Fallout (PC)

10/27/08 - All the hype around Fallout 3 coming out this week got me feeling that I should really go back and finally take a decent shot at Fallout 1. My relationship with this game goes way back to the one that inspired it. There are a few games I've played in my 2 or 3 decades of gaming that stand out as memorable milestones. Two of them were Dungeon Master on the Atari ST and Starflight on the PC. (Just typing these titles still gives me shivers!) The third was a little game from Electronic Arts called Wasteland. It ran on 2 360K floppy disks on a 4MHz PC with CGA graphics running MS-DOS 2.1. I don't think it even used a mouse. But the story was simply magnificent. You started with a party of post-apocalyptic adventures kitted out in nothing more than leather jackets and pistols. Over the course of the game, we (Di played too) took our party to the radiated corners of the South West, upgrading finally to suits of power armor. Battles in this game were contests of vast inventories of guns of all types, rocket launchers, and particle beams. (I'll never forget the image in my mind of our little party, running desperately low on ammo, most of its members severely injured, finally killing a giant mechanized scorpion in the streets of a nuked Las Vegas with our last LAWS rocket.)

When I heard that Fallout was sort of a sequel/upgraded version of Wasteland, I was thrilled! But, when I found out it was a single character afair, I lost interest immediately. The party dynamic was what had really captured my interest in Wasteland and here it was gone. So, I never got into it or the next one, Fallout 2. But now that Fallout 3 is being hailed as GotY material (or the second coming, depending on who you read), I figured it was time to let bygones be bygones and see what it has to offer.

First off, I forgot how rudimentary the old games seem by today's standards. I've gotten so used to the first 1/2 hour of the game being a tutorial that I just jumped right in. Little did I know the tutorial was in the manual. Also, this is almost as old-school as you can get. The game is not "real-time", but turn-based even though you can move with the mouse. It's going to take some getting used to, but I think it is going to be fun - or at least a good experience.