And so our time in the Sierra Madre has come to an end.
I don’t really have much more to say about this DLC that hasn’t already been said. A lot of commenters have complained that I missed a lot of the “good parts” and haven’t shown or explained any of the justifications for some of the weirdness in Dead Money. I suppose that might be a fair complaint, but to be honest, I played through the entirety of Dead Money before we really got into it on Spoiler Warning – and I felt I was pretty thorough – and I really didn’t see many of these justifications. Or if I did, they weren’t profound enough for me to recall when the issue came up.
I guess it really depends on how you want to look at Dead Money. I had a lot of fun with it, and I still believe it’s superior to anything Fallout 3 did, but I certainly won’t deny that it has sizable flaws. And for me, putting some small bit of text on a terminal hidden somewhere hard to find is hardly a justification for the security systems not simply trapping Vera in her room, but recording her pleading confession of guilt and despair at the end and then turning that into a security hologram. Or how your collar mysteriously disappears at the end without explanation. Or where Elijah was trapped and why opening the vault freed him and allowed him to walk through force fields that bleed when you hit them. Or how Elijah managed to pull off everything he did after being trapped somewhere in the Sierra Madre entirely through the use of Dog, a mentally unstable nightkin that has multiple personalities and was dumb enough to eat an explosive collar.
Cool? Sure. Sensible? Not really. So convenient that you really can’t not call it contrived? You betcha.
Hey guys, note from Shamus here: We’re having trouble getting the gang together to record the show this week, so this might be our only episode. So… savor it, I guess. Is what I’m saying.
This post was up for a few minutes last night, and then I pulled it down when I realized it might be our only Spoiler Warning this week, just because I like to distribute content evenly throughout the week. I’m like that.
Also, if the vault was built to be an inescapable deathtrap, why did Sinclair put his real actual pile of gold bars and cash money in it? (Moreover, who put them there?) Wasn’t he basically throwing all that money away for no reason? Or did he plan to let them set off the trap and then just wait for them to slowly die of thirst, and then dismantle the trap? I’m asking because I couldn’t figure it out based on what I’ve seen in the LP so far, and I was wondering if those questions were also covered.
Josh Viel is the primary editor and producer of the Spoiler Warning video series. You can support the show by backing the Patreon.
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