February 24, 1998
I was eagerly anticipating the release of Fallout ever since I heard that Interplay had it in production. When I installed it, it had the easy-to-use wizard common to most new Windows 95 programs. Fallout has four install size options. The first option, the small installation, only takes 1.9 megs. With this option, gameplay and movies all run fine, but starting the game and loading saved games seems to take forever! The other three sizes for installing are: "Medium (88.7megs)," "Large (267.3megs)," and "Humongous (644.3megs)." Each of these options has progressively faster load times.
Gameplay
This game has exciting and challenging gameplay. You begin by creating a character. The
creation options are chosen in an interface shown below.
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During this part you can choose your character's physical and mental attributes, name, age, sex, special traits and skills to be tagged. Each trait is on a scale of 2 to 10, 2 being bad and 10 being heroic. Once you begin the game, the attributes are set but the skills increase as you play the game. Once you decide on your character's attributes, you must tag 3 skills. This makes those skills go up faster each time you get a level and gives you a 20% boost at the beginning of the game.
Once you create your character, you see a short video and learn the plot. The story goes like this: It is after a nuclear war. You, however, were safe from the blast deep in your vault, a really big bomb shelter. Unfortunately, the water purification chip that keeps the drinking water in your vault clean is broken. You have been chosen to go out into the world to find a replacement and return it to your vault. You must wander the decimated wasteland of the California coast, talk to survivors, and eventually return home as a hero.
You start in a cavern with a pistol, a hand to hand weapon, ammo, and various other equipment. Through the course of your quest, you will undoubtedly pick up other weapons such as fully automatic shotguns, cattle prods, and high-technology energy weapons such as gattling plasma guns and plasma rifles. You can view your items at any time by clicking on the Inventory button which will bring up this display.
During the game you must explore the nuked California coast fighting Radscorpians, raiders, troublemakers, mutants and a variety of critters that get in your way. As you do, your character gradually becomes more skilled at every level awarded for gaining experience points. The game, for the most part, is real-time except in combat. Combat is a turn based process. Each person or critter has a certain number of action points determined by attributes. It takes a certain number of action points to move, shoot, punch, reload, and go into your inventory. This may sound like a rather slow and clumsy way to do combat, but considering all of the different options you have, there was really no other way to do it.
There are more features of the gameplay that other role-playing games don't posses such as the ability to use combat skills such as Small Guns, Big Guns, Energy Weapons, Unarmed, Melee Weapons, and Throwing. There are also other skills not associated with combat such as Speech, Barter, Gambling, and Outdoorsman. Other skills like Sneak, Lockpick, Steal, and Traps are used for more illegal actives. There are more skills still that are used mainly by learned people such as Doctor, First Aid, Science, and Repair. As you can see, there is a very wide selection of skills which allow players to customize their characters almost exactly to their specific play style.
There is also the matter of talking with non-player characters (NPC's). Fallout accomplishes this with a helpful dialog screen where the player can choose from a list of responses that varies with the character's charisma, intelligence, and speech characteristics. This allows characters to talk with NPC's in a semi-realistic way.
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Although the responses the computer gives you are sometimes lacking, they allow the player to get the point across. Playing readers should remember that your choice of words can sometimes get you killed.
Another noteworthy aspect of gameplay is that while looking at your character's inventory or characteristics, the rest of the game stops so you don't have to worry about getting killed while you are checking to see how many experience points you currently have.
For those of you who like puzzles, Fallout is for you too! You need to find out secrets and get clues to open the doors to more complex puzzles which will eventually lead you to the end of the game. To find out the answers, you must be able to get information out of people, and in some occurrences, word choice can be curtailed. Sometimes you must help others out so that you will have a good reputation. Also, be sure to be courteous to those who can help you in the harsh post nuclear world of Fallout. Just like in real life!
Graphics
The graphics of Fallout aren't everything I had hoped for, but the rest of the game
compensates for what the graphics lack. Fallout has an overhead doormat view that isn't
very detailed.
The mutants, rats, radscorpians and people, for example, can be distinguished from each other, but aren't very detailed. This, however, is acceptable considering they are fairly small. Also, each different suit of armor has its own picture as does each weapon type (knife, large energy weapon, small energy weapon, handgun, shotgun, big weapon). One troubling feature about the graphics is that there are only about 10 different NPC character artworks. This bothers me because I sometimes can't tell my character from NPC's. This doesn't really cause problems, it's just a distraction.
Another troubling feature is that when you are wandering in the desert you sometimes stumble across Radscorpians, raiders, and rats that you fight to pass. All of these battles are fought on a very small selection of maps. This is painfully obvious because of their small size. The videos are, I must say, outstanding.
They sport some of the most real-looking people I have ever seen in game movies. Their expressions even vary slightly in a life-like way depending on their mood and how much they like you.
Conclusion
This is, without a doubt, the best role-playing game for the computer that I have ever
seen. It has taken the old text based adventure games and put all of that versatility and
story line into an easy and fun to use graphical menu interface. It has stepped far beyond
other role-playing games like Diablo into a completely new realm. For those of you who
have played dice and paper role-playing games, Fallout is as close as you can come to
these games on the computer.
Although the graphics leave something to be desired, the game play and story line
completely make up for it. This game has very few flaws, and the ones it has don't detract
from the game. For all of its outstanding qualities and comparably tiny imperfections, I
give Fallout five "All System Go" lights, so you won't be sorry if you go out
and get it today. Go check it out here.
Copyright © 1998 by Shawn Lankton.
"Go Inside" is a David Boles Trademark
