Vital Stats

Genre: RPG
Players: 1
Online: None

Developer: Black Isle Studios
Publisher: Interplay
ESRB Rating: M
Release Date: 9/30/97

Platforms

• PC
• Mac

Times are tough, and your gaming dollar probably has to stretch farther than it ever has. It’s tempting to hit the bargain bin, but 90% of that detritus belongs in there. Instead, you need a sure thing; maybe something indie, or maybe something you missed over the years that has returned to the fore. This week, penurious gamers can count on Fallout.

If you’ve been around and gaming for ten years or so, then you’ve definitely heard of Fallout. The seminal post nuclear role-playing game headlined both RPGs and computer games for years after its release. It mixed then unheard of narrative depth with strategic combat to make a game that was both substantial and satisfying.

Sadly, time is never kind to video games, and it’s generally smart to ignore nostalgia-tinted gamers who preach how much better things were when games were younger. However, when a company like Good Old Games bends over backward to make old games compliant with modern operating systems and sells them for a handful of dollars, it’s time to start paying attention.

Flash Point
Fallout derives its name from the nuclear war that erupted decades before the game begins. Survivors fled to impregnable vaults to wait out the radiation, but the vaults failed with the passage of time and the expiration of warranty. Displaced survivors resorted to tribalism to eke out a living in their new wasteland. The game begins as your vault’s water purification system fails, and you’re sent out into the wasteland to scavenge a new one.

In the classic tradition of RPGs everywhere, Fallout is a game about character building. You can select a fighter, thief, or con man at the game’s outset, but there’s a lot more fun to be had from building your own. The character generation system is fairly straightforward, and you only really have to allocate a handful of points among the game’s stats and skills before you’re on your way. This approach will always produce a viable playthrough, though it’s to Fallout‘s credit that dedicated gamers can wring a lot more from the system by optimizing a character for a particular play style. Tooltips bridge between the two approaches to character building by actually bothering to explain everything about your character that you choose to read.

The selectable skills during this process tell you a great deal about the game’s flow. About half of them revolve around combat, though the mere fact that the remaining half do not is fair warning that there’s more to this game than the usual “roving pack of adventurers kill everyone they meet” school of character development.

Once you’re satisfied, you’re disgorged from your safe little hidey-hole, and you’ll get your first taste of combat. Fallout violence is the turn-based variety, and each turn awards you with action points you can spend on moving, attacking, rifling through your backpack, and nearly every other action the game affords. Because every action draws on the same pool of resources, combat is emphatically tactical, so your success will largely be determined by your ability to tell when to spend your last four action points rooting through your backpack for healing items, putting some distance between you and your aggressors, or a hail Mary swing of the sledgehammer.

Best ethical dilemma ever: These guys
will explode if you click on them. Do you?

Skilled characters can also turn the tide of battle with called shots. A good enough crack to the skull will take an opponent out of the fight for a few turns, while a knife in the eye is good for epic damage with a chance of blindness. Whereas most RPG combat amounts to attrition, Fallout combat lets you tip the balance whenever fights feel uncomfortably fair.

Dystopia On $10 a Day
You’ll find yourself in fair (and overwhelming) fights more often than you’d like, too. Evidently all the rails in the game were destroyed when the bombs fell, because once you’re out of the vault you can go where you like. Players who go the right way will hike up a reasonably sloping difficulty curve. Everyone else will find mutant hordes who are high on chainguns and low on mercy.

The wastes are hardly trackless though, and you can get directions from the NPCs you meet. The absence of more than the most minor quest tracking can make it difficult to remember your place after long gaming furloughs, but consistent players will have enough structure to get by.

The sandbox extends beyond mere exploration though, and Fallout will let you tackle almost every problem from multiple angles. Most of the game’s quests have to do with moving macguffins and making peace between aggressors (by whatever means necessary), so parley, theft, and brute force are always viable solutions. Sadly, this design ethos outright fails is random combats, where characters who are all mouth and no gun will just be slaughtered.

A subtler and more pervasive problem is that all roads lead to violence. So if your used-car salesman botches a con, the mark will be on to you, and you’ll have to resort to theft or violence. Once theft has failed, well you can see where this is going. Fallout predates autosaving too, so you may find yourself bounced back to a four-hour old save by an unlucky roll of the dice. If you’re looking to actually enjoy Fallout, plan accordingly.

Once you’ve trained yourself to be your own autosave feature, the diversity of solutions to Fallout‘s many problems shines through its conversations. In addition to the productive and humorous branches you already expect from the common conversation tree, Fallout actually checks your skill set and stats to see if your character would have anything unique to contribute to the conversation. Charismatic characters can bend NPCs to their will, smart characters will figure out where conversations are going, and sufficiently stupid characters are denied any speech at all. Best of all, when all else fails there’s always a conversation option to smooth your way with blood. Your branches down the conversation tree may not change the trunk, but at least they let you pick your path to the bottom—quite a bit more than the typical RPG offers.

The writing underlying these trees is also solid. Most of the characters in Fallout deliver believable dialog, and the rest are smart and funny. The game has an uncommonly black sense of humor that’s absolutely worth the price of entry, but is also peppered with movie homage, pop culture (of the 90′s), and empathetic characters.

Fallout‘s design conceits and writing have aged more gracefully than its graphics, but that’s to be expected from a decade’s passage. The preponderance of the game takes place on an isometric grid of the sort you’d expect from a strategy game. Fallout trades the usual squares for hexes (betraying the game’s GURPS beginnings), which made for interesting tactical combat, but also made it impossible to run in a straight line. It’s a minor graphical quibble, but watching your character try to run orthogonally is surprisingly slow and distracting.

I know that you don’t visit the apocalypse to take
in the sights, but seriously, brown and gray again?

The isometric bird’s eye view had some positive impact, though. The game’s low-detail sprites weren’t harmed overmuch by their age because a low resolution inch-tall character looks much the same as its high resolution counterpart (no matter what Diablo III tries to tell you). Fallout ends up looking no worse than the average competent flash game. That said, you don’t normally spend dozens of hours with flash games, so even if the style is tolerable, it’s still dull.

The real injury inflicted by the game’s age instead falls upon the conversations with major NPCs. It was probably very impressive during the 1990s to have 3D rendered faces with a few frames of animation for important dialog, but modern sensibilities will see them climbing out of the uncanny valley on the cartoony side of real. A decade from now, these renders will be far enough behind the technology curve to look comfortably far from real, but in the meantime, the NPCs look unsettling enough to harm the dialog they deliver.

Make sure you bring some music when you explore the post-apocalyptic world, because Fallout offers just enough ambient sound to annoy. The musical tracks are short, repetitive, and uninteresting, but at least the developers included a setting to deactivate them.

War Never Changes
If you can choke down the bitter pill of the game’s presentation, Fallout offers a mostly modern approach to gameplay. The writing mostly makes up for the unsettling characters and uninteresting music, though the investment required to access it makes Fallout a tenable purchase only for hardcore players and genre fans. Even then, take a look at some screenshots and make a personal decision about whether you can stomach them long enough to get five bucks worth.

What It Costs: $6

What It’s Worth:
•To The Hardcore: $10 (buy)
•To The Genre Fan: $5 (buy)
•To The Casual: $0 (skip)