Des Moines Weekends

Whenever I describe my weekends in Des Moines to my coworkers or Denver friends, I hope that people imagine something like this:


Stolen from a certain site.

F:NV: Number Three: Ungratified Expectations

Nine days ago I left you with the blistering question: what was being projected by the crashed satellite at the desert drive-in? Some of you probably quit your jobs because you couldn't concentrate on anything but the mystery. Well, what was being projected was this: an eye, a searching, frantic eye.

When I began activating the satellite I received a warning that I should probably have a much higher level than mine, so I gave it up for now and wandered off. The bulk of the mystery remains. Of course, no other wanderers would approach the satellite and certainly none would activate it and be levitated or teleported (Blogger thinks that's not a word) into wherever the related action takes place. I'd like to come back here when I'm ready and find the crash site swarming with yokels, maybe a few corpses, maybe see someone zap out, bwip. It's something missing from games like this: NPC curiosity. The game's various scorpions and robot/brain hybrids and drug fiends and military personnel know to run toward me, screaming or firing weapons, but not to check out this bright-lit anomaly in the nothingness of the sand.

 
Anyway, a small adventure ensued. I visited this theme park (really a town surrounded by a roller coaster track) and shot up a bunch of fuckers in a hotel. Dynamite, grenades, I was almost entirely crippled afterward, blood-soaked, but I saved a wiener of a deputy and now have a secondary mission that requires me to find a new sheriff for the roller coaster town. This can be the wiener himself, I think, or a military entity, or a robot, or maybe something else. Who knows? I got distracted from this quest when I saw an enormous dinosaur silhouetted in the distance.

This dino is actually a tourist attraction, a sort of billboard for the hotel which is at the heart of Novac (its very name derived from the hotel's neon no vacancy sign, with its burnt-out letters). Inside this dinosaur is a gift shop and some stairs leading to the mouth. There is also, after the first DLC download, a set of controls accessible from behind the gift shop counter that lets you uproot and pilot the lumbering beast and roar and smash ghouls. The scratchy holotape instructions tell you to be careful how you aim the radioactive breath, but, alas, the radioactive breath mechanism is broken or stolen, who knows.

Okay, I made up all that about piloting the dinosaur just to confuse anyone's who's played this game. Really what you do is climb the stairs from the gift shop and exit into the dino's mouth, where you find this sniper, who has some information on the guy who shot you but will only give it up after you clear a nearby rocket facility of its ghoul infestation. Of course.

*Fallout New Vegas is a HUGE PIECE OF SHIT... I would love to write more witty comments but am knee in Vault 11...*

F:NV: Number Two: More Evidence of Dave

Today I found more evidence of Dave in the Mojave wasteland:

A wee little dino, left atop an ammo box.

How did I find this dino? By blowing up a bunch of jerks, of course. I have been slinging lit dynamite like a robot made to sling lit dynamite and have somehow not run out. Every time I separate someone into little disgusting bits, I reach into their remains and pull out more explosives. And one interesting thing about the engine used in Fallout is that I can reach into the smallest part of the person's body--into a leg or a portion of skull--and extract what I need. Yes! In this game you are able to root around in someone's brains and extract bottle caps, a weapon, a suit of leather armor. I am curious--is this an artifact of carelessness or a carefully considered mechanic to keep you form losing access to loot if an exploded torso goes over the edge of a cliff or glitches into a boulder?

Well, whatever. My real mission today was not to rob corpses but to track down a radio signal, picked up by the boombox strapped to my wrist, and I found its source at this drive-in movie screen.

Well, it was late morning. There was no movie to see. There was a crashed satellite, twitching in the lot.

Can you guess what happened? Yes, you can: I waited for the sun to fall. Some jerks came along at some point and got so close I had to give up the dynamite for a shotgun. But then the night came up and the satellite clicked to life and projected--what?

F:NV: And Dave's Body

Two nights ago I dreamt that a new Fallout game was released. Yeah! Well, it was either that or an expansion for New Vegas. I don't know. The premise was that you explored a desert waste again but this time on a scooter. And you could buy a peripheral hard plastic scooter to sit on at home. And it vibrated and tilted around and probably had controls or something, who knows. Rominger was so excited that he showed up to buy the game in Fallout cosplay gear. He also dyed his hair a cool nickely silver.

Anyway, this inspired me to pick up a copy of New Vegas and Dave, via gchat, challenged me to a dual/duel blog series of our New Vegas playthroughs. Okay! It's on! Get ready for shaky photos of my television taken while I wobble in a crouch, trying not to fall over into fresh cat vomit.

New Vegas is pretty much Fallout 3 but with more sun and a brown filter over everything instead of a green. Also there is an army of weirdos who dress like Roman soldiers and a sexbot and a mysterious guy who commands you via video display and, of course, mutated animals and lawless violence. The game opens when you're shot in the brain for implied but unspecified reasons by this asshole:

Well, okay, dick! Luckily, a friendly (?) robo digs you out of the earth and takes you to a kindly old doctor who not only frees ammunition from your skull but also helpfully asks you to make sure your skill points and various acumens are in order. This is of course ultraconvenient. If this kind of thing went down in real life I would likely shoot myself in the jaw for the chance to suddenly be good at HTML or motorcycling or handstands.

After I left this doctor I, well, I went and made some salmon quesadillas. Then I came back and shot some enormous geckos. What happened was, this guy came up out of a busted trailer and claimed his girlfriend was trapped by the beasts around a few hilly twists in the desert ahead. I chased her trail through the dust and finally had to start chucking dynamite, bang, gore everywhere, bits of gecko, and when I finished them off the dude appeared again and admitted his lie. There was no girlfriend. He only asked me to clear out the geckos so he could get "the stash up there." Well, I blew him up too, and what was the stash up there? A little table, a camera, a few bullets, and Dave's body:

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