Fallout: New Vegas: Dead Money

[romertremor]

This is a rant thread. In Dead Money, you follow a mysterious radio broadcast advertising the Sierra Madre Casino. It turns out that the casino and the surrounding area are hellholes. Dead Money tries to give off a horror vibe that fails on multiple levels. I'm going to list everything I hate about it here:

• The combat. Dead Money introduces new enemies called Ghost People that reanimate after you think you've killed them. The only ways to stop them from coming back are to either gib them while they're up or kick them while they're down. I ask, who thought this was a good idea? Why make it possible to kill them in the first place? If it was impossible to stop them from getting back up, Dead Money would be infinitely creepier. A monster you know you can't ever truly keep down will always scare you more than something you can fight back against. Later in the DLC after you've broken into the Sierra Madre Casino, you have to deal with its security holograms. You can't fight back against them. This is an extreme version of what I wanted out of the Ghost People. With no way to combat the holograms, you have to do some old-fashioned sneaking while hoping they don't discover you. The hologram sections were much more nerve-wracking than the Ghost People sections.
  
  
• The music. Dead Money's ambient music tries way too hard to be creepy. There's one section about halfway through the DLC where, I **** you not, the sound consists entirely of one piano key being hit again and again and again. That's not creepy. That's just annoying background noise. Why not cut out ambient music entirely so the only thing I can hear is the Ghost People in the background searching for me?
  
  
• The Sierra Madre vending machines. In the beginning of Dead Money, you're stripped off all of your gear and forced to scavenge for items to survive. Sounds like a good idea to ramp up the tension, right? Wrong. See, the designers thought it would be a good idea to scatter vending machines that dispense almost anything you could possibly need playing through Dead Money at surprisingly cheap prices. The currency used in Dead Money is the Sierra Madre Chip. Insert chips, receive items. The ability to buy whatever you need completely kills the need to scavenge, and so kills the tension of running out of ammo/healing items at a critical time. You do have to track down the codes for these items, but they're usually either in plain sight or right next to objectives.
  
  
• The explosive collar. When you begin Dead Money, your Courier is knocked out by gas and wakes up in the area surrounding the Sierra Madre, without their gear, and with an explosive collar that will go off if he/she disobeys the main villain of Dead Money. The other way your collar can explode is through radio frequencies. Over the years, the Sierra Madre's various speakers and radios have decayed and they will interfere with your collar's frequency, setting it off in a short amount of time unless you can get rid of the source. I don't think this idea was bad in and of itself, but the developers could have executed it a little better. Often, the spots where you're safe from the frequencies aren't obvious and so you will have quite a few frustrating deaths until you stumble on them by accident.
  

Anything not in that list gets a free pass. Characters, setting, story, and equipment are fine. /rant