Fallout: New Vegas - 16/20 hours

After killing Benny, I rummaged through his suite on the thirteenth floor and found something remarkable - a securitron with a huge smiling face. He was called Yes Man, and he is the most dangerously designed robot I've ever seen. He cheerfully complies with every command anyone ever gives him. Benny used him to infiltrate Mr House's network and find the platinum chip (including setting up the ambush against me). Then I killed Benny, and now Yes Man works for me.

This is exactly as unsettling as you might think. Yes Man is so completely guileless and accommodating, and even when you're talking about terrible atrocities and betrayals, he is chipper and positive. I can understand why you would want your AI servant to be helpful, but wouldn't you at least put a password on that thing.

It's aggravating because it's such an obvious security oversight, and there's no way in the game to fix it. What's to stop some guy from capping me and taking over Yes Man? Or just strolling in and sabotaging my plans by accident? Basically, I have to rely on the plot to keep me safe.

Even with this glaring strategic error, he's still pretty entertaining in a creepy sort of way.  Of all the paths through the end game, he's probably my favorite. Mister House is condescending and demanding, the NCR is bland and far-flung, and the Legion is awful.  The second half of the game is you running around do various errands and sidequests, with a representative of one of the factions acting as your handler. I'm curious as to the origin of this structure. Did they come up with the sidequests first and then use the main quest as an excuse to send you out to them, or was the main quest always intended to send you on a circuit of the various faction, and so they came up with sidequests for you when you got there?

I guess what I'm saying is that the plot makes sense, but it has a kind of stitched-together quality. Your goal is to run around to the different factions of the Mojave wasteland and get their support for a future battle at Hoover Dam. This can involve aiding a power-play by a junior member of the Omertas, in order to stop his superiors from attacking the Strip or exposing a cannibal cult in the White Glove society. Most of the missions require some sort of tact or diplomacy to get the optimal results.

Which is why taking the platinum chip to the secret bunker underneath the  Legion base was such a refreshing change of pace. In theory, I could have approached them under a banner of peace, because Caesar sent one of his spies into the Strip to give me a pardon, but then that would require playing nice with the Legion, and I'd much rather just let my super sledge do the talking.

It was kind of a rough battle. Caesar's Praetorian Guard chewed me up a few times with their ballistic fists (a weapon who's utility I'm not sure I understand - granted, they were effective against the guy with the hydraulic sledgehammer, but centering an explosion around a punch just seems like it's putting your people unnecessarily in the line of fire - surely a plasma rifle would be much safer to wield). However, I countered by doing a shit-ton of drugs, and thus was able to muddle through in a pharmaceutically-enhanced rage.

Once I slaughtered my way through the entire Legion garrison (and how much of a bummer is it that you can't release the slaves or find some way to deprogram the child soldiers), I made my way down into the bunker, and reactivated a giant army of securitrons, who, with the updated software drivers from the platinum chip (and maybe this is just my ignorance of computers showing, but why would you build robots with grenade launchers and on-board self-healing protocols, and not install the software right at the factory, it's not as if the upgraded weapons are an after-market modification), will become an army potent enough to give its commander uncontested control of the Mojave region.

And for that, Mr House had to die. It's absolutely my least favorite part of the game. His plan can't be allowed to succeed. He's a ruthless autocrat, who, if given control of the Mojave would turn it into his own private kingdom, ruling from his cryogenic stasis pod as a nigh-immortal god-king, and while the region may prosper under his rule, it would be at the cost of an untold amount of oppression and bloodshed.

On the other hand, he's helpless old man, and killing his is cold-blooded murder. It's possible to spare him, by leaving his life-support on but disconnecting him from the rest of his network, thus leaving him entombed in a coffin-sized chamber, utterly unable to interact with the world in any way, but he regards this (with no small reason) as a fate worse than death. It's really a no win scenario.

Which I suppose is this game in a nutshell. Like my mission to the Boomers, who are fairly decent, ordinary people on a personal level, and thus it would be cruel to wipe them out. Yet they are also xenophobic and trigger happy, and thus I feel less than comfortable about helping them get a bomber plane in order to secure their alliance. Or the Great Khans, who have been kicked around by the NCR for the last generation or two, and thus don't deserve to be taken advantage of by the Legion, but who nonetheless have been seriously dangerous raiders in the past, and wind up taking future inspiration from the fucking Mongols. Was helping them a humanitarian kindness or dangerously irresponsible?

I suppose I should admire the game's moral complexity. In real life, one tries to do the right thing, but it's not always easy to know what that is. Fallout: New Vegas is good at making its choices similarly murky, which is part of the reason I enjoy it so much. I'll just have to set aside some time to play a game where I can be unambiguously righteous in order to cleanse my palate.