Day Six: Nipton and Frustration

After seeing the town of Goodsprings safely into the hands of the Powder Gangers, I started on down the highway towards my would-be killers.  My first stop was the New California Republic Correctional Facility.  I heard on the radio from Mr. New Vegas that the Powder Gangers had recently taken it for themselves, and I wanted to get some caps from my good deeds that were done in their name.  The leader of the gang gave me a few jobs to do and offered to give me free explosives!  Of course I was going to do whatever they needed so I could get some more dynamite to blow shit up with.  After killing a few deserters and defending the facility from and NCR Army attack, I was given all the dynamite I wanted and a free pass back into the prison.  While I was there I took some time to sneak around and pickpocket a few sleeping convicts for some extra boom-boom.

My second stop of the day was Nipton a small town where I was hoping to gather some information and grab a few boxes of ammo.  The entrance to the town was quiet and strewn with blood.  I spied a single man in Powder Ganger garb who was running around screaming something about winning the lottery, I wasn't quite sure what lottery he won, or what he actually won, so I avoided him, just like all of the other crazies.  The general store was in complete disarray and the owner seemed to be dead asleep on a chair.  I noticed that he had a lottery ticket on him as well.  As he was sleeping I decided to help myself to whatever was left in the shop.  The rest of the town was spattered with blood and I noticed that the town hall road was lined with wooden crosses. Each cross had a man or woman nailed to it.  As I walked by I realized with horror that the people were still alive.  The end of the street was blocked by a squad of strangely dressed men that called themselves Caeser's Legion.  They let me walk on by as long as I spread the word of their deeds.  I highly value my life, especially after being killed once before so I agreed wholeheartedly and started my way towards the NCR's Mojave Outpost.





As a gamer, I often wonder what it is we love about frustration.  Some of the games that I play most regularly, Halo: Reach being a good example, frustrate me the most yet I continue to play them time after time.  I get to the point of swearing at every single kill and death, even if I'm winning the game.  I'm fairly certain that my most used phrase during any game is, "How the fuck?"  Even though the freaking game takes place mostly in a science fiction world, I still expect it to have some kind of "normal" physics.  That's the single most frustrating fact of any game that I play.  How in the hell do I get shot around corners?  It happens all the fucking time too!  Wanted didn't make any sense and made me my brain try to eat it's way out of my head, so when I see the same type of shit in a video game when it shouldn't be there I go into a blind rage.  And then I just start to lose more and more, it's really a terrible mechanism.  The bottom line is that I still play the game even if I don't like the way that the bullets travel or that the lag is handled, whichever of those items is the culprit.  In fact, I think I'm fueled by my frustration.  It's a piece of gaming that has been alive since the beginning.  Who didn't get frustrated on those levels of Super Mario Brothers that just seemed impossible?  Even so, we all continued to try and try again.  We even tend to look for games with levels of difficulty that frustrate us, take a look at Ninja Gaiden back in the day and for a current reference there's Legendary difficulty on the Halo franchise.  Why do we love frustration?