Fallout: New Vegas

Fallout: New Vegas is good. Is it perfect? No. In hardcore mode, the rate at which you die from thirst isn't high enough. I demand to die faster! Luckily, there's a mod for that. In fact, there are lots of mods. There are tweaks that alter the weight of scrap metal, there are difficulty mods that turn you into a wimp and jack up your foes until they hit like a sack of broken glass, there are mods that turn this or that female companion into that girl from Code Geass, and there's even a mod that makes stimpaks weigh more than you could possibly carry.

Most of them suck, though. Here are twenty five that don't.

These mods are the best of the bunch. Some are delightful departures from the New Vegas you know, others will become an essential part of your wasteland wandering, and one or two just make it prettier. You can't use them all together, but you can use most. To install them, download the archives and empty them into your Data folder – find it in Steam\Steamapps\common\fallout new vegas\.



1. Centred third person camera
Why did Bethesda give us the weird over-the-shoulder cam in Fallout 3? Why didn't Obsidian get rid of it for New Vegas? We may never know. Probably because they imagined players actually trying to take aim and fire in third person mode, which is insane. Third person is for screenshots and lightsaber fights - we've known that since Jedi Knight 2! Fortunately, every time a developer does this, one of the lovely modder people undoes it.

This mod also lets you zoom all the way out. How far? All of the far, that's how far.





2. Black Company improved perks
A whole slew of balanced, interesting perks. It comes in two flavours – both are available at any level, but require you to meet certain criteria. In the first version, you need to have high abilities – those are the things you pick at the start and can only occasionally increase. The second version is identical, but requires you to meet skill point thresholds instead. They’re all wonderfully inventive and cover a wide range of interests and specialist player archetypes left out in the cold by Obsidian’s vanilla perks.






3. Better tag skills
This tweak doubles the bonus your character gets at the start of the game for tagging his or her three starter skills. These tag skills are intended as a reflection of your character's past experiences and aptitudes before they ended up left for dead in a shallow grave. If you max out Strength and tag Melee Weapons, you'll get a skill of 50. Not bad at all.




4. Kill the karma sounds
Okay, so I killed a guy, and I've spent the last five minutes picking through his belongings. I'm ashamed of myself. I need help. What I don't need is some annoying string section blaring at me every time I happen to put a kitchen knife into a guy's back and strip his body of clothes and valuables and then start chopping bits off of him for fun. This mod gets rid of the noise and text pop-up that annoys you while you're doing these horrible, unspeakable things.

Tricky uninstall alert!
This mod works by overriding the karma noises with empty files. There's no esp file to delete, and instead you'll have to delete the relevant sound files that you've installed. The readme is kind enough to explain which ones. Wouldn't it be nice if they were all zipped up in a bsa file? Wouldn't it just.







5. Bigger barter and dialogue windows
The barter window is an important window. There, you'll discover that you can finally buy a fancy business suit to complete the Agent 47 impression. You'll discover that hollowpoint rounds are so hot right now. You'll discover that you don't have enough caps to buy the bottle of dirty water that'll save you from your imminent death. This mod makes the barter and dialogue windows bigger, so you can spend less time paddling around looking for the stimpaks, and more time despairing because you can only afford two of them.







6. Better Ammo Crafting
There are more realistic ammo overhauls out there, but this one is balanced for fun. It takes a few liberties - for example, you can craft dynamite sticks into gunpowder, which isn’t really how dynamite works in real life. It ends up making life a lot easier for the budding ammo-crafter without stuffing every merchant’s pockets with sacks of lead ingots, though.







7. Improved throwing
Currently, you can throw a spear into the ground and it’ll just embed itself there. You can’t ever get it out, either. Doesn’t matter how strong you are, you’re powerful enough to drive it in, but too weak to pull it out. That’s rubbiiiiiiiiiish. This mod fixes that by removing the embed thing altogether. The downside is that you can’t pin people to walls anymore, but you can keep using the same spear for your entire magical people-skewering journey.

It also adds some handy recipes to the campfire that let you convert your kitchen knives into throwing knives, gather pebbles to bounce futilely off of radscorpion carapaces, and craft your own spears out of pool cues. Thwock! Oh, and it fixes a bug where enemies could target your spears in mid-air, shoot them, and they’d explode like a grenade.





