Favourite Games: Fallout 3

Sorry it’s been so long since my last post. I was sidetracked by a combination of midterms, a research paper, and an immediate addiction to Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (which I will eventually write about). Looks like it’s time for me to talk about the game that got me into the Fallout series: Fallout 3.

This was the first numbered game in the Fallout series to not be developed by Black Isle Studios or be published by Interplay. Black Isle had folded years before, but not before starting work on their own version of Fallout 3, code-named Van Buren, as well as releasing a demo. This was very different from the Fallout 3 that most people have played in virtually every way, but a lot of the story content was repurposed for Fallout: New Vegas later on. The Fallout 3 that came out in 2008 was made by Bethesda, who are also known for producing the Elder Scrolls series, with Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion being one of the most hyped games to come out around the launch of the Xbox 360. This meant that this Fallout would be very different: instead of being a turn-based game where stats were everything and the player had total freedom, Fallout 3 was a real-time game where stats were everything and the player had total freedom.

Wait, that actually sounds pretty similar. A better way to put it would be that the first two Fallout games looked like this:

While Fallout 3 looked like this:

Yes, many complained that Fallout had turned into another FPS. Fortunately, that was absolutely false. If anything, it was more like Oblivion with guns, which is valid because they took many gameplay mechanics from Oblivion and mixed with old Fallout mechanics. It even runs on the same engine as Oblivion, but looks much better.

The story was also fairly different from previous Fallout games. For starters, it didn’t take place on the West Coast anymore: the whole game took place within Washington D.C. and the surrounding area, including Arlington, Virginia. Your character lived in Vault 101 his entire life, but is forced to flee to the Wasteland outside when his father James (who is voiced by Liam Neeson) has left the Vault, with your character taking the blame from the very controlling Vault Overseer. You end up running into all the old Fallout mainstays during your journey to find your father, including the Super Mutants (who have become even more stupid than in the first game, if that’s possible), the Ghouls (with Feral Ghouls being among the most common enemies in the game), and the Brotherhood of Steel. Naturally, the Enclave joins in as the villainous faction again, being led by the mysterious and oddly affable President John Henry Eden, who is voiced by Malcolm McDowell, better known as Alex from A Clockwork Orange. Yes, I know that it’s odd that they hired a British guy to voice the American President, but Heroes was still big back then, and McDowell had a big role on that show, so Bethesda took advantage of it.

So how does Fallout 3 differ from the previous games, besides looking more like a standard console FPS? Well, Bethesda brought in the item repair system from the Elder Scrolls, but changed things around a bit. Instead of having to use repair hammers to fix items, you just needed to find another of that item and use that up to repair the other item. There were also unique versions of certain weapons and armour, which were generally better than their non-unique counterparts and could be repaired with those common items too. You could use a third-person perspective instead of first-person, but it was useless beyond just looking at your character, since aiming became very difficult. Bethesda compensated for the loss of the turn-based combat by creating the VATS system. VATS (short for Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System) used the Action Points of the old Fallout games, but did things a bit differently. By pushing a button, time would stop, and your viewpoint would zoom in on an enemy, with different body parts available for selection. Each body part had a different hit rate and would suffer different effects if crippled. You just picked whatever parts you wanted until you knew the enemy would run out of health or you ran out of Action Points, hit the confirm button, and watched the action. Alternatively, you could just shoot manually, but that was boring.

Above: A player who is either getting ready to shoot a Super Mutant or preparing to get his brains splattered by a sledgehammer from the future wielded by a giant yellow moron. With a tire for a shoulder pad.

A lot of old Fallout elements were kept, too. SPECIAL was still around, as were skills, though skills like Outdoorsman and Gambling were taken out. Perks were reworked to fit in with the gameplay changes, and you would get them every level instead of every third level. This meant that by level 20 (the highest level in the base game), you could be a walking tank, especially if you picked up power armour.

The main question is, however, if Fallout 3 is any good. I would have to say that it’s still a very good game, but doesn’t hold up as much when compared to Fallout: New Vegas, which made a lot of improvements. Fallout 3 was a very buggy game, even after patches, and there isn’t much to make it feel really connected to the older Fallout games. Though, considering that many people who bought Fallout 3 had never played the first two, that probably would have been for the best. The main story isn’t that well-written either, and the ending is just plain terrible unless you have the Broken Steel DLC installed. The Brotherhood of Steel is kind of meh here, too: while they’re more likable in this game because they try to help people in Washington, they also come off as more bland, since part of the appeal from before is that they were incredible jackasses who only cared about preserving technology.

