Postscript: how to escape the Sierra Madre with all 37 gold bars

Still geeking: as a bit of a postscript, I discovered how to escape the Sierra Madre vault with all 37 gold bars.... if you take steps to make every second count.

Most of the methods for doing this seem to involve elaborate setups with landmines or cheating with console commands; this method works on my unmodified XBox with patches to date and needs no hackery, although it'll probably take you a few tries 'n dies to make it.

Here's a scribbled walkthrough.... and just for proof, a snap of all 37 bars laid out back at the Brotherhood of Steel bunker, which by the way is ideal player housing for the rest of the game, containing a functioning Sierra Madre vending machine. (You did win the complimentary voucher back at the casino, right?) This is also on my newly-relaunched personal blog, chrisworth.com. Enjoy!

My Fallout: New Vegas Tour

The site's now complete. In less than a week it's approached 100,000 pageviews and over 5000 people have watched the videos. But doing a tour based on a videogame remains a fundamentally silly thing to do. So a few people have asked: why did I do it?

Here's my answer: because life itself is fundamentally silly. We're born. We eat, sleep, reproduce. And then we die. We're each an eyeblink even in human history, let alone the history of the universe. There's not a lot of point to any of it; life has no innate meaning or purpose, save that which we impose upon it. So the worst thing you can do is take it too seriously.

Besides, the American West is among my favourite places on earth. The vast distances, the extremes of climate, the hardscrabble characters eking a living from motels and dime stores. There are millions of stories scratched into the sands of the Mojave, with millions more left to be written. In its own tiny way, this trip was one of them.


The only thing left to do is thank my special friend Melissa, source of the idea. (Herself a midwesterner, she once did a tour of Rome based on the much-panned film "Hudson Hawk".) I haven't seen the movie yet, Melissa: it's waiting for us when I see you again.

So there you have it: my Fallout New Vegas Tour, a real-world journey around 34 locations that appear in the game. If you've just arrived at this blog, here's where you start.

Location 34: Hoover Dam

Anyone for skateboarding?

Hoover Dam is an amazing piece of civil engineering, and it's fitting it's both my last photogaphed location and the end of the game.

A shorter drop in-game

It's no longer possible to drive directly over the dam on its top edge; a new bypass bridge came into effect in summer 2010. This means I was one of the last foreign visitors to drive over the Dam itself (last year!) when construction was finishing up.

That's a lot of concrete

Looking over the dam! This is the only location where I've been forced to use different image heights to compensate for the wider aspects in the game (it's a scale thing.)

Everything's wider and lower

But as you can see the game captures the sheer immensity of the 1930s masterpiece quite accurately.A sharp intake of breath at the audacity of those engineers... both civil and software.

Isn't there a shotgun in there?

Seems further to walk

The towers that house the hydroelectric turbines are reproduced faithfully, although without the "Arizona Time" and "Nevada Time" clocks that denote the different states the dam spans.


 

A glass box in the canyon...

...but concrete suits the NCR better

A point of difference, though, is the Visitor Centre. I suppose the in-game building takes its cues from the 1950s; the current building is quite new.

A couple of wingsuiters

A bit shorter in-game

The angels monument near the visitor centre is also nicely graphic'd up, including the gold-leaf inscription (almost readable in the game - try it!)

Come on in, the water's lovely

Bit too chilly perhaps

This picture showcases a serious point. See the "clean" rocks for a couple of metres above the waterline, leaving a neat bathtub mark around Lake Mead?

 That's how far the water level has receded - possibly due to global warming. You see signs of this all over the West's lakes and forests, and it's worrying.

And that's my Fallout New Vegas Tour! It's been a great trip; thank you for joining me on it. GAME OVER!

Location 33: Cottonwood Cove

Nearing the end of my tour, I reached my penultimate stop: Cottonwood Cove. Er.... ave?

A ramp for launching boats...

One trap for anyone relying solely on their Pip-Boy/GPS for directions is that there's a street named "Cottonwood Cove" in Boulder City, so my suitably dusty SUV and I bowled up in a neat residential street that's more soccer mom than switchblade maniac.

... or launching campaigns

Not to be deterred, I fast travelled to the correct place thanks to a friendly BLM ranger or two. That's the great thing about American recreation areas - once you get on the right road, it's generally a straight run to the venue.

The first indication I was in the right place came at the ramp; the sloped launchway is easily discernible in FNV, although the water table seems to have dropped a bit.

Latin is a language,
dead as dead can be

First it killed the Romans,
and now it's killing me.

The clincher, though, came with this rocky dune on the left. It's where you peer out after arriving from Camp Forlorn Hope, Boone hissing through his teeth if he's your travelling companion.

In reality, much of the area is concreted over, but the general shape of the bay, jetties, and strollways fits. 

I'm seeing cover, sniper points,
throwing lines...

The lighting's a bit odd in the game here, presumably to create an aura of menace - this is, after all, the second-most Caesar'd up location in the game.

I'm seeing blind alleys, dead ends,
places to die a horrible death...

In reality, Cottonwood Cove had the most glorious weather of anywhere I visited, well over 30C.

Always trust a brown sign

A shout-out here for the USA's Bureau of Land Management (the agency that puts up all the brown signs.)

Especially if it's wood

The rangers you meet in such areas tend to be full of information, friendly and outgoing and obviously enjoy their work although it can hardly be a high-paying job.

On my trip they were a constant presence, a bit like the NCR, and always keen to help out. 

 

I came, I saw, I conked out

So here's the cove itself: drier in the game, but both pontoons are there. I tried to cadge a lift to the Fort, but couldn't find a boatman to take me there.

Misty eyed as the trip nears its end

It was at Cottonwood Cove that I sensed my strange journey was nearing its end. There was only one place left on the list: Hoover Dam.