8. Depth of Field
This gorgeous mod comes in two flavours: make everything beautiful, and make everything not-quite-as-beautiful. It blurs up the distance and makes it look like this:



I left this mod on while taking the rest of the screenshots, so you can see it in a few others. Warning: if you don’t like this sort of thing, you won’t like this sort of thing.







9. Plausible starting outfit
“Welcome to New Vegas, stranger! This is a totally different place than the Capital Wasteland. We have cowboy robots, dynamite, and gambling. Watch out for tumbleweeds! Have my old shootin’ iron! Oh, and by the way, here’s a Vault uniform you can wear so you look exactly like you did in the last game.”

No thanks. This changes the starting outfit Doc Mitchell gives you so that he hands over a sort of yokel-flavoured dungaree thing, or a beige dress. That’s more like it. Yee-haw!





10. More Grass
Grass is the coolest. You can crouch down in it. You can walk through it. You can lie in it and watch the clouds. Cows can eat it. Horses eat it. You can eat it too. Without a little grass, cats have difficulty digesting food - it’s their main source of folic acid, after all. Grass is great. Fallout: New Vegas might be set in a horrific future where nearly all life has been exterminated or mutated beyond control, but... very little grass? What?!









11. Goodsprings Shack
This mod adds a shack in Goodsprings that you can call your own. It’s just a fridge, a bed, and some junk, but if you rescue the key from the owner's maggot-ridden corpse, it can be your home for life. Or you could just pile it full of the hi-tech shit you find.





12. Bottle water
No, not bottled water. This lets you bottle the water. You know, at all those handy water sources scattered around the desert. Drinking water will return an empty bottle, and you can fill those at any source you find. If the water is dirty, it’ll replace irradiated water you have on you as well as filling up empty bottles. Find a pure source, and it’ll replace all your dirty water too. The implementation is slick - just sneak up to a water source and activate it.





13. Caps have weight
If you put 17,000 bottle caps in your pocket right now, they’d be heavy. That’s what this does - simply adds a small weight to every bottlecap. When you start getting rich, you should leave some at home, or give a bunch to your pals. NOT FOR KEEPS ED-E.







14. Lethal headshots
Another fantastic mod, this makes headshots deadly. “Headshot” is the medical term for the condition where a bullet breaks open your skull and rattles through your brains, scrambling your grey matter and rocketing out of the other side. So yeah, that should really kill you.

That’s what this mod does, while preserving the shakey-aim of lower Guns skill and thus maintaining game balance. Wear a helmet, people! It also decreases your chance of scoring a headshot in VATS, which is a welcome balance tweak, and the damage buff doesn’t apply to all creatures - Deathclaws are made of sterner stuff, and robots don’t always have brains where you’d expect them to.

I’d also like to give a special mention to the commenter on the Fallout: New Vegas Nexus who suggested that this mod should cause the game to end after the first cinematic (where you get shot in the face).





15. No RPG bullet bending
This has the same goals as the above mod - make the guns work more realistically - but it goes about it in a totally different way. Rather than touch the damage that guns do, this mod makes them super accurate. It’s not for me, personally - I found that with a Guns skill of 20 I could kill anyone from an enormous distance just by waiting for my shot and killing them with a sneak bonus. If you’re not a fan of RPG elements, though, this can help turn Fallout: New Vegas into a pure FPS.









16. Fellout: New Vegas
This gets rid of the orange jam on the lens, adds lovely skies, and injects lots of other pretty into the world. This is the successor to the awesome de-greenification mod for Fallout 3 - the name refers to the assumption that the Fallout from nuclear bombs would have already “fell out”.

It also makes nights a lot darker.





17. Food don’t heal yo’ no mo’
This is probably my favourite mod of the bunch. With this mod in hardcore mode, you can no longer freeze time, open sixteen cans of Pork n’ Beans, guzzle them down, and grow your leg back in half a second. Food doesn’t heal you at all. Not even a little! Now B.J. Blazkowicz is the only man who can wolf down a hot meal in the middle of a fight to close his wounds.

