jcosmocohen: :-) I'm glad to find someone else who didn't enjoy F:NV as much as F3. I've wondered if it was because I played F3 to death and F:NV was basically more of the same, or I just didn't like the setting quite as much.
I think that might be part of it. I got F3 for Xmas when it came out and me and my girlfriend played it to death over the holidays, each with our own game going. We got really into the whole game universe. It helped somewhat that I was living in Northern Virgina and working in DC at the time, so all the locations were versions of real-world places we knew.
We even invented our own games using F3; for example, she loved collecting all the garden gnomes and had them stashed at her house in Megaton. I logged into her account and went into her home, picked up all the gnomes, and hid them around Megaton in out-of-the-way places. Then she logged in and had to find them, as a scavenger hunt. :)
I don't think that F:NV really could have compared to F3 for me no matter what it was like, given that confluence of events. F3 just seemed so creative and open, with so many odd little things hidden all over the place. F:NV seemed more straightforward and less, well, fun.