» Fri May 04, 2012 9:32 am
I just completed it today - took me the better part of 4 days (around 10 hours total or so). It ended well, but had a very sad feel to the whole thing. The characters are so memorable, and Frederick Sinclair was a real romantic at heart, which made me really feel for him. You could just visualise how things were prior to the bombs coming, and immediately after, and it plays out like a very tragic drama, one without a good ending. I ended up killing Domino, not because I wanted to, but because I didn't prostrate myself before him when we first met. Looking at the wiki, I don't see how on earth we could possibly have known that in order to keep him alive we needed to make sure we never picked any riposte answers to his offensive attitude, but perhaps that's the way the game was designed - the average man would end up killing him. I certainly felt very very good about killing him as more and more details of the casino's history were revealed. A complete scum, but memorable. Christine and Dog had less of an impact on me, but they were nevertheless likeable, and they both got their good endings, although it's sad that Christine chose to stay and not leave with me to start anew. Christine's muteness also kind of worked, and gives some ideas about creating companion mods without the need to find voice actors! And poor Vera.. those holograms of her walking around in the Suites really chilled me - it was like ghosts in a haunted house, replaying the last moments of her life. It was just so so sad....
So what did I get out of it? A couple of souvenir gold bars (all I could carry - you're not meant to take the whole pile, are you?) which will never be sold and will adorn my room in Novac, some nifty new weapons which I probably won't use well with my current skillset (Gauss rifle, holorifle, 3 variants of cosmic knives, 2 variants of knife spears, over a hundred throwing knife spears - my melee and energy weapons skills haven't really been levelled up much), some nice armour and helmets, a couple of police pistols (how I hate .357 pistols but they were great for taking out speakers), a beautiful dress (just one. I couldn't find it in my heart to rip the other one off Vera's skeleton), a neat tuxedo ripped off the still-warm corpse of a scumbag, loads of new recipes, a truckload of casino chips (broke their bank) and lots of memories - some good, some bad, mostly sad. I still think it was tedious (especially the speakers - the clouds are designed so that you can usually find an alternative path around them, and I never had any problems with any holograms - you just need to avoid walking right in front of them, and you can use terminals to make them walk away, but those speakers can really ruin your day if you can't see them hidden in nasty places - I think everytime I died and reloaded was due to a speaker), but it was a really good ride. I just wish the casino interior part of the game was longer, and the part outside shorter.
I'm standing at the gates to the Mojave now, looking back at the casino against the red sky. Would almost be anticlimatic to head back, but I guess I have to. Did I miss anything?