Conflicts: Unfortunately, this mod conflicts with the water bottling mod. So either water heals you and you'll be using it a lot, or water doesn't heal you and you've got some extra in your pack because you aren't chugging it to fight internal haemorrhaging.





18. Companion Sandbox Mode
This mod changes the behaviour of companions told to “wait here.” They chill on chairs, wander around looking at stuff, talk to eachother, fight wandering monsters, and in an early version they’d even raid your fridge for food. Leave tons of followers around your hideout and pretend you’re having an awesome party!





19. ED-E no longer has clumsy, invisible legs
ED-E is a floating robot. It shouldn’t set off mines and bear traps by floating over them. This mod gives your noisy robot chum a perk that prevents that. Hooray!





20a. Timescale adjuster
This does two wonderful things to Fallout: New Vegas. Firstly, it lets you alter the rate at which game time passes in relation to our own time. Currently, a half hour of in-game time passes in about 4 minutes. With this mod, you can change the rate so that it’s much closer to - or even the same as - the passage of time in the real world. You can even have different rates for combat or for interiors, so that time doesn’t march on during a prolonged fight, stays relatively close to real time when you’re indoors, but picks up the pace during long overworld treks.

It also lets you alter the rate at which you get hungry, thirsty, and sleepy, and prevents timing conflicts between these two functions that’d otherwise have your character starving to death in his sleep. The only downside is that it controls this via an item that magically appears in your inventory, and you have to go through some fiddly menus to set it all. I have my interior and combat rates set to 1 and my overworld set to 3.







20b. Harder hardcore rates
If you like the timing just fine and just want more brutal hardcore rates, you don’t need to bother downloading the above mod - just download this easy esp file that doubles your dehydration rates and almost quintuplifies your hunger and tiredness rates. No fiddly menus, just a harder hardcore mode that’ll have you regularly reaching into your pack for a drink in the scorching heat.







21. Automatic skill perks
This mod changes 40 perks to be granted for free when you hit the skill requirements for them. So when you hit 30 Guns skill, you immediately get Rapid Reload. They’ve been taken out of the perk list too. Rather than making the game impossibly harder, this is a mod you can rely on to make things a little easier.

I did notice a bug, though. If you get your skill high enough while in Goodsprings to unlock one of these, and then re-tag your skills as you leave Goodsprings (you have a chance to rebuild your character before you go), you’ll keep the old perks. It’s avoidable if you know about it, but keep an eye on the mod page for a fix.







22. Sandstorms
This adds enormous, screen-filling sandstorms to the Mojave wasteland. Fear them, for they are mighty. Mighty hard to see through, I mean. It’s a nice cosmetic touch.





23. Play after the main quest ends
Didn’t Bethesda eventually put out an official patch for Fallout 3 to let you keep playing after the final cutscene ended? This mod does that too. Come on, developers! Pay attention to your modders!





24. Higher stakes gambling
This greatly increases the maximum bet in casinos, increases the amount of chips you can buy from the cashier, and optionally lets you get rid of the chance a casino will ban you for winning too much. Use this mod if you find yourself amassing great piles of bottle caps in real life, especially if you keep them in a huge room and swim through them regularly.







25. Wasteland Unlocked
This is an esp file packaged with Black Company’s Harder Hardcore pack. It’s a giant set of modular esp files that tweak enormous amounts of entities, so I won’t recommend you just use them all if you’re using some of the mods I’ve recommended so far, for fear of conflicts.

Just use WastelandUnlocked.esp, and if you don’t mind a smarter AI, use SettingsTweaks.esp too. It’ll open up the wasteland like never before, adding monsters and wild animals that you’d normally only find at really high levels, spawning rare high level items (or just trash) in dumpsters, and lowering the level requirements for many recipes that’ll help you cope with the newfound threat. It also removes lots of stimpaks from the world and replaces them with the bits to make new ones.



Fallout: New Vegas


This week, on a very special episode of the PC Gamer Podcast...Josh returns from BlizzCon to tell us about Diablo III's Demon Hunter class. We share our spoiler-free experiences in Fallout: New Vegas (also, how is Dan already on his third playthrough). Evan tells us why Tribes deserves to be remade, and Logan describes the unique anatomical advantages of a civet vis-à-vis coffee.

Download, and hear us say words about games.

