Now THIS is Fallout DLC.

After pitiful Fallout: New Vegas DLC performances thus far with Dead Money and Honest Hearts, gamers were given a treat at the end of July with Old World Blues. Not only is it easily the strongest DLC package for New Vegas, but it is arguably the best DLC to date among all of Fallout 3 and New Vegas’ DLC combined. A lackluster performance of late has been easily redeemed with this content, completely worth the 800 MS points.

Unlike Dead Money and Honest Hearts, Old World Blues adds a tremendous amount of gameplay to the New Vegas experience. While the former two took (at most) 3-5 hours to get through, Old World Blues kept me occupied for a week’s worth of playing a few hours a day. The story is long, the environment is vast, and – best part – you can return to it at any time while playing New Vegas, affording you endless opportunity to keep the DLC alive as more than a one-off package.

The game starts at the old mole rat infested drive-in theater outside of Nipton. You turn on a projector and suddenly find yourself waking up inside a medical wing of a Think Tank within the Big Mountain Research Facility, or Big MT, or Big Empty. The area is controlled by a handful of absolutely hilarious AI robots that are in an endless quarrel with Dr. Mobius, a former colleague of theirs turned mortal enemy. They fight amongst each other, suffer from extreme agoraphobia, and refer to your fingers as hand penises. You also find out they are responsible for many of the happenings and creatures in the rest of the Fallout universe. The world outside the Think Tank is inhabited primarily by lobotomites on which the Think Tank have operated, and whose ranks you have just joined. The difference between the other lobotomites and you? Dr. Mobius has your brain, which is somehow able to communicate with you, and have replaced your heart and spine with mechanical versions. It sounds insane, and it is, but it is a very humorous and well-crafted story that keeps you engaged and truly involved with the characters. And characters they are. Even the light switches are sassy.

The Big Empty has over 30 locations to explore, half of which are outside the bounds of where you need to travel to complete the main quest put forth by the Think Tank. Similar to Honest Hearts, the map is enormous, but unlike Honest Hearts, it is actually interesting. There are lots of places to go, interiors to search, secrets to uncover and stuff to find. The quests aren’t terribly structured, which allows you to go anywhere you want at any time and complete the DLC at your own pace. Some of the quests are repetitive fetch missions, but housed within such a great story, it isn’t all that irritating. Fast travel is possible and easy.

One certainty about Old World Blues is that it is very challenging, even with a maxed-out character. I used more stimpaks during this DLC than in any other package or area in all of Fallout. I started with over 300 and left the Big Empty with just over 100. Granted, I entered the world somewhat poorly equipped and low on ammo, which couldn’t have helped. I also wore Joshua Graham’s armor from Honest Hearts, which got completely ruined in a matter of minutes, leaving me only to scrounge for armor in the Big Empty – which is mostly crap – particularly because there are no other humans aside from the lobotomites who just wear hospital gowns. So seriously, get your stuff prepared before you enter. Don’t expect to get too much repaired while you are there. The only AI that can repair things for you charges an utter fortune.

Like any DLC, you come away with very powerful new weapons, new items, new perks (one of which is very handy for Hardcore mode), and another raised level cap. There are lots of valuable goodies to claim as well, providing you with a bundle of caps if you shop them all.

My heart was honestly broken with the first two DLC for New Vegas, and I was starting to worry. This package totally renewed my faith in incredible DLC production, and is by far the one to get if you were only to download one add-on for the title. Take your little hand penises, grab your controller, and download it.

Let me preface by stating that I played through the Honest Hearts story, got both endings and bagged all 120 achievement points in just over three hours. That’s $3.33/hr. And I even did all the optional missions that have no relevance to the actual plot. Let’s take a look…

Looking back in time, the Fallout 3 DLC packs were grand, exciting things that not only added to the story and the depth of Fallout 3′s main track, but provided excellent discoveries and characters along the way. When Dead Money came out for New Vegas, I was expecting the same. Instead what we got was a Saw-esque scenario that not only lacked relevance to the main story, but failed to capture the spirit of Fallout the way the DLC packs for its predecessor did. It was, however, at least something that you could spend more than a couple hours working on, which is more than I can say about Honest Hearts.

Honest Hearts puts you in front of Joshua Graham, the famous Legate of Caesar we’ve been hearing about the whole game. He was forced into retirement after the battle of Hoover Dam when Caesar had him covered in pitch, burned, and chucked into the Grand Canyon. Turns out he lived and has been hiding out in Zion National Park with a couple gangs of folks, has a bandaged face and is a relatively likable guy. He’s revered by his followers and wants you to help him protect them from another group of nutjobs that pretty much look and act the same as Graham’s followers, but we’re told they are bad. That’s essentially the point. Nothing really made me give a crap about him or his people, or the fate of Zion for that matter. I’m just told to help him, and for some reason I do. After hearing about The Burned Man during the entirety of Fallout 3, I was really looking forward to meeting him and diving into his story. It’s very impressive how they managed to take such a mysterious and interesting character and end up making him so boring. Oh, and if you choose to shoot him in the face instead of offering to help his crew (or if you choose to shoot the scrawny fellow that takes you to him thirty seconds after you start), the DLC pretty much ends right there and you’re left to wander Zion with even less purpose.

