Fallout

Just finished it for the first time after a weekend binge. It's a great game. You won't have fun if you don't know what you're doing. There's no tutorial. Shift-click to run. Fog of war in this game isn't as good as Jagged Alliance - all enemies are highlighted even if behind cover, but you can't scroll far away from the character to plan in advance. Peeking through a window is only possible if approaching buildings from the north or from the east. Unlike Fallout 3, Agility is important. Companions can't equip armor and get stuck in doors (the Bethesda purchase makes sense now). I don't really have a right to nitpick a game older than me, but giving stars seems to be mandatory, so I'll give a five. I played the 1.1 patch without any of the popular mods. Installed it on the GNU/Linux distro Debian and played it on low resolution.

Im playing games since shitting in my pants and boy I wondered why those old games are fascinating so much. After finishing Cyberpunk 2077, I played Fallout 1, what a contrast and its so much more fun. Why?? Besides the old graphic, it exceeds in everything else which modern games dont have anymore (witcher 3 is one of the rare examples which come closer to it): The story, gameplay and characters are just great. But what I love most, are the consequences and decisions you make have an important impact on the game. Its also not forgiving. It happens often if you choose a wrong dialog option, you will be attacked and are dead (most of the time). Is it frustrating? To the contrary. It motivates you. You can also solve quests completely differently. Want to be the good guy and solve everything honestly without violence? Do it. Want to be the bad guy and kill your way thru the game. Possibly. You shape the game most of the time and its so relaxing playing it. If you havent played it yet, do it. You wont regret it. Experience of a life time. :)

I'd like to rate this game higher, but it gets docked a little due to the clunkiness of the interface, in particular inventory management. I should point out that I played the game as provided by GOG, so basically vanilla with an HD widescreen patch only. The story is really good and there's some pretty good replayability in that regards as well. Graphics are still quite good with some nice, gory deaths for enemies, but sometimes items blend into the background that are needed to advance the story. For that reason, I needed to check a guide here and there to figure out what to do. I wouldn't say I needed to use a guide heavily, but I did have to use it often enough to make it fairly essential. Music is atmospheric, but not what I'd call excellent. Definitely worth a go if you've never played it and want to see where everything got its start in the Fallout universe. Just be aware that it's not the smoothest experience nowadays. Not a huge amount of mods for this game as Fallout 2 gets more attention in that area to include Fallout 1 in 2 which just runs this game in Fallout 2's engine. Some people may complain about the children being removed, but that didn't really bother me much.

A 1997 role-playing game in a post-apocalyptic setting in an imaginary California in the year 2161 onwards, after its devastation by a nuclear war between China and the USA in 2077. It adopts the 1950s' angst of nuclear destruction and ideas of the future as its style. A spiritual successor of the 1988 videogame Wasteland. I enjoyed the gameplay, the turn-based combat, the hexagon movement pattern, the atmosphere, the story, the background music, the dialogues, the writing, the quests, the character stats/skills/perks/traits. At first I was afraid about time limit (150 days for the first main quest) but even with hoarding & selling items, exploring everything, etc. I finished it in about 60 days. The game could do better with more unique/different models. One can't tell the companions or foes apart. The models partially dictate what weapons they are allowed to use. The game lacks some quality of life features. Such as: • Ability to remap keys • Exchanging items with companions (workaround is bartering and stealing) • Tell Dogmeat to stay instead of following (keeping your companions alive is a very frustrating task) • Inability to push your companions (I swear, I yelled at times when they blocked me in a corner AGAIN) Fixable through (unmaintained/outdated) community patches but I decided against them in favour of gameplay authenticity. The digital releases on Steam and GOG adopted the European version 1.2 with a high-resolution patch. A 121 pages long manual and a game controls reference card. The European version had the children removed which can be reimplemented with this patch: https://www.moddb.com/games/fallout/downloads/fallout-1-child-patch I learnt that the game has unimplemented quests which also cause the inability to get the good ending for "The Hub" and the "Followers of the Apocalypse" unless one edits save files or installs (unmaintained/outdated) community patches. Fun and the flaws can be looked over. Rating: 3/4

Replayed this game after 20 odd years, and the flaws are glaringly obvious: lack of directions, bugs, skills that do nothing (steal), broken quests, broken triggers (especially towards the end of the game). Yet what this game does well, it does flawlessly! The atmosphere is one of a kind, the story is incredible, the voice acting and writing blows most modern games out of the water, and the graphics have held up really well if you don't mind pixel sprites. If you've never played this game, don't be put off by the harsh beginning. Make sure to dig out the manual and read it and/or consult guides and other players if you get frustrated. It's well worth it believe me.