New Vegas is my favourite game of all time.

I have a lot of fond memories of NV; I remember coming home from school and spending countless hours playing the game and falling asleep watching AlChestBreach's videos.

I believe this is one of those games from a particular era that really just was lightning in a bottle. There's a specific kind of 2000's-2010's spice in NV, the kind you find in games like KOTOR, or Oblivion, or Skyrim, or Mass Effect 2, that's a bit harder to come by these days, and in a way, you kind of had to be there to understand it. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to gatekeep some of the most popular, well regarded RPG's of all time... I'm just saying the kids these days growing up with live service games and nice pre-built PC's are having a different gaming childhood than I did.

My experience gaming during that time was particular: it was the era of youtube before sponsorships and the overwhelming commercialization of free internet media, I was running games on potato settings because I had 4 gigs of ram and integrated graphics on a dual core processor in my dad's ♥♥♥♥♥♥ old desktop, and I found myself regularly googling "best free to play FPS 2010" or "how to use the pirate bay for video games" because I had no money, and was, y'know, a child. It's these circumstances that made me really appreciate the few games I had in my Steam library (that I could actually somewhat run at a stable framerate) back then, and NV was one of those. I really, really loved playing the ♥♥♥♥ out of this game. I would pour hours and days into modding and troubleshooting and playing, and then happily rinse and repeat.

Yes. Rose tinted glasses exist. Reflecting candidly, NV runs like ♥♥♥♥, kind of plays like ♥♥♥♥ in a number of ways, has a multitude of mechanics that are wildly unbalanced, uses a dated engine even by 2010's standards, is chock full of bugs, etc, etc.

A big reason why I love this game as much as I do is how much fun it is to mod and tune it into the game it should've been.

I'd never play pure vanilla FNV and I highly recommend you don't. The Viva New Vegas modlist/guide has been the definitive way to play the game for years. It's lightweight, performance and bug-fix focused, and maintained and curated by notable members of the modding community. If you're gonna give this game a go, you need to do follow this mod guide to make it even remotely stable on a Windows 10/11 machine. Which, yeah, is a hurdle to jump over, and honestly, says something about the game itself. But it's worth it.

When you grow up loving gaming, sometimes you get to know a game like the back of your hand. Maybe it becomes an integral part of your childhood, a piece of media you hold close to your heart, or maybe something you and your friends could talk about at school and connect over.

NV is one of those games for me, and I'm thankful for that.