Fallout

The Good
I am generally not very fond of CRPGs, or RPGs in general for that matter. I have always held the firm, conservative belief that RPGs should be limited to fantasy (AD&D) and CRPG to hack'n'slash (Eye of the Beholder 2). I know it's lame, but that's the way I always thought. That is, before I played Fallout.

To tell the truth, I never knew of this game (well, maybe by name) before a friend of mine urged me to play it late in the year 2000, about three years after it came out. I was definitely not disappointed. Fallout is an extremely unique game that has much going for it, with good reason:

• Fallout's game engine is, basically, very advanced. Utilizing a decent SVGA resolution along with some clever palette optimization techniques the game is able to draw an extremely detailed playfield. While not absolutely visually astounding, the engine does the job very well and puts out a fairly smooth framerate without sacrificing quality. Good thing.
• The atmosphere in this game is superb. It is difficult to say which supports which, the story or the atmosphere, but the two work in tandem to create one of the most realistic and frightening experiences I've ever had the pleasure to play. I recall one of the reviewers complaining about the lack of colour in the game (something along the lines of "nature will survive") - that's fair enough, but I believe that the uncolourful graphics in Fallout corrolate much better with its plot, and one also has to consider that the world you move about in Fallout is referred to as The Wilderness. The graphic artists did an excellent job of conveying an appropriate image of the outside world, as I would have imagined it had Fallout been a book. The dreary, for lack of a better word, visual design in Fallout contributes to the atmosphere tremendously. The lack of many visual stimuli actually contributes to the game.
• Aside from the outside world, the visual design in Fallout is incredible. The effort that went into the various structural types (desert village, vault, city, sewer etc.) is evident every step of the way. Everything looks exactly as it should - shattered cities bombed back into the stoneage; the high-tech, metallic look of the vaults; the claustrophobic, eerie Necropolis; the old, decaying Cathedral. This point cannot be overemphasized, as the contribution of proper visual design to the overall atmosphere in a game is simply something that cannot be described in words.
• The storyline in this game is worthy of a decent novel. While it won't earn its author a literary prize, it is definitely worth noting that depsite the seemingly banal nature of the story (post-nuclear world, mutants roaming about), the execution of the story in the game is - despite being partially linear - extremely rewarding.
• The three primary characters are well-rounded, plus the ability to generate your own character provide for a varied gameplay - where in one you run around beating people into a bloody pulp, in the other you must rely on charisma and quick fingers to get what you need. The amound of personality traits and special abilities is seemingly limitless, and the radically diverse nature of the various perks is truely genius (my personal being Bloody Mess - it's funny as hell). The effect each and every one of your character qualities will have be detrimental to the process of the game.
• Fallout is one of those games, one of a select few, whose introduction sequence leaves me with a feeling of DAMN!!!. It has one of the most memorable intros I've seen in my whole life - funny at first, profound and amazingly touching later. I will easily place Fallout's introduction sequence right up there with the likes of Dune 2, Reunion, The 7th Guest and Star Control 2. Trust me; coming from me, that means a lot.
• Where it actually features it, Fallout enjoys excellent background music. Unfortunately these tracks are fairly scarce, usually limited to an eerie tune playing in the background; however, as already said - whenever there is music in Fallout, it is definitely worth hearing.
• The ending sequence (though not the ending itself) in Fallout is absolutely magnificent, giving you an account of what you have done and what the ramifications are. The ability to play the game as either a good or evil person also makes it a lot more interesting.
• Fallout is littered with injokes (did you know the Brahmin sometimes utter "Moo, I say"?) that add a lot of flavour to the game; for example, if your character is lucky, you just might run into a crashed alien ships during your travels, where you will find (a) an alien weapon (literally, a Death Ray), and (b) make note of this: a picture of Elvis!

And in summation, I will only say this: Fallout is one hell of a game.

The Bad
Despite its greatness, Fallout is not without its flaws.

To begin with, it is basically a very difficult game, at least in the beginning. You'll have to be extremely careful not to run into too many fights at first, simply because you might not make it out alive. This changes over time, but the Super Mutants towards the end of the game will still give you a major run for your money.

More importantly, the interface in Fallout is not very intuitive; it makes a lot of sense basically, but the learning curve is extremely steep. I had my brother (who finished the game before I even got around to playing it) to give me a kickstart (in the ass), but it still took a good few hours to get used to it. Occasionally, due to loads or whatnot, I still make stupid mistakes using it, that quite frankly should not occur. I wouldn't call the interface cumbersome, but there's definitely room for improvement.

