Goatmoose

Bethesda announced around 3-4pm yesterday that The Pitt had been fixed and was available again on Xbox Live. Bits of joy and bliss and molecules of super duper happy flowed through my loins, and I proceeded to boot up my white machine with zestful vigor. This is what they suggested to do in order to play:

1. Delete the garbage DLC file.
2. Download the new one.
3. Use a pre-garbage DLC game save, and enjoy.

Long story short, I followed those massively complicated directions, and it still froze. I used an older save, one from even before Operation Anchorage. Still froze. I was pissed like a fat guy after two pots of coffee, hiked up my socks, and stormed to my laptop to check out the Bethesda Blog to see what’s what. Several other homies had posted their annoyance with the same situation. So what gives, chuckles?

Since Bethesda didn’t seem to want to comment on the issue, but aside eat their giant Pitt Cake (the cake is a lie!), I took matters into my own hands. I opened up a save from a different playthrough that was like 5 months old – and voila, it worked. I was on my way to The Pitt. Home, sweet, irradiated raider and slave infested home. It turns out you don’t just need a pre-Pitt save, but a super old ass save. At least I did.

The boss of the Pitt resides in the building seen in the background behind the sculpture of Andrew Carnegie.

It’s hard to say a lot that people don’t already know about The Pitt without giving away what goes on. You run around crazy Pittsburgh, full of steel mills and workers- apparently becoming irradiated 500 years in the future reverts us to our roots as an industrial age steel town. You’re a slave and all your possessions get stripped at the beginning, but yeah, you get them back. It’s cool for a while to be so unarmed and helpless, though. Since I played through as a good person, I obeyed myself as a slave. I can imagine the game could get pretty rough if you tried to take out all the people using only the little crummy tools of brutality you are afforded as a slave. Until, of course, you gain control of the fabled auto-axe, a mostly one-hit-kill weapon that uses your entire stock of AP for a V.A.T.S. target, but is pretty phat for sure. Morbidly obese, Rosie O’Donnell style phat.

So cool to see my city destroyed. For real. I definitely have enjoyed the play better than Operation Anchorage, mainly because it’s still set in a city and therefore has the same feeling/appeal as the actual Fallout 3 game. And you don’t have to travel around using subway systems, because we don’t have fancy stuff like that here. We’ve got Heinz ketchup.

Saying any more might destroy the story, which I didn’t yet have a chance to finish myself. The point: if you like Fallout 3, it’s worth the $10. Download it and have a few hours of solid fun, with new weapons, new enemies, new junk to collect and a new boner in your jeans.