There is fortunately quite a bit of good stuff here, too. Wandering through the DC ruins is a real pleasure, and a lot of the landmarks, including the Metro tunnels, are really accurate to their real-life counterparts. You also have an in-game radio that plays old tunes like “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” and “Maybe.” Killing groups of Super Mutants becomes even more fun when you have “Butcher Pete” playing in the background. While most of the companions are bland, Fawkes the Super Mutant, Sergeant RL-3 (who is a Mister Gutsy robot), and Dogmeat are great to have along with you, mostly by virtue of them being incredibly tough and hard-hitting. All the guns are satisfying to use. The two best elements, however, are Liberty Prime and the Fat Man.

The Fat Man is a very special weapon. It fires explosives, but not any regular explosives. It shoots miniature nuclear warheads.

That’s right, the game gives you a man-portable nuclear catapult. Sure, the warheads are really rare, but what other games can boast about letting the player shoot enemies with nukes?

Liberty Prime, on the other hand, is not a usable weapon. He is, in my opinion, the best NPC in the Fallout series. Why? He’s a giant robot that looks like Gort from The Day The Earth Stood Still that shouts out anti-Communist slogans while praising America. He also has laser eyes and throws Fat Man warheads like footballs. Behold:

The best thing to ever happen in Fallout

The only bad thing I can say about Liberty Prime is that he only moves around to kick Enclave ass in the final quest of the game, and can bug out sometimes, forcing you to load your last save again.

Overall, Fallout 3 is great, but after playing New Vegas, it just feels kind of dated.

Tune in next time, when I’ll talk about the DLC for Fallout 3.

Also, please leave comments for me. Constructive criticism is always appreciated.

Favourite Games: Fallout 2

A few days ago, I said that I would eventually get around to writing my opinion on the rest of the main Fallout games. Since I’ve found a bit of spare time to do some writing now, I figured I would talk about Fallout 2, which many perceive as the best in the series, and possibly one of the best video games ever made. As for me, while I agree it’s a great game, it definitely has some flaws, minor though they may be, and these serve to hold it back.

Fallout 2 was released in 1998, just a year after the original game, and it shows, since they run on the exact same engine. There have been some slight changes in the game mechanics, and the game world is much bigger than before, but it otherwise looks more like an expansion pack than a sequel. But that’s fine. CRPGs aren’t exactly played for their graphics; it’s more about role-playing and experiencing the story, after all. I just think that if Black Isle worked on it for another year or so, the game might have ended up looking better. And would also have been less buggy.

Anyways, the game starts by explaining that you are a tribal from the village of Arroyo, which was founded by the Vault Dweller (the person you played as in the original Fallout). More specifically, you are the Vault Dweller’s grandchild, and the village elder (who is the Vault Dweller’s daughter) charges you with recovering a legendary device known as a GECK (Garden of Eden Creation Kit), which will help save the village from the famine and disease that is currently ravaging it. All the tribals of Arroyo know is that there probably is a GECK in Vault 13. Those of you who played the original game or read my previous post on Fallout know that Vault 13 is where you lived in the original game. Fallout 2 explains that there was a mixup in supply shipments to the Vaults before the war, and Vault 13 ended up with a GECK while another Vault got a ton of spare water chips. The tribals also know that a trader named Vic, who lives in the town of Klamath, recently left a Vault 13 canteen behind in Arroyo, and may know where the vault actually is. Before you can go off searching for him, you have to prove yourself as the Chosen One of your people by going through a temple of trials (which appears to actually be the ruins of a museum).

This set of trials serves as the tutorial of the game, and tells you what the rest of the game will be like: HARD. You’ll already have created your character by this point, and chances are you’ll have tagged skills relating to guns instead of close combat, which will already bite you, since you’re going to have to fight your way through the trials with a spear and your fists. Having few points in their corresponding skills means that you’re going to miss. A lot. Chances are you will die against the radscorpions and giant ants (Of course there are giant ants. Everyone knows that radiation makes insects grow abnormally large and vicious, right?). You’re also going to have to blow up a door (hope you know how explosives work!) and get into a fistfight with another tribal as the final test (though you can talk him out of it with high enough speech or just cheat and pull out your spear). Apparently Black Isle was forced to put in a tutorial at the last minute by Interplay (the publisher), and decided to make it really hard as their revenge. I think that punishing the players might have been a bad idea here, but I’m no game developer, so what do I know?

