Episode 306: Fallout: New Vegas

AFTER TEN YEARS OF PODCASTING, we're finally talking about New Vegas!

Transcript

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This is The Gorge. It's a podcaster. My friends and I gorge ourselves on what's happening in the world of video games and entertainment.

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For 10 whole years, The Gorge is brought to you by Patreon.com slash thegorge, where for just $3 a month you gain access to all of our bonus content and early access to our TTRPG series, The Reboot. Um yeah, we've been doing this shit for 10 years. Uh does it make us any money? No. Do I care? No. No. Uh it's fun.

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No.

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All that matters is that it's fun. It makes us a little paltry bit of cash every couple months, and that's truly all I ask for. Most of the time, you people are paying for my gotcha rolls. So thanks. Uh if you want to pay for my gotcha rolls and hear early episodes of the reboot and any bonus content, go to patreon.com slash the gorge. Also, you get pictures of my dog uh podcast mascot peanut. Yeah.

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I I'm free from uh Gorge uh subscribers paying for my gotcha rolls because I finally got my NP5 Draco, so now I think I can quit literally all gotchas forever.

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You're done. You're free. Congratulations. Now you can spend it on um Warframe colors, I think.

SPEAKER_10 1:36

Absolutely not to worry about. Is that what I'm gonna do on that? See, I'll spend I'll spend money on Warframe because that's not gambling, that's just uh exploitative micro microtransactions.

SPEAKER_02 1:44

You can gambling on on W-bucks. Is that what the kids call it in Warframe?

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Nah.

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No, it's platinum.

SPEAKER_04 1:53

Oh.

SPEAKER_02 1:53

Ah, okay. Well, this in our 10-year anniversary episode, we have decided to talk about something that we somehow have not talked about for 10 years.

SPEAKER_10 2:11

You'd think, given the character of the podcast, that it would have come up at some point. And indeed, there was an episode a few weeks ago where we got into a little bit of it. Yeah. But then we realized that we had we had to stay our blades.

SPEAKER_04 2:27

We had to hold we had to hold ourselves back. Um, because somehow for 10 years, we've never talked about Fallout New Vegas.

SPEAKER_02 2:39

We have Vegas.

SPEAKER_04 2:39

Even though this is ostensibly, this is functionally a Fallout podcast that does occasionally talk about other shit, but like at its core, it's mostly a Fallout podcast.

SPEAKER_02 2:52

We have done four to five episodes about Fallout 4 specifically.

SPEAKER_04 2:59

A game that I don't actually think is that good, but I like a lot.

SPEAKER_02 3:03

We've done like three episodes about 76 and a fake episode about three.

SPEAKER_01 3:08

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_02 3:10

We've somehow never talked about New Vegas.

SPEAKER_01 3:13

You guys have collected so many articles about Fallout 76's first year that you've made an episode dedicated to compiling all of them.

SPEAKER_04 3:22

Yeah. And yet, we never talked about Fallout New Vegas. That is partly because um I never really played it until recently.

SPEAKER_02 3:34

Pegans. I played it when it came out, um, but I think I've mentioned this before, maybe not on stream, but I mentioned it before to you guys multiple times, which is that uh much like with three, I never got to play much of the DLC for New Vegas because I had a first model 360 and it didn't have Wi-Fi, which meant connecting it to the internet meant I had to drag it into our basement and hook it up to the router there, and then like get like a really long Ether, like uh uh HDMI cable to connect it to the TV that's down there.

SPEAKER_05 4:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:14

And it was always a huge pain in the ass. So I just never did it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 4:20

I truly, okay, I vividly remember playing New Vegas for the first time because I was living in my little junky apartment in St. Petersburg, Florida, right? Um, but I never got into it because uh it didn't. I mean, like it didn't really hook me. Like I played a lot of Fallout 3. Um, unsurprisingly, the Fallout 4 fan played a lot of Fallout 3, a game that is also kind of doing what Fallout 4 is doing, which is being an exploring video game, not being like a like a plot video game. Um and so I played a lot of Fallout 3 and I played New Vegas. I was like, this is fine, but it was very plot heavy, and it was not what I was really looking for at the time, right? And so I just kind of fell off of it. I finished it, like I did a run, I did like a yes man playthrough or something, um, but it wasn't that deep, right? And then I was kind of done with it from there. And I never really played New Vegas again. I made an attempt at a replay a couple years back, a couple years back, like five years ago, I made an attempt to play it and I bounced off of it again. And then the show was essentially a New Vegas sequel, and I was finally like, okay. Well, no, Oats started playing it, and I could like hear it from the other room, and I was like, fine, I'll play it. And then I crushed it out in like a month and a half. Um, it just kind of ate my life super, super hard. Uh, and then I came out of it and I had to confess I had to come to the horrible realization. The thing that I am ashamed to admit after years and years and years of this, which is that New Vegas is the best one.

SPEAKER_10 6:03

It's really good, is the thing. Whenever, whenever fuckheads like me are like New Vegas is the best one, it's because New Vegas is the best one, unfortunately.

SPEAKER_04 6:10

New Vegas is actually the best one. It actually is the best one. New Vegas is uh it does, in fact, have that dog in it. Um, super it does have that dog, it has a robot dog, it's has several robot dogs.

SPEAKER_02 6:22

This is something that you've encountered uh another like uh situation you've encountered recently, Sarah, in which that that thing or that character that everyone says is the coolest.

SPEAKER_05 6:35

Yeah, I know.

SPEAKER_02 6:36

Yeah, yeah, they are.

SPEAKER_04 6:38

That's brutal. Do you know how hard it is for me to admit to being wrong and to have been wrong so consistently for so long? I will say, however, I continue to be validated. I hate that map. I hate that map. I hate New Vegas' map so much.

SPEAKER_10 6:55

The only thing I really enjoy about the New Vegas map is that the simple act of putting a wall of death claws between you and New Vegas does basically Yeah, it does like in that one swoop, despite being a completely open map, that one thing makes you go, alright, I as the player now have realized that the most efficient way to get to New Vegas is in fact to do a counterclockwise motion that takes me through a solid two-thirds of the map.

SPEAKER_04 7:25

Yeah, no, I think I think the design of it is is very smart. Like we can start there. Is that the the layout and kind of the structure of Fallout New Vegas is genius? The game is it it is that game, it is that guy. Um, it's fantastic, and part of that is that like the actual construction of the game is really smart. I'm just saying I think the map itself is very boring to look at. Um that's a game that cries out for a remake, like really hard.

SPEAKER_01 7:56

Yeah, I will be the first to admit, having been from the Mojave, there's not a whole lot you can do to improve the look, but it looks like that in real life. It does like that that's yellow instead of it.

SPEAKER_04 8:08

Part of the reason, I I I will say part of the reason that the that the the East Coast games, thus the the Bethesda games, um do function. Especially even like I was listening to Noah Caldwell, you know, to kind of get ready for this video. I listened to the big nine-hour Noah Caldwell trade's video about Fallout. Um he was talking about like you know, Fallout 3 is a very flawed video game, but it does have a great map, right? And it's because the Bethesda direction of kind of creating, not making like these one-to-one recreations, but more so trying to like evoke the character of the landscape, not so much what the landscape actually looks like, is probably the better option. Like West Virginia doesn't really look like that, but like you're evoking the vibe of it. And so even though it doesn't, it's not really like that, it it still feels like that, yeah. Right. Um I think generally speaking, like evoking these ideas um is probably better than just doing a one-to-one recreation because the real world is is kind of boring sometimes. Sorry. Um that being said, the actual like the bones of the matter, this whole like forcing you to like do the trick from good neighbor to prim, you know, up through Novak to have to do the whole thing. And and like you can, if you want, you can take the north trail from Good Neighbor to Vegas, and you can brute force junction. You can brute force it, you super can't, it's just hard because on one side is Cazidors and on the other side is Death Claws, right?

SPEAKER_02 9:53

Right.

SPEAKER_04 9:54

Um but you can still do it if you're super, super stubborn. You can bypass all that shit if you want.

SPEAKER_01 10:00

Um then there's Victor going, and here I am stuck in the middle with you, y'all.

SPEAKER_05 10:05

Yeah, having to go north with you, fighting all those Cazidors.

SPEAKER_10 10:09

Death Claws to the left of me, Cazidors to the right, here I am.

SPEAKER_05 10:14

Putting you back in that grave in Good Neighbor.

SPEAKER_02 10:17

Yeah. Now I do want to- I do want to point out one thing by the way, because you talked about how you played New Vegas before we dive much deeper. Um I also uh only really did one run of New Vegas, and I never I remember I never got to finish it.

SPEAKER_04 10:32

Oh, you've never seen a single ending at all.

SPEAKER_02 10:34

Yeah, because uh what happened was I was trying to do Veronica's quest. Uh Veronica's like uh like her primary quest where you have to find some kind of old world artifact and bring it to the brotherhood to be like, you know, here, look at we can actually advance as a culture.

SPEAKER_04 10:52

No, you can't.

SPEAKER_02 10:53

Um and what happened was you go into the vault and you find the gun.

SPEAKER_03 10:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:01

Well, there was no gun.

SPEAKER_03 11:05

New Vegas.

SPEAKER_02 11:06

Like it just there was nothing there for me to pick up.

SPEAKER_03 11:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:11

And I went. Well death happens. I guess I'm done.

SPEAKER_05 11:19

Yeah. Um, that sounds about right.

SPEAKER_02 11:25

Yeah. Um, but yeah, no, I think I think New Vegas' map is fine.

SPEAKER_04 11:33

It's fine. It's perfectly fine. It's sure it does exactly what it needs to do.

SPEAKER_02 11:38

I think I think one of the problems with it is that there's not really I guess like a lot of like because I was looking, I was actually looking at the Capital Wastelands map recently. And like, remember how like and and uh you know the Commonwealth also has this where it's like there's a lot of like both of those, like the Bethesda maps have like areas of concentration that serve as like, well, here is like you know a main hub area or like a more populated, densely populated area, like like you know, uptown Boston or you know, around like the the uh southwest southeast corner of of the capital wasteland, right? Where it's like here's where all the main people hang out and live.

SPEAKER_04 12:27

Sure.

SPEAKER_02 12:28

And New Vegas' version of that is the strip, which is one point on the map. Like it's it's a separate instance, right?

SPEAKER_04 12:41

But New Vegas has more stuff spread out across the map as well, and I think again, because New Vegas is the best one. Um probably I know it's hard. It's hard, it's so hard. I hate admitting to being wrong. Uh this will never happen again, I assure you. From here on out, I'm only gonna have correct opinions for the rest of my life, and I will never have to readjust them. This I promise to all of you.

SPEAKER_10 13:10

Well, well, like your opinion's always been correct. Like you've never said that fall at New Vegas isn't the best one ever.

SPEAKER_04 13:16

That's true.

SPEAKER_10 13:17

Whenever someone says that you did, in fact, say that, it's just them misremembering.

SPEAKER_04 13:21

They just misremembered, yeah. They have no idea. Um I've always been right.

SPEAKER_01 13:26

That's why she hit me in the head upset upside the head with a hammer the other day. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 13:30

To make sure you remember that I've never said anything to the contrary of Fallout's New Vegas being the best one. Yeah, absolutely. Um, but no, I do think this uh this spreading out of like multiple towns and lots of different little like stories being told in those locations, i it's good. It's good. It's good.

SPEAKER_02 13:49

It's it's the thing is it's it's like you mentioned that New Vegas is settled.

SPEAKER_04 13:54

Yeah.

unknown 13:55

Right?

SPEAKER_02 13:55

That's not a thing about it.

SPEAKER_04 13:58

New Vegas is about the end of the frontier, right?

SPEAKER_02 14:00

Like the Commonwealth, the the capital wasteland, you know, and Appalachia, like there's areas of wilderness that you that have been untouched, right? And like are too like, you know, or like you think of like uh fucking um the glowing sea, right? Yeah, four, where it's like, well, here's an area that's dangerous and hostile to go to. There's areas like that in New Vegas, but they are But it's Quarry Junction.

SPEAKER_04 14:28

The difference between Quarry Junction and and like the Glowing Sea is that Quarry Junction is a thing that was part of like this new civilization that sprung up from um like that like it is part of like this new post post-apocalyp apocalyptic civilization that was like functional. It was a they were making the limestone for concrete, right?

SPEAKER_02 14:53

Yeah, and it's been occupied.

SPEAKER_04 14:56

Yeah, and now it is full of death claws. It's different than this is still an untamed part of the world because New Vegas is kind of in a weird way an old-fashioned like Western, right? Right.

SPEAKER_02 15:09

Like if if new if New Vegas had started in Universe two weeks earlier, Corey Junction would have been fine.

SPEAKER_04 15:18

Yeah, exactly. Uh, which I think is very interesting. This is like the the the big thing, and again, and I don't it's gonna be really hard to not bring it up, but the rule is we can't bring up the DLC of this episode. Sorry. Because otherwise we'll be here.

SPEAKER_10 15:35

We will be here forever because I think I frankly have a lot more to say about the DLCs than I probably do the base game.

SPEAKER_04 15:43

Yeah, the thing is I could talk way more about the DLC. I would like to do a separate episode about the DLC if at all possible. Yeah, for sure. Um, unless we just want to cram it all in here and just it accept that the base game conversation will be a little light versus DLC, which I think is the most interesting part of New Vegas as well, frankly.

SPEAKER_02 16:05

Let's talk about as much of the base game as we want.

SPEAKER_04 16:09

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 16:10

And see how we feel as far as time goes by the time we are exhausted of that.

SPEAKER_04 16:16

Because like, well, the thing is that kind of like the main thesis of like the whole, like, New Vegas is pretty separate from not separate, it is the main game is telling one story and the DLC, all four of the DLC, are telling one complete second story, right? Like those two things. They but they're not like they do influence each other, obviously. But they are, and they're both kind of about the same thing, which is old world blues, right? Not the DL, not the excellent DLC, but the idea of of the old world and letting go. Hey, imagine that. That's that's your art words for the whole game and all of its DLC, is the idea of you can't let go of the old world. And it's the thing that unites like all three of the major factions, um, and it's the thing that differentiates yes men, like the yes man route is this idea of not being able to let go. Right. Um, and I don't know. It it's good, it's really good. So I really like it.

SPEAKER_02 17:33

In the spirit of not talking about the DLC then, just yet, um, I'm really curious to know what everyone went with. For Saturn, what was your most like iconic route that you went with?

SPEAKER_10 17:46

Oh god, you're starting with me, huh?

SPEAKER_02 17:49

Or just I'm just saying, like, in general, like I know all the three of us have played it recently. Saturn has been a while, so yeah.

SPEAKER_10 17:54

For me, it has been uh I probably haven't played it since before this podcast started, funnily enough. Uh I would say that I always did the charisma speech builds because like I just like doing that.

SPEAKER_04 18:12

I I don't know the most fun way to play this game.

SPEAKER_10 18:14

Yeah. Funnily, I don't really like charisma builds in most games, but Fallout New Vegas is still very suited to it. You know? I feel like very often in games that uh the charisma build is literally just uh I want to not do a combat encounter. Um but Fallout New Vegas, while it does have some of that, it does have a lot more interesting representations for that as well. I usually did I wanna say I usually did a charisma build, and my main weapon was always like the riot shotgun or some variant thereof.

SPEAKER_04 18:53

Do you remember what ending you went with?

SPEAKER_10 18:55

Um, let me think. The first time. God, no. Um, I actually don't remember what my first ending was. I know in general I would do yes man.

SPEAKER_07 19:07

Okay.

SPEAKER_10 19:08

Um but not for the yes man is the only is the only correct answer, like to the like, you know, I can only trust my own politics reason, but because yes man is the most uh chaotic.

SPEAKER_04 19:20

That's correct. Correct, yeah. Yeah, that sounds about right, yeah.

SPEAKER_10 19:22

You you're less because I I know what's right for for Vegas and Yes Man more because yo fuck all these people.

SPEAKER_01 19:30

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_10 19:31

Correct, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:31

A vote for Saturn is a vote for anarchy versus a vote for Saturn is a vote for anarchy.

SPEAKER_10 19:36

Yeah, what I will say is, and and like I know we're not talking about the DLCs yet, but I will say uh as exemplary for what my uh usual approach to playing the game is, the first time I finished Lonesome Road, I picked the option to uh nuke everybody.

SPEAKER_04 19:49

That sounds about right. Interesting.

SPEAKER_10 19:52

I was like, yeah, no, uh, I think both the NCR and uh the Legion both need uh to be served some humble pie. Uh so I would like to, I would like, I would like to see them both turned into ghouls. Thank you very much. I understand. Well, have a nice day. And that's kind that was kind of my approach to New Vegas. Um also I'll mention this wasn't my first playthrough, it was my second playthrough, and I need to stress that I did this when I was in high school and was doing normal, uh bored high schooler things. My other iconic uh New Vegas playthrough was uh a principal, and tell me if this rings true for any kind of way that like I will play certain TTRPG characters today. Uh the thing I did for my second New Vegas playthrough is no matter what, unless the game stops me, I will kill everybody.

SPEAKER_05 20:38

I knew it!

SPEAKER_10 20:39

I was playing the second so familiar.

SPEAKER_05 20:42

I was not I'm not shocked at all. Wow.

SPEAKER_10 20:46

Uh the funnel the funny outcropping of this is uh and not to linger too long on my build, but I want to bring this up because I will forget later. When Prey 2017 came out, um, the director whose name escapes me, um fuck, I used to know it and I don't remember it anymore.

SPEAKER_04 21:03

Oh, um, oh my god, hold on.

SPEAKER_10 21:05

Is it Harvey?

SPEAKER_04 21:07

It's Harvey Smith.

SPEAKER_10 21:09

Harvey Smith. Uh he had made a tweet uh to the effect of like, just so you guys know, there's like accountings in in uh in the game for particularly seditious playstyles or something like that, right? Like and the thing is, I had no one knew what he was talking about. I found it immediately because my first playthrough, I accidentally killed someone, and I went, well, I may as well make it a project to kill literally everybody just to see how how the game handles that. And I ended up getting like not only the premature ending that you get for doing that, but also the uh obscure variant you get of one of that game's later game quests where the script changes completely because, like, oh, you're just killing everybody, I say.

SPEAKER_03 21:55

Great. Shit, I gotta play for twenty seventeen. Fascinating.

SPEAKER_10 21:59

It's so good. It's anyway, that that that was me. I I like to talk sweet and carry around a big shotgun. Yeah, totally. I don't know. I think I did some science in the thing. Uh I just depended on the shotgun for everything, otherwise. You don't need a lot of skill to use a shotgun good.

SPEAKER_04 22:12

No, not at all. I would s um I know you played this game a lot, so I mean you've probably literally done all of them.

SPEAKER_01 22:21

Yeah, I think so. My two favorite ways to play New Vegas that I've done is so there is naturally, of course, uh the Angus route, which is where I pick a character who has maxed out physical traits, semi-decent luck and and charisma, and like bone stupid intelligence.

SPEAKER_05 22:52

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 22:53

And then I walk in with the tag like the skills tag would be unarmed, explosives, and speech. And the only way I get out of any situation alive is if I do not pass that immediate speech check, we go out guns blazing, and by that I mean uh pulls out uh like cocks his biceps and then just starts punching the shit out of people. Hell yeah.

SPEAKER_05 23:18

Correct.

SPEAKER_01 23:21

Um that was uh a Mr. House ending. Um and spoilers, that tends to be most of my endings, I think out of all of the endings, I tend to like house the death in part because I uh you like running over original. Yes, I I do think, you know, an exceptionally charismatic old man autocrat is great. But also I think in terms of like politics, it's it's Las Vegas. What would be more appropriate than just having like an insane capitalist take over, you know?

SPEAKER_07 24:04

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 24:07

It's what it deserves, really. It's gonna it's gonna let it fall to the ground.

SPEAKER_04 24:10

Yeah, no, I don't I don't trust the brain-damaged mailman to uh to run the joint.

SPEAKER_10 24:15

Um, like the thing is, you know that if Fallout New Vegas came out in 2020, that House would be way more of a Trump XP than a Disney XP. You know? Absolutely. Like it absolutely that kind of guy.

SPEAKER_04 24:29

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 24:29

Yeah I mean, like no matter what, he would still have a lot of Howard Hughes in him because that is like the entire premise of the joke.

SPEAKER_04 24:37

But like Howard, like he is he is almost explicitly a Howard Hughes, like down to like his middle name is Howard. Like they're not, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 24:49

His name is Robert Howard House, you know what I mean? So true. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:56

Um what was I saying? And then my so my the the my second favorite playthrough is the one that I just did that everybody got everybody else's like got the ball rolling, which was um a very specific and very fun challenge run. Um which is um let me see if I have the notes right as follows. Um No luck, no charisma, strength 10, endurance 10, agility six, everything else it does matter. Tag skills, barter, guns, and survival. Take Shersha Lafemme, but I cannot use it for speech checks. I cannot use speech checks, period, except those that require special as its check, rather than a skill. The only exceptions are two of my tag skills, barter and survival. Girls can make me do anything. I will drop whatever I am doing if a lady explicitly asks in dialogue and it starts a quest on the UI. Addendum to four. If in doing so my quest leads me to another woman who starts a new quest, I will drop whatever it is I was doing to do the new one, and I am under no obligation to return to the original quest if that makes it funnier.

