Yeah. So is it ok if I do Vegas in parts?

I remember when I was a kid playing FO2 and realized the door kids were stealing my stuff. I quickly realized they always stole the top item of your inventory and set a brick of C4 for a 2 minute timer and set it neatly on top of my inventory. One pickpocketing later and I was one brick of C4 lighter.

Long story short the game knows you're up to some fuckery and will assign blame for the exploding children to you, awarding you the child killer reputation penalty.

I still think the little bastards deserved it.

"northern California is experiencing the worst drought in decades" - truly, war never changes

My personal favorite creative solution in F2 was the last Bishop mission to kill the NCR VP, What's-his-face.  Had no special requirements for killing just had to do it.

The area was deep inside NCR and with guard everywhere.  Lacking both ammo and the skills to gun my way out of the NCR i had to get creative.  Which involved using his grandkid.  He would be running around the tree in the compound and you can ask him to go talk to his grandpa that a stranger wanted to talk to him or whatever it was.

So I figured you can reverse pickpocket C4, so I turned the kid into an IED (after getting him drunk cause less perception means higher pickpockets chance) and had him go talk to his grandpa, only to explode and kill them both on the second try.

First try I had multiple blocks of C4 and I accidentally put the inert block on the kid and kept the active C4 on myself cause I had trouble differentiating between the two sprites.  Imagine my surprise when I was the one who blew up...

manipulates town into massacaring innocent ghouls, blows a septic pit up and covers the town in shit, releases a demonic beast that slaughters the guilt-ridden survivors before pissing off

"I have nothing but fond memories of this place"

"We are a walking, talking, monkey's paw... whatever, this place is dead" is the most accurate representation of fallout's evil builds

15:44 The best example is actually 'Ghost Town Gunfight' in New Vegas, where you're given the option to either assist the small community of farmers and traders who dug you out of the ground, stitched your head up pro-bono, and taught you essential survival skills for your upcoming revenge quest, or the dynamite-happy raiders who only get two side quests afterwards and then disappear from the game.

I think Fallout 2 is one of those things that really just set an example in a time when video games were still unpopular to most people. You really cant replicate what made it so fun because it came out in essentially a different era in technology, culture, and overall is just so significantly different from what most would even consider a videogame like a platformer or an FPS.

I've got a dumb story about this game from way back in the day. A friend of mine was playing this game three years after it was released. He had just figured out the trick of abusing gambling by placing a heavy object resting on the 1 key, creating an infinite loop of "bet 5$, play again, bet 5$...". Suddenly his brother barged in the room "Hey bro, a plane just flew into the World Trade Center!" They spent the next couple of hours glued to the TV screen and when he got back to the computer he had something ridiculous like millions of dosh and the game's economy had kinda broken down.

"Some media is simply more engaging as a foreigner"
Hispanic Dragon Ball Community

Speaking of the power of Bozar: Back in 2003, after finishing the game for the first time, I was wandering the desert in post-game and randomly encountered a group of deathclaws. Thinking nothing of it, I pulled out a Bozar and burst-fired at a deathclaw the furthest away from me, at the very edge of the screen. The shot critted, and the deathclaw got obliterated with the sum damage of 1101 points. I still occasionally play Fallout to this day, but have never seen anything remotely close to this kind of damage. Ever since, I keep the screenshot of that encounter in a special folder on my hard drive.

I remember taking the mutant 'cure' syringe all the way to Horrigan to see if it would one-shot him and all it did was crash my game.  So much for creativity :)

"A correct option, and a contrarian option" That is startlingly accurate. As much as I like (some of) the Fallout games, the ethical dilemmas presented in them usually just come down to that scorpion and the frog shitpost. There's no equally valid choices with moral implications other than "Do you want to do the quest or do you want to fuck everyone else and yourself over for laughs y/n"

I always found it interesting how the temple of trials is this elaborate stone structure, clearly taking the efforts of professional masons and artisans to construct... Yet the villagers of Arroyo, who supposedly built the thing live in tents outside of it.

I guess they ran out of stone for their habitats? 🤔

I've gotten so used to you doing total conversion mods for Fallout that I was really confused when it turned out you were actually talking about an official game 😂

"Now most people associate the series with Bethesda's open-world games."
"They are, of course, painfully and spiritually misguided."

Theres something about Warlockracy's voice recording that makes him sound like an AI, but not all the time.

It's strange to me how little games have mechanics related to persuasion where they don't just have a convenient dialogue option labeled basically "the right answer."
I'd like a game that organically tests your knowledge or silver tongue through having a myriad of options, and you have to just understand the characters and the situation to manipulate or persuade them naturally.

7:09 Wasn't Todd. Avellone was the one last I heard. He never liked the idea of talking animals including the Intelligent Deathclaws and wanted a lot of stuff that was in both Fallout 1 and 2 not to carry over into future entries. Wanamingos and Floaters for example. Meanwhile, the devs wanted talking Mutant animals to be in Fallout - the S'lanter are a good example - but they could never get them to work with the game's atmosphere, so you can only find left over references to them in 1 and 2.

Also funny story - Gizmo was originally going to be the correct choice long term (Killian would end up becoming a paranoid sociopathy after taking over) and have more content related to either choice - but studio meddling occurred when the higher ups thought, unironically, that gamers won't get such a morally grey scenario, and had the team make it more black and white situation instead; Kilian is the good choice, Gizmo is the bad choice.

Frank Horrigan's extremely inconsistent depictions would be referenced with Legate Lanius in New Vegas. A reference, that's what it was.