Enoch

YES! Due to FO3 I have a pathological hatred towards the DC metro. Eh. Try taking the Red Line to work everyday.

I find the skillbook-based perk useful-- getting 20 points per magazine is very nice for meeting thresholds. E.g., I got my Lockpick up to 55 pretty quickly, so that I could open all Average and below locks, and could use a magazine to open any Hard locks I find. Later on, I'll probably raise it to 80 and leave it there, guessing that there are few enough Very Hard locks that I can rely on magazines for them. Combine that with increasing the effectiveness of the Books, and it's a nice skillpoint-efficiency perk.

Leftovers. The other night, I cooked a pork tenderloin. Seasoned it with salt & pepper and browned it in a pan, then transferred to a baking dish in a 400F oven to cook until the internal temp reached 140F. Meanwhile, in the still-hot pan, sauteed a minced shallot and a clove of garlic in a little oil. Then added some chicken stock, some white wine, some cider vinegar, an apple (peeled cored and sliced), and a fistful of dried cherries (chopped). Reduced. Added a little butter and salt. Once the meat was cooked and rested, sliced and served with the sauce. And some green beans. One of the better pan sauces I've ever made-- just the right balance of vinegar to sweet to savory. (Too bad I didn't measure any of the liquids.)

By the way, I forgot to mention this in the 'early impressions' post I made a day or two ago, but it deserves specific praise: The NCR propaganda posters are awesome. Great work by the artists and/or designers there.

I think it's a well-designed game. Good balance of luck and strategy, and the strategy element of when and where to use face cards is multi-layered and has some synergies with deck construction. But the interface for picking out your deck is soooo clunky (on PC, anyway) that I just get infuriated whenever I start playing, so I haven't been playing that much. It's actually the one area where I'm having persistent glitching/performance issues. Moving side-to-side through my deck, one press of the arrow key usually lags and often moves me 2 cards instead of 1. It makes selecting the card I want quite frustrating-- I can't help but picture how much more easily and smoothly it would go if I could use my mouse, like I can in every other game designed post-1990.

Legion and NCR money seem to be intended as exchange for chips. After you get chips, you can probably exchange back to caps. I never did this, though, so I can't confirm. Sell it to any merchant for bottle caps? That's what I've been doing. I was a little disappointed that I didn't get a better rate of exchange on the NCR money from the trader at the NCR outpost than I did in Goodsprings and Primm.

I've only gotten about 12 hours into the game (just achieved level , but that's enough for some general impressions, I think. Plot wise, I've been to Nipton, but not Novac, yet. I've explored just about all of the locations in the general vicinity of the plot locations so far, excepting where I was killed or chased away by something I couldn't handle (Deathclaws, Giant Radscorps, pack of Nightstalkers, pack of feral ghouls, etc.). The combat is much improved over FO3, if only because VATS isn't quite the "win" button that it used to be. As opposed to FO3's "it's a turn-based mode where the enemy doesn't get a turn!" enemies are returning fire effectively. And if they outnumber me and I can't rattle off a few quick fatal headshots, I'm usually toast. That said, the effect of skill level on combat seems inordinately miniscule to me. I went with Energy Weapons as a tag, and have a grand total of 14 in my Guns skill, but I'm not having much trouble at all hitting things with conventional firearms. The crafting seems fairly pointless. Food is easy enough to find (or cheap enough to buy), and the Hunger counter goes so slowly that you'll never be in starvation trouble as long as you pick up fruit when you see it. For the more complicated stuff, you're pretty much required to memorize or write down which particular types of the various shelf-stuffing in the gameworld that you need to be gathering, and, frankly, I can't be bothered. I'm using it to recharge my spent energy-ammo, and that's all. I guess it'd be useful to convert common ammo types into rarer ammo types later on, but I'm still too early to have any rare-ammo-using weapons. The hardcore-mode additions of dehydration, tough-to-heal crippled limbs, and stimpak healing over time are great. Anyhow, what I like most so far is the sense of mystery. As I said, I'm not very far into the storyline, but I'm the mysterious motivations of Victor (I particularly liked what happened when I asked him to help against the Powders, and then talked to him later to ask why he didn't show up), the creepy graffiti in out-of-the-way locations that seems to be addressed specifically to me, and the story of the 5 other couriers and the bizarre bric-a-brac they were carrying created a very satisfying sense of mystery.

IIRC, the rule is 1 humanoid and 1 non-humanoid. So, one of Rex/ED-E, and one actual person. I've been running solo so far, though, as I still haven't gotten any further than Nipton. I've found ED-E, but haven't repaired it yet (I think I got sufficient Science with my last level-up, though), and I've met Cass, but, as far as I can tell, I don't yet have the option to recruit her.

