Fallout: New Vegas is pretty fun when it's not breaking down on you. Problem is, that happens a lot. Hopefully a "comprehensive" patch due for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 in the "coming weeks" will fix that.

While there's sadly no firmer timeframe on when to expect what for many will be a game-saving remedy, we do know the 360 version's save game issue should be fixed, "along with a number of other issues being reported".

In the meantime, PC users on NVIDIA hardware like myself suffering from crummy performance in many areas will be getting a separate patch in the next day or two that fixes not just that problem but more save game issues and companion AI problems as well.

It's a shame when you have to get excited over patches, but with this game's engine - which marries the deep technical lows with giddying exploratory highs - it's par for the course.

More news on New Vegas updates [Bethesda]

Something Awful, on target as always, skewers side mission premises in Fallout: New Vegas. Eight more ads are at the link. Seen on Something Awful.

Fallout: New Vegas released 18 days ago. That's 432 hours. Since then, more than 475,000 hours have been spent reading and editing the Fallout: New Vegas wiki. That's 58 years.

Over on Wikia, where numerous games' wikis are tended by legions of fans, Fallout added more than 1,200 new pages since the game's release, and its traffic shot up sevenfold at one point - 2.5 million visitors in one week.

They weren't just lurking. "Over 475K man hours were spent reading and creating content about Fallout: New Vegas – the equivalent of 58 years!" wrote one editor in a note to the community. The traffic surge also shattered all previous Wikia records. World of Warcraft's Wiki was the previous title holder, with 5 million daily page views. Over the past two weeks, Fallout's has beaten that mark, topping out at 8.8 million on Oct. 24.

As the wiki is named The Vault, might some be taking "We are born in the Vault and we will die in the Vault," a bit too seriously?

New Vegas Players Spend 58 Years At The Vault [Fallout.Wikia, thanks Pawel]

NeoGAF user water_wendi started a couple of playthroughs in Fallout: New Vegas before deciding to try a complete pacifist run. Fifty-one hours later, he finished the game, with no humans nor animals harmed in the making of his story.

He thinks it's possible to go 70 hours in this game without killing anyone, too, calculating about 2 to 3 hours on a sidequest where kills aren't necessary, and another 10 if you explore and loot everything. All told, he's logged about 100 hours in the game, and is putting it away for now.

It's impressive, but left unsaid is how many times, if any, he found a gun in a locker and just said the hell with it, blew someone's head off, and reloaded his previous gamesave. Or maybe he really was as pure as his messiah rating proclaims.

[NeoGAF via Joystiq]

So, we've seen tributes to Star Wars, Blade Runner (actually, a carry-over of a Fallout and Fallout 2 reference to that movie) and we know there's one for Indiana Jones in Fallout: New Vegas. That's three. There must be more.

Reader Paige B. just sent that in; the "Rodent of Unusual Size" is a nod to "The Princess Bride." Spot on!

Just for the record, here's the fedora-in-a-fridge, well early in the game, supplied by reader TheTingler. Many of you have seen and mentioned this. It makes fun of the infamous and implausible scene in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, in which Han Solo Jack Ryan President James Marshall Calista Flockhart's husband survives a nukeular blast by hiding in the Norge.

As we're about a week into release, we should be seeing many, if not most, of these kinds of homages in New Vegas. Post them here, screenshots if you can dig 'em up, or just gab about any other ironic or darkly humorous detail that tweaks your funnybone in the latest Fallout installment.

We've seen an homage to Owen and Beru Lars, now reader Zack F. has found Deckard's gun in Blade Runner - called "That Gun" in-game - in Fallout: New Vegas. The sidearm has a street value of 900 caps.

Zack says he picked it up in Novac. Here's an alternate view; Zack dropped it so we could see its name and cap value.

Edit: I've been advised by reader Marcus that it's called "That Gun" because that was the name of the Lone Wanderer's weapon in Fallout and in Fallout 2. Which was an homage to Deckard's weapon. Either way, still cool.

When Obsidian slip a little Star Wars into Fallout: New Vegas.

Reader Jon was on the ol' dusty trail outside of Nipton when he ran into these two corpses, named after Luke Skywalker's very dead uncle and aunt from Star Wars: Episode IV.

Now all we need is for somebody to find Tosche Station somewhere in the game and we're good to go!

[thanks Jon!]

You can call the devices the U.S. Army is testing out at Fort Dix in New Jersey wrist mounted phosphorescent OLED Displays is you want. We're calling them PIPBoys.

What the gentleman in the photo here is looking at is one of eight wrist mounted phosphorescent OLED Displays delivered to the U.S. Army for testing by Universal Display. The organic light emitting diode display is mounted on thin, flexible metal foil, which in turn is mounted on a wrist-wrapping housing to create a fully functional display and communication device.

Aren't they beautiful?

LG Display created the 4.3" QVGA full-color, full-motion AMOLED displays using amorphous-Silicon TFT backplanes crafted on flexible foil. Then Universal Display used its full-color PHOLED technology to create the front plane. The entire unit was designed and implemented by L-3 Display Systems.

The devices were presented to the military for evaluation and testing, and were showcased at the U.S. Army's C4ISR On-the-Move testing environment last month at Fort Dix, New Jersey, where they received positive feedback by senior leaders who make critical research, development and acquisition investment decisions.

I would wear one of these 24 hours a day. My wrist would become a pale, sweaty mass of matted hair.

That's probably not a good thing.

It's just another fine example of PIPBoy technology in real life. All we need now is a devastating nuclear war, and in a couple of centuries we'll be playing Fallout for real!

UDC Delivers Wrist-Mounted Flexible PH-OLED Display Prototypes to U.S. Army [OLED-Display via DVICE]

Would a nuclear war really lead to the sort of desolate, post-apocalyptic wasteland found in the Fallout series? GameTrailers tapped renowned physicist Dr. Michio Kaku to find out.

My personal favorite misconception about life after a nuclear war is the idea that the world will be overrun with radioactive mutants. As Dr. Kaku points out, it doesn't really work this way. Radioactivity has a much better chance of killing you dead than turning you into a young man with the proportionate strength of a spider.

Mutants are entertaining though, which is why they show up in games like Fallout or comics like Spider-Man. Peter Parker wouldn't be any fun at all if he were bitten by a radioactive spider, lost all of his hair, and then died.

Fallout 3 (and New Vegas) are set in a bleak, post-apocalyptic world, where mankind lies despondent after a devastating atomic holocaust. Fantasy it may be, but it's based on real science; question is, just how real is it?

Futirist and TV personality Dr. Michio Kaku explains in this short clip for Spike which, whackjob political predictions aside, gives us all a pretty good primer on just why everyone in the Fallout universe is so damn miserable.

And poorly-dressed.