New game!
New world!
New rocken mostashe!
http://failingfalloutnewvegas.wordpress.com/2011/07/04/joe-will-rise/
GASP at an improved number of photos!
THRILL at more uniform post length!
APPLAUD like a drunken chimpanzee at regular bi-weekly updates!
Post 1 comes out today as Joe is re-built for a new world.
Ever since the “Point Lookout” DLC came out I’ve been toying with the idea of bring back Joe. After a little thinking I came with a plan and began to put into motion Joe’s triumphant return.
Sadly, this plan is never to be. Just before Christmas my home was broken into. As well as my game collection and tv, the thieves stole my Xbox. Every save-game, every moment of Joe’s life is on that harddrive. And with that gone, Joe is forever lost to us all.
At this stage you may well be wondering why I’m even bothering to make this post. Especially considering that this blog hasn’t been updated for over a year. But the truth is I never had a plan for Joe before. Someone commented that Joe found his way into situations very naturally. Well, there was a reason for that: I decided what to do next the moment I sat down to play.
Anyhow, I thought that someone (if any of my old readers have this site on an RSS feed) might like to know what I had planned for Joe’s future. It was a fairly comprehensive plan, and would have taken Joe through some exciting situations and then provided a ‘real’ ending to the blog (assuming that he didn’t die at some stage in the proceedings).
I did consider re-building Joe (or starting a “son-of-Joe”), but it just wouldn’t have been the same.
EDIT: See you soon – In New Vegas!
I have to say, when I started this blog I had a plan for my character. The idea was simply that he would have objected to leaving the Vault and would try to build a life of comparable safety and comfort in the wasteland.
Now that he has contact with Megaton, he is also a well respected businessman and private contractor.
I admit that I feel a little lost now, because he really has achieved everything I’d have hoped he would. A warm, safe area to live in. Plentiful food and water. A dog and Clover.
Hard to know what to make of Clover. By this stage Joe would have set her free, so I’m assuming that her continued presence is due to her own (probably somewhat damaged) reasoning.
It was a long road to get there, and Joe has been a scavenger, a homeless waster, a slaver (although he considered himself a lawman), a hunter, a plumber (Joe the plumber!) and trader. My favourites were right in the beginning, in the trailer, and then again when I was in the tent near Paradise Falls.
It’s pretty obvious that I’m not updating anymore – and this is for two reasons. The first is that Joe is actually pretty powerful now. Playing somebody competent is less fun then it was playing ol’ Joe.
Of course I could up the difficulty, but there is also my other reason. Getting images from my Xbox is a pain in my substantially sized buttocks. It involves getting digital camera shots, copy those to my seven-year-old PC, convert them to a smaller size, crop them and then e-mail them to my work PC.
Arguably, I could go on without photos – but they are really the ones telling the story. They bring the funny and the best posts are the ones that are properly illustrated. There is a chance that I might return in the future when Xbox Live integrates with Facebook and allows us to post screenshots straight to the web.
Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Another day in Canterbury Commons and it occurs to me that I did in-fact agree to some contracts back in Megaton that I haven’t followed up with. And Canterbury Commons is a big of the small time for a bigwig like Joe. If only he could move his sweet pad to a more convenient location.
Megaton still has many possibilities and if I can disarm that bomb I could use the reward to set up a branch of ‘Honest Joe’s’ in Megaton. I can imagine it now: The first in a chain that will allow me to control the very will of the wasteland. Mwahahahaha! Mwahahahaha! Mwahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Err…. Anyhow…
Of course, that is going to mean a long trek back to Megaton and the surrounding environments. Off the top of my head I have to visit the woman who allegedly stole the saloon-keeper’s caps, check out the old supermarket and see if my study of explosives will allow me to deactivate the detonator of the nuke in Megaton. Of course there is a big ‘maybe’ attached to that last one. It being a giant nuke and all.
While the prospect of messing about with the nuke is clearly the most likely to result in my early demise, the prospect of searching a 200 year-old supermarket for food is perhaps the most irking. That’s about as likely as finding food in the remains of a medieval market.
Nevertheless, a deal is a deal and I should honour my commitments…. So far as I think it’s safe.
This trip isn’t going to involve any traders; so all rules are obviously back in effect for this outing. I figure four days of food and water will be enough, as the trip back only took three days.
I figure I’ll bring my hunting rifle and my shotgun for personal defence; which will be particularly important considering that I’m leaving Dog and Clover at home for the duration of this outing. While NPCs are not capable of actually visiting my store as part of the game, it is an important part of Joe’s fiction that the store be running. And it would be unwise to leave Clover without Dog for protection.
To shake things up, I decide to travel by night. Which turns out to be a fairly wise choice fairly early on in the proceedings, as shortly after I pass through Canterbury Commons’ lower cattle paddock I almost make a terrible mistake.
Just over a hill I zoom in on something that looked like it would produce meat – as this is an area wherein Mole Rats used to play. This was not a Mole Rat.
Luckily, he didn’t see me and I was able to slink off into the shadows.
Nice save.
A few pieces of exciting news, in case anyone missed it:
Broken Steel is coming the 5th of May
Broken Steel changes Fallout 3’s ending, raises the level cap to 30 and adds new quests and areas.
Next year, a whole new Fallout game is coming. Fallout: New Vegas
The big news is that this new game is being developed by Obsidian, who you may know from Neverwinter Nights 2 and Knights of the Old Republic 2. This is massive news, because Obsidian is the home of many developers that once worked at Black Isles – the creators of the original Fallout games.
J. E. Sawyer is heading the project – which is great, because he was heading the ‘real’ Fallout 3 before Black Isle went under.
Ah, yes. Home, sweet home. I’ll admit I missed my little apartment.
I’m more then a little gratified to see everything is where I left it (and no items have vanished or teleported to the roof).
I sleep for two days – Least that Joe deserves after trudging through the wasteland after a suicidal trade caravan, surviving in a town comprised of soulless scavengers and trudging all the way home.
It’s amazing the amount of crap I have here. Back in my early days of scavenging, I left no stone unturned. I picked the places I visited clean. I have over a hundred cups, clip boards by the dozen, plates, cutlery and random trash that I will never ever use. I did refrain from collecting empty bottles and dented cans – but that is about all I left behind when picking over a ruin.
Now I have plenty of ammo, water, food, medicine and money, so the crap I have here seems rather redundant. I figure that it’s time to convert this to money or usable items.
It takes several trips, and the better part of a day, to lug all the rubbish down to Canterbury Commons. Not a particularly enthusiastic response from the townsfolk in response to my heroic return, but I suppose they are used to traders who consider my recent endeavour a half-trip. After Megaton, most traders head down to a ‘city’ that supposedly has been established in the remains of an old aircraft carrier. But after the debacle of just getting to Megaton, I’m in no mood to attempt a trip to this ‘Rivet City’. If Traders have issues with raiders, I don’t want to see them try to deal with the Super Mutants near the city centre.
For the next few days I sleep, eat, drink and hang about the house. I spend all my other time reading books on repair and explosives. And I practised setting and disarming mines.
This is because one of my game rules is to only boost skills at level up if I have been using that skill. I figure that if Joe was even considering an attempt on the bomb, he’d want to be VERY practiced. Disarming practice is clearly in order.
I miss Galaxy News Radio.