The Temple of Trials. You will learn to despise this place very quickly.

After the excruciating tutorial, you get to leave the village (though there’s some sidequests in the area that you should do first) and then you can do whatever you want. Seriously, there’s no specific place you have to go to first. I’ve even heard stories of people just going to one of the main villain bases, stealing as much stuff as they can carry (including the second-best armour in the game) and then going to the final area. I imagine that would be ludicrously hard, even by Fallout 2 standards, but I don’t doubt it’s possible.

One big improvement Fallout 2 makes in comparison to the original is the use of companions. In the original Fallout, companions ultimately proved detrimental by the end of the game, since they didn’t level up with you (or if they did, it wasn’t very noticeable). You also couldn’t give them orders, so they would do as they pleased, which tended to be bad news for you, as the AI governing companions was slightly dumber than a brain-damaged turkey. Well, the companion AI is still stupid in Fallout 2, but now you can actually mess around with their settings to regulate how they behave in battle (so now there’s less chance they’ll shred you with automatic shotgun fire because they were shooting through you at an enemy). You can also freely change their equipment by simply going through a conversation tree, whereas the original Fallout literally forced you to pickpocket companions to do this. Companions will level up, but less frequently than you do; this means that they will end up being useful at the end of the game, but not to the point that they make you feel like your character isn’t needed. Most significantly, you can actually have a small army of companions with you, depending on how high your Charisma stat is. That’s right, Charisma now has purpose beyond giving bonuses to Speech and Barter. Basically, every two points of Charisma translates to another companion slot, though I don’t remember this actually being mentioned in-game. Anyways, the possible companions are:

Sulik: a tribal you meet with in Klamath. Since Klamath is probably the first town you’ll visit in the game, chances are Sulik will be your first companion. To get him to join, you either have to pay off his debt to the local motel ($350, which is a lot at this point in the game) or rescue a guy from the Toxic Caves, which is quite difficult due to the radioactive sludge that’s all over the floor there (worth doing later for the Bozar, which is probably the best Big Gun in the game). Sulik specializes in close-combat, whether with his fists or trusty sledgehammer, though he can use any gun that uses the SMG animation. Give him a Mega Power Fist or Super Sledge later on with some power armour, and he’ll be smashing enemies across a room with a single hit, then running up to them and doing it a second time. Talks with a Jamaican accent and really hates slavers and bad guys overall.

Vic: the trader that you have to find who may know where Vault 13 is. While it turns out that he just bought the canteen off some guy who found it in the middle of nowhere, it’s still worth it to rescue him from the slavers in the Den, either by paying for his release or just killing them all (the latter is really only recommended when you’re very strong, since there’s quite a few slavers and they’re all well-armed). While fragile and not especially quick, Vic is deft with repairs and can end up being one of your best snipers. Give him a Gauss rifle or sniper rifle and watch him take down enemies with almost no effort. Just don’t let anyone get near him; a small breeze can prove dangerous for him. Quickly develops a tendency to call you “boss;” won’t stop even if you ask him to.

John Cassidy: A grizzled old man running a bar outside Vault City with a heart condition. When you meet up with him, he’ll offer to join you (provided you aren’t a child killer or slaver) for free, saying that he’s sick of putting up with all the crap Vault City security forces put him through. Think of him as Clint Eastwood in a post-apocalyptic future, and that about sums him up. Is a good shot with rifles and shotguns, and can slug it out with his fists as well. Probably the best companion in the game. If you can only take one companion with you, go with Cassidy. Just don’t give him any drugs besides regular stimpaks, or he’ll drop dead of a heart attack.