Want to subscribe to us on iTunes? Follow these instructions to add the podcast to iTunes manually:

In iTunes, go to to the advanced menu and select “Subscribe to podcast” and copy and paste this URL into the box: http://www.pcgamer.com/feed/rss2/?cat=29038
Push OK, and that’s it! The podcast will now auto-download whenever an episode is released.
Plants vs. Zombies GOTY Edition

Attention PC gamers! We’ve got a giveaway so momentous that it stands to eclipse epochal moments in history going all the way back to the discovery of fire by an unfortunate troglodyte in a lightning storm about one and a half million years ago. In fact, it’s so spectacularly massive that it may create a singularity unimagined by even Stephen Hawking at his most fanciful after a fifth of bourbon. What could be so huge? How about this: a magical Steam code that will grant you free, permanent access to Valve’s entire catalog—which includes some of the finest PC games ever made—and every game Valve ever will make. That’s right: you can win Portal 2, Dota 2 and even Half-Life 2: Episode 3.* It’s the prize that keeps on giving, year after year!

But wait, that’s not all! Click through to see what else, and how to win it!

Update: Winners have been drawn, and notifications are going out. We'll post the list of winners soon!

Update 2: Winners posted!




We’re also giving away sweet, shrink-wrapped, aromatic Collector’s Editions of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, Fallout: New Vegas, Civilization V, Mafia II and Plants vs Zombies. That’s a total of six fabulous, planet-shattering prizes, all up for grabs. Click here to see them all!

But wait, there’s even more! We’ll pick a seventh lucky dawg who’ll receive a copy of Borderlands Game of the Year Edition! The giving just won’t stop!

So how do you get in on the action? Just “like” us on Facebook, then comment on this post on Facebook (not our comment area below) with a list of the three games you’re most looking forward to in 2011 (in order of preference). That’s all! (If you're already a fan, just comment with your list.)

On Monday, November 1 at 10am Pacific time, we’ll draw seven winners from the comments (with the help of everybody’s random friends at Random.org,) and contact them via Facebook. Winner #1 gets first choice. (We suspect they’ll pick the Valve code.) Winner #2 gets to choose between the remaining prizes, then winner #3 gets to pick, and so on.

This contest is open to US residents only. Sorry, rest of the world! We’d let you enter if The Man would let us.

*Provided the sun doesn’t burn out before it’s released.

Our winners are:
Michael Hudak: Magic Valve code
Craig Fender: StarCraft II Collector's Edition
Phillip Front: Fallout: New Vegas Collector's Edition
Jeremy Sanchez: Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition
Darien Sumner: Civilization V Collector's Edition
Justin Anderson: Mafia II Collector's Edition
Zack Jones: Plants vs Zombies Collector's Edition

Thanks to everyone who entered!





Fallout: New Vegas

Since Fallout: New Vegas was released in the US on Tuesday, players have been discovering a raft of weird and wonderful bugs. The good news is that the game was patched this morning, and more updates are planned for the near future. Read on for the patch details, and a round up of some of the most freakish bugs.

Today's update, which will apply automatically when you launch the game, is said to fix "quest and scripting issues." There's no mention of fixing "moonwalking dog issues", or "dog eyeball placement issues" just yet, but speaking to Kotaku, Bethesda's marketing man, Peter Hines has said "we are currently working on releasing patches/updates as quickly as possible for Fallout: New Vegas,", so further updates should be coming soon.

For now, people are still finding nightmarish examples of reality gone-wrong. The most remarkable bug was uncovered by Shodan210, and quickly thrown up on Reddit. It's somehow funny and incredibly creepy at the same time. David Lynch would struggle to match the weirdness of this slow talking man's gently rotating noggin. Check it out.



Fallout 3
Recharger Rifle: batteries not included (or needed).
Calling all modders! The Fallout: New Vegas G.E.C.K tools are have been released. They're freely available to download from the official Fallout site, so you're a few minutes away from being able to create your own masterpiece set in the wastelands of New Vegas. Read on for details on some of the new features included in the latest version of Bethesda's modding tools.

The key changes come in the form of a new conversation system that lets you structure chats via a more simple branching tree layout. It also contains "built-in support for low-intelligence dialogue options". I'm not quite sure what that means, but it might make scripting conversations with dunderheaded supermutants easier.

