Journal entry 5: Goof Troop

If you don't have broadband, may the good lord have mercy on your soul.  I took a lot of pictures this time.

So in our regular segment, "What the fuck, VATS?", I invested in the Bloody Mess perk.  This actually makes VATS make a lot more sense because once you have it, everything is meant to explode.  Like with many works of fiction, if the story doesn't make sense, you just shoehorn in your own interpretations until you like the result.

Or until you start shipping living characters with dead characters and inventing reasons for this to make sense.

I don't really know what this was or why it was here but it sure was striking.  You know, on account of it being one of the few things that aren't part of my HUD which aren't a washed out shade of "I think I'll clean the toilet this weekend" brown.

As I wandered the dry, dusty landscape, suddenly there was foul treachery!

Protectron, no!

You think you know people!  You open yourself up emotionally, let them into your life and by God you trust them!  I loved these robots once, now they're wandering the open wilderness and trying to kill me.

Sir Vaulter will never love again.

A nice man threw a grenade at me and then apologised.  That was good.  If more people, on throwing high explosives at me, simply responded with "oh, sorry, I totally thought you were one of the other guys", I'd probably be confused enough to either try to parley or to leave them enough time to throw another grenade.  People who have dialogue choices like this aren't enemies, too.  That's an important thing.  As a result of the dialogue choices they may become enemies but often a quick reload of a save and some more tact on subsequent chats will deal with that.  Unfortunately the mercenaries that wander the lands have used this philosophy against me, running up to me to talk only for their conversation topics to be "nope, we're just going to kill you".  They exploit my love of quests and people who look like they're going to give me quests.

This is all very meta and I don't like it.  I tend to shoot people who are running on sight, now.  It's just as well there aren't any track and field events or nursery schools in the future.

I find the use of the adjective "Activate" a little tasteless here.  I don't even want to think about what I did.

It's worth pointing out that here, I'm hunting "the family" which sounded either like the mafia or vampires.  It turned out to be an underground gang of vampire thugs, so I was double right.  The best kind of right.

Just taking a pic of Sir Vaulter in the thunderbox.  He didn't pull down his trousers, but considering the insane bullshit he's already shot at so far, poop is going to be well below the worst thing he smells of.

Note the hat, properly calibrated to a rakish angle.  Sir Vaulter is ready to assist troublesome dames and solve mysteries on the mean streets.

A man approached me in the wilderness and assured me this was a safe place.

I have never felt more intimidated.

This man has, so far, given me one of the few rational responses to a stranger wandering into his home.  Most people tend to say "hi" and then go about their business while I wait for them to turn around so I can hack their personal computers and publish their Internet browsing history (or whatever).  This guy approached me and asked why I'd talked my way into his house.

I think he's the only truly rational guy I've met in a Bethesda game apart from Cicero.  That's really upsetting.

To summarise:
"Blah blah good guy blah blah bounty whinge sniffle cry cry"

I don't know who I've upset but I certainly hope that all my killing and looting of their assassins is upsetting them more.

Nothing can improve this screenshot.

It turned out that this guy was making meth from breakfast cereal.  I wish that was a joke.  I wish it wasn't working.  Moving on!

I met the king of the vampires.  He was, predictably, a broody, self-important prick who had clearly spent many hours in the tunnels justifying to himself why all this deviant behaviour was acceptable, necessary and completely reasonable.  "Oh, but we don't eat flesh, we only drink blood".  I like that Sir Vaulter even told him "you seem to be conforming to the traditional ideals of fictional vampires".  I think I just really dissed this guy.

Unfortunately in the wasteland, enough people seem to have turned to cannibalism that this guy has a sizeable cult.  I didn't take the correct course of action and bathe this place in cleansing fire because I didn't have enough grenades.

Because I couldn't kill him without alerting the rest of club Tepes, I broke into his bedroom and rifled through his stuff.  He has a teddy bear next to his bed.  That raises a question or two.

Grenade bouquet sounds like the kind of thing you'd get Tank Girl for her birthday.  I wasn't good enough at using grenades to identify where the pins were, apparently, so I just shot the grenades.  I find you can solve a lot of problems by just shooting them.  Sometimes people can be problems.

ROBOT BUTLER FOR MY HOUSE
This is a wonderful day!  Wadsworth, old boy, you and I are going to get on like a house on fire.  Except not so much, because a house on fire does not get on.  What does that phrase even mean?

I popped to the water purification plant to find dad.  I didn't find him but I did find some audio logs and some super mutants.  Their bodies lay inert in the control room for the water purifier.  That can't be sanitary.

I was instructed to go to a new place, put on a special suit and enter the matrix.  All the fog in here makes it really creepy at first.  Odd, because this is simultaneously one of the funniest and the most genuinely distressing areas I've been to so far.

I like how it's all future technology all over the place but they just shoved a lazy boy recliner in the middle of it.

This child.  This child will haunt my dreams.

