Fallout: New Vegas - 25 hours

I'm not sure how I should go about summarizing Old World Blues. It's kooky. Most of the last two hours, I spent just listening to the various characters, enjoying their odd vocal performances and bizarre, overblown dialogue. Yet, simply quoting the game (and there are a lot of fun, quotable lines) would get pretty dull, pretty fast.

So, let me try and summarize the plot thus far. There's this pre-war scientific facility called Big Mountain that did important clandestine weapons research. Somehow, it survived the war more or less intact. In the subsequent centuries, it's become mad scientist central. The remaining researchers have transplanted their brains into robot bodies and completely lost touch with their humanity (this leads to some of the best jokes - like the head robot mistaking your character's toes for penises, and then repeatedly getting sidetracked by the bizarre implications of such a theory).

Your character gets tangled up in all this by stumbling upon a crashed satellite that is somehow connected to Big Mountain and knocks them out and/or teleports them to a medical facility, where the robots remove your brain and install some kind of high-tech relay in its place. Due to the area's generalized defenses against robots and cyborgs, you're stuck there indefinitely. The only way out is to perform fetch quests for the robot mad scientists until you can recover your brain and get it put back in.

Ordinarily this is the sort of plot that bugs the hell out of me, but the scientist robots are all so entertainingly out of touch that I can't hold much of a grudge. I'm too interested in what they'll say or do next. Plus, it's not like they're holding my brain hostage. Somehow it fell into the possession of an antagonistic mad scientist called Dr Mobius who doesn't really seem more mad than my "allies" per se, but is threatening Big Mountain with his ARMY OF ROBOT SCORPIONS.

In other words, it gets pretty over the top. But it is also astonishingly grim. As you learn about the background of Big Mountain, you uncover all manner of atrocities committed in the the name of science (such as using prisoners of war as human test subjects). It is this juxtaposition of the silly with the bleak that categorizes the Fallout series at its best.

So far, I've only finished one mission - retrieving the data for an alternate module on my sonic emitter. It rests inside a laboratory that was dedicated to the creation of animal-robot hybrids. In order to retrieve it, you have to go through a mock high school where unwitting test subjects thought they were supposed to learn about communist infiltration, but actually were meant as target practice for the cyberdog prototypes. The deception is suitably awful, but the mission itself is kind of fun because one of the robots, Dr Borous, used to run the facility, and the whole "training scenario" revolves around his obsessive lingering resentments about his unhappy high school experience (I confess - I laughed at "Richie Marcus likes balls" - because I am a child).

Aside from the talking and the brief fetching, the only other thing I've done is retrieve personality modules for the various appliances around my base. It may not have been the most sensible design decision to make a germaphobic sink or a sleazy seed-dryer that can't stop coming on to you, but it gives the place such a delightfully twisted "Beauty and the Beast" vibe that it's worth the detour.

It's a shame that I saved this DLC for last. It has so many fun little creations that I'm probably going to want to play with them for a long time to come.