Some things to note about the GOG version: I'm sure a few others have already pointed these out but for the sake of backing them up, this is the UK version of the game, so children are removed completely, due to (understandable) reservations from the censors about having the ability to kill kids. This doesn't quite break the game in the way it supposedly does to Fallout 2, but for the sake of completeness there thankfully is a patch to put them back in the game, as well as patches for other areas. In addition, I recommend the Team X 1.3.5 patch (the GOG version I learned is already at 1.2), as well as the most recent NPC mod, which allows useful functions like being able to change NPC companion armor, a more reasonable way to exchange items, leveling them up, and telling Dogmeat to wait, but also fixes some bugs that cause the game to crash when leveling up with NPC members currently in your team and when requesting them to change armor (the one that does this last thing was a bit hard to track down, but I have the link to it posted on the necessary forums for the Fallout games). You can find links to these and other patches and mods on the forums here and over at the No Mutants Allowed! website. I'd recommend trying some out, while being wary of others (there is a Fixit patch which is supposed to work as an all-in-one fix-'er-upper but caused some nasty technical problems with my game, and other's too it seems). As for the game itself, few introductions are necessary if you're at all into the world of PC gaming. It's one of the most highly acclaimed RPGs for any platform, let alone for the PC, and rightfully so. Brian Fargo's continuation/spin-off of sorts of his creation Wasteland from back in the 80's it puts you in a post-apocalyptic setting where the world is but a barren desert of radioactive matter, burnt out buildings, tribes of raiders, merchants, and heavily armed guards, mutants, ghouls and other nasty creatures. Plenty of cheeky satire and pop culture humor can be found as well significantly lightening the load, going from a potentially depressing Threads/The Road type of setting to something more akin to A Boy and His Dog or The Road Warrior. You begin with a pretty involved character creation system, with three premade characters with their own portraits and backgrounds (not really necessary since your male and female characters look the same no matter who you choose and the backstories never come into play at any point) as well as the ability to make one of your own from scratch, where you balance a set number of points to your stats, three skills of your choosing and a couple of traits, which are facets of your character with as much an upside as a downside. Every few levels you gain perks as well, giving your character much-needed boosts in certain areas. You can make your character as intelligent, agile, strong, perceptive, lucky, and so on as you like, as some expense in other areas too of course, and these have an actual, significant effect on how you play. A character with 1 INT will only be able to communicate in grunts, gibberish and general monosyllabic nonsense, with the characters around you reacting appropriately. This can make for a humorous playthrough but good luck actually being able to get information, quests, or direction from anybody. The more charismatic and good with speech you are, the more you might be able to accomplish goals with just the strengh of your word alone, lying your way past guards and getting better deals on bartered goods. High perception and an efficiency with rifles can make you a skilled sharpshooter able to score a headshot from a distance past where your enemies are able to see you. High luck makes you more likely to stumble upon valuable goods and amusing easter eggs in your random encounters in the desert. Characters will respond to you in a number of ways, some may not take a liking to you and react even with hostility. A lot of these factors are random, with different results gotten just from a save and reload. A karma system, which goes up and down depending on how good or immoral you are, also affects the way the world perceives you and the kind of ending you get. This is the real joy of the game, you really can be whoever you want to be and you really do get to see the consequences of your actions, or lack thereof. In fact, one of the biggest problems of the game is that for all the complex ways you can tinker with your character, there is so little of the game to go along with it. Meaning, it's a pretty short game with a small world accompanying it. You run on a time limit the entire time so it's short almost by necessity but that also takes back from the exploration aspect, with relatively few towns and quests in each one, though you can pretty much go wherever you want from the beginning. Certain stats are used more than others, most of them only in one or two areas at most, and one could probably get by the entire game without any kind of traps or outdoorsman skill at all, and you certainly aren't going to get much long-term use out of them if you do have them. Getting the most useful weapons and armor is possible pretty early on making the other ones all but pointless, and the task of gaining experience points for the sake of getting perks is cut short when you can complete the game so soon with only two to three at most in place, and so many other ones that you probably won't ever bother using (no opportunities ever presented themselves for me where extra poison and radiation resistance beyond what can be done with a Rad X, RadAway or Antidote were necessary, as Radscorpion encounters and your visit to the one radioactive area in the whole game, the Glow, are limited at best). Multiple playthroughs are possible within under a week's time (I've gone through the game three time myself). I suppose it's a testament to how good it is that it's biggest flaw is that there isn't enough of it (supposedly rectified with Fallout 2, which I haven't gone though yet but I read is a much larger game), but it's still disappointing that so much of the game is cut so short like it is. As for other areas, the graphics, though obviously of their time, do a commendable job at presenting its setting with trash-laden alleys, abandoned makeshit buildings, hi-tech facilities and bombed-out towns. It's all presented in an isometric perspective, which can make navigating behind walls and buildings a bit cumbersome but it's by no means unmanageable. Another highlight is Mark Morgan's haunting ambient/industrial soundtrack, fitting every area perfectly. My favorite is the rumbling demonic churchbells and chants of the Cathedral area. Fans of dark ambient and industrial music, and labels like Cold Meat Industries will find a lot to love here. Some tracks are better than others and can grow a bit repetitive (don't care for the Hub's music myself despite how well-fitting it is), especially when spending any decent length of time in any one of these areas. A minor grievance in the grand scheme of things though. Finally worth talking about is the combat system. Turn-based with tactical elements on a hex map, it's of the kind where you spend a certain number of action points (affected