Part 44: Post-Game Extras: Read All About It
Extras, Extras: Read All About It
Some of you might have noticed that my strength went from 9 to 10 unexpectedly at some point without announcement. I actually made a little side trip at one point and the images got misdirected. For the curious, this is what happens when you open the stuck doors in Vault City.
The only thing inside is the red module that increases your strength, which is a small joke on the part of the developers. You can obviously take some Buffout or something to force these early, but it's not like you're going to be able to use the enhancement system anyway before you go to Navarro so there's no reason not to swing by.
In the last update I alluded to a special reward from talking to Father Tully in New Reno. In addition to getting you a divorce if you should have the misfortune to get married, if you talk to him after the end of the game he'll give you a special book as a prize.
What we're talking about is the Fallout Hint Book, a device that not only breaks the fourth wall but pulls up the green board and destroys the foundation underneath it.
Using it gives you 10000 experience and sets all your skills to 300 or 299%. Not sure why it does the latter, but it's not like you can't fix it with the levels you're going to get because you can use it again and again as many times as you want. It's a pretty decent tool to let you screw around in the game world now that you don't have anything pressing to do.
Going back to the terminal in Vault City where we reformatted our Pip Boy will load the designer notes on your Pip Boy so you can read a message from the developers. Take a note of the directions to a computer on level 3 of Vault 8...
Going there gets you 20,000 experience points and the same effect as the Fallout Hint Book on your skills. You can also use this one multiple times to get to as high a level as you feel the need for. Speaking of Vault City...
For your viewing pleasure, the Vault City travel log we got way back when we first visited. The quotation marks around the word people in the New Reno entry and the description of Broken Hills just ooze with Vault City attitude, and I love the description of Vault City as a utopia.
Moving south from Vault City we also have this information about how the Sierra Army Depot changed over the years...
As well as a medical log that describes the activities of one H. Lector. This one neatly explains away the shattered door on the fourth floor, the modifications to the organ extractor, and the skeleton with the giant head.
There's also another medical file that explains how the two people whose eyes we were using as passkeys ended up making involuntary donations. I don't know what kind of lab they were running, but evidently nobody thought it was strange to take a damaged eye, plop it in some gel, and toss it in a storage locker and see what happened. The note doesn't specifically mention General Clifton, but it's not hard to extrapolate.
We also have an evacuation notice, which doesn't tell us much...
And a transcript of the GNN news right before things went to hell in the War, loaded with jokes from the 90s. The end of the world occurred exactly as we'd imagined it would… with the president being impeached on a flimsy pretext following an affair and the Jets actually winning a Super Bowl.
Going south and west we have a series of documents from the military base, written from the outside in. These records suggest an Enclave project utilizing miners to access the FEV, with some unpredicted results. And yes, the whole operation was run by a Colonel Sanders.
Of course, he got away clean unlike poor Captain Pickard. Their clever change in spelling nearly kept me from seeing that reference.
We have the classic bloody journal entry from the guys on the second floor, which means that someone was keying this in on their pip boy WHILE being overrun by mutants...
Just like the guys on the third floor. There's probably more than a few other problems with this account, but I'll leave that alone. I'm kind of wondering who Sergeant Bracks is a reference to, since there's no way it's not. The reference to miners is an important clue about where Melchior the Magnificent came from, although I haven't found the references to his family in the town.
The next section is a brick, so I'll go ahead and introduce it before the first image. When you join the Hubologist they hand you a data disk with 7 pages of material on the wonders of Hubology, recorded below.
Keep in mind that Fallout 2 was released in 1998, pre-dating Southpark's Scientology episode by 7 years. I particularly like the bibliography at the end and the Battleground Quetzel title, especially since Battlefield Earth wouldn't be released for two more years.
And with that, it's time to close out on Hung Wei Lo and Buffy.