Myron: Teen genius who works for the Mordino family in New Reno. Developed a highly addictive drug known as Jet after killing hundreds of enslaved test subjects through testing that could only be described as a crime against humanity. Probably one of the most evil characters in the game, if not in the entire Fallout series, which is really saying something considering his competition. Is also near-useless as a companion, since he can only use pistols. His one redeeming feature is that he can make stimpaks for free if you give him the ingredients, but you’ll be so rich by the end of the game that even that is useless. Even killing him is more trouble than it’s worth, since the game will consider you a childkiller if you do it. Don’t even bother recruiting him.

Lenny: A Ghoul doctor who works in the town of Gecko. Once an inhabitant of Necropolis, he regrets not having gone with the Vault Dweller on his journey, and will ask to join you if you have a good reputation with the citizens of the town. Is notable for being the only character proficient with medical skills who can join up with you, and can take a beating to boot. Not the best companion, but you could do worse. Fairly flat as a character, though.

Marcus: The Super Mutant mayor of the mining town of Broken Hills. He’s basically a member of a race of proud warriors who once opposed humanity, but is now on such friendly terms with humans that he’s willing to work with them. Is also voiced by Michael Dorn, and can be described as the big guy of your team. Wait, am I describing Marcus, or Worf of Star Trek: The Next Generation? Anyways, Marcus is a pretty good companion, and is notably the only one who can use Big Guns and the really big energy weapons, like the Turbo Plasma Rifle. He’s one of the most interesting companions you get, but suffers from some downsides. He can’t equip armour, though his skin eventually becomes as tough as Mark II Combat Armour, and he has a tendency to kill your own guys with the bullets from most of the Big Guns. Give him something like the Turbo Plasma Rifle, though, and he’s pretty good in a fight.

Goris: A member of a modified group of Deathclaws who have increased intelligence and currently live in Vault 13. After they’re massacred by the villains (who created them), Goris will be the sole survivor, and will ask to join you in order to gain revenge. Is the smartest of the Deathclaws, as he proves himself to be quite literate and capable of human speech. Despite this, he is just as tough as any other Deathclaw, but you can’t give him new weapons or armour. Because of this, he’s OK as a companion. Has an awesome animation at the beginning of battle where he throws off his cloak.

K-9: An intelligent cyberdog who can be recruited at Navarro. He is just as erudite as Goris, but needs your help to get his legs working again. Is limited in use due to only having his teeth to fight with. K-9 is also an obvious reference to Doctor Who, and will not be the last one in Fallout 2.

Pariah Dog: The single worst companion in any game, ever. You encounter him randomly (depends on your Luck stat), and he will automatically join up with you and never leave. He also has 750 HP, which makes him one of the toughest characters in the entire game. What’s the downside? He comes with the Jinxed trait, which will cause everyone in your party to suffer incredibly bad luck, resulting in guns jamming, missing more often, taking critical hits more often, having their guns explode… You get the idea. His high health makes him tough to kill, he won’t help in a fight, and as soon as someone attacks him, he will flee the area, only to return on the next screen. If you encounter him, just reload your game.

Skynet: An AI you encounter in the depths of the Sierra Military Base. If you have a Science skill of 121%, you can install a cybernetic brain into a Robobrain, which Skynet will download itself into. Skynet can attack with it’s arms and whatever rifles you give it, but cannot recover health with stimpaks. It can repair itself somewhat in battle, but you’ll mostly have to let it heal after each fight. Not very good as a companion, but interesting in concept.

Fallout 2 greatly differs from the original in tone; namely, it is way darker. This is probably one of the darkest games I’ve ever played, including the Mass Effect games, where you have to deal with Mecha-Cthulu and all his friends coming to kill everything in the galaxy, make another one of them, and come back to do it all again in another 50 000 years. As mentioned before, there are slavers (who you can join up with), prostitution, mobsters, and villains who plan on committing genocide. Speaking of which…

Meet the Enclave. These mysterious soldiers have been going around the Wasteland and killing or abducting people with their advanced technology, including power armour beyond what the Brotherhood of Steel has and helicopters (“vertibirds” here), which are the only form of flight left in the world. While mysterious, they clearly demonstrate that they hate everyone they perceive as mutants, which includes everyone who isn’t one of them or a Vault dweller. Sound like the Nazis so far, don’t they? Well, you find out who they really are at the end of the game:

The United States government.

