I love Fallout: New Vegas but you know what I don't love? New Vegas itself. The strip and the casinos are a bit of a letdown. The streets are nearly empty. The casinos are dull. And the biggest crime of all: you can't play poker.
For the past 15 years, our choices of casino games in New Vegas have been limited to slot machines, blackjack, and roulette. But finally, finally, one heroic modder has added video poker. And New Vegas, at last, feels more like Present Vegas as a result.
The mod by W00Z, called wGames - Introducing Video Poker, adds a classic of the video poker genre: Jacks or Better. Belly up to the machine, place a bet, and you'll be dealt five cards. Click the ones you want to hold and you'll be given new cards to replace the discarded ones. If you've got a pair of jacks, you'll win your money back. Anything higher like two-pair, three of a kind, a flush, a straight, and so on, and you'll rake in the caps.
With the mod installed these new video poker terminals can be found in The Tops, Gomorrah, the Atomic Wrangler, and all other New Vegas casinos, with a lovely detail that the card backs on each machine will vary depending on which joint you're gambling in.
The mod is customizable so you can tweak it in a few important ways. For instance, your character in New Vegas has a Luck skill that (among other things) gives them better odds in Vegas games, but you can disable it with these poker terminals if you want a more traditional experience of losing all your money.
You can also decide if you want the classic video poker colors with blue screens or a more logical, if less glitzy, green monochrome look. And you can tweak settings to adjust the sounds and speed of the poker terminals, and choose if you think the swanky Ultra-Luxe (it's a high-end casino far too classy for slots) should have or not have the video poker terminals.
Here's a bit of the mod in action, take a look:
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To me, video poker is Vegas (or Reno, or Atlantic City, or any casino in general) so I think this is a fantastic mod to add to vanilla Fallout: New Vegas. Make sure you read the installation instructions and requirements on the mod's page: there are a number of other mods video poker relies on—and some of those mods rely on other mods. Good luck!
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Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.
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