Fallout 2 - 20/20 hours

At last I am finally at Navarro.

Again.

I don't think I'm going to make it.

I have a team of the most elite fighters the wasteland has to offer. Sulik, who has been with me since practically the beginning of the game, now equipped with a suit of Brotherhood of Steel power armor and wielding a high-tech ripper blade. Cassidy, of Vault City, who uses an automatic shotgun to deadly effect. And Marcus, the rogue super mutant with the incredibly potent minigun. Together, we can tear through almost anything the wasteland has to offer . . .

Except Enclave patrols. Those give us some serious problems. I'm hoping that the troops at the base are less potent. Only a few wear power armor, and we should be able to take them one at a time. However, much of this will be utterly dependent on my luck in achieving critical hits.

It's a fact I've learned to my sorrow in the process of clearing out the various sidequests. For example, while driving from Vault City to Broken Hills, we stumbled upon a mysterious cave in the desert. Exploring it, we found it to be booby-trapped with explosives and deadfalls. In the center of the cave was a major raider base. In the inevitable bloodbath, the raiders did an average of 3 points of damage to me. However, my team's collective damage was so low (at this point I had Vic instead of Marcus on my side) and the enemy's number so high that they made dozens of attacks before we could take them down. So it was kind of inevitable that I'd take a critical hit that did 382 points of damage (compared to my max hit point total of 90). However, you can't really plan around those sorts of events, you just have to suck it up and reload the game.

On the other hand, I've been buying up improved critical perks for some time now, so my critical hit chance is better than 20%. When I use an aimed shot, I do massive damage reliably enough for it to be a viable strategy. But there's no escaping the element of luck involved in such a scheme.

It's something that has to be done, however. I've already cleared out most of the wasteland's major sidequests. The only exceptions are New Reno, which is far too skeevy for me to get involved in, and San Francisco, which I'm saving for last.

I wound up using the wiki for more of these quests than I'd like to admit, primarily because the logic on these quests is not that of mere mortals like you and me. Like, where do you suppose the voice recognition module for Vault 13 turned out to be? Did you guess the weapon dealer in an isolated corner of New Reno? Me neither.

I guess you're just supposed to thoroughly explore everything, take careful notes, and be willing to accept the massive time sink this entails. I am not quite that hardcore. I prefer to keep the story moving forward, even at the cost of a certain amount of verisimilitude (I suppose there is a certain logic to an ancient bit of more or less useless technology finding its way into the hands of someone who can't use it and doesn't know what it is, but still).

New Reno actually seems like it's particularly bad at this, though. When I raided the stables in order to shut down Jet production, nothing in the game acknowledged this whatsoever. After I slaughtered my way through all the guards and scientists (and a few unfortunate drug-addled slaves who didn't seem to realize I was freeing them from cruel medical experiments), I wound up getting hit on by Myron, the creepy teenager who is responsible for inventing Jet. He even offered to join my party. This startled me so much that I consulted the wiki. Much to my dismay, I learned that if I capped him, I would be considered a child killer.

Not wanting to stain my sterling reputation, I accepted his offer, then promptly abandoned him in Broken Hills. I don't expect the game to take this into account (seeing as how its much vaunted freedom seems to have a huge blind spot for this whole area), but at least I feel better knowing I did what I could.

Which brings me back to Navarro. I have to go there. It's essential to finding my missing tribe. Yet my chances of surviving a frontal assault are small. If all else fails, I could try infiltrating it again, but I really feel like the story of the Chosen One requires an Enclave blood bath. Whether that is attainable or not remains to be seen.