That’s right, the US government turns out to be the villains. They’v survived the war on an oil rig off the California coast, and were the ones who planned the Vault project in the first place. As it turns out, the Vaults weren’t meant to save anyone: they’re actually meant as experiments for the Enclave’s goal of going into space and colonizing another planet. Their plan is to use FEV (Forced Evolutionary Virus), which is what created the Super Mutants, and modify it into a supervirus that is lethal to any organism with even a trace of radiation. They’ve been abducting people from around the Wasteland in order to use them as test subjects, and when you finally get to their oil rig base with an oil tanker in San Francisco, they’re just about ready to deploy. You fight your way through the base, and eventually confront the president, Dick Richardson.

God, this guy is even scummier than he looks.

You can choose to just leave him alone or kill him, which you could easily do by just injecting him with a super stimpak and letting the damage side-effect kill him. You then can set the base to self-destruct or convince a scientist to change the FEV enough so that it’ll affect the Enclave instead, then unleash it on the base. Either way, you have to make a run back to the tanker, and then you meet the final boss right at the exit: Frank Horrigan, Secret Service Agent.

You don't want to mess with this guy.

Voiced by Michael Dorn (I guess Black Isle really like him on Star Trek), he is the only final boss in the series who cannot be talked down: you HAVE to fight him. You can convince some fleeing Enclave troops to lend you a hand, or you could hack some turrets, but otherwise, you’re going to have to take him out before the place self-destructs. He has the best power armour in the entire series and uses the unique Endboss Plasma Gun and Endboss Knife (the latter of which is the size of a sword). Once you take him out, you get to go home to Arroyo with the GECK (you did pick it up, right?), and the village ended up becoming a prosperous city. You also get a slideshow detailing how your actions affected the Wasteland; you might, for example, have slept with the wife or teenage daughter of a mob boss in New Reno, which would have gotten the one you slept with pregnant with your son, who ends up taking out all the competition and ruling the city himself (this is confirmed in Fallout: New Vegas).

I mentioned earlier that this game got really dark, but it also has a lot of humour at the same time. It proves quite jarring to run into Monty Python’s Knights of the Round Table (who also have Holy Hand Grenades that you can get from them) or the Doctor’s TARDIS. They’re funny, sure, but they don’t really fit in. Still, this is a good game, though there was a lot of content cut out (for which there are mods). Overall, I’d recommend Fallout 2, but Fallout is still the better of the two, if you ask me.

Join me next time, as we head to the Washington D.C. area for Fallout 3, and all the RAGE that accompanied it.

Favourite Games: Fallout

Those of you who know me will have realized that I am a tremendous nerd. I’m especially fond of books and role-playing games (which I’ll refer to as RPGs from now on in the interests of saving space). In particular, I enjoy the computer RPG subgenre, or CRPGs for short. And why not? It’s pretty much the most complex video game genre around, and games in this category typically give players a great deal of freedom in how they play the game. Most of these games also take place in fantasy settings, so they all end up looking the same unless they do something truly exceptional. There are a few, though, that go beyond this and simply take place in a different type of setting (mostly sci-fi). The Fallout series goes one step further by taking place in a post-apocalyptic world that never managed to culturally advance beyond the 1950s and has been ravaged by nuclear war. I’m going to eventually discuss the 4 main games of the series (I won’t include Fallout Tactics or Brotherhood of Steel because I haven’t played either of them, and from what I’ve been told, I’m better off pretending the latter game doesn’t exist at all). For today, though, I’m just going to write about the original Fallout, which came out way back in 1997.

Credit goes to The Vault (http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout_Wiki)

Fallout (or Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game), which was produced by Black Isle Studios and published by Interplay, has a fairly straightforward plot: Your character is an inhabitant of Vault 13, one of several vaults built to protect people from nuclear war. The game takes place in the year 2161, but the war itself took place all the way back in 2077, and the game never really says whom the USA fought against (though Fallout 3 later showed that it was against the People’s Republic of China). Anyways, your character has never been outside the vault in his or her life, until the computer chip that regulates the water supply of Vault 13 breaks down. There also happens to be no spares in the vault, which means that someone has to venture out into the California wasteland to try and find a new water chip before everyone dies. Naturally, since you’re the player, you get chosen. You get to create your character, and then you’re booted out of the vault with little more than a pistol, some ammo, a knife, and some basic medical supplies. From there, you have 150 days to find a new water chip and get it home. Beyond that, however, you’re free to do as you please. Naturally, things don’t stay that simple, but more on that later.

