With Chris Avellone back in the writer's chair, it was pretty much expected that the brand-new Fallout: New Vegas DLC, Old World Blues, would sport a more adventurous design than Honest Hearts, and perhaps even the survival-horror experiment that was Dead Money. The end result, though, is perhaps even a little overboard for what most fans of the series could have expected - it's equal parts Planescape: Torment in terms of morbid absurdity, and 1950s cheeseball sci-fi film. Despite the odd combination, though, Old World Blues is the strongest DLC for New Vegas yet. The real question isn't so much "should you get it", but what it represents for the Fallout franchise, and for its fans.

Like all previous DLCs, Old World Blues begins with the Courier receiving a radio invitation, this time to a midnight screening of an old film, drive-in style. Upon arriving for the event, however, it's pretty clear that things aren't all they seem, with a crashed satellite projecting a strange image on-screen. Like clockwork, the Courier loses consciousness, and, after the opening title crawl, finds him or herself clad in a hospital gown, surgical scars still healing, overlooking an unfamiliar industrial wasteland from above. That wasteland, the Big Empty, or more correctly, Big Mountain, is an ancient pre-War science complex, home to all sorts of lost technology, housed in forgotten laboratories.
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