The NPCs are spectacularly... useless. Ian will do all the work for you at first, or should I say, you're as good as dead without him. Towards the middle of the game, however, he becomes a bloody neusance (constantly shooting you in the back etc.) and not much help, and in about two thirds of the game the only justification to keeping him around is as a human baggage (or cannon fodder). The NPC AI in Fallout is extremely handicapped, and it is quite unfortunate.

Another major drawback is that some of the parts in Fallout are very trial-and-error based, for example: The Glow. It took me three tries to get the damn thing right, and I still didn't go as deep as possible into the complex. The military base also took some work, as you will have to find a way to move about the troops without making too much rockus (five Super Mutant Guards with SMGs are not to be trifled with, even when fully armored and with the best weapons). Getting the damn Powered Armor working also took quite a while. This is unfortunate, because it puts an unnecessary and unwarranted blemish on what could've otherwise been nearly flawless gameplay.

Last but not lesat, your nemesis, The Master, is not a very good character IMO. To begin with, it looks like it was taken directly out of Phantasmagoria 2 - it even sounds the same. Second, it's damn near invincible (I couldn't kill it no matter how hard I try; I hear other people managed though). I also gave it about 30 tries and still couldn't convince the bloody thing that I was right. I had to blow up the entire cathedral, which was an incredibly bothersome ordeal. This basically makes the actual ending of the game very unsatisfying, at least for me. I feel the same way towards how the designers chose to end the game (won't spoil it for those who haven't played it yet though).

The Bottom Line
A spectacular game that gave me a new taste for CRPG. Depsite some flaws, it is an overall extraordinary experience that I recommend to any computer game lover.

The Good
Replayable, decent plot with sense of urgency, good setting, focus on role-playing, deep but uncomplicated statistic system, entertaining despite serious flaws.

The Bad
Riddled with bugs (even after a patch), half-finished feel with many incomplete areas and storylines, drastically imbalanced (towards "Easy"), many useless paths of statistic development.

The Bottom Line
Way back in 1999, I played a little game called Fallout 2. It was a blast- one of the best RPGs I've ever played. The kind of game where the first thing you want to do after finishing is go back to the start and do it all again. I played through it two or three times, until I felt I had seen all it had to offer, then made a mental note to track down the original someday. "Someday" was a long time coming. You know how it is- you get busy and things get put off. It was 2007- Fallout's tenth anniversary- before I finally got around to snagging a copy off eBay. In the meantime Fallout had been idolized, emulated, enthused about, and raised to the level of RPG classic. It is a frequent- nay, expected- presence on various "Best of All Time" lists.

Now I've played it, and... I'm surprised at how mediocre it is.

I'm sure anyone reading this will know the plot, but just in case, it goes something like this: Pretty much the entire world has been turned into an irradiated wasteland after a full-scale nuclear war. A handful of human settlements survive- most in huge underground cities called "Vaults", sealed off completely from the outside world. You were born and have been living in one such vault, Vault 13. For all of your life, the vault has been a peaceful and reasonably happy home, but now something has gone terribly wrong. The circuit board that controls the vault's water recycler is broken. They can't fix it, don't have a spare, and will run out of water in five months. The only option is to send someone out into the wasteland to track down another vault and find a new chip. Guess who drew the short straw?

Fallout is a great game in a lot of ways. The setting is well-executed- gritty, dirty, and anarchic, just like you'd expect a post-nuclear world would be. Even in later areas, the professional fighters carry knives and spears frequently, because there just aren't enough guns in the world to go around. That's brilliant. Much more significantly, the focus on dialogue and diplomacy over combat must have been revolutionary in it's time. Just like the sequel, I played it twice consecutively, and might eventually go at it a third time.

On the other hand, though, I'm often surprised at how thin it's spread. In fact, I'd say it has the worst coding and nuts-and-bolts design of any game I've ever played and liked. Subplots peter out or stop entirely. NPCs mention things that don't exist in-game, or don't exist as described (Killian is especially bad with this). Scripts misfire, breaking quests. Important NPCs vanish due to weird bugs. Quests that are referred to- in at least two cases, even appearing on the quest list- don't exist or don't seem to be completable. Cities are full of empty buildings and generic NPCs. Several areas are blatantly half-finished. If this game were released today, even with the RPG market in the state it is today, it would be lambasted by critics, derided on the internet, and flop mightily on the shelves- frankly, it's "beta in a box".