Yeah, assuming that you mean "Bison Steve's" (a clear reflection of "Buffalo Bill's" in the real Primm) I could only take down those last few guys laying some mines and drawing them out.

My first (entertaining) bug:

Thanks, I was thinking of stone, but I was thinking it might have been a false friend (that's what it's called in Finnish...) FYI, in the U.S., "pit" is by far the more common term. "Stone" is still in the dictionary, but a lot of people would look at you funny if you starting talking about an "olive stone" (or cherry, peach, etc.).

Those are probably only skill magazines. They provide a temporary boost. The books that give you a permanent increase are rather rare.

Ah. Thanks. I wasn't paying much attention to the plot-quest, and I didn't really walk through Primm in the most logical of ways.

Quick spoiler request: Who, if anyone, gives you the quest This might be blindingly obvious with a bit more poking around the area, but I had to go to bed at that point, and now I'm sitting at work getting a little curious.

I think Hurlie's talking about crippled limbs. I don't have the V13 Canteen, but I'd be really surprised if it or a quick nap can fix a broken leg (which is what traps tend to do to me, at least).

There's a higher standard applied to the U.S. at present, simply because the Dollar is pretty uniformly viewed as the global reserve currency of choice, and because the big moneymaking engine of world trade for emerging economies over the past 30 years is basically summed up as "sell things to Americans." It's a puzzling little mess we're in. There is no budget (or political will) for further fiscal stimulus (quite the opposite, really, particularly at the state and local level), so the Fed is the only one that can really act to try to do something to alleviate economic problems. But their big weapon-- a second round of "quantitative easing"-- probably isn't going to work particularly well. It's main function is to flood the banking industry with cheap liquidity. That's great for the balance sheets of the banks, but they're not really passing on that lending to the small and medium-sized American businesses that are going to have to be the engine of recovery. Instead, most of it either sits on their books or gets lent into overseas emerging markets. The emerging markets (like the Russian chap WoD quotes) don't view this all too kindly, though, as the flood of cheap lending has the effect of strengthening their currency and raising the price of their exports. This helps American businesses indirectly (raising the price of competing imports and strengthening their exported products), but it's a weak echo of the original action, and creates its own complications in inviting unfriendly trade practices in return. It's going to be a rough decade. And, really, this or something like this has been baked into the pie for the last 10 or 15 years. The American economy has been fundamentally misallocating resources for a long time due to many factors, but chiefly to perverse incentives in the financial sector and the inability/unwillingness of regulators to recognize and/or correct them. As for other countries, I find it somewhat comforting that, after all the cultural homogenization and making nicey-nicey of the last 60 years, countries are sticking so closely to their national stereotypes. Half a million job cuts announced in the UK, and the Brits apply an extra-thick coat of lip-stiffener. Threaten to raise the retirement age 2 years in France, and the mob takes to the streets and shuts down any actual work for weeks.

So, have I ruined anything for myself by translating ? Bonus spoiler: It's

Heh. My first character has the same Tags as Maria. But I have less Str & End (4, 3), more Ag & Lu (7, 5), and I took Trigger Discipline instead of Wild Wasteland. Also, has a Y chromosome. Have just completed what seems to be most of the Goodsprings quests, and struck out on the road towards Primm. (My tabletop gaming group met tonight, so not much time to play PC games today.)

OK: Caravan. Is there any way to select a card in your hand that isn't the one you just drew? This is driving me a little bit nuts. (EDIT: Figured it out) PC controls for the card game generally are extraordinarily annoying. (Using the arrow keys instead of the mouse? What is this, 1992??!) Everything else has been fine so far. A bit of a slow start, but that's OK in my book. No stability issues for me yet (on an nvidia card).

I think it's part of his prize for winning the fanfic contest.

Order online. Cook it yourself.

Quite true. The whole 'power of myth' thing was basically Joseph Campbell glomming onto Lucas because it would sell a lot of books for him, and SW nerds glomming onto the line Campbell was selling to gain intellectual cover for their guilty pleasure. If you want a popular late-70s film that mirrors the archetypal epic hero's journey, the best example isn't Star Wars, it's Rocky. The genius of the Star Wars films is/was in design: the art, models, sets, costumes, makeup, puppets, and sound were unbelievably cool. And cool production stuff like that is really really important in getting the audience to buy in. On topic, I'm mucking around with BG2. Just did the obligatory early run to Watcher's Keep to grab the potion bag, ammo belt, and bottomless quiver, after having already completing assorted minor quests, plus the Keep and the Druid Grove. I think the Planar Sphere is next. Then maybe Firkrag (or however you spell it).

That's a really cool article. Reminds me of how impressed I was when I was first playing PS:T and realized how the Hive background music shifted into a character motif when I walked by where Annah was standing.

The party has gained an item.

Clicking through to FO3 reviews on metacritic, the earliest I saw were posted the day before the NA release date.