I still stand by this DLC being perfect. By taking away your gear, it forces you to rely completely on your build. Yeah, sure, it can be pretty brutal. This is also a game that lets you save at any time. "Oh no, this radio killed me! I have to go all the way back to... the quicksave I did right before I entered the area with the radio." Frankly, the DLC was actually a lot easier than I remembered. You are encouraged to completely avoid the ghost people via stealth or simply running and that works really fucking well. That being said, you still have to be careful. There are traps everywhere. If you have light step this will be pretty much negated, but without it you really do need to be cautious. This creates a balance of wanting to get out of this hostile environment full of ghost people while also needing to slow down. If you want to genocide the ghost people because you're just a bloodthirsty little gremlin, its really not at all hard to just hack their limbs off with a knife or bring Dog with you so he can eat them. The environment is hauntingly beautiful. Definitely my favorite location in all of Fallout EVER. I love that everything connects to the idea of old world ghosts. The ghost people, holograms, graffiti, left behind supply stashes, traps, your classic computer terminal and holotape journals. And the characters. Oh my goodness GRACIOUS. Dog and God are genius. Dean Domino is genius. Christine is genius. Father Elijah is genius. All of these characters are equally as interesting. When I first played this, leaving the Sierra Madre and hearing Vera's goodbye actually made me tear up. The message of letting go of the past and starting anew isn't just a beautiful message in it's own right. It's also a perfect one for Fallout. Forget the past. Forget the Sierra Madre. Go out into that wasteland and build something new. Begin again.

I think I'm one of the few people that doesn't like this game for reasons completely unrelated to Hbomerguy. Listen, I love the man but that video is kind of... ehhhhh? I also don't hate Bethesda, like, at all! I actually enjoyed Skyrim, Fallout 4 and even Fallout 76. Fallout 3 has a lot of really good elements but its how all of these good elements connect that it drops the ball. The main story has some intriguing elements that simply end up having very unsatisfying conclusions. As my playthrough went on, I realized you could really just throw that onto the entire game. The game teases you with an interesting idea only for it to kind of just... fizzle out. Quest rewards are almost always shit. Unique weapons are really just slightly better or worse versions of the one its based on. The karma system seems really reactive until you realize its so sensitive that you will ping pong from being good to evil to good again 24/7. Megaton has this cool sheriff guy but also this dickhead Moriarity so you think, "Oh so I get to solve this problem!" Nope! You go to Paradise Falls, a place full of slavers, and for some reason freeing the slaves from the slave camp left me confused as to how it works. These are things I never even thought about while playing later Fallout titles like New Vegas. Meanwhile, while Fallout 1 and 2 could leave me confused, it was always because I wasn't thinking outside the box enough. In Fallout 3, I'd get confused only to look it up and find out its because there is just nothing in the box. The box was fake. Three Dog is the best radio station host in Fallout though and you know its true.

No! Bad Bethesda! No glorifying slavery! Bad! No! sprays with spray bottle No!

This DLC very much tries to pull a twist on you by revealing that gasp the cure you need to steal from the slavers is the slave leaders BABY. Oh no! And also, the slave leader doesn't even view his slaves as slaves! They're his "workers"! And he's an ex-brotherhood member just trying to make up for what his people did in the Pitt all that time ago! Listen, he HAD to force everyone to do the work under slavery. It was their only chance at making the Pitt hospitable! Uh huh. Sure. And then the rebels have you summon the Trogs so all the slavers can get eaten and the story really acts like that is a super bad thing to do. Oh yeah, sure, totally a worse thing than SLAVERY. I miss Fallout 2.

"Look, no matter what sweet-sounding words you use to cover the stink, it's still slavery." - The Chosen One, Fallout 2

I think I'd genuinely rather play Fallout Shelter. I saw some people say that Fallout 2 plays sexual assault for laughs but I never really felt that way. This game? On the third mission a raider woman has a slave that very comedically talks about how his "little tribal" had "things done to it" and now it has a rash and smells. This game also toes the line between portraying this chapter of the Brotherhood as fascists and portraying them as the "tough but fair" heroes of the wasteland. It just made me uncomfortable with its writing really. But beyond that, the gameplay just suuuucks. It's SO boring. Fallout has a decent combat system but it has always been carried by its many different ways to tackle a situation. This game eliminates that and puts the focus completely on this janky ass combat. I'm talking somehow MORE jank than Fallout 1 and 2. It's horrific really. I tried really hard to give it a chance but, just, no. Just no. This still has my favorite power armor design though.

