But I did manage to make some more time last night for Fallout 3. Still trying to finish up some achievements and good karma-focused quests before I start over with a new, evil weasel of a character. After sneaking around for an hour and more or less getting nowhere (found one more bobblehead in Vault 108), I did the worst thing ever:

Cheated.

Well, took advantage of a glitch to be more specific. See, I was sitting at around 43 successful speech attempts, and you need 50 to unlock the following achievement:

Silver-Tongued Devil (20G): Won 50 Speech Challenges

Basically, if you go to Little Lamplight, there’s a kid sheriff there named Knock-Knock. Ask him to tell you a joke, use your intelligence to guess the answer, and then select the [Speech 100%] response. Rinse and repeat. You can do this as many times as you need to. Something, perhaps, Bethesda should have caught.

So I did it six more times until I heard that infamous ping, the very same ping that echoed in my head as I tried to sleep last night. It just doesn’t feel right, “achieving” what I did, but I was worried that I’d run out of proper speech options at this point, and I didn’t want to have my evildoer being all talky in my next playthrough. His/her speech success is most likely going to involve a rocket launcher to the face.

Not terribly proud of this, but I guess in the end it doesn’t matter.