SPEAKER_10 26:04

And somehow, despite all this, Adelaide did still did not have sex with uh what's her name, Red Queen question mark.

SPEAKER_01 26:12

Who's the Deathclaw egg lady? Uh Red Alice, I think.

SPEAKER_10 26:15

Yeah, there you go.

SPEAKER_01 26:17

Uh because uh at no point does any of the quest lines actually point you to going into the sewers. That's true. That's true.

SPEAKER_10 26:24

Oh, you just never explored there, so yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:27

I mean, like I'm like big giant lady. I don't think she'd want to go into the gross sewers of like Las Vegas.

SPEAKER_04 26:35

Adelaide just totally missed her one chance to get laid.

SPEAKER_01 26:40

You know.

SPEAKER_04 26:41

Brutal, tragic.

SPEAKER_01 26:43

It's very funny because this also means that dead money starts basically the second I accidentally switch over to that radio channel because it's a woman telling me.

SPEAKER_05 26:52

Yeah, it's a woman.

SPEAKER_04 26:58

It's Laura Bailey telling you to come to the Sierra Madre. How could you possibly say no?

SPEAKER_01 27:04

Right. Which means, of course, I started at like level 15. It was the worst experience of my life.

SPEAKER_02 27:09

Oh, brutal. Oh, that's so dumb. Okay, real quick, not to talk about the plot. The DLC's recommended order is the dumbest thing ever. Yeah, they released the.

SPEAKER_04 27:22

They released that shit in the most insane way ever.

SPEAKER_02 27:25

What do you mean? You're like, oh, you're supposed to do dead money first. Okay, then why is level cap 10 higher than old world blues?

SPEAKER_10 27:31

Uh, because you're not supposed to do dead money first, it's just the first one that came out.

SPEAKER_04 27:35

It's just the first one that came out. I don't know why they went. Starting with dead money is a very bizarre decision, despite, you know, everything. If you're at home.

SPEAKER_10 27:48

The only important one is that you do Lonesome Road last. Yeah. Like you can you can make arguments to do uh whichever order for the other three for based on level or release order, but realistically, like they're written in such a way where it is assumed that you will do those three in whatever order you find suitable to your needs.

SPEAKER_04 28:09

Right. Um, but Lonesome Roads is explicitly meant to be played um basically right before you go to Hoover Dam, right? It's meant to, it is kind of it's where how you get the most dialogue out of Lonesome Road is by having done the most amount of shit in base game New Vegas. Um you need to do Lonesome Road last. And like very, very last. So go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 28:37

I was saying I did an intro, I did uh so this playthrough I did, I tried to really roleplay a lot harder than I normally do. Um I picked the three S's for my tagged skills, uh speech, science, stealth. Um I refused to ever lie to anyone, but stealing is okay.

SPEAKER_05 29:07

Incredible.

SPEAKER_02 29:08

I would never initiate a fight on purpose.

SPEAKER_05 29:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_10 29:14

I would love Paul never lie to anyone, but stealing is okay, because I feel like if we had a Greek scholar in the room, like if Socrates was in the room with us right now, he would be hollering. He would be he would be throwing things at you.

unknown 29:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_10 29:33

He'd be like, what is theft if not another kind of lie?

SPEAKER_04 29:39

Absolutely. Plato would never forgive you. I'm sorry, dude.

SPEAKER_02 29:43

You see, well, you see, it's it's pragmatic because my character's intelligence was four despite having ending with a hundred in science. Sure. So her thing was that she doesn't like lying because she can't remember what the lie is. That's practical. Like she if she lies to someone, she has to remember that she lied and also what that lie is. And that's too much work, so she'd rather just steal from them.

unknown 30:12

I see.

SPEAKER_02 30:12

Because you only have to steal once and not get caught.

SPEAKER_05 30:16

I guess that's fair.

SPEAKER_02 30:19

Um yeah, so she would never I would never initiate a fight with anyone on purpose, but sometimes fights just happened. Um and uh I tried to make as many friends as possible.

SPEAKER_04 30:39

Understandable. Have a nice day. And what ending did you get?

SPEAKER_02 30:44

Uh I did NCR this time.

SPEAKER_04 30:45

Oh, nice. Okay, fun.

SPEAKER_02 30:47

But I'm already thinking, I might roll a new character and do an independent role. That's how it starts.

SPEAKER_03 30:55

That's how it starts.

SPEAKER_02 30:56

I kinda wanna because I'm like, there's a lot of quests that I did that I was like, okay, I accomplished the the goal that I wanted to and did it in the way that I wanted to, but I bet I could have handled that better.

SPEAKER_04 31:10

Could've handled Could have done 10,000 other things to make this go the way you want it to go.

SPEAKER_02 31:15

If I if I had known that this quest would lead to that, then I would have done that first and then gone back and talked to them.

SPEAKER_03 31:29

Right.

SPEAKER_02 31:30

So now what if I went and just redid yeah. Like I'm already like mapping the spider web in my brain.

SPEAKER_01 31:41

I had a I had a very fun time having that that similar situation where I was like, I uh I might have made a mistake uh with my challenge run because I almost got Cassidy killed.

SPEAKER_04 31:52

As a result of Gloria Van Graaff asks you to bring Cassidy to her. Mm-hmm. Yeah, so if Gloria Van Graaff tells Adelaide, yeah, I want to kill, I wanna kill Cassidy, you gotta bring Cassidy. How did you how did you get out of that?

SPEAKER_01 32:11

So, um because of the specific way I interacted with all of them, I didn't start Heartaches by the number until I talked to Cassie again.

SPEAKER_04 32:22

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 32:23

Which allowed me to go, okay. What does Cassie want to do?

SPEAKER_05 32:29

You kinda you kinda had to weasel your way out of that one.

SPEAKER_01 32:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 32:34

Yeah, you kinda had a metagame that one.

SPEAKER_01 32:36

If I had started if Heartaches by the Number started the quest, like, because it it can't start the quest channel. If I had started that way, Cassidy would have been dead by the end of the way.

SPEAKER_02 32:48

Well, you might have had you might have had a loophole as well because you have to talk to her brother to actually turn Cassidy in.

SPEAKER_04 32:56

Yeah, but you but you it's V it's Gloria asking you to do that, right?

SPEAKER_00 33:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 33:02

So, you know, Adelaide would have to do anything a woman tells her to do. Yeah, sorry. Damn, brutal. Adelaide's alliances are so fickle.

SPEAKER_01 33:13

All it takes is pretty lady making goo-goo eyes at her.

SPEAKER_04 33:16

Just once. That's all it takes. And then you're otherwise you're dead.

SPEAKER_10 33:20

Uh what did you do, Sarah? Adelaide be saying golly.

SPEAKER_03 33:25

Gosh. Wow. Goodness gracious. Um I also did.

SPEAKER_02 33:31

Real quick, that reminds me of one more one more thing. Sorry to interrupt you, but one more thing. Um, Alice doesn't swear, so I could never pick a dialogue option that had a curse word in it.

SPEAKER_10 33:39

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_05 33:41

Amazing. That must have been very difficult. There were so many times you want to tell somebody fuck off of this game.

SPEAKER_02 33:47

This is crazy. There were a lot of options that I wanted to pick, but I couldn't because they said hell.

unknown 33:54

Wow.

SPEAKER_10 33:54

I think it would be very funny for one of these games to have a selectable perk that that's like, I don't swear, and it will literally dynamically replace the swears in dialogue options with non-swears.

SPEAKER_04 34:09

It's PG swears instead. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 34:12

You know, the one that came close to that is uh you can legit play V from Cyberpunk uh as a non-drinker. You can always refuse alcohol in Cyberpunk 2077.

SPEAKER_04 34:27

Oh, that's funny. That's cute. Okay. I never thought about that.

SPEAKER_10 34:30

I like that because I feel like you definitely drink during that that montage, and I like the idea that it's Warrior of Light-esque. It resulted in something so bad that V swore off alcohol forever.

SPEAKER_02 34:45

Yeah, I think I don't think you're ever actually seen drinking. I think you're seen ordering drinks, but like you never actually take one. Let me see.

unknown 34:56

Mr.

SPEAKER_02 34:57

But go ahead, Sarah. What did you what did you do?

SPEAKER_04 35:00

Uh I did speech, science, medicine, um, Mr. House playthrough, attempting to be as pacifist as possible. So solving as many things through through nonviolence and and never pi and like you, never picking a fight. Um, except for the one time I lost my temper and I shot Caesar in the face.

SPEAKER_02 35:23

Sorry. Well, that's that's that one is different. I was doing Boone a favor.

SPEAKER_04 35:29

Oops.

SPEAKER_10 35:30

See, the thing is, uh Rosalie is a woman, so killing Caesar is at worst of a morally neutral action.

SPEAKER_07 35:38

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_10 35:38

So can't kill killing Caesar for literally any reason and in any way can never be more evil than neutral.

SPEAKER_03 35:46

So the thing is Yeah, it was mostly good.

SPEAKER_02 35:49

Listen, I had every intention of going to Caesar and cashing in that like that coupon to wipe away your uh bounty. Um but on the route to Cottonwood Cove, I got attacked by um Legion Assassin. And that was enough to put me into vilified.

SPEAKER_04 36:12

Uh so I mean they still won't attack you if you go into the camp, like even if you're vilified, because I was already vilified by the Legion just for like I don't even remember what. I don't know. Probably for freeing those those guys after uh Nipton, maybe. I feel like I was already on bad terms with the Legion by the time I went to go speak to Caesar. And they still, if you go to the uh uh oh hey, thanks, dude. Um but if you go speak to the Legion after like Caesar asks you to come speak to him, he won't like attack you. Uh but yeah, if you bring Boone with you, he will just attack everybody. He literally won't he won't stop. And he's right to. He's right to, yeah. Nobody's more morally right to do so than than Craig Boone, but you know.

SPEAKER_01 37:06

He does go out of his way to at least like warn you, be like, hey, so uh game mechanics, I will kill everybody I come across if you can. Yeah, he does say that.

SPEAKER_10 37:15

Hey, buddy, just letting you know, my name's Craig Boone, in case you forgot. And I gotta let you know if we go into the fascist camp, uh, I'm gonna make a fascist carpet out of fascist skin, okay?

SPEAKER_04 37:29

Uh we actually did. The funniest part was that I did spend an unreasonable amount of time trying to have Benny survive all of this. It's horseshit that you can't. Um like you have to do some, you have to do some some fucking around to make it work. And I was so excited because I managed to kill everybody in Caesar's uh uh tent, right? And somehow Benny was still alive at the end. By the way, that's actually hard. Uh, if you're not adequately like carrying enough stuff, trying to kill everybody in Caesar's tent is actually really hard. Yeah, there's a lot of them. Shit ton of HP too. They're tough. And they all just gang up on you, and you're like, oh fuck, oh no, uh, beans. Um, but so I did manage to kill everybody. At one point I felt I was just like, oh no, I've beefed it because I hucked a grenade into the other room and then um was just like, I've killed, I've done it, I've killed him. And then I peeked in there and everybody else was dead, and there's Benny still just tied up, like, hey baby.

unknown 38:31

It's like, oh cool, okay.

SPEAKER_04 38:33

Um, and so I was very excited that I managed to make it work. And then unfortunately, he walked out of the tent and was just immediately lit up by everybody in Cottonwood.

SPEAKER_10 38:44

Uh a fate that befits Benny.

SPEAKER_02 38:47

So you know, you know, um, when you're doing uh come fly with me. Yeah, and there's that one ghoul who has set up like a kill zone.

SPEAKER_04 38:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 38:56

Uh and you can talk him down.

SPEAKER_04 38:58

Yeah, he's a cool guy. Hark Harkness? Harkness.

SPEAKER_10 39:02

Yeah. Harkness is the um is the android from Fallout 3.

SPEAKER_04 39:06

Um, who he's got like an H name, and I thought it was very cooler name.

SPEAKER_02 39:11

Uh, but him like I had stealthed my way through that so I didn't have to kill any of the of the uh Nightkin?

SPEAKER_06 39:17

Harland.

SPEAKER_02 39:18

Harlan, that's it. But I had to I had stealth my way through so I didn't have to kill any of the Nightkin. Um and then managed to talk him down. And he's like, Alright, I'm gonna go. And then he walked out, and I he gets like 15 feet, and I immediately hear the sound of a Nikkin screaming. And like three of them just kill him immediately.

SPEAKER_05 39:42

Oh no!

SPEAKER_02 39:43

And I'm imagining Alice being like, oh, I could have prevented that maybe.

SPEAKER_04 39:50

Oops, that's brutal. Um and then I also did a Mr. House. I did a I did a house ending because um that just makes sense. Don't leave, don't let the brain-damaged mailman take over New Vegas. You know.

SPEAKER_02 40:06

I would I would like to silly. I have an idea for an independent run, and then I also have stuff I won't want to do for a house run.

SPEAKER_04 40:15

Sure.

SPEAKER_02 40:16

But I will probably never do a Legion run.

SPEAKER_04 40:20

That's fine. Legion is also not one, nobody cares about the Legion. Two, the Legion is the least fleshed out of all of the routes because they they made this game in 18 months, and they're like, uh, we're not gonna devote too much time to the fascists. It's fine.

SPEAKER_10 40:36

Um the only reason to ever entertain doing a Legion playthrough, honestly, is just if you're really curious about seeing what they do for the Hoover Dam.

unknown 40:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 40:46

Right. You know, and like that's it.

SPEAKER_04 40:48

There's nothing else there. You know, completionism's sake mostly is just like, what does a you know a Legion playthrough look like?

SPEAKER_10 40:54

And it's just um it mostly looks like my kill everybody playthrough, except you're too afraid to actually kill everybody, so you have to partner with the people who are okay with you killing everybody.

SPEAKER_04 41:06

Right.

SPEAKER_10 41:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 41:07

It's like, oh, okay, well, fine. Um but shit, I lost my train of thought. Oh well. It'll come back to me.

SPEAKER_10 41:19

Yeah. I'm sorry for stealing your thoughts now with my potent psychic vampire energy.

SPEAKER_04 41:24

You're spores, how could you?

SPEAKER_02 41:26

You and I, Sarah, I know. Maybe Oats did two more. We we both we played with Viva New Vegas.

SPEAKER_04 41:33

Yes. Oates did too.

SPEAKER_02 41:36

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 41:36

Yeah, we all did. Viva New Vegas is the is the way to play that game. That game was for me. I noticed you had a lot of crashes, Ben, because every now and then I saw Ben reving the old uh lawnmower on Steam, right?

SPEAKER_02 41:47

It was it was uh uh I think the fog in dead money.

SPEAKER_01 41:53

Crazy was messing with things.

SPEAKER_02 41:56

I had most of my crashes in Dead Money.

SPEAKER_01 41:58

There's a few weird parts of how Dead Money renders stuff that um Viva New Vegas tries to fix, but it isn't it isn't it isn't that modelist's fault, it is you're trying to run that game on a nicer operating system and the engine doesn't know how to handle it.

SPEAKER_02 42:23

I also I also think a lot of it is due to the fact that Viva New Vegas allows for sprinting. And when you're going through several loading zones very quickly.

SPEAKER_04 42:39

New Vegas gets a little cranky at it. Yeah, it doesn't matter.

SPEAKER_10 42:42

Follow New Vegas is basically a horse in its temperament. It gets spooked. If if it sees a bush that it's seen 50 times before, but it looks slightly different today, it'll have a heart attack and immediately die.

SPEAKER_04 42:53

This is why I can never upgrade my PC. I truly can't. Because at this point, like I'm I feel like my machine, whatever ghosts are inside of it, has become perfectly calibrated to run Fallout. All Fallout games, right? Because I don't think no, I had one crash and it was because I played for 12 unbroken hours.

SPEAKER_02 43:22

And that would do it.

SPEAKER_04 43:24

At the end of when it crashed, I literally sat there and was like, you know what? No, that one's on me. That was my fault. I'm sorry, New Vegas. My bad.

SPEAKER_02 43:32

Between New Vegas and Fallout 4, I've never had a crash that I didn't go, that's on me. That's my fault.

SPEAKER_05 43:42

I caused that one. I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_02 43:44

I look at my mod list and I go, yeah, no, no. It's unreasonable of me to expect you, like, to expect you to uh run perfectly with all of these things shoved into your mouth.

SPEAKER_04 43:58

Yeah, he said.

SPEAKER_02 44:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 44:02

But no, new Viva New Vegas made the game run um extremely well for me.

SPEAKER_02 44:07

Yeah. Aside from that, like it runs fantastic.

SPEAKER_04 44:10

It's great. It's very it's weird to play that game running well.

SPEAKER_02 44:16

Yeah, I will say, speaking of map design in New Vegas, not just the overworld map, like the you know the Pit Boy map, but individual locations and whatnot. Um yeah, being able to load instantly and having a sprint button saves a lot of time because there's a lot of areas in that game that are just empty.

SPEAKER_04 44:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 44:40

Like trying, like, hey, I did an NCR run. I had to go to Camp McCarran a lot.

SPEAKER_03 44:47

Okay, McCarron's brutal.

SPEAKER_02 44:49

Why is it so big? Why did they put the airport entrance all the way over there? It's why did they do that? Because they made the make you regret being born. There's and like it's not like it's it's like not like it's an area, like the strip is big, but there's a lot of buildings in it. Cam McCarran is just empty. It's just tents.

SPEAKER_04 45:13

It's just tents.

SPEAKER_02 45:14

It's just tents with no one to talk to.

SPEAKER_04 45:16

It's really funny. It's there was no reason. Why is it it's huge too, is the thing, and it's really funny. And I under because they're like they're trying to go for like a semi-realistic scale, but dang, y'all. It it I was trying to find somebody to turn in a quest or to pick up a quest, because I was trying to do, you know, as completionist as possible, and I think I succeeded. Um, but I was trying to find the guy who runs the uh the first recon team. Like I was trying to find their commander because he's the one who gives you the bounty hunting quest, right? And I had already done all the bounties just by running around New Vegas, so I'm walking around with three heads in my backpack, just like I gotta get rid of these things, man.

SPEAKER_02 45:57

They're starting to stink.

SPEAKER_04 45:58

They're starting to stink. Um, so I had to find the guy who I could give these heads to. And brother, it's so hard to find one random NPC moseying around all of the tents in Camp McCarran.

SPEAKER_02 46:13

One random NPC who is dressed like every other NPC in that area.

SPEAKER_04 46:19

That's crazy.

SPEAKER_02 46:20

You have to start looking for guys who aren't wearing hats.

SPEAKER_04 46:28

But it's fine. I did do what I think is I think I did just about except for like a handful of like like little minor fetch quest type shit. I think I did everything you can do in Fallout New Vegas to the best of my ability.

SPEAKER_02 46:50

I thought I did too, uh, and then I got to the ending, and the game was like, uh, the fiends having never lost their power wreaked havoc on New Vegas. And I went, oh shit, I forgot about that. Yeah, it's all oh right. Those guys. Yeah, those guys. Oops.

SPEAKER_08 47:11

No, I think they can stay. I like their funny hats. I think.

SPEAKER_02 47:16

I thought I had killed enough of them that it wasn't a problem anymore, but I forgot that most of them didn't have names.

SPEAKER_10 47:21

Yeah, you have to kill specific ones.

SPEAKER_04 47:23

Uh that's actually the other time I lost my temper and shot a guy on the face while he was sitting on a throne. So I'm two for two in Fallout New Vegas. When some smug asshole tries to tell me what to do while sitting on a throne, um, I was like, I'll show you who's gonna sit on the throne, you crusty bitch. Um and so then I domed, I domed that guy in the basement of Vault 3 without even thinking twice. I was just like, Sarah, asshole.

SPEAKER_01 47:51

Yeah, Rosalie just channeled Sarah for like all 30 seconds.

SPEAKER_04 47:55

I was just I was overcome. I was I was overcome with fury. Uh there's like these these fucking assholes in Vault 3 were just like, yeah, they opened the doors for us, and they were they were so nice and so welcoming and so excited to meet the outside world, and we killed all of them and took over the vault. And I was just like, cool, okay.

SPEAKER_05 48:19

You roll up your sleeves, shame, shame, just loading that medicine stick from the gun runner's arsenal, just like shame, shouldn't have told me that one, buddy. You should have kept that one to yourself. Sorry, dog.

SPEAKER_02 48:33

Oh, you fucked up big time.

SPEAKER_05 48:36

Yeah, uh, so I saw that problem real fast.

SPEAKER_10 48:39

I I always like that encounter because the one that's so matter-of-fact that it makes you feel like they must have had more plan for it and then just went, uh fuck it.

