Goatmoose

DLC: Dead Money
Cost: 800 MSP
Achievements: 5
Total Points: 140

It is somewhat disappointing that this DLC only ponies up 140 possible points.  For $10, the price of an average XBLA title, I expect to be able to add 200 points to my score.  Regardless, Dead Money’s achievements aren’t terribly hard to get if you just play through the story.  You don’t need to pointlessly hunt down 100 steel ingots or alien recordings, or particularly go out of your way at all.  Just flow through the DLC and you can acquire them all.

But just in case, here are some tips…
1. Assemble Your Crew – 20
This achievement is story-related and cannot be missed.  It is likely the first one you will unlock.  At the very start of the DLC package, you are tasked with finding three others – Dog, Christine and Dean Domino (yes, the guy on all the Tops show billboards you’ve been watching during load screens since mid-October).  Each is located in a separate chunk of the Sierra Madre and finding them is simply a matter of following the blip.  I started with Dog, then Christine, then Dean- but I can’t see why it would make much of a difference which way you went.

At first, you will be fairly weak and the Ghost enemies you encounter will be much better equipped at kicking your ass than you are at kicking theirs.  One of the plus sides of this DLC is that should you find yourself overwhelmed, trapped, low on health or otherwise unwilling to take on too many enemies, you can simply run past most of them.  Just keep hauling and don’t look back, and you’ll usually be able to run away from them.

2. Sierra Souvenir Aficionado 30
This achievement requires you to find 500 Sierra Madre chips.  These are the currency for the DLC.  This sounds like a lot of chips, but in reality is painfully easy.  During your play you’ll likely find thousands of these.  Just loot everything like normal – every desk, cabinet, nightstand and drawer you can find – as well as picking them up off the ground.  Most people who play Fallout habitually search everything, and nearly everywhere you look in this DLC will turn up some chips.  I had this achievement about 20 minutes after starting.

3. Having a Ball 20
This is also story-related.  Once you’ve found all three of the folks for the first achievement, you must escort them to particular locations to launch the gala event that opens the doors of the Sierra Madre.  Get them where they need to be, get yourself where you need to be, and bingo.

When escorting the three, Dog is the easiest because he will kill any enemy you encounter when he is in your company.  Dean is also fairly useful with his pistol and can lay some hurt down when being escorted.  The trip you take with Christine is the shortest, so it doesn’t matter a whole lot whether or not she’s skilled with a weapon.

The next two achievements don’t come until the very end of the DLC, depending on how you finish the game.

4. Cash Out 30
There are three ways to end the DLC.  Two of them net achievements and the third is the end of you.  When you reach the Sierra Madre vault, before entering, save your game.
The ending where you get trapped in the vault gets you nothing.  So instead…

The cash out achievement requires you to convince Father Elijah to meet you in person in the vault.  There are a number of ways to do this – having high speech is obviously the easiest, but you can also impress him with certain high explosives, science and other skills.

When he comes down to meet you, he will try to trick you and activate all the gun turrets in the area.  These will kill you unless you run back into the vault and hack the terminal to change their targeting parameters.  The terminal requires a very high science skill to use.  If you change the parameters, they will attack Elijah.

It is important to note, however, that to get this achievement, you can’t simply let Elijah die.  The first time I played, I let the turrets kill him, escaped the casino, and got nothing.  He has to die by your gun.  The second time I played, I turned the turrets on him but quickly ran over and pumped him in the head with a shotgun before the turrets had time to do much damage.  I got the achievement on the spot.  Elijah isn’t particularly strong and goes down easily.  You don’t have to escape the vault for the achievement to pop.

5. Safety Deposit Box 40
Load your pre-vault opening save and convince Elijah to come down and meet you once again.  This time, instead of walking up to him, sneak out.  It’s easy to sneak out – just go the opposite way.  Once you’re out of the room, you can run like normal.  When you get about halfway through the vault, you’ll start to hear him talk, realizing that he’s been trapped in the vault and you are on your way out.  The escape is easy – the threat of your collar blowing up is nearly nonexistent because you’re already halfway out of the vault before the beeps begin.  Once you escape, it will pop.
There you have it.  Let me know via comments if you have any questions on getting to the vault or any other problems with Dead Money.