I went back to Fallout New Vegas today. I’m hoping to wrap it up before I start to miss the game and so I can move onto either FF 7 Remake or Alan Wake II. Unfortunately I caught something last night and I wasn’t in the mood to start Lonesome Road, so I went back and grabbed an achievement I missed in Old World blues and also to sell off some more of the gold.
Turns out I missed getting all the personalities for the Sink. So I went back and did that since I thought it would be easy. I ended up running out of ammo fighting scorpions though and was lazy and decided to just sprint past them and tank the shots. Somehow I didn’t die from it, and managed to grab the last 4-ish modules.
I also had to go by Higgs Village for one, and was creeped out by it more compared to last time. I think it’s because I slowed down to appreciate it. Anyways, I got the Toaster up and running and I have to say it’s my favorite of the personalities. I wish I had one irl. So I picked a screenshot I took of my conversation with it for today’s screenshot
I hope to tomorrow to get over what I caught and start lonesome road. If not I may just start it anyways though because I don’t want to put it off too long before I fall out of the mood for New Vegas.
Alan Wake 2 is amazing, but with the interconnected Remedyverse being what it is it also sort of wants you to "do your homework" - the experience is definitely enriched by having played Max Payne and Control before (with the AWE DLC of the latter being a direct bridge to AW2). The Quantum Break overlap is much more minor as they don't own the rights to its IP. It's fun for those who played it, but not necessary and not important.
I played a brief while after picking it up on Epic, but dropped it because it ate through my battery and I didn’t have time to figure out performance on launch. I did spoil myself on the connection of Control too Alan Wake (I’d rather sacrifice Control’s plot for the sake of my Alan Wake II experience), so I’m aware of a lot of the stuff, or can at least draw my own conclusions and fill in gaps.
Max Payne though I can’t say I know much about except I know the character Sam Lake plays in AWII is heavily inspired by Max Payne, that Max Payne takes pain killers to heal, and something about wife and kids I think?
Alex Casey (the detective from Alan Wake's books) is essentially Max Payne - they had to change the name when making Alan Wake 1 because Rockstar had bought the IP.
There are callbacks in AW2 in both narration, atmosphere and character design that I really enjoyed, but you won't miss out on anything story-relevant if you haven't played it. Watching a couple of minutes of cutscenes from Max Payne 1 on YouTube is probably enough to get most of the references.