There's a wealth of information on how to get started with the GECK on the wiki page. If you're looking for some inspiration, check out some of the amazing mods the community made for Fallout 3.

Team Fortress 2

Tim, Tom, Graham and Craig take a second stab at a podcast that was destroyed in a fire. We weigh in on whether Dota 2 can make Defense of the Ancients fun for the masses, how big a deal Fallout: New Vegas is, the philosophy behind BioShock Infinite, the ability to use feces as a writing implement in Duke Nukem Forever, the wisdom or otherwise of scaling difficulty in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the prospects for Civ 5's AI, and our ever-changing opinions of Team Fortress 2 selling items for real money. Tom also does an impression of the police baton from Deus Ex 1.

This is an extra-long bonus ultra podcast, bonusly ultra-soon after the last one, to make up for our unexpectedly long hiatus. And as a special favour to anyone sick of hearing about them, we barely mention StarCraft 2 or Minecraft. In two week's time, we'll be countering this with a favour to anyone who isn't: a Minecraft special about why the game has taken such a firm hold of so many people.

Download the MP3, subscribe, or find our older podcasts here.
Fallout: New Vegas
More like "HELL Yes!"
When you fire up Fallout: New Vegas and create a character, before it lets you out into the world the game will ask you one very simple question: are you a man, or are you a little baby who needs his mommy to save him from the big bad game? More diplomatically put, you'll be given the option of playing in Hardcore mode.

What's Hardcore mode, and are you hardcore enough to play it? Don't jump in blind: read our guide to the five big differences, and tips for how to survive the increased deadliness of the Hardcore Nevada wastes.





1: Stimpacks don’t heal instantly
This is the biggie - all the rest of the changes combined won’t affect you as much as one. In normal mode, you’re basically invulnerable until you run out of stimpacks. Those syringes full of magical juice, both the normal and super varieties, can stimulate your body from battered bones and shredded flesh back to Isaiah Mustafa-like condition in the blink of an eye, meaning that your health bar is basically infinite until you’ve exhausted your supply. But Hardcore mode changes all that: now a stimpack will take several seconds so to work its magic, and in the heat of battle you’re almost certainly going to take damage faster than you’re healing. In effect, your health bar is diminished from near-immortality to frighteningly finite.


What to do about it
First off, when you're creating your character, you might want to crank up your endurance to increase your health point pool. Every extra point you put into this stat means you'll start with more HP and gain more every time you level up.

Second, don’t wait until you’re almost dead to start healing! You can’t use a stim when you’re at full health, but the moment you take a hit in what looks to be a rough fight, start pumping stims into your system. That way you’ll be healing for the entire fight, before it’s too late to do any good.

Above all, pick your fights carefully. You might laugh in the face of a Deathclaw in normal mode, but in Hardcore you’ll want to make sure you’re tough enough to survive a couple of whacks before you venture into the beasts’ territory.

Recommended Perks: Toughness (x2), Lifegiver
2: Crippled limbs require a doctor to heal
In the normal game, shooting a stimpack directly into a broken limb or concussed skull will fix it on the spot. In Hardcore, you’ll have to either travel to a doctor’s office, use a doctor’s bag or shoot up some Hydra (a new drug) to restore your busted bodyparts to working order.




What to do about it
This isn’t as big a deal as you’d think. Thanks to fast travel, a crippled character can be back in the Goodsprings doctor’s office with no wait, and for 50 to 100 caps, you’re patched up good as new. However, to avoid frequent trips, and when entering an indoor area full of enemies where fast travel is blocked, it’s a good idea to pack some doctor’s bags and Hydra. Pick those up wherever you find them.

Recommended Perks: Adamantium Skeleton
3: Ammo has weight
In the normal game you’re a walking ammo supply depot. Every bullet, flamethrower gas canister, energy pack and missile you pick up gets thrown into a magical bag that weighs nothing, so a well-prepared character might never run out of ammo. In Hardcore, each and every bullet has mass, and your character can only carry so much before being weighed down.


