The Guns of Anchorage

Don't remember if I mentioned this but I grabbed two of the expansion packs for Fallout 3; Broken Steel and Operation: Anchorage. It appeared as though all the expansions were part of the weekly discount on XBLA at %50 off. Believing the discount to be temporary I readily added 1000 MS points to my account and picked two. I think it may be a permanent thing though because I checked the next week and they were still at the discounted price. I hadn't yet beaten the main game (I still haven't) so I put in a few hours with my main character who I plan to use for Broken Steel. If you are not aware it is a continuation of the main game, letting you play past the ending and raising the level cap to 30. For Operation: Anchorage I chose to use my evil character, and go strait the the expanded content right away. Making it across the map to get there was challenging at level 2, especially since I was used to playing at level 20+. It was actually refreshing to have a lone raider with an assault rifle be a credible threat and gingerly negotiating such an obstacle was actually fun. I'm at a point with my main character where I'm more or less moving down a checklist tying up loose ends before the last mission. It can be tedious.

Anyway the little bit of Anchorage that I've played has been fun. The whole thing is a simulation, a game within a game. The mechanics are stripped down for a faster moving experience which again is refreshing. you don't have to mess around with item management as much because it's a "game" so you refill your ammo and health at stations along your path. There are intel items to find as well, and grabbing all ten before the end of the simulation grants you a special perk.

I'd really like to get all the achievements for this game but that puts me in a position to have to buy The Pitt. They did that thing that they sometimes do to games with DLC. They added the achievements to the game whether you have the content or not. So you could get all 1000 points from the normal game and still have an annoying 250 keeping you from %100 completion. I guess most people don't care but I'd like to see %100 for certain games and now I have to pay extra for it. I don't really want to play The Pitt either, out of all five of the expansions it seems to be the least interesting. I'm much more interested in Mothership Zeta since it's the most different, and Point Lookout looks cool because I grew up in roughly that geographic area so it would be like playing in my post-apocalyptic back yard. Whee.