"War Never Changes," Except Apparently in Every Detail--But I Get Your Point, Perlman

I beat Fallout: New Vegas yesterday. Sort of. The epilogue slideshow telling me the fates of around fifteen characters and sideplots made me realise there are an extraordinary number of alternate endings to this game. I got a lot of unhappy or ambivalent endings--people wandering off into the wasteland unfulfilled, going crazy, changing their names, or just carrying on as before. I was toying with the idea of installing Oblivion again and playing it again before Skyrim's released, but now I want to try for some of the other endings in New Vegas. I never even found the guy voiced by Kris Kristofferson.

There's not just minor plots, there are several primary factions you can side with that change the ending substantially. I ended up siding with Mr. House, the super computer running New Vegas whose ending installs him as dictator of Vegas and the surrounding Mojave. You get a lot of hard-ass dialogue options when you work for him, and, hey, he's voiced by Rene Auberjonois.

This is Matilda, the character I beat the game with;



I focused on Medicine, Speech, and Guns for skills. Speech is so much more fun and useful in the Fallout games than it is in Oblivion, I'm hoping it's one of the things that'll carry over to Skyrim. I particularly liked the Terrifying Presence perk you get with a high Speech--you can cause people to lose their shit through dialogue without a shot being fired.

Anyway, the final battle on Hoover Dam was a great shit storm. I figured out the console command to pause the game while freeing the camera, so here are some random shots I found in the fray. Mind you, none of this is from cinematics, it's all stuff that was happening, much of it I wasn't even aware of until I tracked the camera around;





That's Raul Tajeda, the character voiced by Danny Trejo. You're not normally allowed to have more than one companion, but I used a mod to disable that restriction. It didn't really make the game easier since, having gotten my character to maximum level, the game was already pretty easy at that point.