Fallout: New Vegas

Francince Garret, meanwhile, is a practical lady with obligations to her pocket-book. She sends us out to locate a trio of sorry gamblers with tabs to pay and promises us a cut of the caps - 50 per cent, after a bit of bartering - if we settle the markers.

Her first two targets prove easy pickings. Santiago is a smooth talker from the rubble-and-burning-barrels end of town, but he soon forks over the caps when we turn persuasive, while Lady Jane is a down-on-her-luck Californian who has the means but can't get to them. Fortunately she still has some caps. Fortunately for her, that is - we haven't dipped into our well-stocked arsenal for a little while now and the VATS targeting button is getting harder to avoid.

The third debtor is Grecks, a ghoul in a sorry state, and we're not proud of how this one goes. Having located him and reclaimed what he owes, we use the rest of the conversation tree to shake him down for a little extra, and then use our hyped up Speech skill to talk the clothes off his back as well. He thanks us for not killing him. "You're a very, very bad man," the game's producer tells us with a look of concern.

Speaking of which, elsewhere in Freeside we meet the Kings, a gang of greasers run by the King, a bored-looking crime lord nursing a poorly canine friend with an exposed robot brain. It turns out King is concerned that one of his enforcers, Orris, is up to no good.

We're invited to hire Orris to escort us through the hairier bits of Freeside and observe him work to figure out why his own brand of private security is proving disproportionately lucrative - assuming it isn't all down to his spiky get-up, reminiscent of Tom Savini's Sex Machine in Dusk Till Dawn.

As Orris proceeds down the main street he diverts us into a back alley to avovid some dodgy-looking guys up ahead, and then appears to dispatch a group of thugs with brutal efficiency, after which he schools us on why he is the only security in town worth a damn.

At this point we can choose to point out that he has just "killed" four guys with three bullets, which is a mite suspicious, but we reason that we could just let him go and then report him to King later, so we don't. Unfortunately the game isn't quite set up for this kind of thinking, and upon returning to King we're only given the option to say Orris "seems legit" - something the King, like us, very much doubts. He insists we repeat the exercise and look closer.

Cursing this apparent and very un-Fallout gap in game logic, we go back to Orris and pay another 200 caps to set off again. As we near the point where we ducked into the alley, however, he changes tack. "You didn't think you'd get away with that twice, did you?" he chides. "My guys saw you coming out of the Kings." It's a shame they didn't see our Anti-Materiel Rifle too, because it splatters Orris and his guys within a few well-placed rounds.