The missions are essentially fetch missions – go here, get this, go shoot some folks here, then we’ll team up and kick bum. The environment, while vast, amazingly well-designed, littered with tons of areas to roam and explore and completely perfect for the Fallout universe, is equally underused by the DLC. Honest Hearts forces you to traverse only a small amount of the land – and while it does give you the ability to return to it after completion (which is different from most), there really isn’t much reason to. Sure, there is plenty of terrain you can roam and look for things and be all Fallout-y, but there isn’t a whole lot there to find. I guess if you really wanted to walk around for 8 hours shooting mole rats and young cazadors, it’d be the best DLC ever, but I’m more into usefulness. It’s all very thin.

Honest Hearts provides a couple new weapons and armor offerings, as do all DLC packs, but it doesn’t really give you anything to write home about. When I went back to the Mojave Wasteland after beating the DLC for the second time, I kept using the same weapon I took into the DLC to begin with. A quick trip to Gun Runners netted me a few caps for the junk I brought back from Zion, but even that was hardly worth it.

As a Fallout fan so devout that I’ll continue to buy DLC and play no matter what the quality, these words hurt me to write. I may have radiated water in my veins, but the New Vegas DLCs are 0 for 2 in my books. Even if you subscribe to Graham’s story and are interested in the character of the Burned Man, I feel there isn’t enough there to counter the game’s tiny story and pace. Zion is expansive and awesome, but an environment alone can’t carry a lackluster… everything else. On the contrary, if you’re only contemplating a play for the 120 achievement points, you should definitely give it a go. You basically get one for starting the DLC, two more during the story, then one for each of the two endings. If you save at the right place before the story branches, you can get both endings with less than 10 minutes work each from the branching point.

At least the next DLC should be out in a month… third time’s a charm, maybe?

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.

So, we’re doing this again.

Back starting in 2008, Fallout 3 ended up reaming its millions of avid fans for another $10 every couple months as its five DLC packs were released with completely satisfying gaps between them.  An ample length passed between the last Fallout 3 DLC and the launch of New Vegas to get us all riled up and stiff for another Fallout title.  It came, we conquered, and now we’ve seen the release of the first New Vegas DLC, Dead Money, on December 21.  Let the process start again.

I don’t know about you, but I’ll buy a Fallout DLC just because it’s a Fallout DLC and I’m a hideously large fan of the games.  Some content for Fallout 3 was better than others and I assume the same will be true for New Vegas’ add-ons.  I didn’t much care for Operation: Anchorage with Fallout 3, its first DLC, just as I didn’t much care for Dead Money.  However, I paid my $10, played through it and don’t regret the decision merely due to my love for the series.  Even though I didn’t enjoy it a ton, it was worth playing – and raises the level cap to 35 – a nice little perk to take back to the main story.

If you haven’t yet heard, Dead Money takes you to a lost casino called the Sierra Madre, located in an isolated part of the wastes plagued by a poisonous cloud.  You find yourself there with a collar around your neck (much like the gun collar from Saw) and are somewhat under the whim of a nutter named Father Elijah.  The Sierra Madre is rumored to never have been opened, as the great war started right when the casino was to have its grand opening gala.  Elijah wants you to open it and you serve to find out all its secrets and uncover the truth of its existence and what happened.  The story itself is actually pretty interesting and unique, as the casino and its surrounding areas hold much to discover and have some good twists and ideas.  It’s the gameplay that is lacking.

The collar around your neck is detonated by radio frequencies, and the Sierra Madre is conveniently covered with radios.  You spend half of your play time trying to find and disable these radios within the few seconds you have before your head explodes.  This is somewhat neat at first, and annoying as hell after about an hour.

Part of what makes DLC fun is getting new weapons and armor to bring back to the wastes.  You’ll find a few- the police gun, cosmic knife, the bear trap claw, some machine guns, gas bombs, etc., but none are really that spectacular.  I ended up pawning them all at Gun Runners once I got back to the main game and buying the other main game weapons I couldn’t previously afford.  I think the police gun, which is essentially a .357, is the only one I kept.

And as for armor, you basically end up with some reinforced combat armor.  Joy.

The enemies are essentially two-fold.  You have Ghosts, who come in a few varieties depending on what type of weapon they use (bear trap claw seen above).  They are super strong and, until you learn the requisite skills from one of the other characters you meet, very hard to kill.  The other enemies are holographic guards that defend the casino areas.   These can’t be killed and will kill you with a few shots, so you’re generally left to find ways around them if you want to live.  Aside from a couple seemingly ill-placed radroaches and all those radios that can murder you remotely, those are the only enemies you’ll face.  The best tip for playing is to make sure you save often – your head will be blown off a number of times and the enemies can give you a good thrashing.  You won’t always want to retrace your steps, so a save at least every few minutes is recommended.

One neat element is that caps nor any faction money has any value in the Sierra Madre.  You find unique Sierra Madre chips nearly everywhere and, combined with other items you find around the DLC (cigarettes, pre-war outfits, etc.) you can trade them at unique vending machines for food, stimpacks and other essential items to get you through the DLC.  It really limits your resources and forces you to plan, be careful and pay attention to what you’re doing.

