ad hominem
Scholar
So I was able to score the jewel case version of Fallout 1/2 for $10 bucks at the local megalomart the other day...I'd been into CRPG's for some time but somehow missed this one when it came out. Since most people tend to have multiple orgasms when they talk about it over here I figured I'd give it a shot. Here goes nuttin'.
Initial Impression:
The opening movie was fantastic. It really set the mood like no other that I've ever seen...I love the old 50's housewife take on the post-apocalyptic world, then dropping back to the bombed-out city. Nice touch. After getting through that and the overseer's speech, I was well on my way to realizing....the interface sucks ass. Not just a regular, everyday kind of ass-sucking, but a full-blown, sweaty, hairy ass-sucking. Yeah, visually it fit in with the story (so we're running on tubes again? Nice), but c'mon. I've seen worse, but this one was right up at the top. No sort option? I have to click at least twice and possibly three times to get information about anything? How many more lines of code would they have had to write to put a "take all" button when looting corpses/lockers? How about a slightly larger information pane...you know, where you can actually fit a single bullet point's worth of information without having to scroll down six times? Bah!
At any rate, once I cut my teeth on the interface and left some poor little rats bleeding on the cold, hard cavern floor, I was on my way.
Out in the open:
So this is where I really started to see how much time the developers had spent crafting truly different solutions to each problem that the PC faces. I played as the agile, brainy type this time and tagged speech and science up to about 120% and 90%, respectively, so I tried to take the intelligent, non-violent solution to most things...and it actually worked! After some experimentation it seems that there are basically three different options for solving most every quest, corresponding to the three pre-made characters: a combat option, a stealth option, and a Henry Kissinger option. It's not "solve it however you feel like it", but I guess it's the closest anyone's ever come (outside of Nethack) and I enjoyed that aspect immensely.
I also realized, after going through Vault 15, that this game unfortunately had a bit of a pixel-hunt aspect to it. It doesn't bother me to have some hidden secrets but when every last thing blends into the wall that gets a little old. In addition, why must I spend time going along every bottom wall to see if the cutaway reveals anything? I find this to be unrealistic; if my character is inside the room I should be able to see anything inside the room. This bugged me a bit but certainly wasn't the end of the world.
Civilization at last:
The hub was fun...the idea that bartering would be the main form of financial transaction seemed consistent with the starting over aspect of fallout. Bottle caps were an interesting form of currency, too, located mainly in the most heavily populated center. One nit: why are the bottle caps always at the bottom of the trade lists? There aren't a huge number of merchants in the game and if you're trying to store cash (say, for books) instead of slowly unloading your pack mules time and time again it gets old really fast.
Speaking of pack mules, the travel companions were....interesting. I appreciate the option to load others up for storage, but the interface (again) just didn't make sense. So you have to barter with them like you would anyone else. Fine. I suppose that even though you traveled with them for a while they wouldn't trust you in the current environment. But to get around the free trade option by allowing easy and unlimited stealing? That just seems silly. Either steal like you do from anyone else or just have a free trade system with them. They weren't the brightest about aiming around you, either. In one particular firefight, Tycho hit me twice and Dogmeat once...so I killed him myself, the rat bastard. I did like Dogmeat, though.
Combat:
I thought combat was done quite well. I like the penalty for accessing inventory in any way, and I thought on the whole the various weapons and armors were accurate and well-balanced. I quickly learned to take out the mutants with rocket launchers first. The targeting system was brilliant, and I found myself enjoying that part of combat more than anything else. One of my pet peeves with RPGs and games in general is that someone could be one HP away from death and still fight like they're unscathed. To be able to hit the leg and hamper movement, or hit the eyes and hamper sight, or hit the groin and knock them down, that was great. A++ for that implementation.
The Endgame:
Not a whole heck of a lot to say about it, except I wish the rest of the game had the same amount of depth. It's understandable that more lore, information, etc. would open up to you as you advance in the game, but the holodisks, info at the vats computer, Maxwell, etc. gave a lot of the much-needed depth to the story and I thought they could have trickled that in earlier. Maybe hide a disc at Vault 15? Have Killian expound on some topics of interest a bit? Dunno. At any rate, the depth of story was great, and the Master was fantastically executed. I convinced him that he was wrong, but loaded a previous save and killed him just to see the differences, as well. That was just a great concept (although having an old, old CRT monitor embedded in your middle specifically for the purpose of displaying spoken soundwaves seemed silly). The Military Base was well-done as well. I was disappointed with the ending, though: a bunch of still shots of all the places I've visited, then a small confrontation with the Overseer? I felt like there should have been more. Did I miss something?
Overall, Fallout had a fun storyline with very engaging characters. While there weren't a huge number of quests, the options for solving them were greater and more diverse than in any other game I can remember playing. From my memory of the era the graphics seem dated even for '97, but since I'm playing it now that really didn't bother me. The voice acting was good--sparse, but good--and the animations for those voice actors were enjoyable (Harry, in particular). The combat was fun and pretty strategic. My only serious problem was with the damned interface; it seems even more eggregious since it would have taken such a small amount of time (AFAIK) to fix. At any rate, it wasn't the most enjoyable game I've played, but it was definitely one of the best. Kind of in the same way that Dovstoevsky is one of my favorite authors, but I wouldn't call any of his work "fun". Perhaps with subsequent playthroughs with different characters I'll come to like it even more. Maybe not as much as some of you (I never had that "new and shiny!" experience with it), but it was a great game nonetheless.