There are much deeper issues, too. Although in many ways the best-executed part of the game, the overarching plot is drastically overrated. The water-chip quest is really just a McGuffin to motivate you on from town to town, resolving the troubles of the populace along the way. The plot that develops later is just plain old you vs. the bad guys, with a hint of mad-scientist. With slight modifications, I've seen it before. Numerous times. The ending IS ingenious, but it can't obscure the mundanity preceding.

The stat system is a huge flaw. I won't knock the developers for that, because I don't think it's their fault. Fallout was originally supposed to use an electronic adaptation of Steve Jackson Games' pen-and-paper GURPS system. Somewhere along the way, though- by accounts I've heard, rather close to release- Interplay and SJG had a falling-out, and instead the developers cooked up a homebrew system called SPECIAL.

SPECIAL is pretty simple- at game start, you choose cosmetic details- age, name, sex- then distribute 35 points among seven statistics that each have a range of 1-10. These statistic values determine characteristics such as hit points and carry weight, and the starting values of your skills. Skills are on a percentile scale, each calculated from one or two statistics using a different formula. You choose three "Tag Skills"- things you do especially well. Lastly, you choose up to two traits. Traits confer powerful extra benefits, but are typically double-edged. Gifted, for example, gives you 7 bonus statistic points but your skills will be less developed. Finesse gives you less damage on standard attacks but more on critical hits, and so on.

Once the game starts, you increase your abilities by gaining experience levels. At each new level, you get more hit points and more skill points. Skill points are spent to increase your skills- one skill point for one percentage point in a given skill. You can go above 100%, but you get diminishing returns. To your Tag Skills you get a 20% bonus at start, and they also increase twice as fast- one skill point equals two percentage points in the skill. Also, every third level you get a bonus ability called a perk, some of which are very powerful.

All pretty good- simple to understand yet with an appealing complexity. The problem is, it's radically imbalanced. Without giving stuff away, once you know the game you can draw up a quick list of "must have" tags, stat values, and traits, and use that to coast through 90% of the game with any other reasonable values you wish. Many skills are useless- Big Guns pales next to Energy Weapons. First Aid is useless due to the abundance of stimpaks. Doctor is useful only when you get hit with a crippling critical, which hasn't happened to me yet. Outdoorsman is a joke. Traps only show up in one area. Sneak is nearly useless next to fast-talking and an occasional disguise.

Monty Hall also makes his presence known- after getting finished with the third town, you have more money than you know what to do with, and after completing a certain major side-quest, you'll never need cash again.

Yet bizarrely, I still love it. That's not some half-baked internet equivocation- It really is the most enjoyable game I've played all year. (Except for a Fallout 2 replay, heh.) I'm at a loss for explanations. I guess the elusive "fun factor" really is hard to define.

I will defend Fallout as worth playing, but I'm unconvinced it deserves the title "classic". If you ask me, the sequel- often derided as inferior- is actually a much better game. It's more solid, more developed, better written, and significantly less half-baked. As I write this Fallout 3 is in development, from a different studio known for a much different design philosophy. The fanboys, as fanboys are want to do, are prophesying doom- a lousy game that disgraces the Fallout name. Maybe they're right. Maybe not. We'll find out when the game comes out. But after hearing the entire gaming community enthuse, and then seeing what they're enthusing about firsthand, Fallout is frankly almost a disgrace to it's own name. The emperor is... well, no, not REALLY stark naked, but dressed like Carl from Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

The Good
Zovni's review of this game, "Vault-Tec Approved", was probably the most brilliantly written, dead-on accurate, comprehensive review I could imagine being written for what is essentially the Grandfather of Post-Apocalyptic RPG's. As much as I feel that Fallout is without doubt one of the crowning jewels in my computer game collection, I don't know that I could possibly say anything about this masterpiece of gaming that he hasn't already covered. How many ways can one say "priceless"? I can say with certainty that if the bombs fell and the world was thrown into post-apocolyptic anarchy and only a handful of working copies of this game survived, I would beg, bargain, barter, con, steal, or kill to ensure that one of them was mine.

The Bad
As much as this review is likely to be awarded a 1 on the MobyGames scale of 1 to 5, I just can't say anything that hasn't been said. Granted, yes, the game had some bugs - like all games do - but I honestly couldn't say that the worst of them would make me want to play Fallout even five minutes less.

The Bottom Line
I post this review for one sole reason: To throw my vote in, to raise my hand for, to emphatically stand behind, as so many have before me, Interplay's Fallout as the all time #1 Absolute Must Have Computer Game of All Time. Stop reading this page right now - click the Buy/Trade link on the left there and get your hands on this game!! If you don't, you might as well put your PC up for sale on eBay, because without a copy of Fallout installed, your computer is nothing. =)