This might be a controversial statement, but I’m well prepared to take any thrashing I get from it: Fallout: New Vegas is the greatest video game ever made.

I have a lot of fond memories with this game. This was my first glimpse into the Fallout series. A guy I worked with at HEB was telling me about this crazy new game where you could get a shoulder-mounted nuke launcher and shoot it into a group of invisible mutants and watch them blow into a million pieces all while having a little robot follow you around.

This intrigued me. I’d never played an RPG before except for ‘Fantasy Star Online: Parts I & II’, and I really didn’t like it too much. I didn’t like it at all, actually. I was more of a ‘shoot everything first and don’t ask questions later because this is an FPS’ kind of guy. Call of Duty II and Red Dead Revolver were my two favorite games ever. So he walked me over to the video game display, grabbed me a copy of New Vegas, and said “Get this. You won’t regret it.”

And you know what? He was right. To this day there is no single game that gives me the same feeling as Fallout: New Vegas. Even hearing a bit of the soundtrack is like a drug addict hearing the click of a lighter. It’s a trigger. I want it. I need to play it.

You might say “But Reed, doesn’t anything get boring after doing it for 300 hours?” Well… Kind of? But the great thing about New Vegas is that it always throws something new at you. Or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, you can always throw something new at it.

And that’s what I love about the Fallout series as a whole. When I first played New Vegas, I didn’t really like it too much. It was to big. Too much freedom. After about a year of coming and going from the Mojave Wasteland, I ended up getting Fallout 3. That’s where the real fun began.

I started playing it nonstop. I beat it. I played it again. I beat it again. I played it. Again. And every single time I went back to scour the wastes, I found something new. I found a group of vampires that live in the metro station. I made different choices, like blowing up Megaton or choosing to put the FEV virus into the water purifier. Fallout 3 is what made me love Fallout, but then I went back and played New Vegas.

Kelsey had gone out of town for two whole weeks (the longest we had-and still have-ever spent apart from each other), and I needed something to do while she was gone. “Should I go buy a new game, or should I pick up an old one?”

Sure enough, I found New Vegas sitting there in my cabinet and popped it into my 360. From there, I spent every night of my winter vacation with a couple of beers, a controller, and occasionally, a deathclaw. It was an amazing experience that made the absence of my love… moderately bearable.

So what about Fallout: New Vegas made me give it the title of Greatest Game of All Time? I’ll tell you. Over the next few posts, I plan on letting you know why New Vegas is, in fact, the best game ever made. Check back tomorrow to read the second installment in this series.