SPEAKER_04 48:50

Yeah, I mean, you can technically sell chems to them for a bet. Like the whole thing is that I mean it's it seems like a pain in the ass to go through all of the um the loading screens for it, but they will buy your drugs off of you at a better rate than merchants will. Um, because especially if you do the thing, which is what I did, I interacted with the cons first, and I resolved the cons questline in a satisfactory manner, aka they decided to go to Wyoming and become motorcycle nomads, which is the coolest way to do it. Um so unfortunately that means because like the cons were selling drugs to the fiends, right? Like that's where they were getting their psycho hookup. But once I cut them off from the cons, they're like, damn, we need a new psycho hookup. And so they would buy they'll buy chems from you at a decent rate, right? Um, but I was like, I I have so much money. I have so much money because I have a high luck and I've already been kicked out of three casinos.

SPEAKER_05 49:50

So yeah, there's really only one thing I'm gonna do to you, big dog. Sorry.

SPEAKER_04 49:59

I need to kill. I need to kill. I need to kill these smug motherfuckers. Um it was great. It was great. Very felt good.

SPEAKER_02 50:08

Um doing doing the cons is funny because it's like you get the thing where it's like, well, if you if you if you kill Papa Khan, you can have them join up with the with NCR, but I'm like, that's not how I would play, right? Like, that's not how this character my character would Alice would do handle things. So I had to settle for, hey, can you guys go away? And they went, yeah, alright. And then that turns out that that's the best outcome for them.

SPEAKER_10 50:37

It's uh because you're like, they're like, listen, my my my friends, my sweet, my sweet, my sweet brothers, my my cons, listen to me. The things I am going to do to this like 10 square mile area are going to turn your hair white. You want to be somewhere else.

SPEAKER_05 50:53

You want to get so far away from Las Vegas.

SPEAKER_01 50:56

And then you know they learn archery on motorcycles up in Wyoming, like actual like uh Mongoline Horde. It's the same thing.

SPEAKER_04 51:05

I am sad. I missed out because like if you because like you can you can kind of adjust the ending. I missed the opportunity to give them the books from the followers of the apocalypse to have them just become motorcycle archers in fucking Wyoming, which is the coolest outcome ever.

SPEAKER_10 51:22

Um there's a setting for a fallout game, right?

SPEAKER_04 51:25

Yeah, put me in my in Wyoming so I could run in some motorcycle archer cons. That sounds so dope. Um, but I did still convince them to go uh run around Wyoming and stay out of trouble and not end up on a fucking NCR reservation, which bleak.

SPEAKER_10 51:42

Um I love the idea of having a Midwestern Fallout where on the map, where should obviously be Milwaukee is just a place called Kubicon. What is Anado, actually, specifically excuse me?

SPEAKER_02 51:55

That'd be so good. That would be great.

SPEAKER_10 51:58

The stately pleasure dome, and it's just like where a sports team used to play.

SPEAKER_04 52:02

Uh-huh. They still wear cheeseheads, though.

SPEAKER_10 52:05

Yeah. That's that's your raider faction, the cheeseheads.

SPEAKER_04 52:08

Yeah, yeah, the cheeseheads, for sure.

SPEAKER_10 52:11

Um I like the idea of the Wisconsin cheeseheads meeting the Green Bay Packers and then having a long-standing feud over who gets access to all these pre-war cheeseheads.

SPEAKER_04 52:20

Well, the Packers are the cheeseheads.

SPEAKER_10 52:24

Are the Packers from the Midwest? Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 52:26

Green Bay. Yeah, Green Bay is in Wisconsin. Is it? Yeah.

SPEAKER_10 52:32

For some reason, I for some reason I thought they were East Coast because literally the only people I know who ever like the Green Bay Packers are exclusively from West Virginia.

SPEAKER_02 52:40

No, that's that's why MST3K does the Packers running gag so much. It's because they're they're that Midwestern.

SPEAKER_04 52:47

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're the Midwest Darling team. Yeah.

SPEAKER_10 52:51

I literally just was like, I have no idea where Green Bay is, but everyone I know who likes it is from West Virginia, so they must be from around there, I guess.

SPEAKER_04 53:00

Nope. Nope. Uh the West Virginians just don't have their own team.

SPEAKER_08 53:06

Shut the fuck up. I don't know shit about football.

SPEAKER_04 53:09

They don't have their listen, they don't have their own team, and I think most West Virginians would sooner die than root for the pirates, right? Or no, the Steelers. The pirates. The Steelers are the football team. The Pirates are their baseball team. Excuse me. The Steelers.

SPEAKER_10 53:26

My household is one where even though we live proximal to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, uh, my parents were old enough that we were a strictly Miami Dolphins household.

SPEAKER_04 53:37

That's right.

SPEAKER_10 53:37

Oh because the Buccaneers didn't come around until later.

SPEAKER_04 53:41

Mm-hmm. And also because the Dolphins were sick at the time. Anyways.

SPEAKER_10 53:45

Yeah, they they were uh They were unstoppable, yeah. Are they still the only team to have ever had an undefeated season and then also won the Super Bowl?

SPEAKER_04 53:54

Um, I wouldn't being able to read it. I haven't I haven't paid attention to the ENFL in a hot minute, so I don't know if that still holds true. I'm gonna say yes. It was true for a very long time at least. It was true for a time in like time, yes.

SPEAKER_10 54:08

That happened in like 1972 or 1974, I think, and then did not ever happen again.

SPEAKER_04 54:13

That's correct. Um, so yeah. It's uh but no. What were we talking about before we started talking about football? The cons. I love the cons.

SPEAKER_02 54:22

Love the cons. They're great, love their outfits.

SPEAKER_04 54:24

Love their outfits. Um, just love a love making friends with the gang of goons who helped me get shot in the head, but it's fine. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 54:35

Listen. It wasn't all of them, it was just two of them, and they were working for Benny, so fuck it.

SPEAKER_04 54:39

Um those guys, I even let those guys walk away alive. It's like, you know what? You do you, man.

SPEAKER_10 54:45

Challenge, challenge playthrough, uh, where your only two precepts are always do right for the cons, and you've definitely got to have sex with Benny. That's it.

SPEAKER_05 54:55

Oh no.

SPEAKER_10 54:57

Uh, it's called enemies to lovers.

SPEAKER_02 55:00

I uh my Benny's outcome for my playthrough was funny because like I also, when I burst in to kill Caesar, um somehow Benny just managed to survive- I didn't even try, he just survived.

SPEAKER_04 55:12

Good for you.

SPEAKER_02 55:13

Um and then I was like, well, my options are to like execute him now, or to just leave him, you know, to to turn him into the Legion, or to let him go. None of those feel appropriate. So the in-lore thing is that Alice just forgot about him.

SPEAKER_05 55:34

That's correct.

SPEAKER_02 55:36

Like she killed Caesar and then didn't notice that Benny was there and just left.

SPEAKER_05 55:42

Just walked off.

SPEAKER_02 55:44

And then whatever happened to him after that is a mystery for the ages.

SPEAKER_04 55:50

That's right.

SPEAKER_10 55:51

Oh, he gets devoured by birds.

SPEAKER_04 55:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_10 55:54

Just random birds. They they swoop in and then and peck at the muscle on the bottom.

SPEAKER_02 55:58

A big eagle swoops down and picks him up and carries him off.

SPEAKER_04 56:02

Yeah. Just flies off. Bye, Benny.

SPEAKER_02 56:05

A scorch beast a scorched beast queen somehow managed to survive this long and swoops down and carries him away.

SPEAKER_10 56:13

To make Benny her Scorch Beast king.

SPEAKER_01 56:17

I think I had the funniest interaction that I've ever had with Benny during my latest run because I've never s I've I've never had my speech low enough that I didn't realize one of the ways you can try and convince him. Because if you're playing a character like Adelaide, you did not pick up any of the evidence to talk to to tell Swank that that he's a fank. There was no way you could convince the the cons to help you out. And there's no way you can actually do a speech check. To tell to try and like, you know, um convince a guy just through your words and emotions alone. Um so obviously I ended up locked up in the presidential swing. Um there is a speech check of like 25 just to get more information out of him. Um that I couldn't even pass that. Um and it is literally just the failed version is but ple please come talk to me. I'm not mad. I promise I'm not mad.

SPEAKER_02 57:23

See, that's that's the thing about New Vegas, is that even your failed uh like uh I almost said roles, but your failed dialogue options are good.

SPEAKER_04 57:34

Yeah, no, failed dialogue checks uh are fun, is the thing. Uh it's the it's the disco Elysium thing where sometimes you want to fail because that also gets you interesting outcomes, right? Yeah. Yeah. One of the things they actually I have they have talked about in the past is that they wish they had gone a little harder with that, and that speech had done more than just make you avoid combat encounters. Like speech does more than that in New Vegas, but it for the most part, it is still kind of just the I don't want to do a combat encounter um like skill. And they're like, we wish we had done more, like we wish we had leaned into it a little bit harder, right? I mean they made the game in 18 months again, so it's fine that they didn't. Who's gonna hold it against them, right?

SPEAKER_02 58:22

Yeah. Um it's I I do appreciate that it's not just speech, right? Right. Like you're in a dialogue, you're getting all different kinds of skill checks to get more dialogue. In science and medicine, engineering, everything.

SPEAKER_04 58:40

Uh uh terrifying presence and searing imperialists give you.

SPEAKER_10 58:44

Yeah, I was gonna say it's cool when they also they also flag your specific perks too, and not just your skills.

SPEAKER_04 58:50

Uh like Cherche La Femme or Um Confirmed Bachelor. That's the other one. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 58:56

Um that's right.

SPEAKER_04 58:57

They they give you like unique things. I don't know, it's awesome. It's just, it's so good.

SPEAKER_02 59:04

Yeah, they do a fantastic job of like every they give you so many options to uh resolve a situation that it's not just do you want to do this violently or non-violently?

SPEAKER_04 59:21

You want to just talk your way out of it, yeah. Exactly. Like speech and barter are different things, like and you can give yourself more like unique ways to see it resolved with your different dialogue options, right? Like you can have you can, you know there, there's like Hanlon is a really good example. Um, there's tons of ways to handle what's going on with Hanlon at at Camp Golf. Um, and I don't know, I think that's really just cool and interesting. There's like a lot, I don't know how they made the game in 18 months.

SPEAKER_02 59:55

It's insane.

SPEAKER_10 59:57

Um it is just the obsidian of the era special. That's literally all they did.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:03

Yeah, I don't I don't there's so many things that like I can't comprehend how you started and finished this, even with the advantage of working on an engine that's already been made for you, you know, using a bunch of things.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:20

Like, like, how did you come up with all of this?

SPEAKER_04 1:00:26

Because there's a ton of assets that already exist, but also like there's a ton of new shit too. Yeah, like they don't reuse a lot of like there's not that many Myrelurks in New Vegas, you know?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:39

Like there's not low flies to fight the rats or not. Like you don't fight mole rats, you fight real rats.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:47

They they had they they didn't reuse the uh super mutants, they made new models for super mutants.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:57

That's actually not true. They use the super m uh Marcus has a unique super mutant model, but the the and the nightkin have a unique variant, but the like your standard mutants wandering around, I think are still just the same super mutants from three, but with the head straps and stuff that they wear in uh Fallout 1. They are different.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:21

They're different they're also retextured.

SPEAKER_10 1:01:23

I was just saying, I think the textures are the ones that I think because I remember in Fallout 3 they I always thought they looked kind of like they were made out of uh WD40, you know? Like you just or uh whatever that foam is, that like horrible yellow foam. Oh yeah, yeah, uh spray on shit. Yeah, uh they they all the ones in Fallout 3 look like they were made out of that, and you can tell for Fallout New Vegas they went back like, no, they need to look like green and not like they're made of boogers. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:49

Fallout 3 supermutes are so bad looking.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:51

Yeah, they uh but like the models themselves are the same, but they're used not often. You really only fight them in one place, and it's Black Mountain, right? So, like you had to make all new assets for pretty much every NPC in the game, except for like raiders, because they're all wearing the same raider gear from Fallout 3, but like all the NCR stuff had to be made new. All of the Legion armor, the Legion armor, everything everybody's wearing in uh Vegas, like the caravaner outfits are all new and unique things. Boomers are all new and unique, like yeah, you can reuse Vault suits, you can reuse doctor suits, like the outfits that the Paul Rosie Apocalypse are wearing. Um like but there's so much new shit in New Vegas that they made from scratch on top of writing this game and just and like yeah, we joke that they kind of had a like a heads, like a leg up because they reused a lot of stuff from Van Buren, but a lot of stuff from Van Buren got rewritten like super hardcore because they're like, well, it's been 10 years or however long since Van Buren got canned, right? Right. Um and those ideas we had back then we don't like as much anymore. We want to kind of tweak those ideas and and do something more interesting with them. So, like, yeah, they had the bones of like Caesar's Legion and stuff like that in Van Buren, but all of that had to be expanded on, and then it all had to have at the time it was the most voice-acted game out. It had 64,000 lines of spoken dialogue, which is absurd for the time.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:41

And Yuri Loenthal is 32,000 of them.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:44

That's right, baby!

SPEAKER_10 1:03:46

And Liam O'Brien is probably like 28,000 of them at least.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:51

Uh yeah, you just hearing so much Yuri Loenthal, Liam O'Brien.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:01

The two hardest working men in Fallout New Vegas, baby.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:07

And oh, and and it's it's Laura Bailey, Liam O'Brien, and Yuri Loenthal. Because Laura Bailey's also fucking everywhere.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:14

She's putting a ton of work in. Laura Bailey's putting in a ton of work, and she gets to be Vera and uh Christine at the very end of Dead Money. Um, that's her payoff, is that she gets to play like an important character. Good for her. Um, but yeah, no, Laura Bailey's putting in a shit ton of work. Liam O'Brien and Yuri Lowenthal are putting in a shit ton of work. Um there's still stunt casting, the the always wonderful rest in peace king, Renee Aubrechenois uh plays House and he's so good. House is so good. House is such a great character. Like to actually get to kind of step back and like play the game and exhaust all your dialogue options with him. Like he sucks so much ass, but you come away from it. I still just I just think he's great. He sucks.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:04

He's fun, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:05

But he's fun, right? Like, just this like the most stuck up son of a bitch you've ever met. And like a guy who's just like totally obviously not of the era. I love it. It's so good.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:21

Um their arrogance will be their undoing. I suppose there's a lesson in that. Moving on.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:29

Whenever you whenever you kill him, your Pit Boy immediately gets flagged with uh an obituary that he wrote.

unknown 1:05:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:37

Yeah. He wrote an obituary that's like the world has lost a great mind to and then all of the Securitrons on the strip are programmed to print that obituary out and hand it out to everybody. So everybody knows that House is dead, it rules. It's so good. Uh, fantastic character. Just like there's I mean the problem is that New Vegas has so much good shit in it. Like, it's actually kind of hard to come up, and like the critiques I've had, um, I've like talked about on Blue Sky, and it's nothing I really want to talk about on the air because it's mostly like uh questionable female character writing decisions, let's say.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:29

Yeah, I mean you you sense a pattern in your companion's backstories.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:35

Yeah, you're just like, wow, you guys only have the one backstory for every woman in the game who isn't Veronica. Uh oops. So, you know, it is of its time. It is a game from 2010. Yeah. Um, and all of the warts that come with that, unfortunately. Um like it's so good. That's like the thing I come away from it the most. I just there are parts of New Vegas where I'm playing through it, and I was just like, you're talking with these NPCs, and everything is so like uh carefully considered, and there's so much thought into like setting and and world building and backstory and choice and consequences, and you just kinda take a step back and you're like, we really didn't get another one of these until Disco Elysium, huh? Uh-huh. Like that was it.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:34

That's like the next game that has this much depth in your ability to interact and alter the world.

SPEAKER_10 1:07:42

And so the thing is now I will say, to its credit, there is one between those that is, I think, comparably good in detail. It's just that I'm the only one on this podcast who has played it.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:53

What is it?

SPEAKER_10 1:07:53

Uh and that is Divinity Original Sin 2.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:55

Oh, sure. Another uh No, no, that's um that's the Baldur's Gate guys, right?

SPEAKER_10 1:08:02

Yeah, that's that's Hilarian. Uh it's funnily enough, despite Baldur's Gate 3 being called Baldur's Gate 3, it is much more Divinity Original Sin 3 than it is Baldur's Gate 3 in terms of like the game that it is. Um but I bring this up only because like, but even then, that's still also a 2018 video game.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:19

Right.

SPEAKER_10 1:08:19

And like, so we just had most of a decade where there was just like no good CRPGs whatsoever.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:26

There's really nothing coming out. I mean, now more and more things are are kind of trying to take that approach, especially after like the success of I gotta play Nor, I gotta play Norco at some point. Everybody says Norco's really good. Um, of like this kind of reactivity. And like clarity of purpose is the thing that I think stands out the most of like New Vegas and its DLC. It's a thing that like the thing that probably had me like jumping out of my chair the most about dead money, but it can apply to the whole game, is that like I don't think until this coalesium, I've never played a game that so much knew what it wanted to be, and then did not for one second diverge from it. Right? Right, like New Vegas is a game that knew exactly what kind of story it wanted to tell, the way it wanted to tell it, and like the world it wanted to get elbows deep in. And they sat down and they said, How can we do this in the most efficient way possible? Because we only have 18 months to make it, and then uh then they did it, and it is so it is like laser focused in a way that few things are, because like video games are a collaborative effort, right? Like, of course they are. Um and part of collaboration means that sometimes the whims of your collaborators can also be killed. I mean, that's that's part of art, is that like your collaborators will influence the thing that you're making, right? Right, and when there's a ton of people with a ton of hands in the pot, sometimes it means that things can kind of veer off into multiple directions, and it can feel like things get left on the wayside, or there's a a plot idea that didn't get as explored as in-depth as you wanted. Right. Right? Especially a game like New Vegas, which had multiple riders. You have games like um like Near Automata is another game that I think has extremely strong clarity of purpose, but it is mostly because of the direction of one person, right? Right. Um This is a game that had multiple riders of Avalon, Gonzalez, and Sawyer were the guys doing the the heft of the writing, um with like with additional support from other people as well, but those were the big three, and it's crazy to play a game and and really interact with a game that is so it just felt like all three of them were on the same page at all times, right? Yeah, like I don't know, it's really impressive. That's the thing that like I was just playing the game and constantly just thinking, like, wow, these guys really knew exactly what they wanted this thing to be.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:37

Not only do they know what they wanted to be, they were able to s to succeed.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:42

Yeah, there's there's cut content stuff. Yeah, there's cut content for New Vegas, but not that much. Like they got pretty much exactly what they wanted.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:51

Like the way the way everything in this game interlocks with everything else in the game. Your your decisions have consequences outside of the quest that you're in, you know? Like, they pulled off what people have been saying was impossible.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:16

Like, how do you consider all of these variations of the world you can exist in?

SPEAKER_04 1:12:25

And more specifically than that, like a reactive world is this idea of like a genuinely political game, right? Yeah, like a game that has thoughts in capital letters about politics in capital letters. Because like it is very, it's and it's not without veering too hard into like fucking Bioshock territory, like OG Bioshock territory, right?

SPEAKER_10 1:13:01

Which is a game that's also about politics, but like, you know, like also has uh but it's got a very specific single political belief.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:10

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:11

Bioshock also has a Deep Space Nine actor playing the role of a primary antagonist.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:16

Yeah, playing your your your 1950s hyper capitalist, yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_10 1:13:21

And then obviously Andrew Ryan and and uh House also uh in being uh from the 7th gen era of bad guys who look like mid-century capitalists, both kind of look similar.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:31

That's right, yeah. They're both pulling from the your Howard Hughes and your Walt Disney's, right? Um explicitly.

SPEAKER_10 1:13:39

If I had a nickel for every 7th gen shooter that had an unflattering portrait of Harold Hughes slash Walt Disney in it, I'd have more nickels than I would expect, frankly.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:51

A surprising wealth of nickels. It's kind of strange, actually.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:54

Um you'd have enough nickels to open your own city underneath the ocean.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:59

Hey, nice. Or to at least fund a an okay video game about it.

SPEAKER_10 1:14:05

But bio show but I will say for Fallout New Vegas, Fallout New Vegas didn't trick a high school era Saturn to thinking it would be a good idea to read Atlas Shrugged.

SPEAKER_05 1:14:14

Yeah. Whoops.

SPEAKER_10 1:14:18

Oops.

SPEAKER_05 1:14:19

Oh, sorry.

SPEAKER_10 1:14:20

Word to the wise. Don't do that.

SPEAKER_05 1:14:22

Don't do that.

SPEAKER_10 1:14:22

Can't imagine it's a good idea. On one hand. Now here's the thing. On one hand, I do sometimes go like, man, I don't really like consume like I don't like make that much time to read or like watch TV or whatever. So sometimes it I'm like, how the fuck did I find the energy to read all of Umineko, right? It's like 160 hours of just fucking reading. It's like half a million or a million words or some crazy shit like that. And then I remembered that when I was 14 years old, I read all of Atlas Shrugged, which is itself about 700,000 words.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:54

Listen, listen, Saturn. Peter Parker turned out just fine. Did he? He's Spider-Man now.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:04

I would posit that he is in the worst position of his life right now.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:09

Well, I mean you can't bl you can't blame you can't blame his his uh his hand right.

