This game is punishingly difficult, at least from the standpoint of someone who is not really good at games. I’ve actually never been “good” at games, even the ones I play a whole lot. Take Mario Kart for example. I played literally thousands of hours of that game in all of its various forms, and can easily be bested by someone with real skill in the game. This is not to say that I can’t kick the hell out of the game on my own in single player, far from it, but it’s almost like I can’t pick up on those subtle things that make a good player great. Who knows.

In any case, I am working my way through it now. I doubt I will be able to get them water chip back to vault before the time runs out, but that’s OK. Next time I will hopefully know better how to best this quest. I had a few false-starts; namely where I took on something that was much too tough and wasn’t save scumming like I should have been. Now, I still have the original follower Ian and we are both outfitted with armor and weapons. Not necessarily the best stuff mind you, and Junktown wants me dead (big misunderstanding; I was standing past the guard after dark so he shot at me), but overall I’m getting through it.

I’m in the Necropolis right now, or at least, heading back to it. I got pretty far through the sewers looking for the parts to fix their water pump in the hopes of trading for their water chip. I popped out of a manhole and there was a friendly supermutant so I thought my chances were pretty good. I walked into a building to try and make my way to another manhole and there was another supermutant. He was friendly, but I said the wrong things to him and he mopped me up. I hadn’t saved recently.

So there you have it, working my way through a hard game. Maybe I’ll make it to the end, maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll start playing those top-down looking RPGs from SpiderWeb software, I own all of them already. Who knows what the future will hold!