There is a lot more that could be said, but those are the essentials.  I don’t want to spoil what is actually a fairly interesting story.  Just know that at the end, you have a choice to make that determines your achievements.  Save first.  And before you go, find yourself some gold bars to take back to the wastes.  It’s certainly worth the payday.

Check back a little later for a Dead Money walkthrough/achievement guide.  The game has 140 points worth of achievements and sells for 800 Microsoft Points ($10).

After manually adding all my points from my 126 played games, I can confirm the points for the Broken Steel achievements, Death From Above and Shock Value, while having been completed, were not added to my score.

Twitter user MagicWhiskey said he encountered a similar problem with The Pitt. The fix came in the form of deleting The Pitt from his console, then re-playing the missions to have them properly awarded.

It was also suggested I try recaching the memory on the unit, which hasn’t been attempted. Neither fix has been attempted yet, and I shall let you know my findings. Hopefully one works and my gamertag recognizes that it didn’t award me the points – considering the pair do still show up as completed when you look at the overall achievement list.

I bring this up as I’m wondering if any others have the same problem.

The fact is, I have completed every achievement except Data Miner – the one for hacking terminals, which is part of the standard disc game. If you look in my Fallout 3 achievement list on the console, it will show Data Miner as the only one not unlocked.

However, on the main achievement menu, where it shows all the games you have played, it says I have 65 of 68 achievements unlocked, for a total of 1370 of 1450 points. When you click the game to view the achievements and get to the aforementioned screen, it’s as I said – only Data Miner remains unlocked. So yeah… it knows I did them, but the summary says I didn’t. Conundrum. So, basically, two of my unlocked achievements registered the unlock, popped up on my screen when I unlocked them, the console remembers I unlocked them, but they somehow didn’t get counted.

The xbox.com website says the same thing – 1370 points, 65 of 68 unlocked.

The two in question are Death From Above and Shock Value – both from the Broken Steel DLC.

So, has anyone else experienced achievement problems with Broken Steel? Is there any way around this? I haven’t yet tried re-playing the DLC and redoing the quests on a different save. It may work, but again it may not, as my achievement list on the box itself shows them as done.

I don’t know if my gamerscore includes them or not. They made have added themselves to my aggregate total and are just not correctly represented in the Fallout total. The only way to figure that out would be to add my points from every game played – 125 games. I haven’t been in the mood to do that just yet.

Let me know your thoughts!

The expansion pack for Left 4 Dead was released today, adding a whole new gameplay mode to the already awesome zombie blaster.

Survival mode puts you up against a never-ending stream of every baddie in the game, forcing you to use resources wisely, protect your teammates and survive for as long as you possibly can.

Read more: See my initial thoughts about the add-on at Addicted Gamer, where I wrote a full hands-on review.

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.

Maybe having lived my entire life in Pittsburgh has given me a bias, but I’ve been super looking forward to March 24th since early February when Bethesda Softworks started announcing DLC packs for Fallout 3. It’s a super shame that so far, The Pitt is an ice cold poopsicle.

After booting up, everything was looking good. The radio signal (dictated above) came in to ignite my new mission pack and I traveled to said location. I met up with Wehrner and he told me I’d need to dress as a slaver and sneak into The Pitt. This DLC utilizes some of the already existing Fallout universe, which I thought was cool, as Operation Anchorage was basically a complete addition. Wehrner told me somewhere to the west there was a trade going on where I should be able to pick up a slaver suit before heading to the Pitt with him, so off I went, smile on my face and combat shotty in hand…

Welcome to The Pitt? Not quite yet, it seems.

Unfortunately, “somewhere to the west” is all the more detail I’m able to give about it, as I never made it there. As far as I’ve read on forums and blogs already irate by 9:30am today, few have. The game freezes the entire console with every attempt to head west, regardless of what route is taken. I tried four times over four routes – stuck at every attempt. Other reports include rocks you can walk through, trees and bodies floating in mid-air, graphics turning into black lines and Metal Gear Solid-esque exclamation points jagging all over the place. The few that did manage to get the suit and make it to The Pitt said the city itself is even more glitchy than the journey to it, with walls you can walk through and freezing even more rampant. All this makes the DLC unplayable for every single downloader so far. Epic failure.

It’s a good thing the route to The Pitt is way up on the north border of the Fallout universe, because with the patch in its current state messing up that portion of the map, even playing the regular game would trigger a freeze if you were wandering in that area. Fortunately there’s no real reason to be up there when you’re playing the regular game.

Now, Bethesda has a reputation for bugs with Fallout, but has patched them all eventually – and has made a stellar game overall with Fallout 3. I find it very unlikely that they missed all these bugs during testing. Clearly something with the process of bringing it to life for consumer use has caused an unbearable amount of crap. I have no doubt they’ll be working actively to figure out the problem, administer patches and fix the issues so we all can enjoy what we have waited long and paid 800 MS points for. But who knows how long it’ll take…

But dammit… today was supposed to be the end of a long, annoying wait. Apparently there’s more waiting to be done…