SPEAKER_10 1:15:19

Look, he's a he's a West he's a Western comics character. Some libertarian was going to get their hands on him.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:26

You're gonna have to deal with a libertarian at one point or another. And they can't be.

SPEAKER_10 1:15:30

It might even be Chris Avalone.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:32

They can't all be Frank Miller, sorry.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:36

Is that the slogan of New Vegas? You're gonna have to deal with a libertarian sooner or later.

unknown 1:15:41

Yeah actually.

SPEAKER_10 1:15:42

It's not it's not the intended slogan because Chris Avalone would never allow the indignity of of uh implying that libertarians are annoying.

SPEAKER_05 1:15:52

Ah, Chris Avalone.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:54

Chris Avalone! He ruined one half of the DLCs he worked on.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:59

That's a it's cr. It's really crazy that Chris Avalone. I'm just saying, it's wild that Chris Avalone is responsible for the best and the worst DLC in Fallout New Vegas. How did you do that?

SPEAKER_01 1:16:15

Like the highest highs, the lowest lows.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:18

The man like all libertarians, he contains multitudes and half of them suck.

SPEAKER_04 1:16:24

It's crazy. And I have come around kinda on Lonesome Road, and I I don't know what we've been talking for an hour now. I feel like we haven't we've barely even talked about the actual video game Fallout New Vegas. I should have come with notes. I never come for paying these things.

SPEAKER_10 1:16:43

I'm sorry to be the dead weight here. I unfortunately, as a reminder, am the one person here who has not played the game in literally more than 10 years and did not bother to refresh before this at all.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:52

It's all good.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:55

What were we saying, notes? I mean, like, I did have questions about like how people handled New Vegas, in part because I'm curious as to how everybody feels about New Vegas. Sure, sure, sure, hit me. That will help me. And and I'm I'm burning it now. So Ben very recently dealt with it, and Sarah didn't get around to it the first time around. How did you feel about the the quest with Hanlon? I love Christopherson.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:26

That was really cool.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:28

I really like Chief Hanlon as a character.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:32

Um very interesting situation for him to be in.

unknown 1:17:37

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:38

This is this is a spoilers episode. Can you jog my memory about Chief Calderon? Uh go ahead, Sarah.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:44

Hanlon is the guy who runs Camp Golf, and he's also the guy who's in charge of the of the NCR Rangers, right? He's the one, it turns out, has been sending um bad intel to the NCR itself. Like nothing that gets anybody killed, but stuff that creates like um what's the word?

SPEAKER_02 1:18:06

Like he's he's talking about how the Legion is employing super mutants and uh like they're running like their one camp is getting way too many bullets.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:19

Right, because the deal is that it's he's creating bureaucratic gridlock is is the is the phrase I was kind of looking for. Um because he understands wisely that the NCR can't hold the dam and survive, right? He like he knows that the NCR cannot support the it can't hold Vegas and hope to keep thriving, right? Um so he wants to kind of engineer like the pullback of the NCR from Vegas in order to spare the lives of like NCR soldiers, right? Because like he understands that this is a losing game. Like even if they win at the if they even if they win at the dam, something is still gonna happen in the next five years, and there's no chance of of still holding the dam because like you still gotta hold it against like everything else in the east in like Colorado and shit like that, right? Um and so you can And history proved him right. And history proved him right, absolutely. So you can like confront him about it and like talk to him through it, like talk him through it and like have him kind of explain himself. He has this like fantastic scene where like you walk out onto the like the balcony overlooking golf with him to you know, camp golf with him to talk it out and stuff. Um and uh you can kind of help Hanlin sort of either like resolve to essentially kill himself, right? Or to stop like sending these these uh bad orders through the chain and um like actually potentially survive and eventually become in some endings an NCR senator, which is very funny. Um Hanlin's cool. Hanlin kicks out.

SPEAKER_10 1:20:12

Yeah, he's a great guy. Garlamon forever kind of guy. Sort of.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:18

So so Saturn, the the other thing is, because I know you were you're the kind of player for it, uh, he's the only one who could who wields the best revolver in the game, and the only way to get it is to do the quest incorrectly so that he kills himself. I see he's he's just like uh He's also voiced by country singer Chris Christofferson.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:40

Oh that's that's nice. That's neat.

SPEAKER_10 1:20:46

Vegas has so much stunt casting in it, it's really great.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:48

That's incredible. It's if you're not voiced by the through three you mentioned earlier, then you're like a celebrity stun cast, and you're Matthew Perry or Renee Aubrejoy or Chris Christofferson.

SPEAKER_10 1:20:59

Or you're that guy that got to play uh Mr. New Vegas.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:02

Yeah, an actual like Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:04

Yeah, who's like the actual or it's just Michael Dorn coming back from Fallout 2 to play Marcus again, which rolls.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:13

Hey everybody, it's me, Michael Dorn. I've said it but I've said it before, I'll say it again. You cannot go wrong with casting a TNG era Star Trek actor in your thing.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:23

God, I didn't realize how old Wayne Newton is. He is just recently turned 84.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:29

Wow.

SPEAKER_10 1:21:29

Wow.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:30

Wow, Mr. New Vegas, getting on up there.

SPEAKER_10 1:21:34

Um I think, you know, they've got Elder Scrolls 6 coming out at some point. You give Michael Dorn to voice an orc in that. He'll do it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:42

Fuck yeah. I would love that. Let him do it.

SPEAKER_10 1:21:45

Um that dude ain't doing nothing as far as I know. Like, he'll he's probably game.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:51

But no, I do. I am one of the most interesting things I think about like Fallout New Vegas is the whole this idea, and I mean I don't want to like argue for any one ending being correct. I will argue for the Legion ending being wrong, but obviously.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:08

The other, the other thing, like the game the game makes it a point to be like, no, there someone is going, like, no matter what you do, someone or some faction is going to suffer based on the decisions you make.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:25

And then I think one of the most interesting things about New Vegas is this idea that you can't hold the dam. Like, you can't unless you are House himself, because the V like the Hoover Dam is of Vegas and the House always wins, right?

SPEAKER_08 1:22:42

Right.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:43

So it's this idea that if you are the Legion or if you are the NCR, you you can't hold the dam in perpetuity. Something is gonna come and get you. Like the dam is always going to be a point of contention, and if you are a massive empire, you this is still the post-apocalypse. You're not like the NCR is not the United States of America, it doesn't have the resources to hold it.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:10

Yeah, the you're constantly like it when you when you do an NCR run, you are just getting kind of like, we don't have enough resources, we don't have enough people here. That's why you are doing everything.

SPEAKER_04 1:23:21

Yeah, absolutely. Like you, you know, one of the most interesting things about New Vegas is how much you represent like the the shifting in the balance of power, right? It just takes like one person to come in and nudge things one way or another. And yeah, if you play, like if you do an NCR ending, then yeah, the the the NCR can hold the damn, but like with but that's without your intervention, maybe the NCR could win, but not for long, right?

SPEAKER_10 1:23:48

Right. Like that that's the funny the funniest structure of the four endings to me is the idea, it's like, well, the problem with the Yes Man ending is that obviously hitching everything on the courier's political whims is a doomed enterprise no matter what you believe, because ultimately the courier is going to move on and none of the stuff is going to remain. And the secret being, well, yeah, but that's true for literally every ending.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:08

Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_10 1:24:10

When you finally get bored and stop being in New Vegas and NCRs hold the place themselves, they won't. When Caesar's Legion has to hold the place themselves, they won't. House will presumably get killed at some point in the next five years.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:23

Please enjoy the Fallout TV show. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:27

Uh what were we saying, I would Saturn basically hit the nail on the head. There's like no there's no ending where it ends on like a finality of what's going on. It is just this is the triumphant moment. There is still a lot of things that are going on around New Vegas. There's no like history, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:56

Contrary to what Francis Fukuyama wants you to believe, who is currently unfortunately really going through it right now, uh, history doesn't end, actually.

SPEAKER_10 1:25:08

Um what's the current what's the Francis Fukiyama update? I haven't been keeping tabs in the whole thing.

SPEAKER_04 1:25:13

I feel like I feel like I feel like I saw a post on Twitter the other day about how Fukuyama is just like, I was wrong that history never ends.

SPEAKER_05 1:25:20

It's like no shit dog.

SPEAKER_10 1:25:22

Um I have to I have to stress um because uh I am of the four of us here. Uh my undergrad was uh I'm a history major. Like I have a bachelor's in history. One of the capstone requirements for that degree was taking a class on historiography, which is the study of the various ways, like the lenses of history, like uh Edward Saeed's like anti-orientalist lens, the communist uh historical materialism lens, so on and so forth. Literally the entire first week of that class is this fuckhead named Francis Fukuyama once said that the the fall the Berlin Walls, end of history. We're going to spend the rest of the semester going over why this is maybe the single dumbest thing literally anyone has ever said.

SPEAKER_05 1:26:10

Ah, Fukuyama. Sorry, dog. Oh, that's it.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:16

That's the last thing in history? Oh, really? That?

SPEAKER_04 1:26:20

Yeah. The Fukuyama.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:21

Fucking idiot.

SPEAKER_04 1:26:22

Fukuyama's whole thing is that, like, with the defeat of uh uh the USSR, right? The collapse of Russian communism, uh, the United States had finally defeated its last enemy, and as a result, was now like the predominant global hegemon, and thus history was over. Now we could all just coast toward like neoliberal bliss for the rest of time, and what could possibly go wrong?

SPEAKER_10 1:26:51

And part of this specifically, too, was he had this argument that capitalism versus communism was the final ideological debate of humanity, and that ultimately the collapse of the USS Armant that communism had lost. And one of the things we go over is like, yeah, but it didn't communism didn't lose. The thing is, if anything, capitalism lost because all the communist countries became capitalists and now we're in a perpetual state of market agony because everybody's trying to bleed each other dry.

SPEAKER_04 1:27:22

Right.

SPEAKER_10 1:27:22

And then it's like, if anything, the the failure of the USSR has proven just how like untenable capitalism is in the long term.

SPEAKER_04 1:27:31

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:33

I want to read his actual quote regarding that because it actually could slide perfectly into an ending card in New Vegas.

SPEAKER_05 1:27:41

Sure.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:42

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War or the passing of a particular period of post war history, but the end of history as such. That is the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. You fucking idiot.

SPEAKER_04 1:28:02

Has anybody been more wrong in the history of everything than Francis Fukiyama, right?

SPEAKER_10 1:28:09

It's like it is genuinely like we will struggle to find incidents of someone saying something more wrong in the future.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:18

He should have to wear a dunce cap for the rest of his life.

SPEAKER_04 1:28:23

Yeah. It's uh it's astonishing. And truly, that is what Fallout New Vegas is about, is that like one of the most interesting things I think about New Vegas is that it has a history that goes way back before you even showed up, right? Like before you even were there, one of the big things about New Vegas is learning about the history of a place that existed before you got there. And there's a shit ton of it. There is all of the stuff about the NCR, which, you know, it forms the backbone of two previous Fallout games. All of the stuff involving Caesar Legion. Um, one of the primary things, the reasons you hang out with Raul is so you can learn more about what the eastern part of the Southwest looked like before the Legion rolled through it. Um is Raul's opinion of things a little wrong-headed. Yeah, kinda. But don't worry about it. He's old, it's fine.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:18

Listen, that's done, that's Danny Trejo for you.

SPEAKER_04 1:29:20

Uh my man, it's fine. Don't worry about it. Fall out new.

SPEAKER_10 1:29:24

Danny Trejo will absolutely voice any kind of old Hispanic guy who has absolutely wretched personal politics that you'd want him to.

SPEAKER_04 1:29:31

That's absolutely 100% correct. Yes.

SPEAKER_10 1:29:34

Danny Trejo, whose main acting career, whose main acting role that I know him for, is the rapist from Conair. Will in fact do anything you want him to do.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:44

I will point out that Danny Trejo uh considers Row Wool to be a good guy because he does not explicitly die at the end of his story.

SPEAKER_04 1:29:53

Danny Trejo could be wrong.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:55

Um, that is one of my favorite things, my favorite like acting quirks ever, is that Danny Trejo will play a villain, but that villain has to die spectacularly.

SPEAKER_05 1:30:08

That's really funny.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:09

He will not like he will not play a villain that does not get his at the end.

SPEAKER_10 1:30:14

See, that that's that's why that's why Danny Trejo is respectable and The Rock is not, because Danny Trejo's like, I'll play a villain, you just have to blow him the fuck up.

SPEAKER_05 1:30:23

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:24

His character in Yakuza 8 gets eaten by a giant shark and rules.

SPEAKER_04 1:30:30

Uh sick. Um, but no, there's so much like history that exists in New Vegas before you show up. And debatably, you also have some history. How do I feel about that history being introduced? Don't worry about it. I don't like it. I don't like it very much. But you also have a history. The world has a history, and you get the sense because the ending cards of New Vegas are good, because ending cards are cool. Um, the hezza. Ending cards are very cool. Um, you get the sense that you existed in this history for like a very short period of time. But I mean the tagline of the whole fucking series is War Never Changes. And that's because what I mean, War Never Changes means like it's not just that, like, yeah, people be killing each other in war all the time. It's saying war is gonna keep happening because history never ends, right? You existed in Fallout New Vegas for a very brief amount of time, but because of the way New Vegas is structured, that world keeps existing, that history keeps going on, and you get a great sense of that in New Vegas just by finishing it, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:31:42

It's very funny to me that one of the most like definitive like finality uh statements in all of New Vegas is in old world blues. Where one of the endings you can get is the implication that the that the courier just fucked off and lived in old world blues the rest of their life. Yeah, they lived in they lived in the in big empty. Yeah, they just kept going back to big empty until they until they died.

SPEAKER_07 1:32:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:18

That's that's it. Every other type every other ending card is just like and then the next chapter of their life began because this wasn't the end for them. Stuff kept happening.

SPEAKER_04 1:32:28

Stuff kept happening. The world, you know, the world spins madly on, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:32:32

You were you were a pivotal moment at this point in history, and then the vector that you changed the direction of New Vegas into, it continued to go in that direction.

SPEAKER_04 1:32:45

Right.

SPEAKER_10 1:32:46

And like it does, it does make me think that like a Fallout New Vegas style RPG with the specific way, you know, it is its quests are laid out, its consequences are laid out, whatever. Would be a great fit for one of those like Meiji restoration games about the Shinsengumi and whatever.

SPEAKER_04 1:33:05

God, yeah.

unknown 1:33:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_10 1:33:07

Like uh fucking what's it called? Like uh samurai something or other four or whatever, where you just make choices and the game changes very wildly.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:16

Yeah, Way of the Samurai. Yeah. God, that would fucking rule.

SPEAKER_04 1:33:21

Yeah, no, I would love a fucking uh Shinsengumi New Vegas like. Yeah, that's not sick as hell, actually. Thanks.

SPEAKER_09 1:33:29

Uh Takyuchi, uh, call us. Yes.

SPEAKER_04 1:33:32

We got ideas. We're full of them. We will write your next FGO Guda Gouda event.

SPEAKER_10 1:33:38

I'll put a stolfo in it for some reason.

SPEAKER_04 1:33:41

Why is a stolen era Japan? I think a Shin Tsingumi out with a stolfo would be really funny. Uh, they should do it.

SPEAKER_10 1:33:50

Um Shinsengumi is stolfo is that he would not be distinguishable in any way from either normal stolfo or any given member of the Shinsengumi.

SPEAKER_05 1:34:00

Correct.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:01

I wonder what the what the ast how the Astolfo mod looks for New Vegas.

SPEAKER_09 1:34:07

Astolfo mod for New Vegas?

SPEAKER_10 1:34:09

I'm sure it exists.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:11

That has to exist.

SPEAKER_10 1:34:12

I I know it exists for uh Left 4.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:14

I mean there's like anime girls all over like anime girl mods all over the place. I imagine like an Astolfo mods like that. It has to exist. It has to exist.

SPEAKER_10 1:34:24

If it doesn't, listener, it's on you. I'm not doing the work.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:28

Anyway, I I think they need to show a lot of restraint and constantly have all of the Shins and Gumi refer to Astolfo off-screen until the last chapter, and then you see them for like exactly two lines of dialogue.

SPEAKER_04 1:34:41

Ah, that's really good. They're still the five-star servant for the event. Um but no, I uh I don't know. I just it's hard to talk about new Vase because there's it's it's very dense, right? Um there's just there's a lot of moving parts in the game. There's a lot of stuff I just like. And that's kind of the hard that's kind of what makes it hard to talk about. But I think the thing that like because like a game, the reason we talk about Fallout 4 so much, despite my not thinking is very good, is that you can talk about a 7 out of 10 for literally the rest of your life, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:35:20

Yeah, it's always going to drive you crazy. There's so much potential built into it. There's so much of the good that you can see, and that the negative stands out even more.

SPEAKER_04 1:35:27

Right. A 10 out of 10 is just like, it's good. How do I express that to you? It's good.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:33

It's so dense that it's really hard to unpack and like pick apart because it's like at any given point you're like, okay, but I need to describe more than the sum of the parts. I need to talk about the parts themselves.

SPEAKER_04 1:35:47

Yeah, and like how do I talk about the parts themselves? There's so many little things I love about New Vegas. It all feels like it comes back to this sense of like being a thing that that has always existed, that it's not just like a game world, you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_01 1:36:01

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:02

Like I adore the music and it's so the the the music and also the radio picks are obviously all-time classics, but yeah, the the the game music itself is beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:16

I guess I can tell I can tell there are parts where you come across areas like especially as you walk up um to Jacobstown, but there's multiple parts throughout um like the Mojave Outpost, like as you get too close to California where it'll start playing Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 be a second.

SPEAKER_04 1:36:34

Uh they play the uh they play the um the cathedral theme in in certain parts of the game. I think it's just fantastic. I mean, just you know like audio callbacks to Fallouts 1 and 2 um are great, right? To just pull like to get and again it kind of ties it ties even more so into like the world itself. Like the like the world of New Vegas is to me the most interesting part um by a long shot. It it is it's this idea of it's again, I brought it up earlier. It's the cowboy movie idea that the frontier isn't closing, isn't closed yet, but it's closing, right? Like we are you are at the end of the era of cowboys, like you are like one of the last cowboys, if you choose to be, right?

SPEAKER_10 1:37:32

You are cowboy remnant.

SPEAKER_04 1:37:34

You are cowboy remnants, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:37

Um that is the plot of Red Dead Redemption, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:37:40

Yeah, exactly. Um, it's it's as like civilization encroaches onto Vegas as a region, like the frontier world, no matter what ending you pick, the frontier closes. That's the biggest thing, is that like if unless you I mean truly, unless you pick independent, and even then independent has its own problems because you've lost like the the freedom, like you, the courier, have lost the freedom of the frontier to manage Vegas, right? If you give Vegas to somebody else, they will close the frontier instead. Like if you give Vegas to house, um specifically Good Springs falls under uh house's surveillance, right? Like and he says it's because you like he's protecting the town that his best lieutenant came from, but you know, it's surveillance.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:42

Right, he's spying on people.

SPEAKER_04 1:38:44

He's spying on them. He if you uh if Prim, if you pick an NCR uh sheriff for Prem, but you still give Vegas to house, then he punishes Prim, right? Like he hits them with like way higher like you know uh retribution, stuff like that. If you if you give it to the NCR, then yeah, the NCR sweeps into Vegas and uh just it just becomes part of the NCR, and that's the end of the frontier. It's certainly the end of the frontier when Caesar's Legion comes into town, right? Like then you've just got you know fascist dictatorship and uh slave economy, essentially. Um like it's this idea of of the last, and it it's kind of interesting that like this is the last Fallout game of its breed, probably ever, unless somebody pulls their head out of their ass at Microsoft and doesn't let Bethesda make Fallout 5 if they actually wisely give it to somebody else.

SPEAKER_10 1:39:54

Um or if they at least go, no, Bethesda often stop making Fallout 76, you are now developing Fallout 5 with your knowledge or something, because like if they let Bethesda have its way, uh they're not making a Fallout 5 while any while Fallout is culturally relevant to literally anyone.

SPEAKER_02 1:40:14

Yeah. I yeah, I would fucking love another Fallout that is in a settled location like this.

SPEAKER_04 1:40:23

Yeah, and it's interesting that New Vegas is about the end of kind of that whole era because it was in the real world too. Right? Yeah, like to me, I think that's the most interesting thing to take a step back because now New Vegas is 15 years old because it came out in October of 2010, right? And you know, you to take a step back, I know, and to realize that like it was the kind of the end of an era for like the whole series in a way, and uh that's what the game is about too. It feels like one last hurrah for the the Fallout 1 and 2 era before like all of this has to go away. Um and it's I don't know, it's very interesting. It's a game that's just like it's just so full of that kind of stuff, and it's about like not being able to let go in like a thing. The hardest part is letting go. The hardest part is letting go, and it's very, very compelling, like so many plot lines are about that, even before you get to the DLC, which is like that's the thesis statement of the DLCs, especially is that you have to let go to begin again, right? Right, um and so much of like but the base game of UV isn't about that too. It's about like the structures of the old world and how all three of them are, you know, new, you know, House says, uh, I see if you want to see the fate of democracies, look out the window, right?