What to do about it
To avoid the problem entirely, create a melee character. If you’re using a power fist or a super sledge, you’ll never have to worry about ammo at all. However, if you like to kill things far away, you’ll want to be discriminating about what you pick up. Choose a favorite weapon and only pick up ammo that works with it (or be ready to discard incompatible rounds). If you have an affinity for rocket launchers, though, you’re in a lot of trouble: rockets weigh three pounds each, so carrying a handful will really eat into your carrying weight capacity quickly. There's also the Recharger Rifle, a low-powered energy weapon that regenerates ammo.



Naturally, you’ll also want to increase your character’s strength as much as possible to increase your carrying capacity, and have two companions with you to carry non-essential belongings so that you can fill your pockets with ammo.

Recommended Perks: Strong Back, Pack Rat
4: Dehydration, starvation and sleep deprivation
In the normal game, food, water and sleep only serve to heal HP, and give a few temporary stat boosts here and there. In Hardcore, going without any of them for long enough will cause your stats to degrade, and eventually you’ll die a nonviolent but terrible death.


What to do about it
You don't have to do much. This aspect of Hardcore mode is disappointingly un-hardcore due to the abundance of tasty food, fresh water and comfy mattresses. You can't swing a dead iguana without hitting something to eat - and even if you could, you could eat the iguana. Whenever you get a notification that you’re suffering from minor starvation, just eat something. The worst that’s likely to happen to you is getting irradiated due to drinking dirty water and eating too much Radroach meat, but a quick fast-travel trip to the doctor’s office will fix you up lickity split. As for sleep, you don’t exactly need the recommended eight hours a night. Just an hour or two of shut-eye every day or so keeps you bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as you can be.

Recommended Perks: Cannibal, Ghastly Scavenger
5: Companions stay dead
In normal, your companions might get knocked out in a fight, but they’ll get back up again once combat’s over (assuming you survived). Hardcore reverts back to Fallout 3’s harsh system, in which a Deathclaw’s first swipe will send your beloved companion’s head sailing - and it’s not as funny when happens to one of your guys.


What to do about it
Get a good grief counsellor. If you take your companions into combat, unless you’re very, very careful, they gonna die. Their AI isn’t smart enough to turn tail and run when in trouble, so most fights are going to be to the death. If you’re not into quick-saving before every significant fight and reloading until everyone makes it through alive, your best course of action is to park them somewhere safe by telling them to “Wait here,”  go into battle solo and then return to collect them when the coast is clear.

Recommended Perks: Spray & Pray
Fallout: New Vegas

Fuck George. He’s the gambler standing at the entrance to Nellis Air Force Base. Behind him: nothing but craters and bombed-out houses. The Boomers control this area, a community that protects itself by shelling anyone who gets in range, but I need to get in and George knows how to get past the bombs. He wants 200 bottlecaps for his services.

This is the world of Fallout: New Vegas. It’s harsh. Hell, I only have 200 caps because I killed the doctor who saved my life and scooped a bullet out my brain. So when George demands these caps for doing little more than standing on a path, while I’ve had to slam pool cues into the skulls of helpful medics, it upsets me.



I hand them over, as I can’t see any other way in. After a terrifying bolt through a barrage of bombs, following George’s instructions, I make it to the compound. The Boomers are surprisingly cool, if a bit overprotective. They agree to not shell me any more, which is nice of them. I find it difficult to blow up people I’ve met socially, too. I head back to George. It’s not just his opportunism that angers me. He offered to repay me double the amount of caps if I survived. I’m his dirty little gambling fix!

I grab my spiked knuckles and start whaling on him. Every punch makes me feel a little bit better. He runs off into Nellis and I run after him. The Boomers promised to leave me alone, but George? He’s fair game.

As is anything in his radius. Bombs are indiscriminate jerks. I only realise my huge mistake when he reels at one of my uppercuts and I explode a second later.