Not only does she look creepy, not only is she an elderly scientist conduction a psychological torture simulation on an entire vault, but she's like the magic mental powers kid from that episode of the Twilight Zone with the creepy god powers boy.  I tried to punch her to let her know, in a polite and gentlemanly fashion, that her behaviour was unbecoming of a girl on the cusp of womanhood and I would very much like it if she cut it the fuck out immediately.  She responded by magically electrocuting me.  Gave me a right turn, that did.

Back to young Sir Vaulter.  Despite my attempts to make him look suave and charming, as a child he has a face like a freshly smacked bottom (puffy, red and unpleasant to sit on).  I think he got handsome after he hit puberty.

Odd that the simulation has a speed limit when there aren't any vehicles.  I know you've got to get into character and make it all seem realistic but still.

I prefer this wristwatch to my pip boy.  I bet this thing can't VATS, either.  It's so nice.

RETURN TO THE BLACKENED PIT FROM WHENCE YE CAME, FOULEST DEMON OF THE NETHER REALM

I have dialogue options for animals in this place.  I think I may have jacked up my charisma and speech too high if I can actually talk to dogs.  It's like Doctor Doolittle all up in here.

Challenged a gnome to fisticuffs.  It was a pretty enriching experience.  There aren't crimes in this place so I can punch whatever I please.

The secret kill switch for the simulation was in the creepy, dirty abandoned house with stuff lying around it.  Since the door wasn't locked and this town has at least one kid in it, the house with the random assortment of things that shouldn't make noises but do seems like the supidest possible place to hide your kill switch.  1960s suburbian middle American kids would probably live in a place like that.

This simulation had a "release the murderous Chinese commies" button.  I really like that.  If Transport Tycoon had have had that, I'd have been more into it.

Note that this was the lesser of two evils good option,  Releasing a communist commando company gave me good karma.  You should not be reinforcing this message, Fallout 3.

What am I doing here?

You'd be far happier not knowing, game dad, and quite frankly so would I.

Some hours after resolving the vampire thing, I found where you live if you're a naughty boy.  It looks like a typical vampire castle.  I guess the family will never know about this place and that's a shame.

Again with the "these people seemed to embrace radiation as part of their culture" problem.  Nuka cola has little orbital flight path tracing lines around the bottle which is the universal cartoon symbol for "this is atomic, even if you don't know what that means".

Intercepted what I can only assume to be a tango shipment.

At this point, I started to worry about game dad.

I think at some point, Sir Vaulter's dad had ammunition.  He seemed to want to shoot things.  Every so often, he would blame somebody I couldn't see for making him make an unpleasant decision and then go stomping off into the wastes to find a creature to shoot.  Once he ran out of ammunition, he proceeded to beat all his opponents to death with what looked like a pipe.  This included heavily armed bandits and the pictured radioactive tongue monster above.  Dad knew no fear.  He ran straight at a raider armed with a rocket launcher, took a rocket to the head and still beat the guy half senseless.

You don't punch super mutants!  JESUS, how is this working out so well for you?!

As we ran along, dad shot into the air and hung there.  He wouldn't move and I couldn't reach him, so he refused to walk any further because I wasn't close enough to him for him to lead the way.  I tried doing the right thing and shooting him with my sniper rifle to cure his early onset witchcraft, but he'd gone too far down the path of Satan and was resistant to bullets.

Thankfully, the Brotherhood of Steel didn't bother to look up.  It was a perfect hiding place.

As dad continued to become less and less rational, shouting at people who weren't there and trying to smash everyone who even looked at him funny, even if they hadn't fired a shot, it occurred to me that this must have been what it was like for the rest of the world to have to communicate with Dragonbjorn.  As I spoke to dad, he was unresponsive.  I tried to give him guns and ammunition but there wasn't an option.  Perhaps I should have told him they were quest rewards.

I regret everything I ever did as that Nordic adonis.

Pirate Pely?  Ice cream?  Talking parrots!

This is immediately the best place!

Back in Rivet City, I became increasingly upset that in a lab, carrots were just laid on the table.  That's not hygenic.  The sad thing is that she'll learn the hard way and then I'll probably get a quest to fix it.

Back to the water treatment plant and several day since my last visit, there are still corpses.  Dad seems to be ignoring this.  Since super mutants are made from a forced evolution virus, I'm quite sure that the last thing we all want is for them to be decomposing into the water supply.  Could you just drag them out a ways?

No?

Well... I mean okay but I'm not going to be held responsible, I'd just like to state that.

Did I really disarm the bomb in Megaton?  I prefer the term "damaged beyond any hope of repair".

In conclusion, I seemed to achieve lots of stuff, it's just that my means don't seem to have returned a tangible end.

Thought for the day:
I'd really like to wait for those guys who are getting paid 1000 for my head to instead capture me and take me to the person willing to pay 1000 for me.  I could probably kill them and I bet they'd have tons of cash.