Initial Impression:
The opening movie was fantastic. It really set the mood like no other that I've ever seen...I love the old 50's housewife take on the post-apocalyptic world, then dropping back to the bombed-out city. Nice touch. After getting through that and the overseer's speech, I was well on my way to realizing....the interface sucks ass. Not just a regular, everyday kind of ass-sucking, but a full-blown, sweaty, hairy ass-sucking. Yeah, visually it fit in with the story (so we're running on tubes again? Nice), but c'mon. I've seen worse, but this one was right up at the top. No sort option? I have to click at least twice and possibly three times to get information about anything? How many more lines of code would they have had to write to put a "take all" button when looting corpses/lockers? How about a slightly larger information pane...you know, where you can actually fit a single bullet point's worth of information without having to scroll down six times? Bah!
At any rate, once I cut my teeth on the interface and left some poor little rats bleeding on the cold, hard cavern floor, I was on my way.
Out in the open:
So this is where I really started to see how much time the developers had spent crafting truly different solutions to each problem that the PC faces. I played as the agile, brainy type this time and tagged speech and science up to about 120% and 90%, respectively, so I tried to take the intelligent, non-violent solution to most things...and it actually worked! After some experimentation it seems that there are basically three different options for solving most every quest, corresponding to the three pre-made characters: a combat option, a stealth option, and a Henry Kissinger option. It's not "solve it however you feel like it", but I guess it's the closest anyone's ever come (outside of Nethack) and I enjoyed that aspect immensely.
I also realized, after going through Vault 15, that this game unfortunately had a bit of a pixel-hunt aspect to it. It doesn't bother me to have some hidden secrets but when every last thing blends into the wall that gets a little old. In addition, why must I spend time going along every bottom wall to see if the cutaway reveals anything? I find this to be unrealistic; if my character is inside the room I should be able to see anything inside the room. This bugged me a bit but certainly wasn't the end of the world.
Civilization at last:
The hub was fun...the idea that bartering would be the main form of financial transaction seemed consistent with the starting over aspect of fallout. Bottle caps were an interesting form of currency, too, located mainly in the most heavily populated center. One nit: why are the bottle caps always at the bottom of the trade lists? There aren't a huge number of merchants in the game and if you're trying to store cash (say, for books) instead of slowly unloading your pack mules time and time again it gets old really fast.
Speaking of pack mules, the travel companions were....interesting. I appreciate the option to load others up for storage, but the interface (again) just didn't make sense. So you have to barter with them like you would anyone else. Fine. I suppose that even though you traveled with them for a while they wouldn't trust you in the current environment. But to get around the free trade option by allowing easy and unlimited stealing? That just seems silly. Either steal like you do from anyone else or just have a free trade system with them. They weren't the brightest about aiming around you, either. In one particular firefight, Tycho hit me twice and Dogmeat once...so I killed him myself, the rat bastard. I did like Dogmeat, though.
Combat:
I thought combat was done quite well. I like the penalty for accessing inventory in any way, and I thought on the whole the various weapons and armors were accurate and well-balanced. I quickly learned to take out the mutants with rocket launchers first. The targeting system was brilliant, and I found myself enjoying that part of combat more than anything else. One of my pet peeves with RPGs and games in general is that someone could be one HP away from death and still fight like they're unscathed. To be able to hit the leg and hamper movement, or hit the eyes and hamper sight, or hit the groin and knock them down, that was great. A++ for that implementation.
The Endgame:
Not a whole heck of a lot to say about it, except I wish the rest of the game had the same amount of depth. It's understandable that more lore, information, etc. would open up to you as you advance in the game, but the holodisks, info at the vats computer, Maxwell, etc. gave a lot of the much-needed depth to the story and I thought they could have trickled that in earlier. Maybe hide a disc at Vault 15? Have Killian expound on some topics of interest a bit? Dunno. At any rate, the depth of story was great, and the Master was fantastically executed. I convinced him that he was wrong, but loaded a previous save and killed him just to see the differences, as well. That was just a great concept (although having an old, old CRT monitor embedded in your middle specifically for the purpose of displaying spoken soundwaves seemed silly). The Military Base was well-done as well. I was disappointed with the ending, though: a bunch of still shots of all the places I've visited, then a small confrontation with the Overseer? I felt like there should have been more. Did I miss something?
Overall, Fallout had a fun storyline with very engaging characters. While there weren't a huge number of quests, the options for solving them were greater and more diverse than in any other game I can remember playing. From my memory of the era the graphics seem dated even for '97, but since I'm playing it now that really didn't bother me. The voice acting was good--sparse, but good--and the animations for those voice actors were enjoyable (Harry, in particular). The combat was fun and pretty strategic. My only serious problem was with the damned interface; it seems even more eggregious since it would have taken such a small amount of time (AFAIK) to fix. At any rate, it wasn't the most enjoyable game I've played, but it was definitely one of the best. Kind of in the same way that Dovstoevsky is one of my favorite authors, but I wouldn't call any of his work "fun". Perhaps with subsequent playthroughs with different characters I'll come to like it even more. Maybe not as much as some of you (I never had that "new and shiny!" experience with it), but it was a great game nonetheless.