SPEAKER_08 1:42:04

Right.

SPEAKER_04 1:42:04

And it's very much like he's kind of positing that I am going to make a new kind of world. But it's just capitalist autocracy that already exists, dog.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:16

It's just the same thing. He's just doing it again.

SPEAKER_04 1:42:19

You're not doing it, you should you're trying to recreate the old world the way you remember it. You want Vegas to be like the Vegas you remember before the world ended. You're not actually doing anything new.

SPEAKER_10 1:42:32

Um and it's I think it is the funniest limit of New Vegas' four factions that ultimately the problem with House is that even though he's a significantly more intelligent guy, him and Caesar both have the thing in common where it's like, well, we're, you know, charming to the people who listen to us, which is why everybody takes us seriously, but we're both just like delusional reactionaries art.

SPEAKER_04 1:42:57

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_10 1:42:58

Right.

SPEAKER_04 1:42:58

Yeah. Like fucking Caesar and his Hegelian dialectics, it's not Hegel, but whatever. Him and his fucking dialectics, right?

SPEAKER_10 1:43:10

Caesar and he read uh a full an intro to philosophy book on dialectic once uh about 15 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. And has has been carrying that like a sword.

SPEAKER_02 1:43:21

It's worth pointing out that in the stats, Caesar has an intelligence of four.

unknown 1:43:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:43:27

Yeah, it's great. It's great. It's perfect. No, absolutely. Of course he has an intelligence of four.

SPEAKER_01 1:43:32

Um well, I mean, that's the brain tumor talking. That is the brain tumor as well.

SPEAKER_10 1:43:37

The the brain the the brain tumor only brought it up from a three.

SPEAKER_04 1:43:42

Ah but yeah, no, you're right. There's like there's so much, there are a lot of like similarities between House and like Caesar, especially. Like, there is no um like great man running the NCR, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:44:00

There's Kimball, but he's like he's not really the forefront of it, you know.

SPEAKER_10 1:44:05

The big thing about In a lot of playthroughs, he'll he'll bite a bullet to the brain, you know.

SPEAKER_04 1:44:09

Like he gets domed in a lot of endings.

SPEAKER_10 1:44:11

Um not even because you tried to, just because it happened because you weren't there.

SPEAKER_01 1:44:15

Yeah. Or or even funnier, uh, if you manage to save him and you work for House, House just waddles up to you and goes, I predicted this guy's gonna be so humiliating, he'll kill himself within a year.

SPEAKER_04 1:44:27

Yeah, uh, which is my favorite. The thing is, um, part of what the NCR, like part of the reason the NCR is struggling, is if I'm remembering correctly, Kimball is the first president after Tandy.

SPEAKER_02 1:44:40

Yes, that's actually a really big point, is that Tandy had been president for like 56 years.

SPEAKER_04 1:44:47

Yeah. She was president for a crazy long time. So the NCR is floundering because they have lost their great man, right?

SPEAKER_07 1:44:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:44:56

Um and now they're kind of directionless, you know, in the face of um essentially their great, like their great leader.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:06

That's actually something that I know that that Caesar brings up.

SPEAKER_04 1:45:10

He does specifically bring it up, yeah. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:12

The NCR was doing great when they had uh one single president for almost for five decades straight. And then now they've got some schmuck.

SPEAKER_04 1:45:24

He's just some asshole, and he's he's squandering the east and uh like hurling NCR resources at this dam that they don't even really need. Like, they're doing fine, like the NCR is doing well, and like trying to hold the dam is making their lives harder, right?

SPEAKER_07 1:45:46

Um I don't know.

SPEAKER_04 1:45:47

I think I think all of that's interesting. There's so much like similarities between Caesar and House, and the the the not having that kind of force in the NCR is kind of its absence draws like puts a light on the other two as a result. Yeah, right? Um, because Kimball is weak and ineffectual, and C doesn't that kind of prove how since Caesar's point, which like, no, it doesn't, obviously.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:14

Yeah, no, it's it's just it's just different perspectives.

SPEAKER_04 1:46:17

It's just different. Yeah, it's different perspectives, it's different wrong-headed approaches to like society, like a post-nuclear society.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:29

I think it the game would have been lessened if Kimball was a powerful, intelligent, charismatic individual that you interacted with on a frequent basis, right? Sure. Oh, absolutely. Like, because like the the fat all three of these factions, like it's what I like about them is that all three, and you know, four if you want to include guest man, is that they're all structured differently. You're not running into counterparts depending on which fac like you know, like a lot of these games that that offer like you know, quote unquote choice is that like, oh, you can talk to this guy, or you can talk to the same guy wearing blue on the other side.

SPEAKER_04 1:47:10

Right.

SPEAKER_10 1:47:11

And the NCR faction does not work at in New Vegas if they have George Washington and not like James Adams or John Adams or whoever's guy was.

SPEAKER_01 1:47:20

Yeah, right. Exactly. Like, like another important thing is that also like when you're introduced to all of the the like the vying positions and whatnot when you meet House, you immediately get his deal and you also immediately see his flaws because he's such a stuck up fucking asshole. Absolutely. He's um with with Legion, like you are immediately met with like their atrocities, and then you meet their emperor, and he's just a fucking idiot. Right? And he's still.

SPEAKER_10 1:47:49

But if you're also an idiot, then you don't realize you're an idiot, and then you spend like your entire you know, Facebook posting career going, wait a minute, but Caesar's pretty based though.

SPEAKER_01 1:47:59

Right. But like the the thing with the NCR is you know you never meet Kimball, you meet General Lee Oliver. Right. Yeah. You meet the bureaucracy of NCR as the fla like your immediate, like with each one of those three factions, you're like, as soon as you're introduced to them, you're also immediately introduced to their biggest flaw. And I think that's how like it's really smart how they did that. With the NCR, it's just the system.

SPEAKER_02 1:48:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:48:26

You know?

SPEAKER_04 1:48:27

Yeah, it's crushing the NCR as its system, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 1:48:29

Yeah, the the they are their own worst enemy because like you there's so much NCR presence throughout New Bay. Like, you're running into patrols all over the place. There's always like an outpost here and there, there's a camp, you know, all this stuff. And then you talk to everyone, and everyone says, Yeah, we're stretched so thin. I can't get guys over here, I can't, you know, we're trying to reorganize. Like, I've been waiting on medical supplies for weeks now, and I can't anyway.

SPEAKER_01 1:48:55

We haven't had a latrine in six years.

SPEAKER_02 1:48:58

Like, our our water supplies are running low. We think someone is hijacking our water, but we can't send anyone to investigate it. So, like, it makes sense that you're not meeting like President Kimball, this charismatic, well-spoken individual, because he wouldn't be there.

SPEAKER_04 1:49:15

No, he's not that guy. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:49:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:49:18

Like, and actually, I and just to kind of like I wanted to like run that back to Caesar again. One of my favorite things about that first meeting with Caesar and talking to this stupid asshole is like and cause it's because it's so okay. One of the like one of the things you read, there's a ton of interviews, obviously, because this game's 15 years old, and Josh Sawyer will answer anybody's question about Falling New Vegas on Tumblr back when he had a Tumblr, right? One of the things that you can see him struggling with, uh struggling against is the perception that the Legion are Romans. But they're not. Fascists, right? And so people keep asking him questions about well, if the Roman, like if the Legion are Romans, why do they do this? Why do they treat women that way? Why do they treat slaves that way? And he's constantly being like, you don't understand. They're not Romans, they're the Legion. They're fascists.

SPEAKER_10 1:50:16

They're cosplayed. Fascism is literally like the one of the operating things is wearing the bones of a fake history you don't understand and pretending that you do.

SPEAKER_04 1:50:26

Absolutely. And one of the things that is so like interesting and compelling to me, and one of the things is because like fascists are so stupid and small-minded, is you meet Caesar and he's he's he's a moron from the word go. But the thing that always gets me, and maybe it's just because it's so you know, again, the game is more relevant in 2026 than it is when it was in 2010, is how vile and just like crude Caesar is. Yeah. He doesn't he does not speak intelligently. He's just crude and disgusting and and like rude and and he's like a gym teacher, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:51:12

He's not there's like screen notes, I think, for his like his like like that are provided for the actor that is like you need to read this like the sleaziest, lowest ranked mob boss that you can possibly read as he he does strike you as just a gym teacher, as like a guy who never moved on from high school, somehow founded a fascist empire in Colorado.

SPEAKER_04 1:51:42

Well, in Arizona, but still.

SPEAKER_10 1:51:44

Anyway, did y'all know that the anime uh revolutionary girl Lutana is really good?

SPEAKER_04 1:51:49

Yeah, that's it. These assholes who never move on from high school, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:51:54

Like no, he's Caesar, Caesar is uh a guy whose Twitter profile is him wearing sunglasses in the driver's seat of his truck.

SPEAKER_04 1:52:05

Yeah, absolutely. Uh and I mean it's so striking because like you meet these, like you meet these Legion guys out in the world, and they're all like away true to Kaisar and all that horse shit, right? And like you just before you meet him, you have this image in your head of like, oh, like like a Julius Caesar, like a real fucking guy, right? But Caesar looks and he's doughy and and balding, and he's got brain cancer, and he's just so like small and pathetic and gross. He would be impotent.

SPEAKER_02 1:52:47

He would be selling like he would be like selling Patriot coffee on Twitch.

SPEAKER_10 1:52:54

I was yeah, like literally in the way that like Revengeance gets a lot of credit for its prescience in reusing that old uh Ronald Reagan campaign slogan in Senator Armstrong's dialogue. Uh the design for Caesar was really prescient in predicting uh who would be running America in approximately uh 10 to 15 years.

SPEAKER_04 1:53:19

Yeah, it's crazy. Like I that I guess that's that's the thing, is like when you play this game in you know 2026, right? You're just like, oh, he's just like a vulgar little man that all of his toadies just kind of hype up to be like so smart and badass, and it turns out like he didn't even do all the work. That guy he lit on fire and threw into the Grand Canyon did all the work, right? And now he's like floundering in the face of like fighting this second fight at the Hoover Dam, and he's just so like, I'm gonna bring my biggest dick guy, because like Linnaeus is basic his name is basically like Big Dick McGee, right?

SPEAKER_05 1:54:03

Yeah, he's like, I'm gonna bring my biggest, manliest, most badass legged from Arizona or fucking wherever.

SPEAKER_10 1:54:12

And then Rosalie shows up like, you should kill yourself.

SPEAKER_04 1:54:15

Yeah, and then and then Rosalie just domes this guy without even thinking.

SPEAKER_05 1:54:19

Like, God hearing you talk.

SPEAKER_02 1:54:21

Alice literally just like had a brief flash of brilliance and said, Yeah, if you take the damn, you're just gonna lose it again. And he went, shit, I didn't think of that.

SPEAKER_04 1:54:31

It it's it's just so like I don't know. I I really I'm really glad, truly. Like, I know they had plans for more shit with Legion, and they were like, We're gonna make this game in 18 months, so we gotta cut all this shit out of Legion. And honestly, I think New Vegas is a stronger game for it. Absolutely, right? 100% not entertaining the idea that you're literal fascists carting around literal fascies, right? Like your fucking your your bundle of sticks with a fucking like your labrus, right? Like carting around your fucking labras. Like not entertaining for a second these that these people can contain any degree of depth.

SPEAKER_02 1:55:18

Yeah, like the their whole thing is LARPing as as a bunch of Roman centurions and literally crucifying and burning people. Yeah, they're not a legitimate presence.

SPEAKER_04 1:55:29

No, not at all. They're not an actual force for like the wasteland, and they never should be because it's all a it's all a dead end, right? Like real, like real fascism, imagine that. Right. Um and uh yeah, no, I was just like a thing, because again, like I did not engage with the game very hard when I first played it. You know, I was like dumbass 20 something. Yeah, I guess that dates how old I actually am. Don't read into that too much. You were 20, from 20 loud truck drives by very torn. Um you didn't really you don't really engage with it at the time, but then you can take a step back now as like an adult, like an adult ass adult when you play in New Vegas. And that's what I was talking about like earlier, this like clarity of of purpose, right? Just like knowing exactly what its politics are and what it wants to say about like the real world via a video game, which is that fascists are stupid and you shouldn't listen to them ever.

SPEAKER_10 1:56:32

Because like Yeah, and like because like part of the strength, and like this is why again, like I'm almost like, yeah, like Fallout 4 is more fun to play, but New Vegas is the better RPG. Right. And it's not even like from a mechanical design thing, but it's because when you come into New Vegas and it's like, we know the things that this game is about on a thematic level. We know the things that we believe, we know the points we want to make, whatever. It means that as long as you have those points there, anything you write in the game, you can go, well, how do I tie this back to my central points? And then you find something and it makes it more resonant with the whole, right?

SPEAKER_07 1:57:09

Yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_10 1:57:10

And then for Fallout 4, where you're just like, well, people like the factions in Fallout New Vegas, so I guess we'll also do factions. And as a result, none of them really have any kind of coherent resonance with each other. Like, I guess the there's a thing with the sense, and we're having it be a stand-in for American history of slavery for some reason. For reasons, for ideas? Uh it it's a connection, it has meaning. Uh, what what does it mean? It has meaning.

SPEAKER_04 1:57:40

It has meaning. You're so close to saying you come so so close to saying something interesting about the Brotherhood of Steel, and then you take a step back from it at the last second, and you're like, oh, okay.

SPEAKER_10 1:57:51

Yeah, because you because you're like, well, guys, like, I mean, yeah, the Brotherhood of Steel, they're pretty rough, but like, I mean, they are pretty cool though, right, guys?

SPEAKER_04 1:58:00

And it's like, and then you play this game, and again, the Brotherhood um suck and are useless and bad, and and you have to blow them up. You have to blow them up in pretty much every single ending, um, unless you're able to like really make them work with the NCR, and that is like a thing that is not gonna last, right? And it explicitly doesn't! It explicitly doesn't and then, or you do the thing again where you uh you spare them in the yes man playthrough, and again, it's not gonna last. It explicitly doesn't!

SPEAKER_01 1:58:35

It immediately turns into them turning into raiders. Yes! Just flat out.

SPEAKER_10 1:58:40

I'm imagining the obsidian version of Fallout 4 and just meeting Obsidian Elder Maxim, and he is nakedly like a guy who caused plays in like Hitler memorabilia and posts on Twitter, and like that's it. And like anytime you see him, he's sitting at his desk and he never actually does anything and clearly has no idea what he's talking about.

SPEAKER_04 1:58:56

Absolutely, 100%, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:58:58

It is very funny, like or like not just funny, but like fascinating, like thinking about the show and its treatment of the Brotherhood of Steel versus how this faction ends up in New Vegas, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:59:13

Sure.

SPEAKER_02 1:59:14

Like, like uh on that same idea, it's like this the the faction in New Vegas collapsed in on itself. The ones that we see in in the show are a different branch.

SPEAKER_04 1:59:24

They're from the they're from actual the West Coast, they're from out in LA. Like the like uh Maximus and them, they're from out. I think they're out from out in LA, maybe.

SPEAKER_10 1:59:34

Yeah, oh yeah, because they were uh they like they're from at least from the area like around where they're from Shady Sands area, so they're presumably all Californians. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:59:43

They're all from they're all from Mariposa.

SPEAKER_04 1:59:45

Okay, okay, so they're the Mariposa guys. That makes sense for being like weird kind of like a like being the weird Christian like sort of like they're doing like weird like Christian ritual shit by blessing their armor and stuff, and then if it's like, oh, they're the ones from Mariposa, oh, so they're the actual like descendants of the troops. Okay, that makes sense then. Alright, fair. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_10 2:00:09

You're telling me the descendants of the troops have like weird Christo fascist shit going on.

SPEAKER_05 2:00:14

I know I know strange, I know. Strange.

SPEAKER_02 2:00:18

But like it's just don't be too surprised. Like the people have complained a lot about how the show, like uh wipes out a lot of these factions, you know, kind of cleans the slate in terms of like where the NCR ended up, where the Legion ended up, where the Brotherhood ended up, and all that. It's like, well, yeah, didn't you play New Vegas?

SPEAKER_04 2:00:40

Yeah, I think, you know, like I think there are valid critiques to be made of the show, and I don't I don't want to make this too much about the show because we talked about it.

SPEAKER_07 2:00:47

Right.

SPEAKER_04 2:00:48

Um, but it's it's worth bringing up in comparison to. Absolutely. Um, but there like there are valid critiques to be made of the show, but absolutely one of the biggest things is that New Vegas is about like how all of this is temporary. Even, even one of the biggest things is that even and one of the things I don't mind about Lonesome Road is that like Ulysses is like, yeah, no, these fucking crawler things are gonna make their way to New Vegas eventually. And when they do, it's all over, right? Like the the burrower fucking monsters, whatever they're called.

SPEAKER_02 2:01:20

The burrowers, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 2:01:22

Yeah, they're like this is all temporary, even with house. You know, the fact that the show seems to settle on a sort of pseudo, um like independent Vegas ending, which I think is probably the like if you had to pick a canon ending for Fallout New Vegas, it probably should be, because it's the most textually interesting of the of the four.

SPEAKER_10 2:01:45

Um it's the one that's like most true to I think the character of the courier, however you play them or not, which is I showed up, uh, I was really mad that someone shot me in the head, so I stirred a bunch of shit, and when I was satisfied, I left.

SPEAKER_04 2:01:59

Right, exactly. And then things kind of fell apart in the aftermath, right?

SPEAKER_10 2:02:03

Um and that version of the courier is the one that Ulysses is right to hate.

SPEAKER_04 2:02:07

That's correct. Yeah, for sure. Because he's just that's just we're doing Lonesome Road again. Alright, cool. Um it's uh yeah, I think it's interesting. I think it makes sense for the show to kind of textually fall on uh fall on the the independent Vegas and to have it uh fall apart basically instantly. Because of course it would.

SPEAKER_02 2:02:30

Of course it would. The whole point is like every faction admits we're not sustainable, right? Like we're we we want to secure uh the Hoover Dam to stall for time, essentially.

SPEAKER_03 2:02:45

Right.

SPEAKER_02 2:02:46

To give us a leg up to last a little bit longer before we fall apart, right?

SPEAKER_10 2:02:53

Like and like House is the only guy who seems to have an idea of how to actually keep all the holes plugged, but also he's like a 200-year-old piece of beef jerky in a glass tube. Right.

SPEAKER_04 2:03:04

Right, you know, and and house is explicitly only concerned with the people in his in group. He does not care about the people in Freeside, he does not care about the people in North Vegas, any of that stuff. And that works for him now, and if you you know, if you empower his Securitron army, then yeah, he can probably maintain an iron grip on Vegas for another 20, you know, 15, 20, 30 years, right?

SPEAKER_10 2:03:33

Until the last fluid ounce of water in his body finally evaporates and he dies.

SPEAKER_02 2:03:39

Or until one one freak power outage.

SPEAKER_04 2:03:44

One freak power outage, one oops, the lights flickered. Oh, you shut off.

SPEAKER_10 2:03:51

He's like, don't worry, I have backup power. And then he's like, uh, what do you mean a colony of rad ants has been eating my backup fusion cells?

SPEAKER_04 2:04:01

Yeah, all it takes is one thing. Like, you can't have a society of haves and have nots that are as stratified, because again, we are finding ourselves in the actual historical cool zone right now. Um you cannot have a society that is as stratified of haves and have nots as what Vegas has, and not expect something to pop off in the next 10 years. All it takes, even if there is no power outage, all it takes is one guy getting into the lucky 38 and getting one lucky shot off, and suddenly Vegas doesn't have its strong man deleted anymore, and you've got anarchy again, right?

SPEAKER_10 2:04:41

It takes one guy in in the NCR with a suit of with like clearance to wear power armor, getting blackout drunk one night and dissolving and deciding I'm gonna fix it.

SPEAKER_04 2:04:52

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 2:04:54

Or what happened in the show, which is hey, hole uh hole got in the wall and a bunch of Death Claws got in.

unknown 2:05:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:05:01

That's all it takes. There it is.

SPEAKER_04 2:05:02

Whoops, oops, oopsie poodle. Um, things went bad. So I don't know. I I don't mind, I truly don't mind the show kind of setting things back to zero because it was always gonna happen. I mean, you literally have the option to do it in lonesome road. Even Lonesome Road is like, yeah, no, it's absolutely feasible for these two societies to collapse within the next 10 year. Um we're gonna give you a button to press if you want to help speed it along, right?

SPEAKER_10 2:05:32

And you do, because then you can go fight a bunch of ghoullified legion and get some funny guns.

SPEAKER_04 2:05:36

And you get some cool armor out of the deal from both sides of the of the two places that got blown up. I didn't because I was trying to play a pacifist, but yeah, I didn't I didn't do it.

SPEAKER_02 2:05:46

Next time I'm at least gonna blow up the Legion.

