Fallout: New Vegas

A brief recap.

Deirdre bought Fallout: New Vegas a while ago, since she liked Fallout 3 so much. I think it's been a resounding success with her. A few things, though:

She hates invisible walls. New Vegas uses invisible walls all over the freaking place, and it's a gigantically annoying thing to encounter as a consumer. Invisible walls are generally sloppy, and immediately shatter any suspension of disbelief. It's much better to put some kind of in-game barrier there to block the player's path, rather than make them think they can get somewhere, only to deny them once they've spent ten minutes climbing a mountain (mountain climbing in Fallout also sucks).

She has run out of places to explore, and doesn't want to finish the game.

The power play options are not sufficient for her. Ideally, she would rule New Vegas with the Kings. Second place is ruling New Vegas with Benny, but he ran off. The Kings are totally sweet, though. They're like Elvis-libertarians.

She spent hours running around beating the shit out of Fiends with a golf driver to get the melee weapon achievement. She also got all the other weapon achievements. And the star bottle cap achievement. And the snowglobe achievement. Achievements seem to work for her as a goal.

Fallout 3

So Deirdre actually ordered, received, and starting playing Fallout 3 a little while ago, but I haven't written anything about it.

Summary: She is playing a usually-good character, usually helping people but sometimes doing whatever she wants. She has taken the Bloody Mess perk, and laughs when her targets explode in a flurry of blood and limbs. She often says such things as "yeah suck it I crippled your FACE."

Fallout is much more based on numbers and character-building than Bioshock, and infinitely more than Half-life. So not everything is super intuitive, like where to put points when leveling up. I have told her to just read the descriptions and then put points wherever she likes.

She really likes exploring, so the game is perfect in that regard, since its world is almost intimidatingly huge.