Meet The Sink’s numerous personality modules from Fallout: New Vegas

Without a doubt, Old World Blues is the best DLC add-on for Fallout: New Vegas so far. It has stellar writing, wonderful voice acting, memorable characters, and a decently sized map to explore as you please. It stands a fraction taller than Point Lookout for delivering a great, bite-sized Fallout experience, even if at times it could be a little too chatty, a little too difficult, and a little too reliant on energy weapons for success. Thankfully, my current character Kapture was already a 100 in the Energy Weapons skill before heading over to Big Mountain to be swarmed by Roboscorpions and frenzied Securitrons. One might also want to consider a character high in Speech, as there are a lot of, um, things to speak with, and yes, I said things, not people. Let’s get into that.

All My Friends Have Off Switches is a faux main story quest in Old World Blues; it doesn’t necessarily have to be completed, but I feel like many gamers will go after it, and it mostly runs parallel with the true main story quest, making it easier to pick up some–not all–of the personality modules as they go mucking about the Big Empty. You are basically tasked with finding holotapes that contain personalities for specific items in The Sink, which is your home-away-from-home for now. Installing these personalities will bring the items to life, and after much talking, you’ll learn what benefits they can offer. There are 10 personalities to unearth, as you’ll soon see below:

#1 – The Sink Central Intelligence Unit is a human-accessible computer responsible for Big MT’s data storage. It can repair your weapons and armor up to 100, switch off/on the other personalities in The Sink, and act as a traveling merchant, with a decent stock of items. It has a thin British accent.

#2 – The Sink’s Sink is a nice, if a bit OCD sink. Obsessed with cleanliness, the Sink is also upgradable, allowing the Courier to bottle his or her own water if they happen to have empty bottles. I never took advantage of this, but I bet it’s great for players on Hardcore difficulty.

#3 – This Auto-Doc is actually a prototype built by Dr. Mobius many moons ago. It seems to have a military-like personality, and it can provide the Courier with the following benefits: a haircut, facial reconstruction, implants of varying price, switch out brains, spines, and hearts, and change the player’s traits (only once).

#4 – This personality is a little creepy. Or should I say…seedy? The Biological Research Station is a computer mainframe that is capable of cloning and planting dried seeds that will harvest after three days. It also refers to the Courier as “baby” and makes way too many sexual references. Tara was especially perturbed.

#5 – Blind Diode Jefferson is The Sink’s talking jukebox, but don’t expect much music outta it. You might even say it’s got the blues…the old world blues. By finding special holotapes, Blind Diode Jefferson can update the Sonic Emitter with new traits and bonuses.

#6 – The Book Chute likes to eradicate sedition. What does that mean? Well, bring it lots of pre-war books, and the chute will wipe them clean, readying them for…um, that I didn’t get to discover. Checking online tells me that you’ll be able to make your own skill books with the right amount of blank books and specific items. That’s neat!

#7 – Light Switch 01 is a very seductive light switch that, while appearing to be sentient, is actually not. There seems to be some conflict between it and the light switch in the other room.

 

#8 – Not much different from Light Switch 01, but a few special dialogue options come up with Light Switch 02 if you’ve got the right perks on ya.

 

#9 – Oh, Muggy! You make yourself so hard to love, and yet you are so lovable. It is a neurotic, miniature Securitron that is obsessed with collecting coffee mugs. I get that. I suffer from the very same diseases. Basically, Muggy can turn coffee mugs, tin plates, and coffee pots into miscellaneous items perfect for using at the crafting bench. It also loves to curse. Swoon.

#10 – Last, but certainly not least, is The Sink’s evil-minded Toaster. This thing wants to burn more than just sliced bread, and it’s not afraid to tell you that. It’s special perk is that it can heat up any weapons composed of space-age Saturnite material, as well as help make extra small energy cells and microfusion cells. This very same toaster was originally cut from Fallout 2.

—

Whew. That’s a lot of ‘bots. I whole-heartedly recommend you speak with them often and deeply, exhausting as much of their dialogue options as you can. They are all very unique, and given that each (save for the light switches, I guess) offer some kind of benefit or bonus, it’s worth the effort. I found The Sink to be a wonderful, personified hub for my time spent in the Big Empty, and maybe now even for a main playthrough, as it features plenty of storage space, reloading and crafting benches, and helpful robots at arms’ length. For playthrough #4, I’m definitely going to try to do Old World Blues as early as possible (though the game itself warns the Courier that it is meant only for players level 15 and higher, and I struggled at times even at level 28 through 30, so, uh, eep) just to get such a kick-ass base. It definitely trumps Lucky 38 or Victor’s shack.

But there ya go. Hope you liked this little rundown of the ten robotic personality modules you’ll install in The Sink. Good luck finding all their holotapes!

Games Completed in 2011, #25 – Yard Sale Hidden Treasures: Sunnyville

It might not look like it, but this is going to be a sad Grinding Down post.

Yard Sale Hidden Treasures: Sunnyville, from what I can tell, is one of the last games my mother got to play on her Nintendo DS before she passed away this past December. I remember the day Tara, my sister Bitsy, and I went out searching for Sunnyville at Momma Dukes’ request; we had to even ask the GameStop employee if he had any clue of its existence as I couldn’t find it among the thousands on the shelves. Somehow, he did though, and we got it for her, knowing that it, at the bare least, was a bit of light and distraction during chemotherapy. It’s not a great, amazing game, but it is of the ilk that she loved: finding hidden objects. Her collection has several others from this breed, and she always devoured them within a few days, and then I’d play them after her, and we’d make fun of the lame attempt to add a story to these things and just agree that finding random objects on a random photo brimming with randomness would be more than enough.

And that all basically applies with Sunnyville, too. It’s attempt at a story is modest, but still hilariously unnecessary: you’ve just moved into the neighborhood, into a very empty house, and you decide to scour your neighbors’ yard sales for key items to spruce up your house and possibly win the Superstar Homes magazine contest. And that’s what you do. Go to a neighbor’s house, find items on a list, eventually whittling it down to one or two pivotal ones, find those, and move on. Once you’ve got enough room dressing to complete a section of your house, you’ll see a “before and after” shot of the room, rest up for the night, and start all over again the next day. You need to complete eight rooms, which takes eight days, which really takes…I don’t know. I played this game with little drive, here and there, finding a few items during my lunch break and so forth. My Nintendo 3DS says I logged just under 3 hours in the game; that sounds about right.

My mother played Sunnyville twice, completing it fully both times. I know this because of the three save slots available, two are in her name. I’m not sure if a second playthrough is any more different than the first. I’m glad she got a lot out of it though. Once she was finished with Sunnyille, she passed it along to my wife, Tara, with a short, hand-written note:

Sigh.

Naturally, I miss my mom. Playing this game didn’t do anything to lessen the hurting in my heart; it only allowed me to follow in her proverbial touchscreen taps, relax with a game that helped her relax, escape elsewhere momentarily. Again, not a great game, but one I’m emotionally connected with, hung up on. Would sure love to know what Momma Dukes thought about all the punny names for the neighbors as they got me to even groan every now and then. I can’t wait to see her again.