SPEAKER_10 2:05:48

And I respect you, but I'm also empowered by chaos. I think if Pup was there, she would have blown them both up.

SPEAKER_01 2:05:54

I will say the long the long 15 of the two, like of the two options. The long 15's the funner like bonus dungeon to wade through. I'd rather fight the like the the extremely cool like NCR bosses that they have for it. Very fun.

SPEAKER_10 2:06:10

I I I will say I did think about it a little bit. I still don't know what like Pup would be in the Fallout 76 setting, right, as like a bespoke person. But in the world where she's a courier, where she's the courier, right? Uh it's ride or die, Mr. House, until she has the occasion to like get curious and go take a look at him, and as soon as she sees his leathery ass, it's yes man all the way. She's like, ew.

SPEAKER_03 2:06:35

You're not a beautiful old guy. I gotta get out of here.

SPEAKER_10 2:06:38

You're not even like a handsome old guy.

SPEAKER_02 2:06:40

You're like a mummy. I do think it's very funny that like um you you you go down and you see the withered old, you see the withered old beef jerky, Dr. House, or Mr. House. You see that little glass tube Slim Jim in there. And then uh your your options are to either just shut the machine down or to send an electric shock to his brain, right?

SPEAKER_05 2:07:04

Or just shoot him.

SPEAKER_02 2:07:06

Yeah, or just shoot him. If you if you press the electric shock button, he does fucking explode.

SPEAKER_05 2:07:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:07:13

And it's it was uh I'll be honest, it was a little unsettling to watch that mummy just explode for me. It's like, oh.

SPEAKER_10 2:07:23

They didn't have Harold in this game, so they had to give you another option you could feel kind of Yeah, they had to let you kill another really old guy that you'd feel kind of bad about just for how graphic it was. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:07:34

I uh I genuinely love putting him back into his case because Renee Aubergino's like read of May There be a Black Tartarus for You. It's so great.

SPEAKER_04 2:07:50

What a great, what a great phrase. May There be a Black Tartarus for you. Um again, just fantastic. Fantastic dialogue writing. Yeah, excellent writing. Tons of excellent dialogue writing in New Vegas.

SPEAKER_02 2:08:06

The f the f again, the fucking thing is they had 18 months and they wrote more dialogue than Fallout 3 had.

SPEAKER_05 2:08:15

Fucking how hard Fallout 3 doesn't have any dialogue worth actually.

SPEAKER_10 2:08:19

But this is also like But it's it's worth noting this is just the like the the that era Obsidian special because it was the same shit with KOTOR 2 as well. Yeah, true. Like that is a infinitely more narratively ambitious and narratively compelling version of the first game, and they had like less than a year to make it, I think.

SPEAKER_04 2:08:37

That's crazy. How did they do it? I mean, god, video games back then.

SPEAKER_10 2:08:41

Well, they didn't finish it in KOTOR 2's case.

SPEAKER_04 2:08:43

That's true. They literally didn't finish it.

SPEAKER_01 2:08:45

That's a good point, yeah. I feel like part of it is also like the the crunch of like having a deadline means that they can't afford to throw things out. Like uh there's always like a pruning process, and that got shortened too. Right. So they just kept everything. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 2:09:07

They had to they they they couldn't they didn't have the luxury of cutting anything, they had to make it work instead.

SPEAKER_04 2:09:12

I wonder, yeah, I do wonder if maybe Kotor was a uh Kotor 2 was a uh instructional experience for them when it came to New Vegas. They realized like, okay, I wonder if we had tons of ideas in Kotor 2, and a lot of them ended up on the cutting room floor. We have to be absolutely brutal and kill our darlings about certain ideas if we're gonna get this thing made in 18 months, right?

SPEAKER_10 2:09:34

Like I wouldn't believe that. I haven't like done a comparison of the credits, but like I know Chris Avalon was a lead writer on both of those, you know.

SPEAKER_02 2:09:41

Yeah. I I wonder, I wonder how many of those darlings from Kotor uh got their names changed and were uh put in New Vegas instead.

SPEAKER_04 2:09:51

Uh I I I don't know. I feel like not many because so much of the game is borrowing from Van Buren, right?

SPEAKER_10 2:09:58

I yeah, I was also gonna say that part of this too is that like if anything that was had its name changed from KOTOR 2 is something that made it into Final Kotor 2 because it's like yeah, Ulysses is basically Kraya because that's just an archetype of character that Avalon likes to write.

SPEAKER_04 2:10:12

Right, like the turbo hater kind of character. Yeah.

SPEAKER_10 2:10:15

Yeah. Fall at New Vegas, uh, a a perfect uh genuinely one of the greatest CRPGs ever made and maybe a perfect video game, even with all of its faults, would have still found a letter grade to go up if it literally had Kraya in it. Just imported Just imagine if Ulysses, instead of only being in Lonesome Road, was a guy who would show up at like literally teleported out of nowhere at quest decisions to criticize decisions you made, no matter what those decisions were.

SPEAKER_04 2:10:46

But the thing is that that's what he was. Ulysses was officially planned to be a companion instead of your which is like a lot of his dialogue is this is a thing that Oates has told me before, and a thing that I I've like read about since then. A lot of his dialogue is just dialogue from when he was a companion, right? And they were just like, well shit, we don't have time to implement him as like the because he was gonna be like your legion companion, right? Which frankly probably would have been lonesome. Honestly, that's kind of the one thing that's kind of a bummer is that they didn't implement because I think I would have come away from liking that character more if he had just been a companion who was constantly questioning you, right?

SPEAKER_10 2:11:27

If they made this game like now, like if it was given the Fallout 4 treatment, instead of there being Lonesome Road, it would have been we redid the Legion questline, and this is the Legion questline expansion where it now has a full quest line and also this guy.

SPEAKER_04 2:11:43

Yeah, and Ulysses is also your uh is actually your your companion. And so all of his like, you know, kind of poking and prodding at your like choices through the game happen more organically than just kind of every time you enter a new area, he takes over Eddie and calls you a bitch.

SPEAKER_10 2:11:59

Right. It would genuinely be so funny. He's like, yeah, you know, I'm I'm Ulysses. I'm with I'm with the Legion. I'll help you out, whatever. And he's like, and you're like, damn, this guy really just seems to like never like anything that I do. And you find out later that he didn't meet you. He's known you the entire time, and he's literally formulating all his political opinions based on whatever you pick must be the wrong and stupid.

SPEAKER_02 2:12:26

Yeah, this is Ulysses really does feel like that fucking that fucking panel of Namor walking around being like, this is ridiculous.

SPEAKER_10 2:12:34

A dog, a barrel, how foolish. Cut content uh Ulysses, much like Oberon in this way.

SPEAKER_06 2:12:41

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_10 2:12:42

Just like you have to understand, I am ontologically bound to be your hater. Absolutely you cannot say anything to impress me.

SPEAKER_01 2:12:49

That's true. I loved this, like, one of the things that I I did think was interesting is that, like, he was going to like a lot of his cut content is like a like a dialogue quest, of which most of Lonesome Road pulls from like they just recycle his lines, uh, was that he um he really struggles at just being a legionaire because he just is so stuck in his tribal roots, and at one point you can just try and convince him, and he will take the o like he will do the opposite of what you said, because like reverse psychology is the only thing that works on him.

SPEAKER_04 2:13:26

Great. Honestly, when you frame Ulysses as just like an ontological hater, uh that character rockets really high up the tier list for me. Um once I like once you like understand that he just kind of hates you no matter what you do. Yeah I'm like, actually, no, that's a really funny character. Never mind.

SPEAKER_10 2:13:44

Maybe I'm gonna go to that's what Chris Avalone wanted to do because that's his favorite kind of character to write, as evidenced by Kraya. He just loves to give a player someone who is their dedicated hater.

SPEAKER_04 2:13:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_10 2:13:55

But also like on their team.

SPEAKER_04 2:13:58

Yeah, it's uh that's kind of funny, actually. You know what? Maybe it's fine. Maybe Lonesome Road is fine. Still my least favorite of the three or the four.

SPEAKER_10 2:14:06

Yeah. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_04 2:14:07

Maybe Lonesome Road is fine.

SPEAKER_10 2:14:09

It's a horrible slogan it's like stitched together Frankenstein style from all the parts of the shit they couldn't use. Um, but like I do kind of I would say like I don't like Lonesome Road that much, but I tend to have a warmer opinion on it. Not because I like any of its messaging really worked that hard for me, but like I mean, like, I don't know, like I think the back the career backstory is okay. I I like it well enough. But like for me, it's mostly just like I like what's the fucking word I'm looking for. There's like a literary term, it's like lacuna, right? And it's like the gap. I think there's there's two gaps, right? And it's a the gap between the audience and like the text that they're reading, and then also the author's gap between the thing that they are envisioning and the thing that they make.

SPEAKER_04 2:14:56

Sure.

SPEAKER_10 2:14:57

And I like anything that's like here is the space between. Right. Right. Like here is the here here's me trying to tell you about all the ideas I had that I couldn't make it into the text. I I it it I it it warms to me in that regard.

SPEAKER_04 2:15:14

Sure, absolutely. I super get that. It's like a it's a uh probably the closest the game comes to like looking at you and talking to you. Right?

SPEAKER_08 2:15:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 2:15:24

Um yeah, I like I think it's I think it's okay. I kind of the more time, the more I sit with Lonesome Road, and again, we've already been talking for two and a half hours. I knew we were gonna need another episode for the DLC thing. We're gonna do another episode, don't worry. I'm smart.

SPEAKER_02 2:15:36

Um I have a lot of DLC thoughts that cannot be captured in the next half hour.

SPEAKER_10 2:15:42

It's our 10th anniversary, so we're entitled to a uh 10th anniversary game of the year edition next week.

SPEAKER_01 2:15:47

That's what I said. That's fine. Yeah. Um 10th anniversary part two. I just think my like my favorite thing about like how much of a hater uh Ulysses is, is if you are if you are a bad enough dude to just walk into Lumsum Road immediately before you've developed any relationship with any of the factions, you cannot speak to him no matter how high your skill level gets, like how high your speech skill is. There is no way you can talk him down into just talking with you and coming to a peaceful solution. That's fine. Because he thinks that you are bona fide insane. I guess that's true. Entirely because he has no read on you and just thinks you're a psychopath.

SPEAKER_04 2:16:38

That makes perfect sense because to him and like in his uh like from his view, right? You you blew up the divide, mosied off for a little while, got shot in the head, and then just kind of came back and don't know why.

SPEAKER_10 2:16:54

Yeah, crawl crawled out of the grave and then immediately pulled your sorry hide over to his uh super fun death claw pit maze.

SPEAKER_01 2:17:03

Like the way the way he words it, he's just like baffled and confused and scared as to why all of the meaning he has put into your actions doesn't mean a thing because you're just this brain-damaged psychopath who's just been like going their way through life.

SPEAKER_02 2:17:19

Yeah, you've been running on autopilot.

SPEAKER_04 2:17:23

Yeah, very funny. I love that. Um yeah, I just uh I really like New Vegas.

SPEAKER_02 2:17:32

I'm really New Vegas is so fucking the thing is the thing is everyone was right.

SPEAKER_04 2:17:37

Everybody was right, and I'm really annoyed by it. I'm really, really annoyed by it because I can feel myself turning into one of those New Vegas fans that I hate. Um, but I can like feel myself becoming one of them in real time where I'm like, well, this could be more like Fall in New Vegas, right?

SPEAKER_10 2:17:53

Yeah. Um it turns out when you when you play like a really good CRPG, you look at other CRPGs and go, fuck, what if they were more like this good CRPG?

SPEAKER_04 2:18:01

Yeah, what if they were more like Disco Elysium and Fall in New Vegas? Imagine that.

SPEAKER_10 2:18:04

And that's not even unique to those games either. Like sometimes I'll I'll like try it like an actual like isometric CRPG and I'll play it for a little bit, I'll bounce off, and it's like, I mean, like, but they had like the the the tile chemistry system that in like Divinity Sin 2 where you could like like throw an oil barrel and it would dynamically spread oil on the ground and then you could light it on fire and whatever, and why doesn't your game have that?

SPEAKER_05 2:18:28

It's bad now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 2:18:31

If they do where you make New Vegas and they put just one settlement that I can build.

SPEAKER_04 2:18:40

Just one.

SPEAKER_02 2:18:41

It's f it's fucking over. It's fucking game over for me.

SPEAKER_04 2:18:45

Just give me something to kind of putts back, like it doesn't have to be like a whole town. You need to just give me like a lot somewhere to like build a house. Just like a place to kind of putts back and forth to every now and then between doing things so I can spend yeah, that's it. Not much.

SPEAKER_02 2:18:59

Instead of the lucky 38, or or just let me instead of the lucky 38, like the presidential suite, make that like uh an incomplete like floor of a hotel or an apartment. Like, well, you can build this however you want.

SPEAKER_04 2:19:13

Cool, thanks. I will.

SPEAKER_02 2:19:15

I uh alright, I will never play another Fallout game ever again.

SPEAKER_04 2:19:18

Right. That's it. You know, simple. I got a small brain. I'm very easily amused. That's fine. I make peace with this. Um yeah, I I just really I don't know. How many times can I say I love Fallout New Vegas um before it gets old? Hopefully it hasn't gotten old yet.

SPEAKER_10 2:19:40

I there's a I think if it's I I think if if the Fallout game is good had gotten old at this point, uh the person for whom it was old would not be listening to this episode. They would have stopped listening to the podcast perhaps years ago.

SPEAKER_05 2:19:52

Yeah, probably years ago at this point.

SPEAKER_01 2:19:53

Yeah. Listen.

SPEAKER_10 2:19:56

Go ahead, Oates.

SPEAKER_01 2:19:58

Listen. I've said it once before. It was funny then, it's funny now. New Vegas changed my life, and it's not because I'm a trans woman. I don't believe you.

SPEAKER_02 2:20:14

That timeline is suspicious, Oates.

SPEAKER_04 2:20:20

Oh man.

SPEAKER_10 2:20:22

It's just- I do think it I do think it is funny in retrospect how like likes Fallout New Vegas became some cultural signifier for being a transgender woman when there is absolutely no textual component whatsoever to Fallout New Vegas that would suggest it being a transgenderizing video game.

SPEAKER_02 2:20:43

I think it's I think it's I think it's like a topographical map.

SPEAKER_04 2:20:48

No, I can make that. You know what? I can make that argument. Well, make the argument. I would like to hear it. Fallout New Vegas is a game about remaking yourself from the ground up, right? You start as a blank slate, you get shot in the head, and you start as a blank slate, and from there you get to create the person you want to be from whole cloth, right? Like, in that way, what is that if not a transgenderizing game, right? I guess it's true.

SPEAKER_01 2:21:14

So just like Saints Row 2. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_10 2:21:17

Because like you had many things. And you and you know what it has this in common with is other greatest CRPG of all time discoolesia. Exactly. 100% I get I genuinely think, and it's unfortunate that it's like an old, like, it has a bolted-on, like, DD4E combat system that I understand is a fucking miserable slog. Because I do genuinely think we all at some point need to actually go put play Planescape Tormat.

SPEAKER_05 2:21:45

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_10 2:21:46

Because that is the the progenitor of this style of RPG, like definitively.

SPEAKER_04 2:21:52

Yeah. Maybe at some point. I need to sit down and do that. I've got f I need to actually go play Fallout 1 first before I do myself. Yeah. I would like to play Fallout 1 at some point. Um But uh yeah, no.

SPEAKER_02 2:22:06

There's there's just so many like little things you can talk about with like New Vegas. Because like it, like you said, like there's so much variety in the game that it's difficult to talk about without like here's my entire experience and all the decisions I made.

SPEAKER_04 2:22:21

Right, absolutely. So many little ways to solve things your own way, so many like little jokes that I just always think are funny. Um one of the early jokes that always like always, always makes me laugh is the um the rocket ships inside of uh Dinky the dinosaur. And the and the dinosaur toys themselves, where where Cliff, the guy who runs the store, is like, yeah, they're selling fast. And then you break into his storeroom and you're literally tripping over them. Fucking closet full of them.

SPEAKER_01 2:22:59

There's so many of them setting off your Geiger counter.

SPEAKER_04 2:23:02

Yeah, exactly. I think that's a great joke.

SPEAKER_02 2:23:05

Mr. Fantastic, like slumming around in the basement of RepCon.

SPEAKER_05 2:23:10

Yes, absolutely. Great.

SPEAKER_02 2:23:12

Fucking love talking to that guy all the time.

SPEAKER_10 2:23:15

I I'm so surprised they had the restraint to not literally get Mr. Fantastic for the TV show. Or Dr. Fantastic. That would have been.

SPEAKER_01 2:23:27

I guarantee you.

SPEAKER_10 2:23:28

They should have. Season three is going to be him like finding some supply of drugs and going completely insane.

SPEAKER_05 2:23:34

Yeah, yeah. And just come becoming Fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 2:23:39

So I know Ben and I know Ben and Sarah have never done this. I promise you it'll be the funniest time of your life if you ever do New Vegas again. Play as a character with sub brick intelligence.

SPEAKER_04 2:23:51

Yeah, I do need to do that at some point.

SPEAKER_01 2:23:54

And talk to and talk to some of the homeless people in Freeside. Okay, I can do that too. I might do that.

SPEAKER_02 2:24:01

I've heard that's good. Um I I also love I love doing the Sunset Sasparilla um Star Bottle Cap quest.

SPEAKER_01 2:24:14

It's such a funny ending. I love it to death.

SPEAKER_10 2:24:17

My fondest memory of that quest is uh avoiding it like the plague when I play on Xbox 360, because I found out early on that because of the way that that quest uh tracks itself, that if you start the quest, it will tank the performance of your game for the rest of Linear Prime until you finish the quest.

SPEAKER_05 2:24:36

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_10 2:24:37

Because it is individu because it is using the processing power literally constantly to track the uh whether you have picked them up status of literally every single blue star bottle cap on the entire map at all times. That's fucking crazy.

SPEAKER_04 2:24:53

Yeah, it's very um.

SPEAKER_10 2:24:57

I I never When I saw that man on my second playthrough, I shot him in the head before he spoke again.

SPEAKER_04 2:25:04

Great. Uh I never get tired of come fly with me and specifically the human guy who thinks he's a ghoul. I'm sorry, it's always funny. It's so funny.

SPEAKER_02 2:25:14

When your first movie is like, he's he's like, oh my god, you're hideous.

SPEAKER_03 2:25:19

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's not much to look at either motherfucker, and he's just some bald guy.

SPEAKER_02 2:25:25

And I I love it because Jason Bright, you know, being like, yeah, we like Chris. We don't want him to die of radiation poisoning. Please get him to leave.

SPEAKER_03 2:25:36

Please convince him to leave. He's a nice guy.

SPEAKER_02 2:25:40

He's not to deal with, but we would love to bring him with us, but he will melt.

SPEAKER_01 2:25:47

I love the unspoken, like the unspoken joke that he is balding in part because he worked in the radiation labs in Vault 34. So he left, and Vault 34, because he was the radiation specialist, fell to ruin and is now just filled with ghoul.

SPEAKER_10 2:26:05

I the thing is, they haven't remade New Vegas yet, specifically because they have to add in the ghoullifying drug or whatever, so that there is an alternate solution to that quest where you literally just go, nah, hold on, I got this, and you turn him into a ghoul, and he's like, Oh god, I feel terrible. And mysteriously, his voice sounds completely normal and not at all, but what is his voice?

SPEAKER_02 2:26:30

I saw some one of the funniest things, one of the funniest comments I ever saw was um I saw a post where someone was like, I didn't realize until I saw until I saw Chris that people can just do the ghoul voice, and the response was, yeah, they can do that in real life too.

SPEAKER_01 2:26:51

I just love the I love the idea of of Chris having like that that horrible ghoul affect, and the second you get rid of it, he sounds they they swap his voice so he sounds like Walton Goggins.

SPEAKER_03 2:27:06

Oh my god, there's just there's just so many fucking gags.

SPEAKER_02 2:27:10

I love the bit at the end of Come Fly With Me when you when the rockets launch off and one of them stalls for a second.

SPEAKER_05 2:27:19

It kind of wobbles in the air. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_10 2:27:24

And if you and if you're like into rocket science at all, you just go, that one's not going where they want it to. Nope, nope, that's not. That one's not making it to Mars, not a million years. No.

SPEAKER_01 2:27:34

If your science is high enough, but you're like, there's two different checks. If you do the science way, they'll all fly off correctly. If you do the repair one, it'll still go off in the wrong direction, but you'll get the good slide anyway.

SPEAKER_02 2:27:49

Yeah, that's good. You yeah, I got I I you get the slide where like they just come back.

SPEAKER_04 2:27:56

They just come back.

SPEAKER_01 2:27:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:27:58

So wherever they ended up, they're like, well, that didn't work. Let's go home.

SPEAKER_01 2:28:03

So so Ben, there's it's it's not obvious because you will never run into it organically unless you know to look for it. Way off in the north, past the boomers, like like way up in the northeast, if you screw up that and send one and like you don't fix that one rocket, you will find a crashed rocket with a shit ton of bright uh followers who are now feral and just attack you on site.