It may not look like much now, but this was cutting edge back in the '90s

The tone of the game becomes fairly clear during the video that plays when you start it up. It shows a black and white TV commercial praising the army that looks like it came straight out of the 1950s, except for the fact that the soldiers are wearing power armour (big metal suits that make soldiers incredibly strong and tough as a tank). It’s so cheesy that you can’t help but laugh, right until the part where it announces that the USA has invaded Canada. It then cuts to two soldiers marching two prisoners, with the prisoners (who I assume are Canadian soldiers) trying to make a break for it before being ruthlessly gunned down. One of the soldiers then turns to the camera and waves, and it goes back to the commercial. At this point, the camera begins zooming out to show the player that the commercial was playing on a TV in a building that is little more than rubble. It’s a great opening, and manages to convey to the player that this game is going to use a lot of black comedy to accompany the horrors of nuclear war.

This is what power armour looks like, in case you were wondering

Fallout managed to stand out from its peers beyond the uniqueness of the setting through how it approached gameplay. When you created your character, you had to put points into your character stats of Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck (or SPECIAL). You then had to put points into your skills and then “tag” 3 of them, which would then double and would go up by 2 points instead of just one whenever you put more points into them. The skills themselves are quite diverse, ranging from combat skills like Small Guns and Energy Weapons to survival skills like Outdoorsman and First Aid, and even included skills like Gambling and Speech. For the record, I usually went with Small Guns, Lockpicking, and Speech, if only to stay well rounded. You didn’t get much in the way of appearance customization: you got to choose if your character was a man or woman, and that was it. The weapons and armour you would pick up later in the game would show up, but that was about it. Having an intelligence stat lower than 5 made you speak like the Hulk, though. You also got to take up to two traits at character creation that gave you bonuses and penalties (Gifted basically broke the game by giving you an extra point in all your stats at the cost of some skill points, which you would be swimming in by the end of the game). Every third level, you could also take a perk, which would give you a special bonus: Sniper, for example, would give a significant increase in critical hits with ranged weapons, to the point that having 10 Luck meant getting a critical hit on every shot.

Like most RPGs, you get experience points for fighting enemies and accomplishing tasks for people, but there was usually more than one way to go about doing things: after all, you had all those skills for a reason. Fallout was unique at the time in that fighting wasn’t the only way to solve problems (though most of the mutants and bandits you would run into wouldn’t exactly respond to negotiations). Instead of just shooting someone in the face, you could just as easily talk someone down or sneak around and plant a stick of dynamite in their pocket before running for your life. Fighting was entirely turn-based, and revolved around spending Action Points (AP) to perform actions like movement, shooting, and opening your inventory. While it was usually faster to just shoot normally, you could also spend an extra AP to aim at specific body parts on a target to achieve different effects. Shooting someone in the leg, for example, would make it more difficult for them to move around. You could aim at pretty much any body part your opponents had, and yes, that does include the groin. There’s many stories of people doing something completely ridiculous, like shooting a rat in the groin… with a rocket launcher. This would typically result in one of Fallout’s more gruesome death animations, which also helped to set it apart from the pack, though they could easily be switched off.

Yes, you could shoot at a two-headed cow

You didn’t have to venture into the wasteland on your own, though. You could also recruit certain NPCs (non-player characters) as companions, who would help you carry all that precious loot of yours and would lend you a hand in combat. The most prominent of these companions was Dogmeat, mostly due to the fact that he was a dog. These companions weren’t necessarily helpful, since they proved to be incredibly stupid, and could prove to be just as much of a danger to you as they were to your enemies. All that needs to be said here is that you never want to give a companion a fully automatic weapon, unless you enjoy seeing your character get shredded to pieces. Like all the characters in the game (except for you, of course), if these companions were killed in battle, they were dead for good. This also meant that you could potentially kill everyone you met, including children, though killing innocents lowered your karma meter and gave you a bad reputation in the wasteland, and killing children would make many people outright hostile towards you.

The cast of characters you could meet was quite diverse as well: there were normal humans living in settlements, as well as the typical bandits, but there were also ghouls: people who had been changed by the radiation of the war into immortal, sentient zombies, and were often discriminated against as a result. While most characters were silent, you would occasionally run into some who were at least partially voiced, and those characters (such as Killian Darkwater and Gizmo) were some of the most interesting characters in the game.

