So, considering that I'm spending the holidays with my parents' house which is currently lacking a good PC (I'll be building a new one for them tomorrow), but have brought along my 360 (which apparently the TSA agents had to inspect separately?) and the fact that I was going to play it on the 360 anyway I decided to pick up NV for $40 from Amazon (Amazon Prime baby!). So after about 35 hours of gameplay, I have to say that I'm really glad I have a good PC to play games on. Though it's not a big surprise that New Vegas was a superior experience on the PC (all of Bethesda's past multi-platform games have been), the difference I feel was much more significant this time around than it was previously. 
 
To start things off, I have to say that the issue is not with the quality of the graphics as the 360 version of New Vegas looks pretty good. Sure it's at 720p and seems to lack AA (though it's hard to tell since it's being upscaled) but I would venture that it's comparable to "Medium" settings on the PC version with a pretty good draw distance. The issue isn't just the load times either. Certainly, load times for the game seem to increase the longer you play it without shutting the game off but this seems to be a memory/caching issue that's somewhat present on the PC version as well (i.e. game stability decreasing the longer you play it) but load times early on during an extended play session are actually pretty good, sometimes even better than Fallout 3 (of course, this is the with the latest patch). No, the biggest problem is that frame rate. There are parts of the game that run at a solid 30 fps and other parts that stutter like crazy and dip into the slide-show range. At some points the game will freeze momentarily (probably a mini load) whenever a certain event is triggered, as if the game has frozen but then corrects itself moments later. In Dead Money in particular, the game freezes for a few seconds every time an important quest ends or event occurs. The frustrating part isn't that the framerate is always bad at certain parts of the game, but that it's inconsistently bad. Some parts of the Strip for instance, run smoothly at times but like a slide show other times (again, it seems to directly correlate to how much time you've spent playing it in a particular session). Somewhat long load times I don't mind since I can always use a break now and then, but the extreme stuttering and inconsistent frame rate really irritates me (i.e. this is why I didn't like Killzone 2) 
 
Now, this is not to say that the PC version doesn't have issues. Before the latest patches, I had to install a modified DirectX9 dll in order for the game to run smoothly on my Radeon 5870 (which is more than powerful enough to run the game at the highest settings). Without the modified dll, I would experience some of the same stuttering and inconsistent frame rates as I did with the 360 version. However, with the modified dll and with the latest patches, the PC version ran very smoothly and more or less without a hitch, and also with significantly reduced load times (lower still probably, if I had installed it to my SSD drive). Not to mention that the mod support has pretty much erased any issues I've had with the game along with greatly improving my experience with it. 
 
I wish I could say that the frame rate and loading times on the 360 version didn't affect my enjoyment of the game (though for the most part it didn't) but i can't. While I still have an incredible amount of love for the game, it's still pretty jarring just how different the 360 version feels from the PC version. 
 
I also feel that I must discuss Dead Money. Boy, it's been a long time since I've been this frustrated with a game. Obsidian makes design and gameplay choices in Dead Money that just make absolutely no sense and could have ruined what would otherwise have been a fairly decent DLC episode. First off, the radio/speakers that will cause your collar to explode if you're within range of them for too long has got to be some of the most irritating game play I've ever played through in a Fallout game (I can't even count how many times I died in that final quest). I understand that Obsidian is trying to introduce new game mechanics to freshen things up but exploding collars that react fatally to radios and speakers is not it. Almost as irritating as the speakers are the damned stealth missions involving invincible (that's right, invincible) hologram guards. Fallout 3 and New Vegas were never known for having the most proficient game play around and it really shows in Dead Money. Combining holograms and exploding collars in the last quest also results in a cacophony of shittiness. Obsidian, I hope that you've learned from you mistakes as I'm sure that I'm not the only one whose been grumbling about how irritating and downright frustrating some parts of Dead Money is to play. 
 
But ultimately, despite the frustrations of Dead Money and the problematic frame rate and loading time issues, I'm still really enjoying playing New Vegas (again) on the 360, because, as always, it's the narrative and exploration aspects of the game that draw you in, not the game play.Still, I have to thank the heavens that Skyrim in going to be on a completely new engine.