As far as I care, there's no beating Fallout 2. I must have played through it about 100 times myself. If you're a fan of the new games in the series, do yourself a favor - get through the first hour of this (which can admittedly be a bit boring) and see what fallout once was. Anyway, to answer someone below complaining about the OS X version etc. (Note that this is speculation), while this is indeed the same game you bought, it has been repackaged by Bethesda. About a year ago, the original version was pulled from GOG (They started offering it for free just before they lost the rights) and it took a bit of time until they made a deal to get it back. Bethesda wanted to make some more money on the thing (Which is apparently becoming a trend with stuff like HOMAM 3 HD), so they repackaged it and put it on Steam. Apparently that didn't create enough profit, so it's back on GOG, but the original Fallout 2 is now labeled in your library as Fallout 2 classic, whereas this is just Fallout 2. Likely 100% the same game, only Bethesda doesn't do Wine ports and DosBox, so that's left up to you. As far as the GOG backend can tell, they are 2 different games.
Basically, I bought the game in the beta a bit before release. Judging by the forum activity and my own experience, the Mac version of the game is pretty much just a poorly done wine port, which is full of game crashing bugs. The only official response to some of these over at the forums so far has been basically: Tough luck. I like the game very much, but I sincerely regret buying it now. In short, if you're not on Windows, don't buy this.
After 18 goddamn years I have finally managed to finish this game. Personally, I loved it. Way back it was the first game I bought that didn't fit on a floppy and was distributed on a CD. And for a good reason, it is fairly massive. Almost every single thing can be destroyed, there are tons of videos, the resolution is higher than what was usual at the time, the plot is not too bad, the controls are - but it's not too hard to get used to them. More importantly, the game is BRUTAL. Looking back at it, players became so lazy in the years to come. This here is a game, that is damn hard to get through even when you use cheats. The amount of instant deaths, troops with a rocket launcher waiting to jump you and set you on fire with one shot is just massive. And that wasn't even the hardest setting. I can't even imagine someone finishing this on No remorse. While the game is pretty linear, there is a lot of ways you can deal with every situation. Didn't find a keycard? Blast the doors open with a bomb, it will set the alarm off, but who cares. One more thing, read through the manual GOG is distributing with the game so that you don't spend the entirety of the game wondering, what some tool does :). All in all, it was pretty good. I am not a shooter person, but I have a soft spot for isometric games and this one was great.
Everyone should experience this game at least once in their life. The writing is top notch, there are tons of "easter eggs" and references, it's funny, it's properly dark...amazing really. While I thoroughly enjoyed Fallout 3, it just doesn't come anywhere near this masterpiece. I just hope that Brian Fargo won't dissapoint with upcoming Kickstarted Wasteland 2.