in part by certain perks and traits you may have) to move, attack, use your inventory and so forth, and, depending on your weapons skills with whatever you have equipped at the moment, with a certain percentage chance of striking a certain enemy. Also a cool feature is the ability to strike certain body parts, the more critical areas obviously being the smaller and more difficult targets to hit, and where crippling limbs giving you a great strategic advantage in some cases (a mutant with a two-handed weapon, such as the devastating minigun, will be rendered essentially inert and unable to attack except with his fists if crippled in one arm). Not a feature I found myself using as much as intended but the possibilities are definitely there if you so desire. And when you get NPC companions in the fray it really kicks the battles up a notch (you cannot directly control your companions unfortunately but can give them basic commands beforehand, at least with the NPC mod). If you plan on keeping any of them for any length of time you may find one of the biggest challenges of the game is the feat of keeping them alive, as they are much weaker than you are and tend to stupidly walk into situations that leave themselves open for a barrage of fatal fire, with many more instances of getting killed due to friendly fire, on theirs or even your part, from a stray bullet intended for an enemy landing their way instead. It would also be nice to see more variety in the NPC companion skillset. Besides the one dog you can recruit, which is interesting, two of them are good with knives and SMGs, one with throwing knives in particular and the other one also able to use pistols, and one other one that can use rifles. They blend together too much for my liking as a result. Maybe having one good with energy weapons and another with heavy artillery would have added some much-needed variety to the team, though considering the recklessness of their fighting styles, arming one of them with a rocket launcher, minigun or flamethrower wouldn't be such a hot idea. The most enjoyable parts are when the battles get to a grand scale, such as the takeover of Adytum assisting the Blades gang with the townsfolk against the fascistic Regulators, or when you fight through the Super Mutant lair with guards from the Followers of the Apocalypse (though using them seems to result in getting the bad ending for them), where you get extra companions but only those situations in particular, and I wish there was more of that element in the game (as well as more of the game in general). So is it worth playing? But of course, and as an introduction to classic cRPG gaming I can think of no better way to start. Despite the disappointing length and that a lot of great and promising elements are underutilized in the process it's still a great game well worth your time, and for the price offered here you definitely can't go wrong.
With gold mysteriously and continuously disappearing from bank vaults a secret organization specializing in unusual phenomena enlists the help of a fortune teller to randomly pick a name from a phone book as their secret agent of choice to solve the mystery and put a stop to the thievery. Ultimately hapless teenager Mark is the one strong-armed away. The game is divided into three sections, first the training camp, second the village wherein you try to gain access to the mansion that is outed as being the source of the theft and finally the mansion itself. The story is fluff but maintains a consistently light-hearted and humorous tone that gives it the life it has. Mark manages to be a likable protagonist, with many amusing remarks and interactions with the sometimes oddball inhabitants around him. The graphics are basic by VGA standards but are clean and functional with pretty decent animation and character models. Also simple and functional are the controls, using only the left mouse for movement and examining hotspots and inventory and the right click for actions, with F1 for saving, quitting, sound adjustment and so forth. The true standout element for me though is the music, which is awesome though some of the better tracks are restricted to one room each. As far as gameplay is concerned it would seem at first to be a very good starting point for those getting into adventure games, as, along with the simple controls and humorous, light story, there are no deaths, dead ends, real time challenges or anything of the sortm just item collecting, character interaction and puzzles to solve. Here's where the game falters - namely, the puzzle logic of this game, or lack thereof. It's one of those games where the design is so arbitrary and downright lazy that it's as if it was created around a session of madlibs. The solutions to the puzzles are almost all ridiculous but rarely funny or absurd enough to justify their existence. Mostly it's just frustrating, and a walkthrough will be a necessity unless you like going through tedious trial-and-error processes of elimination, which isn't worth it in this case. In addition to being nonsensical and random, the puzzles are also severely lacking in imagination. Almost of the puzzles are of the inventory-based variety,all of the items of the one-use-only variety, their one use not even making any sense in context, trying to find the right place to stick the right object and sometimes combining two or more objects together in baffling ways, others involve repeatedly probing a character until they give up the doodad you'll need. The most well-designed puzzles are in the very end of the game, one not involving inventory or repetitive interaction but a book case and a color-coded desk drawer (still frustrating though due to it being a pixel hunt with no reason save for outside resources that anyone playing the game would know about, being one well-hidden book among a huge shelf of other, useless ones) and another involving trying to gather the components of the main villain's ID to get a jive-talking robot / safe to open himself up. Usually though it's stupid situations like Mark being too lazy to sift through a patch of grass for a nut and so having to fix a crooked rake in a nonsense manner with the nut in the end being used for a throwaway item combination that triggers something that there's no reason anyone should believe it would trigger! Despite the lack of glitches or any other technical hiccups on my end this kind of design makes it feel rushed, hell there's even one item in the game that's never even used! And besides that this game is just not very compelling. It's ridiculously short, first-time players, even with all the confusing puzzles, should be able to complete it in under an hour at most, the environments are lacking in cohesion save for an excuse to collect disposable objects with contrived functions and as a result it all feels terribly underdeveloped. It's far from unplayable, there are worse freeware titles out there, and for what it's worth you might get a decent time-waster out of it. With a good soundtrack, some funny writing and a short playtime it might be worth the effort if you're an adventure game fanatic but past that once you're done with it there's no reason to go back to it ever again.