SPEAKER_02 2:28:28

Oh, interesting.

SPEAKER_05 2:28:29

Yeah, it's great.

SPEAKER_02 2:28:31

Um, I love the the subtle, very subtle implication that no bark noonan is the chosen one from Fallout 2.

SPEAKER_04 2:28:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:28:43

It's so funny.

SPEAKER_04 2:28:44

It's so good. Oh man. Um, there's I mean there's there's I forgot the uh the the getting like the different horrors for the Garrett's right. Um I forgot that the dude Garrett was obviously asking for Fisto for himself.

SPEAKER_02 2:29:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 2:29:02

And that's Liam O'Brien playing that character, and he's just so excited and he keeps having to like walk it back. He's like, those perverted robot fuckers.

SPEAKER_05 2:29:12

And you're like, hmm, I see what you are. I know what you are.

SPEAKER_10 2:29:17

I still think um, aside from any uh explicitly forced on you canonized backstory from Curry or from other stuff, uh, I like that one like very minor side quest where you meet this guy who's like a blues singer or whatever, and you can decide to imply in conversation that you're definitely his dad.

SPEAKER_01 2:29:34

Yeah, yes, yeah. It's the it's um uh the lonesome drifter. Yeah, the lonesome drifter. Yeah.

unknown 2:29:40

Uh so deep.

SPEAKER_10 2:29:42

Like he brings up his mom or something, but then the name's like, wait, her, she lives at this place. He's like, yeah, why? And he's like, and you're just like, no reason. Are you 18?

SPEAKER_01 2:29:49

Yeah, no. No, so if you have the lady killer perk, you can just ask him like very specific information about a woman in Wyoming, and he goes, Can't say that I recognize that, and you're like, oh god, thank god. Okay. Alright.

SPEAKER_10 2:30:03

Woo!

SPEAKER_01 2:30:04

That's right. Oh, it's so good. Because the um the implication, Saturn, is if you do the quest correctly for him, he's the son of the mysterious stranger from the perk.

SPEAKER_10 2:30:15

That's right. That's right. There you go. Um That's what I was thinking of. Still very funny.

SPEAKER_02 2:30:21

So very funny. Josh Sawyer has confirmed that the that the bullet to your head did not give you amnesia.

SPEAKER_04 2:30:27

Okay. Mm-hmm. And then that just makes Lonesome wrote, okay, it's fine, I'm not gonna talk about it here.

SPEAKER_02 2:30:32

But the thing is, the thing that makes it even funnier though, is that that just means instead the courier has not been paying attention.

SPEAKER_10 2:30:42

Because that's a funnier thing to me, is that is that is the idea of Ulysses catastrophizing, but like, how could you do that to the go to to the divide? I almost called it the gorge.

SPEAKER_02 2:30:55

Oh, yeah, Ulysses, how could you do that and make a bad DLC that I didn't like playing?

SPEAKER_10 2:30:59

Ulysses just like, how could you do that to the divide? Like, do what to the divide?

SPEAKER_04 2:31:04

What are you talking about?

SPEAKER_10 2:31:05

And it's like, what, do you have amnesia? He's like, no, I just sort of like walked away, and that was the end of it. What? Did something happen?

SPEAKER_02 2:31:12

I delivered. Yeah, what happened?

SPEAKER_04 2:31:17

What do you mean it blew up? It was a nuclear explosion. How did you not know it was- and that's why Ulysses hates me? I mean, of course.

SPEAKER_10 2:31:25

I mean, it was kind of heavy, but I didn't ask what was in it.

SPEAKER_02 2:31:28

Cut to the flashback of the courier like idly tossing the box up and down as they're walking down the street. Like, too gonna drop this off.

SPEAKER_10 2:31:38

And that's how you know the courier canonically has lucked him.

SPEAKER_02 2:31:41

They do, they do the uh they do the uh the UPS like porch cam thing where they just like dropkick the package onto the front door, like dust their hands. Alright, off I go.

SPEAKER_05 2:31:52

That was easy.

SPEAKER_02 2:31:54

Uh but no, like it just like the implication that the courier just hasn't been paying attention to anything in in all of New Vegas. Just like, what do you who are the N who are the uh the NCR? It's like what have you not did you not see the guys with like uniforms and guns like walking around everywhere?

SPEAKER_04 2:32:11

Have you not been paying attention? Like, what the hell, kid?

SPEAKER_10 2:32:14

It's like No man, I've been day drinking for the last 20 years, every single day of my life. What do you want from me?

SPEAKER_01 2:32:22

My favorite thing about the courier is that, like, no matter what you do, almost all of your dialogue seems to suggest that you are in your late 30s, early 40s, and have been drinking very hard for the last 15.

SPEAKER_10 2:32:35

Courier 6 is like, here's the thing, bud. You want to know why I am a courier? You wanna know why I do it? Because I'm there, I'm like, what do you need from me? And they're like, I need you to take this object, and I need you to walk a distance and then leave the object when you get there. And I ask, how much are you gonna pay me for this? And they say, 10,000 caps, and I say, Well, alright.

SPEAKER_04 2:32:57

Okay, then, sure, why not?

SPEAKER_10 2:32:59

I'm I'm very I will walk anywhere for money.

SPEAKER_02 2:33:04

Well, you see, until this point, the courier has never had a pit boy to track their location.

SPEAKER_05 2:33:09

Sure.

SPEAKER_02 2:33:10

So they've just been like, they've been like put on, they get a package and then put on horse blinders and just walk in a singular direction and don't listen or talk to anyone else.

SPEAKER_05 2:33:21

Until they hit their destination, yes.

SPEAKER_10 2:33:24

Courier is is like that one Dawn Trail patch quest character. He's like, my hobbies include carrying like approximately medium-sized objects. I should have known this was gonna be a dangerous job. The object they wanted me to carry was rather small. It was quite small. Very small ones are always the worst. Because then you start asking yourself, like, why don't they just walk there with it if it's so small and unbothersome? And I guess it turns out that they don't do it because they're a piece of beef jerky in a glass tube, but I didn't know that at the time. I just knew that he wanted to pay me like 10,000 caps to do it.

SPEAKER_04 2:34:00

Big old chac change, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:34:03

Benny's about to shoot shoot you in the head, and your like last thoughts are like, oh, I really need to start paying attention. Like the reason the reason the game starts mid-conversation is because the courier picked that moment to stop zoning out.

SPEAKER_05 2:34:20

Yeah, they've been daydreaming, yeah.

SPEAKER_10 2:34:22

They've been like literally the courier's disco Elysium brain voices just like, wake up. You are about to be killed.

SPEAKER_01 2:34:29

And the courier's like, I'm what funny, funnier Saturn than the Ron Pearlman in his diegetic internal monologue, and you just like, well, what's been going on with my life today? What's the let me check my my mind journal?

SPEAKER_05 2:34:44

Let me go into my mind palace and then you look up and Benny's got a gun to your head, and you're like, ah shit, that was a bad time to daydream.

SPEAKER_10 2:34:51

Courier. In defense of the courier, if I had the ability to summon a perfect Ron Parolman impression Tolpa to be my internal monologue voice, I would do this multiple times per day.

SPEAKER_05 2:35:03

Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:35:04

Courier's been in the grave for like two hours at this point. Benny's just been monologuing the whole time.

SPEAKER_05 2:35:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:35:10

Suddenly, the last last five minutes, Courier's like, oh shit, what was happening?

SPEAKER_05 2:35:15

Oh fuck.

SPEAKER_02 2:35:16

Oh, he was saying something important, wasn't he? Ah, God.

unknown 2:35:19

Shit.

SPEAKER_05 2:35:20

Now I'm getting it.

SPEAKER_02 2:35:21

Is he the guy I'm supposed to deliver this to? Am I done?

SPEAKER_05 2:35:24

Can I go home?

SPEAKER_02 2:35:25

I think it's o I think the job's over. Why am I in a hole?

SPEAKER_03 2:35:29

Oh. Uh shit.

SPEAKER_02 2:35:33

Who did you spend the most time with, like as your companion? Who did y'all roll with? Christine.

SPEAKER_05 2:35:40

Yeah. Modded DLC companions.

SPEAKER_04 2:35:44

Um, other than that. Oh no.

SPEAKER_01 2:35:47

I mean, like, I I barely kept any of my companions for more than an hour except for Christine. Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_04 2:35:53

Uh, no, I think probably Veronica. Veronica's the most fun to me.

SPEAKER_02 2:35:58

Um Veronica uh Veronica's pretty high on my list too, I think.

SPEAKER_04 2:36:02

Like, Arcade is funny. Arcade and Veronica. The thing is, you can and should early game get Eddie and Boone. Um, the problem is that that breaks the game over its knee.

SPEAKER_08 2:36:14

You want to have any fun.

SPEAKER_05 2:36:17

If you want to have any fun in Fallout New Vegas, like shooting guys, do not under any circumstances get Eddie and Boone. Oh my god. Um because they're doing all the work for you, man.

SPEAKER_01 2:36:30

Yeah. Like on the plus side, on the plus side, you were playing a pacifist character anyway, so combat was not really in the cards for you.

SPEAKER_04 2:36:37

I mean, truly, it was mostly just pointing boon at guys and be like, I get a boom!

SPEAKER_10 2:36:41

Boon was Rosalie's stand for most of the game. I want to say for my uh playthrough.

SPEAKER_04 2:36:50

Oh, very funny.

SPEAKER_10 2:36:52

I want to say for my kill them all playthrough, it was mostly Eddie and Rex because they're, you know, a robot and a dog, uh, so they'll never leave you. Uh, I think for my original first playthrough, I I mean I spent a lot of time with everyone, uh, because I was trying to get them. I want to say in Saturn fashion that I did spend the most time with Veronica because I have a way of homing in on who the lesbian is before they tell me.

SPEAKER_04 2:37:17

Absolutely, 100%. Um, Veronica rules, I think.

SPEAKER_10 2:37:21

Veronica's just funny.

SPEAKER_04 2:37:22

I just like hearing, yeah, all her commentary is good. That's the same reason I like carrying, like toting Arcade around. Arcade is also really funny. Yeah. Um, you know, poor Boone. Sorry, Boone. Um Cassidy is funny, but I don't like her perk that much that I didn't get any use out of it. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:37:42

So I played an alcoholic, so I like that.

SPEAKER_04 2:37:44

Yeah, of course you're doing it. You're having a great time with Cassidy, of course.

SPEAKER_10 2:37:48

Yeah, I didn't I I had a similar experience with her where like I like Cassidy a lot. She's I mean, she's probably honestly my favorite of the companions, just in terms of like character. Yeah. Yeah. But uh similarly, it's like I've never really liked doing consumables-oriented builds in the Fallout game, so she just did not get a whole lot of play with me. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:38:08

She's powerful, but like her perk doesn't really benefit you. But she you know, I do like her as a character and I like doing her quest a lot.

SPEAKER_04 2:38:15

I mean, I just like all the I like all the companions. I do like all of them, yeah. I think they're genuinely great. I think, again, I have to put on my like my my shame cap. Don't look at me. Um, I think they're all better than all the companions in the entire series, except for Nick Valentine, who was probably. Yeah, literally. It's it's crazy that like the strongest one in the whole series. But that's just because he's got two fucking DLCs about him. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_10 2:38:38

Yeah, it's it's crazy that Fallout New Vegas is a game where you're like, yeah, if you had to pick like the two stinker companions, it's probably Boone and Raul. Yeah. Uh, and Boon and Raul are still like infinitely more interesting characters than you get for the cast of most of these kinds of games.

SPEAKER_04 2:38:58

Absolutely. Like Raul himself. Oh, go ahead, Ben.

SPEAKER_02 2:39:01

I was saying, I like all the companions in four, but they don't compare to New Vegas.

SPEAKER_04 2:39:09

They just don't have the same, except for the one. Except for Amazon, yeah. Yeah, they don't have the same like degree of depth, and there's just like a lot going on like in their heads, and you can just kind of tell. And like, I don't know, even Raul, who I don't particularly like, mostly because I think that's a character that they didn't think about when they wrote him. No, they were like, well, he's got this character, and again, I hate I hate even talking about it because I just what uh our uh our PNG tubers flipped out for a second, we're good. I did, I just noticed that. Um no, like that that character is very mm-cause alright, real quick. While New Vegas likes to default to sexual violence against female characters, no, you're true. I don't know why. It sucks, it's bad, I gotta get it out of my system real fast. They do it all the time. It's the cheapest, laziest backstory to be like, this is how fucked up the apocalypse is. And you're like, alright, I get it. The first time you're like, oh, that's fucked up. After the fifth time, you're like, okay, guys, calm down. Like if it was I know it's 2010, but come on.

SPEAKER_10 2:40:12

I hate I hate to be like, this isn't berserk. There's guys running around in like cartoon space alien costumes.

SPEAKER_02 2:40:18

Like, get a grip, you know. I hate to be like analysis about the use of sexual violence in a thing, but like it makes sense with Boone, because he's tied to the Legion, which is the faction that does that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_05 2:40:32

Sure.

SPEAKER_10 2:40:33

But when you It's bizarre for Raul where this happens to him, and then he's also like Yeah, twice. And he's still like, yeah, well, I mean, like, as far as anyone else, the Legion aren't really any worse than anything anyone else who's around. It's like, damn, dude, alright, you've really given up any pretense of having like any kind of like personal beliefs or moral character at any point, huh?

SPEAKER_04 2:40:56

Any kind of internality whatsoever. I thought I wasn't paying attention. Jesus Christ.

SPEAKER_10 2:41:02

Because like you'd think the guy whose whole thing is that happened to me twice, and also for a while I was kind of like Mexican Batman would have a more principled uh like not wanting to fuck with the Legion slash we need to kill these guys, boss, they're they're bad news.

SPEAKER_01 2:41:21

Right.

SPEAKER_10 2:41:22

So like he's just sort of like, eh, whatever, I don't care.

SPEAKER_01 2:41:24

So I think part of that is because they cut Ulysses and they realized they needed to make a leap, like a character, a company you can take into the Legion with you that isn't Rex or Eddie. Right.

SPEAKER_10 2:41:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 2:41:35

That's that's pretty much it, yeah. Which is a shame. Yes, it's but it's Raul suffers as a result of it, you know what I mean? Yeah.

SPEAKER_10 2:41:41

Yeah, because it he goes from being a guy who's like, I'm 200-year-old Batman, I have suffered too much to be able to actually feel anything anymore, which is kind of like what his backstory would make you think he's supposed to be. And it makes him then turn into like the kind your kind of contemptible uncle who has a lot of cool stories, but also is just like a like a Trump voter who you know does not have like the political wherewithal for you to make him realize why that is a bad thing to be. Right. Right. Like just sort of a guy you don't want to interact with, and it's like he's nice enough, it's just that he believes horrible things and you don't know how to tell how to like make him not be that way. Right.

SPEAKER_04 2:42:23

And it's like, but even Raul still like has interesting things because like you're still getting like with Raul, you get like an interesting kind of uh sort of viewpoint of the immediate post-war, because like he literally has been around since the very beginning of this whole apocalypse thing. Um so like you get to have like a viewpoint of that with him, which I think is kind of compelling. Um even your host, he's like a bog standard in like a companion.

SPEAKER_01 2:42:57

He's also like the only like the only instance outside of Chinese subghouls where you get to see a any perspective of what it's like outside of the like directly outside of the US. Because he talks about Mexico City a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_10 2:43:12

He's like I'm gonna be real, uh, because I was I was thinking about this about Rowell, where like uh when in the development of Baldur's Gate 3, one of the things they talked about when they were designing the for like the companion's design and like the party they ultimately settled on, is like we went through so many concepts and ideas for party members, and we really separated the wheat from the chaff to pick to like get a party who would be like varied and interesting and compelling and whatever. I think, and they had some figure like we went through like literally 200 completely distinct, fully fleshed out character ideas for people who could be in the party, right? Before we settled on these guys who are here. And straight up, I would literally replace Raul, the worst New Vegas party member, with a solid, like half of the cast of Baldur's Gate 3 would be gone. He could replace most of them. It's crazy. He's like the weak link, and it's still like that's just the level New Vegas is operating at, you know?

SPEAKER_01 2:44:14

He's still like despite the obvious setbacks that they had to make for him so that you can have a mechanics that would work. He's still a very nuanced, like fully fleshed being.

SPEAKER_02 2:44:37

I'm a fan. He's got a lot going on. He's interesting. He's but he's like, he's the worst, but he's still interesting.

SPEAKER_10 2:44:48

Yeah, he's got he's got a very unique flavor, and he's got like the thing is, like, I haven't played Fallout, like I haven't played Fallout New Vegas in more than 10 years. I can still hear Raul's voice lines perfectly clearly in my head, and I barely ever used him. Like he's got presence and he's got interesting things going on, which is why I'm just like, yeah, for all the work you did, like like engineering your perfect party for Baldur's Gate 3 or whatever, like I like fucking uh that druid guy gone replaced with Raul. Uh fucking uh what's his name? The the wizard uh has a fucking self-important backstory, gone replaced with Raul. I wouldn't even have to think about it. Like there's just no competition. And Raul is the is the lowest rung on this ladder.

SPEAKER_01 2:45:34

The weakest link in the chain is still the compelling like Fallout 4 brainworm style 7 out of 10. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 2:45:40

Because the thing is the thing is also that I think makes Raul stand out a little bit more is is that like it gives that that that bit of flavor that's appealing, is that he, like what Ulysses would have been, also kind of hates that he has to follow you around. Not that it's anything personal against you specifically. He just doesn't like going places.

SPEAKER_03 2:46:03

He just wants to stand out of the way.

SPEAKER_10 2:46:04

He was really happy, he was really happy with his do nothing job in that super mutant torture basement.

SPEAKER_02 2:46:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_10 2:46:13

Like he's like he had a system, it worked. He didn't have to go anywhere, and nobody had any enforceable expectations of him.

SPEAKER_02 2:46:20

Like you're like you you're asking ask him to join you, and he's like, he's too polite to say no. And then whenever you dismiss him, he's like, yes! I mean, well, that's what you want, boss.

SPEAKER_05 2:46:35

I guess I gotta go.

SPEAKER_01 2:46:37

Sure, boss. The old man will call around the dirt to keep hidden. I think his heart broken or anything.

SPEAKER_10 2:46:43

I think if you ever whenever you dismiss Raul from your party, he should lie about where he's going. And like, it's not like he disappears from the game world, but you have to find him, and he goes somewhere random and it's not the place he said he was going to be. I want, oh boss, I didn't mean uh I had an errand to run.

SPEAKER_02 2:47:04

I want the remake of New Vegas where they do the Fallout 4 like swap dialogue between party members. And Raul leaving is every time he'd be like, Well, they're your responsibility now.

SPEAKER_05 2:47:17

Yeah, they're your problem now. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_10 2:47:20

Raul's a guy who makes me think of that old uh like thing that like the uh locals and I I think I forget it was India, but it was somewhere in like South Asia, whenever like the western like like explorers came to go out to figure out what was going on there and ask about the orangutans, and it's like, yeah, the orangutans can speak, they just don't because otherwise we'd have we'd make them start working.

SPEAKER_01 2:47:43

Rel wishes he could be in orangutan somewhere deep in in uh in Papua New Guinea.

SPEAKER_02 2:47:51

Raul in in in the Lucky38 is programmed to uh be like go into a different room than you are in.

SPEAKER_10 2:48:04

Less opportunity Raul in dialogue, never making direct eye contact with you and always trying to walk away in the middle of a conversation.

SPEAKER_02 2:48:12

Raul. Raul, those headphones aren't plugged into anything. I know they're not.

SPEAKER_05 2:48:17

I know you can hear me, dude.

SPEAKER_10 2:48:19

Nah, boss, they're noise cancelling. We don't have that technology, Raul.

SPEAKER_01 2:48:24

He's like the opposite of Boone, who's like programmed. This is my favorite thing about Boone. He is programmed to look dead in front of him at all times, unless he is talking to you, in which case he makes unblinking eye contact.

SPEAKER_05 2:48:38

Oh, funny. Oh, Craig Boone. Oh, there's a man with problems. Sorry.

SPEAKER_01 2:48:45

Sorry about your everything, dog. The concept art for Raul is so cool.

SPEAKER_10 2:48:51

Craig Boone is is the guy who makes you think that letter Kenny bit like, I wish you weren't so fucking awkward, bud.

SPEAKER_02 2:48:57

Yes. To me, it's the fact that Craig Boone's name is Craig.

SPEAKER_05 2:49:02

Yeah, sorry. Craig Boone.

SPEAKER_10 2:49:05

God, that that you know that they uh I know that like it you have to cut corners in video games. God alive Rowell should have just still had his cowboy costume.

SPEAKER_04 2:49:18

He does get his cowboy costume. Yes. He does?

SPEAKER_02 2:49:21

If you if you do a quest and convince him to be a can back to being a vaquero, he just wears the cast the cowboy outfit.