Set may not be the prettiest face in gaming history, but that doesn't mean he isn't a nice guy! (He's actually even nastier than his appearence)

The enemies you went up against were also fairly unique. While you would still run into bandits and large rodents, you also had to contend with malfunctioning robots, cultists worshipping a nuclear bomb, and the dreaded deathclaws. Deathclaws were especially terrifying: while they could only attack you up close, their claws were among the most dangerous attacks in the game, and could outright ignore your armour. Later on, you would run into bloblike monsters (floaters) and super mutants.

All this deathclaw wants is a hug. And maybe to eat you.

Super mutants were particularly important, since the latter half of the game’s plot revolved around them. You first encountered them slaughtering the inhabitants of the ghoul city of Necropolis, where you also had to go to find the water chip. The leader of the mutant attacking the city, who happens to be the dumbest character in not only Fallout, but possibly any other game out there, reveals that they’re looking for Vault humans, and that there are many more super mutants out there. When you got back to Vault 13 and reported this to the Overseer, you would get new orders to find out more about the mutants and stop them before they reached the Vault.

Harry here is so dumb, he refers to his superior as Lou Tenant and will believe become confused if you tell him that you're not a ghoul, human, or super mutant. I am not making this up.

Originally, the game only gave you 500 days to accomplish this, but this was changed in a patch to be unlimited. In order to learn more about the super mutants, you had to go to the Brotherhood of Steel, a militant organization that had dedicated itself to preserving pre-War technology, which included energy weapons (lasers and plasma rifles) and power armour. In order to join though, you’re told that you have to recover some old military records from a nuked military base known as the Glow. You had to be incredibly careful here, since lack of preparation in this area could lead to you dropping dead of radiation poisoning. Once you found the records (and looted everything useful from the base), you returned to the Brotherhood, who would accept you as a member, give you a suit of power armour, and point you towards two locations of mutant activity. Mariposa Military Base was where the mutants were taking captured humans and turning them into more super mutants, and was run by the Lieutenant, who was voiced by Tony Jay, who most people would probably remember as the villain from Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and every other deep-voiced villain in a cartoon or video game from before 2004.

Unlike Harry, the Lieutenant is definitely a credible threat, being big, strong, and incredibly smart.

The other location was the Cathedral, where the leader of the super mutant army was located. You had to fight off hordes of cultists and their leader Morpheus, only to discover that the Cathedral was itself built on top of an abandoned vault. When you ventured down to the bottom, you finally got to face off with the Master, who is one of the creepiest video game villains ever. I mean, just look at him!

To make things worse, one of the people voicing this guy is also the voice of Tigger from Winnie the Pooh. Your childhood memories are now ruined.

This part of the game is where Fallout really demonstrates freedom of choice: While you could choose to just shoot the Master until he dies and then set off a nuke, you could beat the game without even pulling out a gun here. You could hack his turrets so that they shot him instead of you, or just talk him into suicide by showing him an autopsy report that proves super mutants are completely sterile. You then returned to the Vault, where you lived happily ever after… If this was another game. What really happened is that the Overseer banishes you from Vault 13 because he’s worried that you’ll endanger the inhabitants of the Vault by making them want to explore the outside world (the reason for this worry is only revealed in Fallout 2). Your character (known in the sequel as the Vault Dweller) went on to found a tribal village… But that’s something to talk about when I get to Fallout 2.

Fallout still stands up today as one of the best CRPGs ever released. Admittedly, the graphics haven’t aged too well, and it’s significantly different from the more recent Fallout games. But it still has a strong story and setting, the gameplay is fairly easy to get into and holds up today. It is a fairly buggy game, and the graphics don’t work quite right on modern computers, so it’s worth looking around on the Internet for mods and bug fixes to get around these issues. It’s easy to find these days, too: Digital distribution services like Steam, Direct2Drive, and Good Old Games sell Fallout 1,2, and Tactics for $5 or $6, and you could probably find it on DVD-ROM in a store for $15-20. The best would probably be the Good Old Games version, since the downloads are automatically patched, and they throw in a bunch of extras.

I’ll be back on Thursday or Friday with a post on Fallout 2, which will ideally be shorter.