I should have known better. New Vegas might be cleaner than Fallout 3’s Washington wasteland, the Mojave desert having got off relatively lightly during the nuclear apocalypse, but it’s still a game about survival. Shot in the head, buried and presumed dead, you’re caught up in a revenge tale that turns into a battle for control of the region, with you in the Clint Eastwood role. Do you track down the man who put you in the ground, explore the desert, beat up some nearby gang members, or look for a faction to join?
Crafty Buck
What would Clint do? Or, in my game, an athletic, red-headed lady I named ‘Buck’. Lady Buck, I decided, was simply going to be an extension of me. If I found the people I was dealing with personally repugnant, I’d give them Wasteland justice. I plumbed for my usual mix of lockpicking and stealth skills, eventually regretting my Thief-centric approach to character creation. My advice: New Vegas is so skewed towards dialogue that, for the first run-through at least, you should put as much as you can in Speechcraft and Barter skills. Even the final bosses can be chatted into submission if your stats are high enough. You can’t lockpick a mouth. Oh, and you should probably avoid Hardcore mode for that first runthrough. It’s the triathlon of New Vegas, a gruelling slog designed to sap your strength as you play. It’s not for the ill-prepared.

Wandering the wasteland now, two years on from Fallout 3, I’m both happy and disappointed. I’ve long wanted more of the same from Bethesda, and this is the hand that New Vegas deals. But while it’s good to be back, the leap from one game to the other isn’t nearly as large as it should have been. New areas, characters and factions, but the same clunky inventory and character models. Two years to stay exactly where you were.



Fallout’s world of cracked asphalt and rolling deserts can still impress. Whacking the view distance up to max is chilling: futuro-’50s buildings poke into the air, a giant wireframe cross stands on a hill, and at night Vegas glows on the horizon.



The world goes about its business, delivering some amazing random encounters. After a save, I stumbled across two small gangs fighting it out. I leapt into the fray – mostly to try out my newly acquired rebar club: a lump of concrete on the end of twisted metal rods. Combat is still lightweight: swinging kilos of concrete at someone’s head only feels powerful when they explode in a shower of gristle at the end, or in VATS where you’re given choices of where to hit with different chances of success. My rebar broke the face of the Powder Ganger’s leader, leaving a ragged red lump where her smile used to be. I reloaded, and this time sat back, watching the battle play out. At one point, a Ganger limped off to safety and pulled out a Stimpack, healing himself.

The central story is a big improvement on the dad-quest of Fallout 3. You’re following the trail of the man who shot you, as it snakes across the Mojave through the major urban areas, drip-feeding you tasks that vary from sorting out a town’s escaped prisoner problem to a ghoul infestation with a brilliantly overthe- top ending. Scenarios and characters that I’m loath to go into detail over, as their tricky little problems should be experienced first-hand. Twisty moral conundrums are laid at your feet as you pick and choose who to piss off (and you’ll always piss someone off). When a game asks you to lead someone into a sniper’s line of fire, but doesn’t specify who, you definitely have to confront your id.



It’s not overtly encouraged by the game, but you can just head for Vegas. Giant Rad Scorpions and Deathclaws stand between you and The Strip, and you’ll end up aggroing every one of them, but you’re given impressive leeway to just stumble across points of the story as you wander. But eventually, all roads lead to New Vegas.

It’s here that a surprising second act kicks off. Structurally things get messy: you’re used as an emissary from Vegas to talk to the factions. While there you can take up more missions, or simply report back to Vegas without having much to do with them at all – pretty much invalidating the entire endeavour. Don’t do that. The factions are interesting, particularly the Caesars: a vast army with nasty predilections, based on the Roman Empire. They crucify people, for Jupiter’s sake. Even the lesser factions, like the Elvis-impersonating Kings or the mafia-inspired Omerta, have been teased out of Vegas tropes.
King Rex
There’s something for everyone, different personalities and points of view to empathise with or despise, depending on how you’re playing. So the Romans felt my wrath, and I helped the leader of the Kings fix his robot dog (by bashing in another dog’s head to replace the brain). My reward was having the dog as a companion. There are eight companions to pick from, six human and two not, and you can have one of each if you find them. They back you up in fights, and you can set their state via a control wheel, but the most important addition is they bring a perk to your character sheet. Rex’s perk will find and mark nearby items for you to collect. I could have swapped him for ED-E, a floating robot who’s good for spotting people and fighting from afar, but Rex, with his glowing skullcap, was too cute. I was on a ‘nice’ playthrough.