SPEAKER_01 2:49:29

Yeah. If you tell him to go back to his vaquero ways, he he becomes a gunslinger.

SPEAKER_02 2:49:34

Yeah, and he just forgot about that completely. He immediately flashes into the cowboy outfit.

SPEAKER_01 2:49:40

Now, granted, it doesn't look as cool as the concept art. Allow me to pull it up for you.

SPEAKER_05 2:49:45

It's not nearly as cool as the concept art, unfortunately.

SPEAKER_02 2:49:48

Yeah, he does kind of more look like um a mascot character at like a cowboy uh themed theme park, but you know.

SPEAKER_10 2:49:59

Also, his pictures really made me appreciate God, but Danny Trejo is like one of the leatheriest men alive.

SPEAKER_03 2:50:04

That's a man who is made entirely out of leather.

SPEAKER_10 2:50:08

Yeah, I mean when that man dies, they're going to make a jacket out of him, and they won't even need to cure it.

SPEAKER_02 2:50:14

Danny Trejo was in uh uh one of the what was in a Muppet movie, and he's like the puppetiest man you could get to act on.

SPEAKER_10 2:50:28

Danny Train Danny Trejo had intrinsically has damage resistance against energy.

SPEAKER_01 2:50:32

Yeah. Here's what he here's the low resolution version of the outfit.

SPEAKER_04 2:50:38

Yeah, I mean in terms of Fallout outfits, like New Vegas outfits, it's it's not the first.

SPEAKER_10 2:50:45

They they did their best, but unfortunately it's a uh seventh gen Fallout game.

SPEAKER_01 2:50:50

Yeah. It doesn't quite it doesn't quite match the vibes of the concept art, which is extremely sick looking.

SPEAKER_04 2:50:55

Yeah, no, I will because the hat looks just kind of like a bowl on top of its head. Yeah, it looks like I feel like I should be eating I should be eating tortilla chips out of it.

SPEAKER_02 2:51:05

Yeah, looking but also looking at this concept art for Raul uh and also the in-game version, um I'm gonna say something rather controversial, is that I much prefer the way ghouls look in four and seventy-six than in three in New Vegas.

SPEAKER_01 2:51:20

I I mostly agree. However, I I I think the older ones really do need to look like this horrifyingly sickly. Yeah, no.

SPEAKER_04 2:51:30

I think younger ghouls, I think there should be more of a there should be more of a spectrum of like ghoullification.

SPEAKER_01 2:51:36

You know what I mean? My my argument here then is that a recurring theme both on the East Coast and on the West Coast is that ghouls tend to be ostracized even when they should be pillars of the community. And if they look like that, I can kind of understand why, because it's it's making the same it's making the same leaps in logic as making like quarantine areas for like people with leprosy. You know, like it it we live in a post-apocalyptic barely functioning past medieval society that they're making assumptions about how unhealthy Elon is.

SPEAKER_02 2:52:15

My thing as uh what I think is the difference is that like what they what they were going for for three in in New Vegas, I think, is trying to keep to the spirit of what ghouls looked like in one and two. But one and two had a much more like uh exaggerated cartoony art style.

SPEAKER_04 2:52:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:52:37

So you get like, you know, patches of of missing, you know, exposed brain and missing flesh, and they have bolts screwed to their heads to keep their bodies intact and that kind of thing. Which is fine when you kind of look like a cartoon character, but when you're going for a more realistic look, it just kind of looks like you shouldn't be alive.

SPEAKER_04 2:53:02

Yeah. Like falling apart.

SPEAKER_02 2:53:06

Logistically, all of your parts should have fallen out by now.

SPEAKER_01 2:53:12

Like I said before, I I think that I like the look of it in part because he kind of looks like a rotting, like animatronic puppet sitting in the back of a Disneyland lot.

SPEAKER_02 2:53:24

For a person like Raul, who is explicitly like his whole thing is I'm 200 years old and I feel like shit every day, it works. But like, I just think there's like other ghouls in general where it's like you probably should not look like all of your skin is missing.

SPEAKER_05 2:53:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:53:46

Like, there's there's one ghoul in particular. I think they're from three, because I think they might have touched things up in New Vegas, but this ghoul here should not be walking around like a person. They should be constantly screaming in agony.

SPEAKER_04 2:54:00

Well, that's the whole thing about ghouls. Is that like they're not really people anymore. I think their bodies don't work that way no more. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_10 2:54:10

Like the thing is you can't feel pain if all your nerves have shriveled up. Yeah. You know?

SPEAKER_04 2:54:15

That's that's that's kind of the thing, is that it's just like a 1950s interpretation of like radiation poisoning. It's not meant to be like realistic.

SPEAKER_02 2:54:24

I know that, but I mean like I just like I think there's just like a like a middle ground between them. Like, I that's why I think like the four and seventy-six kind of like leathery tightened skin works better for a more realistic art style.

SPEAKER_04 2:54:37

Sure.

SPEAKER_02 2:54:38

I don't know, it just it's just like a uh like I think three and New Vegas like are in the weird, uncanny in-between.

SPEAKER_07 2:54:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:54:47

That you didn't pick one side or the other, so it doesn't quite work for me.

SPEAKER_04 2:54:51

Yeah, yeah. Um my god, what else? We've gotta be talking for three hours, like probably.

SPEAKER_02 2:54:58

I know, but I dream more fucking love New Vegas so goddamn much.

SPEAKER_04 2:55:01

I really like New Vegas a lot, is the thing. Despite my minor complaints about certain uh female character writing decisions, um and and uh the map itself. There's so much in there that is also really good. Um I couldn't even tell you right now, right? Um I don't know. I think it's cool that in 2010 you had a major companion who was just a lesbian.

SPEAKER_02 2:55:29

Yeah, and a gay one.

SPEAKER_04 2:55:31

That's cool, you know? Arcade's gay. Yeah, and arcades gay, and and that I mean, uh shame he's voiced by Zachary, Levy, but light Levi, but whatever. Yikes.

SPEAKER_10 2:55:42

Uh it was such was the style at the time, unfortunately.

SPEAKER_04 2:55:45

Uh why does Veronica scream that way? Felicia Day? You didn't have to do it like that.

SPEAKER_02 2:55:50

Yeah, you when she when she lights on fire, you didn't have to do it that harsh.

SPEAKER_04 2:55:54

They I mean they Well, I mean she was on fire. But they I mean I think they literally set Felicia Day on fire. In the recording booth to get that scream out of her. It's the only explanation. She would have done it for the art form, I know.

SPEAKER_01 2:56:08

I love it I just love all of the little details. Like like a thing I that Shia um asked about, which reminded me of a fun little factoid. So, okay. Much like some of the fun parts about four, and some of the fun parts about 76 is that like, oh that's a historical tidbit. Um there's so many good little ones all throughout New Vegas, because they clearly lived in the area and and wanted to bring him on whenever possible. So that you know, like there's a vegan advanced casino, but right across from it is I said Steve at the Buffalo Bill Hotel. Which has the El Diablo wooden roller coaster, one of the last one of the last ones that exists, Rest in Peace, COVID destroy you. Um inside of that one is supposed to like so for whatever reason they say like uh probably to make things more interesting, they split it up into two parts, but that is both of those hotels are supposed to be the same one because the Bonnie and Clyde um getaway vehicle is inside of the Buffalo Bill, along with um the um clothes and gun of the sheriff who caught them. And inside of the Bison Steve, you can find inside of a safe lucky the 357 magnet that he used to kill um Bonnie.

SPEAKER_04 2:57:38

That's funny.

SPEAKER_02 2:57:39

That's awesome.

SPEAKER_04 2:57:40

Yeah, that's great. It's fun. Yeah, there's tons of little things like that. There's just a lot of like attention to detail. It's you know, like a there there is a certain there's a certain appeal in kind of romanticizing the landscape like we talked about earlier with Fallout 3 and 4, and to kind of fantasize them, right? So they kind of more evoke the spirit of it. Um Disneyland. Yeah, you Disneyland a little. But there is, I will admit, despite the fact it does kind of you know produce a kind of boring map, um uh to the to the point that even I think even Obsidian realized it, because like Zion in Honest Hearts is more like an impression of what Zion looks like. Yeah. They can kind of make like they can actually kind of render in in Engine versus what Zion actually looks like. So even they realize like maybe we went a little too literal. Um but there is a kind of interesting, you know, interesting kind of nature to make it be like a pretty close one-to-one recreation, like of the route you would take from Good Springs to Vegas, right? Of like what that landscape looks like and what those roads look like and and all of that. That I think is interesting. Um there's all kinds of little things there that I just find very compelling. I love all the stuff. I don't know, I like all the stuff at Jacobstown, I like all the history there. I like Marcus a lot as a character.

SPEAKER_02 2:59:14

Really like Marcus, yeah. I wish Marcus would have would I wish Marcus would have been more involved in the plot, but then that might have been like a little bit too like fan service-y. Yeah, like a little bit too indulgent.

SPEAKER_04 2:59:27

Yeah, you just you just play Fallout 2 instead, yeah. Um because he's he's gonna be uh right, yeah.

SPEAKER_10 2:59:33

Yeah, they need the expansion for Fallout New Vegas. They need the expansion for Fallout New Vegas, where it's the fifth route where it's just I have decided that the super mutants are going to take over New Vegas. Marcus. You're in charge, boy! Well, let's let's let we're gonna turn the lucky 38 into an old folks home for all these for all these nightcrawlers.

SPEAKER_04 2:59:53

We're getting rid of we're kicking everybody else out of Vegas, and it's just it's just for it's just for mutants now. It's fine.

SPEAKER_10 2:59:59

And it's just it's just so it's just so grandma can play bingo.

SPEAKER_04 3:00:02

That's we we just want to let grandma play bingo. Uh grandma can play the numbers, it's fine.

SPEAKER_02 3:00:06

That all the the uh the old, I'm just thinking of the old uh the old uh fallout forum, no mutants allowed. But it's just the Simpsons bit where it's like, oh, they got this all wrong. No, comma, mutants allowed.

SPEAKER_01 3:00:22

Act two has you as the climax already take over New Vegas because in act three, Tabitha comes back. Tabitha's revenge.

SPEAKER_05 3:00:32

Tabitha returns because she broke Rhonda again.

SPEAKER_01 3:00:35

Somehow Tabitha returns.

SPEAKER_10 3:00:38

No comma mutants allowed as me when I am uh massacre the uh Fallout 4 Brotherhood of Steel en masse.

SPEAKER_06 3:00:44

That's correct, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 3:00:46

I I want to say, by the way, I I solved the Tabitha, I solved that quest the funniest way possible, because for the longest time I did on accident. Yeah, my well the longest time my character could not survive a fight. I was a stealth build. My strength was like four. Yeah or three, I think. Okay, I didn't have the hit points, I didn't have the capacity to sneak past all these mutants and kill them. Like, when I so when I finally managed to stealth my way up there by stealing a bunch of stealth boys and just crawling my inching my way up there, I was like looting for stuff, fixed the robot without thinking, walked outside, and the quest resolved itself.

SPEAKER_05 3:01:27

That's what I did too. What?

SPEAKER_02 3:01:29

Oh. Okay.

SPEAKER_04 3:01:31

I was just kind of goofing off, and I found the robot, and it gave me the option to repair it, and I had a I had a repair magazine because my character was just constantly carrying, was basically uh, I guess properly role-playing a courier by always carrying magazines with them to just like hand out to people. Um, because I took that one skill that lets that makes magazines do twice as or is twice as effective for however long their duration is. Um so it's plus 20, so you can just do anything in New Vegas as long as you can. Um and so yeah, I was just like, read a magazine, you walk outside, it's like you solved the quest. I was like, I didn't know there was a robot to fix.

SPEAKER_02 3:02:14

You solved my Tabitha Griddle.

SPEAKER_04 3:02:16

And I didn't I didn't know there was a Tabitha riddle to solve, so um cool, I think. So good for Tabitha. I'm glad her and Rhonda run around. I love the ending for those two where they make a storybook and they make a storybook about themselves.

SPEAKER_05 3:02:32

Yeah, and it's a huge hit. I'm like, that's great, that's perfect. Well done.

SPEAKER_01 3:02:36

Yeah, I saw they terrorize Arizona and New Mexico for all of time. Yeah, it's a good time. And everyone is telling stories about just the sh the shit those two get up to ruining the Legion's time.

SPEAKER_02 3:02:50

Just had them had them walk off, and then I was like, oh. Isn't Raul around here, I guess? I'll go find him now.

SPEAKER_01 3:02:58

It's so good. I love I love listening to their radio, which is why much like Diamond City radio, you don't want to fix it. Yeah, yeah. I will leave Raul there just so that I can just continue to listen to Black Mountain Radio forever.

SPEAKER_04 3:03:14

Absolutely. You don't want to fix you, take your sweet time doing that quest because you don't want to fix Black Mountain radio. I get it. 100%. Uh we'll just try. I'm just there's a lot. It's good. Folks, New Vegas is really good. I'm I'm running out of speaking steam after three hours. Yeah. Almost 15 minutes.

SPEAKER_01 3:03:35

Um I think my bladder is about to explode.

SPEAKER_04 3:03:38

I really we'll I mean we're gonna come back because I want to talk about it.

SPEAKER_02 3:03:41

We'll do really DLC next. Yeah, we'll do a uh a mini-ish episode talking about the DLC.

SPEAKER_04 3:03:47

It won't be a mini. Are you fucking kidding me? No.

SPEAKER_10 3:03:50

There's all four DLCs, and it's gonna be another three hours.

SPEAKER_04 3:03:54

It's gonna be another three hours. An hour of it is just going to be Dead Money, the best DLC ever made.

SPEAKER_10 3:04:00

Um I know I know that we don't really do episodes like that anymore, but also we're going to do episodes like that.

SPEAKER_02 3:04:10

I would I'm yeah.

SPEAKER_04 3:04:11

So yeah, no, we'll we'll uh we because I I got too much to say about dead money. Um if you want to play along at home, then uh I think we're gonna talk we're gonna try and talk about them in order. So uh uh the fucking Honest Hearts, Old World Blues, Dead Money, Lonesome Road. That's the order. Yeah. So look forward to it. Yeah. Um I'm sure we'll use the DLC to talk about more of the main game, too.

SPEAKER_02 3:04:42

Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_04 3:04:43

You know.

SPEAKER_02 3:04:45

Um, okay, then in that case, I just want to say thanks to all three of you for doing this dumb little project for ten years with me.

SPEAKER_06 3:05:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:05:01

And all of the various things that came alongside it. I mean, the podcast is called The Gorge because Sarah and I needed an excuse to do self-indulgent discussions about the games that we had both been playing over and over and over again for thousands of hours each. And it's turned into like an more entirely self-indulgent project. Like, take out, and that's hell you're walking into, and all the streaming we do, and the live readings, and just fucking all of it. This was an excuse for me to talk about the Venture Brothers for nine hours.

SPEAKER_05 3:05:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:05:44

Uh, it's an excuse for us to come up with dumb ideas for things, to just like really talk about how much we love certain games, to make fun of current events in the news and whatnot. And um don't worry, the self-indulgent projects aren't going to stop anytime soon because that's right.

SPEAKER_10 3:06:06

I'm uh before you say a thing, you're I'm pleased to announce that uh as a celebration of our 10th anniversary of the Gorge, uh, that we have all made a uh binding pact that we're going to do this uh every single week for the rest of our lives. If we ever miss a single week, we'll have to start removing fingers.

SPEAKER_02 3:06:22

Yes, that's absolutely so that's uh definitely one of the uh uh new bylaws being passed. Uh it's in the contracts you all signed with your blood.

SPEAKER_04 3:06:33

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:06:34

Um then you remember you uh you mailpoint.

SPEAKER_10 3:06:36

Sarah, I know you forgot I collected some of yours and signed it for you. I hope it's a fair.

SPEAKER_01 3:06:40

That's super, super cool. Thanks, God. I'm really appreciated.

SPEAKER_02 3:06:45

That's why when you came up in October, I did ask for a vial of your blood so that I could get these contracts printed.

SPEAKER_10 3:06:53

I was really impressed that that that Dr. Acula guy was willing to show up on such short notice to safely collect our vials of blood.

SPEAKER_02 3:07:01

That trick-or-treater dressed as a dressed as a uh a Dr. Vampire was uh under my employee the whole time.

SPEAKER_06 3:07:07

Yeah. Makes sense.

SPEAKER_02 3:07:09

Um but on that note of things that we are bound to be doing, I am proud to announce coming soon-ish. Uh, a new series. Patron exclusive. At some point. Called Attention Bajoran Workers. In which we are going to do an presumably episode by episode analysis.

SPEAKER_04 3:07:35

Kinda. I think it's just I think it's vi I think it's vibes-based. It might be like three episodes in one episode. It might be it might be like where we talk about ten episodes in one episode. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_02 3:07:48

Small batch episode discussions of the entirety of Star Trek Deep Space Nine, aka the best Star Trek.

SPEAKER_04 3:07:57

The best one.

SPEAKER_10 3:07:58

You're gonna get an entire episode of us talking about Run Along Home. Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_05 3:08:04

Yeah, I'm definitely gonna spend an hour talking about Run Along Home. You're adorable.

SPEAKER_10 3:08:10

For sure. Well, we have to fill the hour no matter what, so worst case scenario we'll just find other things to talk about in addition to the episode.

SPEAKER_02 3:08:19

So on top of the gorge, on top of uh when Saturn starts running our uh brief reboot interlude.

SPEAKER_10 3:08:28

Should be a next month, hopefully. Uh horsey's going how it was. Might that might that might go a little bit uh you know, uh develop the div the the realities of developing a video game that does not have a tight jam schedule and is also more uh ambitious than your last project are uh everybody going, boy howdy, we set a really uh we may have set some unrealistic uh scheduling goals uh for ourselves for things, and then also uh various other things. So I might get pushed a little bit, but still gonna be our next thing.

SPEAKER_02 3:09:01

Once that starts, then we'll then we'll back back uh to regular reboot. We're also, yeah, we're also going to be doing attention Bajoran workers. So please look forward to that. Patreon.com slash thegorge. Uh now, that all being said, thank you to DJ Company.

SPEAKER_09 3:09:23

We fucking anyone? What was that?

unknown 3:09:24

Saturday?

SPEAKER_02 3:09:25

We fucking anyone. Oh no, doesn't happen yet. That's later. Okay, hold on. One sec, yeah, we gotta get this here. Thanks to DJ Company and use the record music. Email us at thegorgepodcastle.com. Follow us on all our social medias again, patreon.com slash thegorge. Look forward to more reboot. Look forward to attention bajor and workers and whatever else we fucking do, all the streaming and stuff we're gonna be doing too. More ace attorney when that happens. Uh yeah, so who do we got?

SPEAKER_01 3:09:51

Um, can we say hold on, let me let me double check this. Can we can we say, can we say fuck Travis Dout? Because he's the guy who wrote for Raul.

SPEAKER_10 3:10:07

He doesn't have he doesn't get he doesn't have soul dominion over the uh terrible treatment of women characters and that that narrative, unfortunately. I would feel dishonest.

SPEAKER_01 3:10:18

I'm not done. He's also the guy who wrote for um uh Jane and Marilyn, the two creepy um the two creepy uh downloadable girlfriends. Um he is responsible for the misfits and for the first recon. So I think he's responsible for all of the.

SPEAKER_04 3:10:33

Oh wait, no, he is responsible for it all of it. I have one, I have I owe Chris Avalon an apology. Um Wow.

SPEAKER_10 3:10:38

Yeah, sorry, Chris Avalon. I mean, I'm still misfirching you for the libertarianism, but I'm absolving you of the other part.

SPEAKER_01 3:10:44

Oop Oop for the games add-on stat was a writer and designer on Honest Hearts alongside Joshua Sawyer. Um he wrote the characters for Jed Masterson, Walking Cloud, Follows Chalk, and Salt Upon Wounds. He also is responsible for all of the dialogue for the for the perks nearing Imperialist. And he was the uh co-writer with Chris Avalon for Luns and Roads and Old World Blaze.

SPEAKER_04 3:11:06

Oh, so fuck this guy. So like this guy is literally he's literally responsible for all of the terrible, uh, the terrible backstories in in New Vegas and a bunch of other horse shit. Okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_09 3:11:19

So so it's just all his fault.

SPEAKER_01 3:11:22

It's all his fault. Travis tr his his name goes goes by the name Travis L. Gimpo Stout.

SPEAKER_09 3:11:29

I'm not typing that middle name. I'm just gonna go with the the two on the other side.

SPEAKER_04 3:11:36

Uh get us out of here.

SPEAKER_02 3:11:37

Good night, everyone. Happy ten years.

SPEAKER_04 3:11:40

Happy ten years. Happy ten years.

SPEAKER_10 3:11:44

His most recent credit, uh, narrative designer on Avatar Frontiers of Pandora.

SPEAKER_02 3:11:50

Wow! Fuck him for that too. Good night, everyone.

SPEAKER_01 3:11:56

Good night, everybody.

SPEAKER_02 3:11:57

Good night, everyone.