Has everyone had a happy holiday season? Personally, I spent most of the night before Christmas trying to find a way to get my brain back into my head.
Perhaps this requires some explanation...
Having somewhat unexpectedly finished off Arkham Asylum, I thought it might be fun to revisit Fallout New Vegas (the sequel to Fallout 3) with the aid of some downloadable content, or DLC as it is more commonly known. Personally, I think that DLC is one of the best innovations in gaming for quite a while, allowing game developers to easily add value to a game purchase over time without having to develop a whole new game engine - or having to invest in packaging and disk burning, for that matter.
I purchased two additional modules for FNV and started out with Old World Blues, a visit to the Think Tank at Big Mountain, a hidden scientific base originally dedicated to pure research which later became involved in weapons development as part of the war against Communism.
After the transition from New Vegas, I awakened in the main dome only to discover that while I was asleep, the disembodied brains making up the Think Tank had shared the wealth by removing my brain as well. Even worse, when they weren't paying attention, one-time Think Tank member Doctor Mobius had somehow stolen my brain and taken it to his dome in the Forbidden Zone.
I eventually fulfilled the main quest for the module by defeating the evil Doctor Mobius and his robot scorpions - well, to be fair, the overly confused and not terribly malicious Doctor Mobius - after which he generously offered to let me ask my brain if it wanted to be reunited with its body.
Of course, my brain wasn't interested, and I was required to find a way to convince my wayward cerebellum to return to its home in my cranium. Which might not have been too bad until I discovered an unexpected glitch in the game which stuck my brain in a loop of reminiscences about shared memories (if one can share memories with their own brain...anyway, you get the idea.)
But let me tell you, whatever the challenges of overcoming my brain's distaste for life in my body might have been, they were nothing compared to the challenges of getting the damn game to function properly, a challenge made even more difficult due to the need to reboot the computer every time the program started to loop.
The down side of the sort of freedom offered by an open world game like Fallout is that it's impossible for game developers to anticipate every possible configuration that a player might create, and as such it's not uncommon for bugs in the software to prevent players from accessing certain portions of the game. Generally, there's only one solution: reload a previous save of the game and change as many parameters as possible going into the nonfunctional area.
So - back out into the crater containing Big Mountain to kill some more of my fellow Lobotomites (I wasn't the only visitor to be relieved of their grey matter) until I leveled up and felt that I could take another shot at the buggy brain conversation. To help load the dice, I did everything I could to alter the parameters before initiating the conversation with my brain: dropped some weapons, loaded some Intelligence and Persuasion modifiers, and even stood in a different place in the dome.
And then, after all that, although I managed to get past the problem and my brain finally agreed to rejoin its body, I unwittingly went through the wrong exit at the end of the game and launched the "He decided not to restore his brain" conclusion. At which point I wrote the whole thing off as a lesson in humility, and left my brain in a bottle. And you know what? There were no problems starting the next module without a brain. This may well be some kind of larger editorial comment on computer games - or at least on the players.
- Sid