But I could so easily have played nasty, and aligned with the Romans. Or ambivalent and aligned with the NCR – the other main faction and strangely likeable people, just doing what they can to survive. Those choices, and the wonderful way the game accepts and adapts when you make them, make New Vegas worth your time and money. I had a lot of fun, but I never uncovered anything as wonderful as Fallout 3’s Oasis or Little Lamplight.

There are things to see, sure, but the rewards aren’t nearly as interesting in New Vegas. I didn’t get as much out of heading for intriguing things on the horizon as I did in the previous game. With some new technology and the ambition to create a full world as compelling as the previous game’s, it could have been wonderful.

For further reading: CVG's Fallout: New Vegas review, and a guide to finding all of the collectible snow-globes in Fallout: New Vegas on GamesRadar.
Fallout 3

At more than half a million words long, the strategy guide for Fallout: New Vegas will be the biggest ever released, and will dwarf famously giant literary classics like War and Peace. It's also roughly the same size as the script for one of designer Chris Avellone's previous games, Planescape: Torment. Trufax, and more of which below.

The hefty tome will list every enemy in the game, detailing where they can be found and what they carry, and give the player more information on the many factions that inhabit the new wasteland. The guide also painstakingly maps over two hundred locations in the world, and lists every item in the game. As a secondary use, you ever find yourself in a post apocalyptic wasteland, you'll be able to strap it to your chest and it should double up as a useful piece of armour.

The book comes in two flavours, the standard edition for $25, and the bigger, harder edition for $35. The latter should be better at stopping bullets.

For more information, check out the strategy guide blog. Alternatively, check out our preview. The game's due out next Tuesday in the US, and Friday 22nd worldwide.
Oct 4, 2010
Quake III Arena

I can still remember my first schooling in the art of Quake. A young staff writer fresh out of university, I found myself working late one night, and the office Q3DM17 expert offered to give me a run-around and a few tips.

Talk about school of hard knocks. He railed me from a mile away. He railed me while performing mid-air pirouettes. He railed me when all he could see was the pixel on the top of my head. He was a frickin’ railgun prodigy, and his name, rather aptly, was Mr Chafe.

Quake Live is basically Quake III Arena playable – thanks to some astounding plugin Gandalfery – in a browser. It runs like a dream, and it’s surely a sign of things to come that a razor-edge, competitive FPS that demands sublime net-coding runs in a browser, and still taps your PC’s hardware for its needs.



The Quake Live servers are stuffed with Mr Chafes, and it’s still a game of frightening speed and precision, but it’s immediately plain that id’s Tech Engine 3 browser-streamed incarnation of Quake knows the difference between good and amazing players when matchmaking. Even so, in the beginner-grade match-ups you’ll meet some extremely skilled combatants.

Dropping into a quick match is easy, and for old hands, there’s a warm sense of familiarity to the maps. I leapt straight into The Longest Yard, and found it as insanely frenetic as ever. Every time I took the long jump to the railgun platform, the same player got right up in my grill, trying to place rockets on it just as I landed. We singled each other out repeatedly, and aside from the inevitable interference from other players, sparred riotously for the whole match.



All this is free, but ad-supported, which isn’t as intrusive as you might imagine. For a few seconds before a match starts, you’re served an ad (Fallout 3: New Vegas at time of writing), then it’s gone. You can pay for the game, which disables ads and offers you extra features, but for casual players, there’ll be little incentive to upgrade. The free-toplay version is bulging with classic Quake maps, and you can jump into all the match-types you’d expect: free-for-all, capture the flag, team deathmatch, duel and clan arena.
Blood and tiers
There are two levels of paid subscription – premium and pro, at £1.59 a month and £3.18 a month respectively – and the extra features they offer cater to the clansman. Exclusive maps, frequent content updates, clan creation tools and so forth, you only get with a subscription. Interestingly, you can only create and customise your own games if you pay for the top-tier service. Go free or premium, and you can only join rolling servers. Which for casual players who just fancy a quick blat, is fine.



Quake III Arena was sublime, and that’s what this is: sublimity in a browser window. Every match is a white-hot opera of surging gunplay that leaves the crump-and-pew of rockets and rails ringing in your ears for minutes afterwards. It’s as immersive and pure an experience as it ever was, and it’s even hard to care that the engine is showing its age. Oh, and it’s free. What are you doing? Stop reading this now, open a browser window and sign up.
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