Confusion muses about bugs in: Fallout New Vegas

All games have bugs. Glitches or exploits, they make the game interesting, as long as they don’t crash the game or make it unplayable. You played a game as big and as long as I have played Fallout NV, you are bound to find a few amusing or noteworthy ones. The entire spectrum of error is full of unfriendly death laser, poor password protection and a demon performing brain surgery on you.

Welcome to New Vegas. Enjoy your stay.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKIkw3LIoQ&w=480&h=360]

If you have heard of NV, one thing you probably probably know about is “That Daily Solar Deathray Laser” that is pro environment, but not pro whomever it is currently pointed at. That little geostationary curiosity is called Archimedes II,  that can shoot an orbital laser once a day thanks to the electricity produced at the HELIOS One solar power plant. Complete a quest a certain way, get the plant online and acquire the targeting device known as Euclid’s C-Finder needed to aim it, and you have the power of the Sun in your hands! The fact that it takes time to aim, only can be used once a day, the targeting device is heavy, it requires a long quest to acquire and it stops instant killing anything that it might be useful for around midgame should be ignored with vigour.

Unfortunately, the targeting information can get a little counter productive to the player’s interest. After going out to enjoy nature, I found nature didn’t really like me much so I fired the Finder to make nature go away. The Finder played the animation, the little target lasers appeared, locked on target and… disappeared. No death laser. After seeing that the safety was off, I shrugged, put it under the “Google a fix for this later” section and continued on. Picture me, 20 minutes later, injured, light armoured, but otherwise as dashing as I normally am, walking out of a building, putting down an autosave (because better safe than sorry) and nonchalantly walked into the Moonlight. I probably would have said “Hello Mr Moon!” if I could.

But before I could have imagined the Moon giving greeting in reply and complimenting my fabulous fashion sense, he was rudely interrupted when the Sun nonchalantly blasted me from existence without even a “Good day.” How rude.

The glitch was that the firing was delayed. And since the finder was no longer aiming, but in my inventory, it locked onto me. 3 quickloads later and I thankful got out of the instant seering-flesh light thanks to the laser having a delay of a second after locking onto my location. A mechanic that made the weapon worse now worked to my advantage! Thankfully the console would have helped if things got a little stuck in a perpetual time loop.

Some glitches aren’t so spectacular. One time I started a new character and all locked terminals in the game had only one password. This continued the entire playthrough. Another is the classic enemies stuck under the landscape. The corpses that wouldn’t stop screaming were interesting. Come to think of it, must glitches in the game were with corpses. Bugs come in colourful variety.

From giant eyes…

To men with amazing lungs and heavy shoes.

To black holes.

To… other things.

New Vegas is a weird place.

There are many more bugs I encountered, and many more still out there. Thankfully some don’t hurt the experience of playing. Unfortunately most do.