Half a star for Lucius himself being pretty fucking cool but that's cancelled out instantly by the constant bigotry. The black guy gets the most brutal and detailed death. A maid is consistently referred to as "the latina maid". A fat woman is constantly demanding more food. You take photos of a maid getting fucked doggystyle. You peep on that same maid in the bath later on. Also, every single woman just has her panties sitting somewhere and you can pick them up. Why? No fucking reason! It genuinely reminded me of the Half-Life 2 Cinematic Mod and how Alyx just has a giant dildo on display in that. The cutscenes are just horrid too and the puzzles could be solved by a fetus that's still attached to the umbilical cord. Despite being as simple as it is, it manages to also be buggy as all hell. They decided to have some combat in this and yeah its about as dull as you'd expect. I wanted to check out the sequels because, again, I think Lucius himself is really fucking cool. Then I read about how the third game has KKK members lynching a black man and yeah, that's where I check the fuck out. Fuck this series.

I tried really hard to give this a chance after the first area made me feel basically nothing but once I kept getting instakilled by a barrier in the queens basement that's when I was officially done with this DLC's shit. Also, the combat fucking sucks. I know a lot of people seem to really have hated the first games combat encounters but I liked them. Here, the combat is that you use the stomp button. It's so fucking shit and so fucking boring. In fact, I'd say the entire DLC is boring. The areas are boring, every item you get is generally the same as the ones in the base game, there are no new enemies, etc. I was excited as hell to play more Supraland after how much I enjoyed the base game so this was super disappointing tbh.

This game was consistently fun the entire way through. It just keeps throwing new mechanics and ideas at you and they're all just so fucking fun. You don't need to do the puzzles the way the devs intended either. I skipped sections several times, most of those times on complete accident. That's the kind of freedom Supraland offers and I loved it. I found the developers sense of humor charming overall although some of the references to other works felt like bargain bin material. The story is also pretty strange with its race war allegories. I've seen a lot of other users criticize the combat but I thought it was really fun. This is just a fun game peeps.

Okay, hear me out on this, buuuuut... this game kind of fucking kicks ass? As the many upgrades make the game itself more complex, so too does the lore surrounding your empire. In the beginning, you've just got some cursors, some grandmas, some farms, maybe a few mines. By the end game, you have genetic fucking clones of yourself making cookies. God damn floating giant brains in space who are so intelligent that they conjure cookies into existence with a thought. You go to parallel universes, steal their shit, and use it to make cookies. It's complete and utter madness. And yet, its not just a funny "hehe haha isn't this so whacky?" game. There is some genuine criticism of capitalism here. See, there isn't actually any reason to bake the cookies. Seriously. You bake cookies to get cookies to get upgrades that helps you make even more cookies faster. There is no outstanding goal outside of just more, more, more, more, more, more. You're filling a cup that will never be full. You want to see the number go higher and higher but there isn't really any point in it doing so. And yet... it feels so good. It just feels good to see that number go up. And since we get to sit back in our chairs and pull the strings of this ridiculous little cookie obsessed universe, we are completely disconnected from the consequences of our number going up. Unless, of course, you choose to pay attention. The news will often give flavor text that is relevant to your actions. This can range from "everyone loves your cookies!" to "a cookie mine collapsed and killed 17 people". Even an apocalyptic event where your grandmas become eldritch abominations is simply a new mechanic for earning cookies. Its kind of spooky at first, but then it just becomes another normal part of the gameplay loop. Again, when you are disconnected from the consequences of your actions due to your position of priviledge and power, you have no reason to care about people. I'm not sure what else to say, but I'm going to quote one bit of flavor text for one of the many, many, MANY upgrades in the game:

"You started this whole cookie venture on the simple kitchen counters of your own home. Your industrial and research facilities, sadly, have long since outgrown the confines of the little house, but you always knew it was still in there, buried somewhere. With a targeted portal, you could, conceivably, pay it a little visit for old times' sake..."