Watching an all-romances speedrun of the legendarily janky Fallout: New Vegas is a delight

Fallout: New Vegas by tomatoangus in 17:25 - Awesome Games Done Quick 2025 - YouTube

The 2025 edition of charity fundraising speedrun event Awesome Games Done Quick has been running for the last week, featuring such wonderfully absurd runs as an Elden Ring saxophone-controller boss showcase and a Crazy Taxi speedrun performed with a live band. As a Fallout sicko, I was pleased to see Tomatoangus (also known as Tomatoanus) tackling a New Vegas all-romances run, a somewhat niche speedrun record we've written about before.

There are 12 romanceable characters in Fallout: New Vegas, and collecting them all Pokémon-style in a single playthrough would normally be impossible. Its NPCs have predetermined sexualities, and there's normally no way to change your character's sex to suit their preferences mid-game. However, as Tomatoangus explains in this run, quicksaving and quickloading right before the moment you're asked if you've finalized character creation means the pop-up keeps appearing throughout the game, letting you sneakily rebuild your character halfway through.

Abusing the quickload is a recurring theme, as it can let you skip through dialogues and also launch yourself forward. A glitch in the revolver-reloading animation can also provide free dashes, infinitely chained if you jump in the middle of it. There's a lot of stuff a normal New Vegas enjoyer would have no idea about, which is part of the fun. Did you know if you clip out of bounds you respawn at the entry point of the location you're in? It's a convenient way of getting around New Vegas at speed, which you'd never know about if you weren't trying to hop across the waste in record time.

One more trick that's central to this run is time-stopping, which is triggered by right-clicking the Pip-boy map. For some reason this freezes the AI and lets you run around completing quest objectives in relative safety, like collecting all the monster eggs you need to impress one of your romance partners. That's what the ladies like.

I'll leave the rest of it for you to discover for yourself. If you're looking for more of the same, back in 2020 Tomatoangus performed a legendary Fallout Anthology speedrun, in which he demolished Fallout, Fallout 2, Fallout 3, New Vegas, and Fallout 4 back-to-back in 2:16:21. It's an entertainingly wild ride.

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.