As a European I know an absurd amount of American place names. You retain a bizarre amount of random names from three decades of American TV. If you sat me down and asked me name American places I could probably get close to if not all the states and a major city in most of them too.

The problem is that I have almost no context to put them in. If I was looking at a map of the US I could comfortably label Texas and that's it. Maybe California? I don't know where it is off the top of my head but I feel like if I saw the map I could pick out California. Everything else is a complete blur. I know there's a whole East Coast/West Coast divide thing going on but I couldn't even tell you which states are on which coast beyond an educated guess after trying really hard to remember the locations from the Fallout games because I know the originals and the modern Bethesda games take place on opposite coasts.

Going purely off of Fallout: New Vegas, which I know best, I know that California must be fairly close if not adjacent to Nevada due to the presence of the New California Republic and the dam on the Colorado River is a major location and that presumably is named after the state so I assume that is also close by. The Honest Hearts DLC takes place in Zion National Park which I can't remember if it is stated in the game to be in Utah but for some reason I know that it is so there's another one presumably close by. A group of tribal people is stated to be from Arizona and a character is from Mexico but mentions being in Two Suns (Tucson, Arizona) at one point on his journey to Nevada so I am also guessing at least one of these states shares a border with Mexico.

Which now that I've typed that out I'm surprised I managed to get that much from one game, assuming it is correct at least.