Another journal

I’m trying to get back into blogging for real – so I gotta make a post a week. Which is partly to make me not like… make every post precious? Like I used to blog the stupidest shit on LJ. And still do on Tumblr. So, because this is all that is on my mind today*, let me talk about Fallout: New Vegas.

Now, I’m not “a gamer.” There are a handful of games I like and I replay those with light regularity. They include: the LEGO Batmans and Saints Row. We’re a household that buys games used, and the game console is used more for DVDs than anything. So it made sense that I didn’t pick up Fallout: New Vegas (FNV) until 2015. By then, Chase had played it some on PC, and my best friend had played it through and loved it immensely. They are both life-long Fallout players, having first scampered around the isometric early entries into the world.

I wasn’t immune to the draw, however. On our first trip to Southern California, I took a picture of a plant and sent it to my bff captioned something about bannana yucca added to the inventory.

My Twitter is nuked (deleted all the tweets), so I don’t have exactly when I first picked up playing FNV, but I know that a year later, in 2015, during one of the seasonal colds I used to get all the time was when I first played the game.

It immediately crawled under my skin and set up shop. I hadn’t got into game writing yet so it wasn’t like my later experiences with RPGs (particularly from Obsidian), where I was admiring the skills of a good dialogue tree. I bought into the story HARD, I played all four of the DLC, my character died a bunch (I am not good at shooting in games, even on easy). I was in the clutches. Then, not two years later, I picked it up again.

This time around I printed out a list of unmarked quests and went hunting. I think this might have been the only time I took the perk that shows all the locations on your map also. I was determined to stretch this play out as much as possible. It looks like I picked it up in April 2017 and only entered the final bit of the story during the winter holidays. I found my js file of downloaded tweets, so have one:

I continued my accidental habit from Fallout of making my characters dumb and lucky as a shiny rock.”

This was the playthrough that really locked it in for me. I was cooked.

2016 was when I locked down a lot of things about who I am, an embarrassing number of which I realised via Fallout New Vegas.”

In the intervening time between then and my next playthrough, FNV started weaving into my life more and more. I learned Twine and started building a FNV fan-game with bit Zorro-related energy. I learned about how games were written and how dialogue trees looked in a CSV (and one of my first works on AO3 is just a dialogue table).

I posted a lot about that game in 2018, but we also moved states and life got weird, so it is on a permanent backburner. Here are some related tweets.

On the off-chance any of you have fave rancheros or boleros from like, mid-century, I’m trying to make a Spanish-language Fallout: New Vegas playlist, so: share ’em!”

Anyway, it’s late but some of you are up. What’s the first “oh shit” narrative moment you can think of encountering in a video game play through?”… [one was when] I fast travelled back to Goodsprings on my first play through of Fallout: New Vegas and a glitch had let loose a scorpion that had just killed everyone and then turned to attack me.”

I never ended up playing any other Fallout game other than a little bit of the mobile Fallout: Shelter. It didn’t matter. FNV was all I needed. When I did the Pixeles Writing Portfolio Program, most of the work I did was around that FNV AU Twine game I never finished.

And so, in 2023, I picked it back up. I have mentioned FNV multiple times in my newsletter, but the relevant bit about this particular playthrough was in my very first one:

At the end of November I started playing Fallout: New Vegas again. It had been six years since I’d played it through last–which means I’ve never played the game in California. The enticement of playing was a carrot I dangled in front of myself for years. Oh finish this novel draft, then you can play. Actually do this other thing now, and you can play. No, you need to [finish/achieve/be better at THIS thing] first…

November went to shit. Like, the back half of the year things had been degrading in ways that are nobody but family’s business, but November is when they peaked. But we got through it! And there, at the end of November, I realised actually I could do something without earning it–and as it was I think I’ve done enough in 2023 (even before November) to justify playing a video game to my brain worms. So I fired up Fallout: New Vegas for the third time.

I’d joked at the time “maybe this playthrough of Fallout: New Vegas will fix me.” And then it did.

I played 160 hours of it (far less then the first playthrough, which tbf was extended because FNV is notoriously laggy and buggy and then our XBox died 200 hours into the game). I don’t actually track my hours much, I only know because when I booted it back up in May, I went and looked at my last save.

I, of course, wrote about this playthrough again in my newsletter. I can’t complain, I guess. Fallout: New Vegas is just part of my blood at this point. One of many such cases. Fifteen years on from release and the fandom is still thriving and modding and writing and daydreaming and making incoherent sounds at seeing a glimpse of a particular Securitron in a trailer because of the implications.

*The trailer for season 2 came out and I am not well about it