.  This isn't that kind of game, kid.

I decided that the best thing to do would be to travel across the world.  Start from the top right, work to the top left, go down a bit, work right, go down, work left until we've seen the whole map.  This will achieve a few things:

• I'll be one radical son of a bitch by the time I take on the real quest
• I'll have see all of the game's content
• Maybe by the time I go on the real quest, all the monsters will be dead because I'll have shot everything with a pulse

So I took Sir Vaulter to the Republic of Dave.  It's a real knob to get to.  The people were generally okay except for Dave Jr. who was kind of a violent, angsty douchebag.  Well, who am I to criticise?  I kill all my problems.

I had a nice chat to this kid while he was literally sat on the toilet.  He appeared to give only the very slightest of fucks about this situation.  There isn't any paper in there and he didn't pull his trousers down.  Not that I was looking or anything, but I'm not sure what I just witnessed.  Maybe he was waiting for me to leave so he could pay a visit to Mister Handy.

I rigged the election to make Dave leave so I could take his gun because the wiki said it was pretty sweet.  Dave's wife told me to help myself.  I did and his daughter started screaming and shooting at me.  I mean really, I had full and express consent from your highest authority figure, what's the problem?

The election bothered me a bit.  Dave ultimately seemed to be kind of okay.  I was a little worried that he'd make his kids breed to further advance his dwindling population but everyone seemed basically okay with being run by him and he didn't seem like a terrible person, just a little egotistical.  I can relate to that.  But that's democracy for you.

DANGER WILL ROBINSON.

Next stop on my tour of DC was Old Olney.  First thing, right off the bat, I just need to get a little something off my chest.

Fuck Old Olney.  Fuck it sideways.  Fuck it with a God damned cactus.

20 feet tall, made of horns and claws, looking like one of those imps from Doom but like it's actually kind of capable, faster than me, able to absorb 4 full clips and more and utterly, utterly unwilling to forget that I took a shot at it and ran away.  I tried to blow away its legs.  Nothing.  I tried laying land mines.  It just ignored the fact that its balls had exploded and kept coming.

Fuck Old Olney.

CAN I GET AN AMEN, CHILDREN?  PRAAAAISE BEAR JESUS, PRAISE BEAR GOD, PRAISE BE UNTO ALL OF YA WHO BASK IN HIS DIVINE RADIUS!

PRAISE THE LORD!

After killing deathclaw #1, I thought I might stand a chance.  I didn't realise that deathclaw #1 started at 25% health.  I hope I never meet what it met before me.  I lead deathclaw #2 into a Team America camp where they filled it full of lasers.  It kept going.  It ate all of those heavily armoured, heavily armed fuckers and then turned its little piggy eyes upon my succulent meats.

Time to reload, then.

A flamerthrower?  I can't be trusted to be responsible with a BB gun and you're giving me this?

Time to enter a new vault.  This one looked a bit crappy but there was a lot of useful stuff in the entrance.

The password is deathclaws.  This wasn't the terminal of somebody that important.  It was probably just to open a safe to get to someone's emergency gun.  The government were making deathclaws before the war started but for someone to use it as a password must mean that at least a few members of the public knew about them.  Surely you'd have culled them?  They're misery incarnate.

Hundreds of years later, after all the people in the vault had been killed/eaten/turned into mirelurks/driven mad by a social experiment involving white noise and Manchurian Agents, the water still runs and the power is still on.  What an age to live in.

It's hard to get excited about a minigun.  I don't know how to use it properly without spraying it in every direction at once.  Perhaps that's the point of a gun which is designed to spit as many bullets as possible in as short a time as possible.

I found a nice place where people worshipped a tree.  You can poke fun but these guys had a nice setup.  Plenty of plants around, nice and quiet, no monsters, happy family life... so far these are the only guys in the wasteland who don't seem to have any problems with internal conflict and who seem genuinely happy and optimistic for the future.

Well done, religion!

I have to undergo the ceremony of purification, huh?

This is sounding less promising.

Oh shitty bollocks.

Drug induced vision loss and then a suicidal talking tree.  This day just got a lot more interesting in a big, big way.

I love this guy.  I love this guy so much.  Since every time I learn to love somebody, they end up becoming a random encounter or dying I can only assume that this guy is going to change allegiances and become the final boss but I'll enjoy him while I can.

I enjoy his habit of unloading his entire gun no matter how dead his target is.  Always double tap.

My word, Sir Vaulter Raleigh, the boy who lived...

After I fixed their tree problem, the people in Oasis told me that they couldn't believe that anybody could feel the way they did about me now.  They definitely maybe weren't going to look back in anger at my defiance of their god's suicide wish and once he'd stopped crying his heart out and had learned to roll with it and be a leader for his people, celebrations rang out throughout the forest like champagne supernovas.

I'm irrationally proud of that previous paragraph.  Seriously, go back and read that magnificent bastard again.  Really drink it in.

People in Oasis aren't affected by radioactive filth water.  I'm really thinking that Sir Vaulter is making up rads.

Considering that the cleanest water source in the game is from a reservoir which has a dead man nailed to it, I may have been wrong about my complaint that we shouldn't leave super mutant corpses in the purifier.  Apparently that's a-okay.

I went into a radar station.  Apparently the previous operators had abandoned their work and decided to get crunk instead.  This must have been the party dish.

I wanted to see if it was possible to climb on top of the very top of the dish.  It was, I nearly broke a leg doing it and the view wasn't worth it because I didn't have the sense to wait until morning and take my picture then.

I'm considerate like that.

Nothing says "good idea" like a radar station filled to the brim with whiskey, a decided lack of handrails, a lot of stairs and one tricycle.  I won't bother linking you to Highway to the Danger Zone here because I don't have to.  It's already in your head.

On the one hand, "commencing launch" isn't a good sentence.

On the other, if I wipe out the world with something called Highwater Trousers, at least I can die laughing.

Oh, you just know I'm going to get blamed for this bullshit.  I don't care if I was responsible or not, you can't reasonably blame me for it.

A little further west, mirelurks assumed the kind of offensive formation normally associated with Power Rangers monsters.  The kind of monsters they'd have to fight before the real monster of the world started getting busy.  You know the ones, the monsters where they didn't even need the dinosaur robots to beat them.  Those ones, yeah.

I shot them.

We have fun.

Oh God, I want to sell my robot butler and buy one of these bastards!  Look at him!  He's searing my eyeballs and I'm loving it!

Here we have a furnace, lit and well stoked, next to a stack of human corpses...

There isn't any firewood in the wasteland...

I've just put two and two together and come up with four big stacks of not asking any fucking questions about what's transpired here.

And to finish, I found a bookcase full of organs.  I'd expect this from super mutants but this was a raider house.  Those guys are kind of crazy but they're not "IKEA suite full of kidneys" crazy.

Thought for the day:
For someone who carries so many rockets and miniature nukes, I'm very good at surviving grenade and rocket attacks.  If I get anywhere near an explosion, by all rights you should be able to see my death from space.  I shouldn't even be able to jog without jostling my ammo into misfiring at this point, not now that I'm carrying a shishkebab.