The first part of Fallout: New Vegas' plot is astonishingly simple. You're tracking down the guy who shot you and left you for dead. You do this by going to a place and doing a random favor for the locals and then getting directions to the next place. Technically, you only do this three times, but at least one of the favors is a major sidequest and, of course, there are plenty of distractions (raider attacks, Legion assassin squads, "Lonesome Drifters" who have no apparent purpose but to spout backstory at you, etc), and these things make the journey seem much longer and more involved.
The sidequest was kind of goofy and kind of sad. The town of Novac, with its delightfully memorable t-rex shaped gift shop, has long relied on scavenged technology from the nearby Repconn launch facility, but recently the place has been occupied by ghouls. So it fell to me to go in and "clear the place out." Mostly, this involved me using a meat cleaver on basically everything I saw (I'd graduated from the shovel at this point), but there were some non-hostile ghouls who wanted my help clearing out the basement from another intrusive group - the nightkin (previously seen in the original Fallout, but I didn't actually fight any).
It is possible to approach this new group of creatures with diplomacy as well, but it requires stealthing your way to their leader, making a deal to find some technology, and then entering a chamber with a cornered ghoul (giving this quest three layers of "we want to go to a particular place, but there's a hostile occupier there"), negotiating with him, and then working your way back up the chain. Because I wasn't specced for either stealth or negotiation, I let my blade do the talking.
Which is a kind of visceral brutality that offends me on a personal level, but has the advantage of being faster. Reporting back to the upstairs ghouls, I learn that they want to use the Repconn facility to go on a pilgrimage to space. That the two-hundred year old rockets are likely to be hugely unreliable, or that this means abandoning their loyal technician, Chris Haversham (who is a human who thinks he's a ghoul, and thus cannot withstand the radiation) does not seem to matter all that much. So a couple of quick fetch-quests later (including an uncompensated 500 cap purchase at the junkyard), and they're on their way. I return to Novac, and get the information I need, and then I'm on my way.
Perhaps seeking redemption for my needless violence at the Repconn facility, when the NCR commander at Boulder City asks me to take care of some Great Khans who have holed up in a building with hostages, I decide to take the high road and talk them down. I do this primarily with the aid of drugs. My Party Time Mentats are able to give me just enough Charisma to defuse the situation (the primary lesson I take away from the Fallout series - drugs are awesome).
From there it's a straight shot to the Strip. Theoretically, there's a sidequest in the ruins surround the Strip, where you deal with a local gang of Elvis impersonators in order to get a passport into the city, but you can bypass that with a credit check at the gate (they don't even charge you anything, just check to see if you have more than 2000 caps, and even then only the first time you arrive). The wasteland's barter economy is such that I have literally never had insufficient caps after taking the default route (it is possible to take a different route to the strip and get here with much less stuff, but it's far more dangerous).
Inside the strip itself, I'm immediately accosted by an old friend, Victor, the cheerful cowboy securitron who rescued me from the grave back in Goodsprings. Victor is perhaps the most mysterious character in Fallout: New Vegas. He obviously works for Mister House, and has been keeping tabs on me in order to guide me to the Lucky 38 casino, but he was in Goodsprings for at least five years before I ever showed up. He's also one of only three named securitrons (the other two being Jane, who appears to be Mr. House's girlfriend . . . somehow, and Yes Man, who we'll get to in a future update). Is he a slave to Mr House? An independent agent? What is his true role? Spy? Representative? Enforcer? I don't think you actually get that much backstory on the guy, so I guess we'll never known.
Mister House is an eccentric recluse who only appears to you in the form of an image on a computer monitor. He's got that classic mid-20th-century businessman look about him, but that is almost certainly a carefully cultivated persona. He is imperious and demanding and frankly, kind of a drag to work for, but he tells me that my assailant, Benny, is his former protege, and can be found at a nearby casino, so revenge, and the recovery of my original delivery, are right at my fingertips.
But first, blackjack.
I always have a Luck score of at least 6 coming out of character creation so that when I boost it with the cybernetics at the New Vegas medical clinic, I can basically make the casinos of the Strip into my personal piggy bank. Online guides say that you should have a Luck of at least 8 to try it, but I've found that with a Luck of 7 and anything remotely resembling reasonable play (though super high luck blackjack is fun because you can, in fact, be dangerously cavalier and still expect to win), breaking the bank is only a matter of time.
It kind of breaks immersion for my character to do this, when he is so close to getting revenge, but I'm not really in the mood for subtlety this playthrough, and when I confront Benny, all hell is going to break loose in the Tops casino, so I figured I should grab the money first, because I'm not sure they'll welcome me back in afterwards.
Confronting Benny is moderately satisfying. He tries to weasel his way out of it, but I'm not buying what I'm selling, and while ordinarily, the fact that my weapons were confiscated at the front door is enough to put a damper on my aggression, this time I'm playing a melee character, so having only a straight razor is not that big of a problem for me. What's more, thanks in large part to the money I won from that very casino, I am now a cyborg, more machine than man, so I'm largely bulletproof. I cut a huge swath through the Chairmen, kill Benny, and recover the platinum chip.
Now, all I have to do is explore Benny's apartment, to see if there's anything valuable up there . . .
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